Slipways News

As in nature, so in Slipways: with winter slowly receding into the past and spring waking up in the northern hemisphere, bugs are coming out of hibernation. This patch fixes two severe bugs on Apple platforms, and one logic bug:

- Game startup fails (Apple): Occasionally, the Steam integration library has a hard time starting up on Apple Silicon machines. This used to hang Slipways during startup. Now, we give Steam a few seconds and if it's not able to get its act together, we start without it.
- Game startup fails (Apple): Slipways used to defer initializing some Unity services until they are first needed. However, initializing them when they are first needed could hang the whole application on Apple Silicon machines. We now initialize these services earlier to avoid the issue, in exchange for a few milliseconds more of initial startup time.
- Crash/hang: Using a project or other means of removing the last person made on a planet would hang the game when the Insecurity sector modifier is active. Logic in Insecurity was tweaked so that this does not happen.

This update brings the version numbers up to v1.3 (b1139) on Windows and v1.3 (b1140) on Mac.

This small update mostly concerns players on Apple devices - no significant changes should be present on other platforms.

- Mac: Slipways is now a universal app, which means it no longer needs to run under emulation on your new-fangled Apple Silicon machine - anything with Apple M1 or up. This makes the game run smoother and more battery efficient, but also fixes any problems caused by the emulation layer itself. Speaking of which...
- Mac: On Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1, something changed in Apple's emulation layer, causing Slipways to no longer register clicks in windowed mode. This should no longer be the case with the new version.
- Steam: The Steam SDK Slipways uses has been updated to 1.57, which fixes a few glitches around mods/Steam workshop use.

This update brings the version numbers up to v1.3 (b1113) on Windows and v1.3 (b1114) on Mac.

This one is another small bugfix patch, fixing a few bug reports that have accumulated over time.

- Endless: Since a few versions, retired endless runs would not save properly into the statistics tab. This should no longer be the case.
- Campaign: A mission completed with exactly 0 score would not count as complete for the purposes of progression. The game should now properly let you through with no additional gatekeeping.
- Seed selection: If you went into ranked mode, then back to main menu, then into standard, and if the sector type for that week's ranked was not unlocked for standard play, you'd *sometimes* get in a weird state where the game would auto-select a locked sector type for you, which would result in a confusing UI experience. Possibly even more confusing than this bug description.

This patch brings the version numbers up to "v1.3 (b1109)" on Windows and "v1.3 (b1110)" on Mac.

Happy new year, Slipways players!

Slipways welcomes 2023 with a small bugfix patch, addressing the following issues:

- Void Synthesizer: a previous patch broke the functionality of this technology, causing it to misbehave when it was supposed to deliver two copies of the same resource to different planets. It should now hopefully work correctly, and it's now in my personal top 5 of "rude technologies that have caused multiple bugfixes".
- Loading/Ranked: when a savefile was loaded, some sector quirks would not be properly taken into account when an early "empire state update" would happen. One of the consequences of this bug were incorrect run previews on this week's ranked leaderboard, showing higher scores than the leaderboard itself. The issue should now be fixed for both the ranked previews and in general.
- Statistics: The "best runs by perk" tab had weird display bugs for runs with more or less perks than the usual two. Those runs should now display correctly.

This patch brings the version numbers up to "v1.3 (b1106)" on Windows and "v1.3 (b1107)" on Mac.

This is a small bugfix patch addressing the following issues:

- Campaign - Greener pastures: Some savefiles in which the construction of the fargate has been started would crash the game upon loading. This should no longer happen.
- Campaign - Ghost in the Machine: The completion event would reappear after reloading a savefile where the megastructure was already reactivated. This should no longer happen.
- Visual: The "smudges" in the sector select screen background should no longer be visible. The galaxy is fine, please don't worry - these artifacts were actually part of the menu background which was dimly visible behind the galaxy.

This patch brings the version numbers up to "v1.3 (b1103)" on Windows and "v1.3 (b1104)" on Mac.