Wobbledogs News

[h2]Hey everyone! We've got new features, adjustments, fixes and optimizations![/h2]



[h3]New Features:[/h3]

• The Dog Storage screen now has a separate tab that lets you browse through all the dog cores and memorials you own. This view makes it easy to organize your collection and prune anything you no longer wanna keep around.
  
• Dog cores now have a quality associated with them. Fully grown dogs who die of natural causes produce the highest quality cores. When selecting a core, there's a new menu option to crack it open. If you feed this cracked core to another dog, they'll have their lifespan extended by an amount relative to the core's quality. Dogs who live past their natural lifespan will have their ages set to "Ancient". The older a dog gets, the less it needs to eat but the more it needs to sleep.
  

[h3]Audio:[/h3]

• A new song that plays while you're browsing through the Dog Storage screen! This'll be added to the OST shortly.
  

[h3]Game Adjustments/Minor Additions:[/h3]

• The game now saves dog portraits for cores and memorials. This means that the first time you load into an existing save file after this update, startup will take longer than usual as the game attempts to generate and store off these portraits for any cores or memorials you already own. This is a one-time cost and the game will let you know that it's happening.
  
• You can now directly command your dogs to sleep.
  
• Sleeping dogs will no longer wake up due to being angry, bored, or stressed out.
  
• When hovering over a core, the owning dog's name is now visible.
  
• A new flora! The key to unlocking this particular little guy lies within your ancient dogs.
  
• A new command, "Play Dead", only accessible to Ancient dogs.
  
• A dog's age, in real world minutes, is now visible in storage and for the active dog in-world when mousing over its age category (adult, puppy, etc).
  

[h3]Bug Fixes:[/h3]

• Fixed inconsistent hover behavior for dog need icons.
  
• If a save file cannot be read for some reason, the game should now let you select and manually delete the file rather than just freezing on startup or showing a file you cannot interact with.
  
• [MacOS] I've added a secondary default binding for deleting objects so that the "delete" key on macbooks works as expected without setting up custom bindings.
  

[h3]Performance/Optimization:[/h3]

• Save files now have additional data associated with them so that dog portraits can be saved for cores and memorials. To offset the size of this additional data, I've gone in and added compression to saved dog portraits. This optimization was successful enough to mean that your save files are likely going to be even smaller than they were previously!
  

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1424330/wobbledogs

Was made aware of the fact that poop would seemingly never spawn in the macOS version of the game. Upon looking more closely, I discovered that not only was poop not spawning, but when a dog attempted to poop, it would occasionally crash the game!

When poop spawns in, I immediately set it to zero scale so that I can apply a transform ease and bounce it to its intended size. In the Windows build this works fine, but in the macOS build, for some reason this results in the game attempting to calculate bounding boxes on a zero scale object, which causes errors to spew and occasionally results in a crash. Poop now spawns in at a very small scale instead. As a result, poop shows up properly once again, and can no longer crash the game!

If you run into more crash issues with the macOS build, please reach out and I'll look into them further!

Exciting! I've tested it out on several different machines with different specs, but if you run into any compatibility issues please let me know and I'll do my best to look into them. For the Mac build, the game defaults to some lower graphics settings since older laptops will otherwise grind to a halt even on the title screen. If you head into the options menu, you should try turning Post FX back on to see if the game runs okay for you! If you're having performance issues even with this setting turned off, try lowering the game's resolution.



They were designed by the game's artist, Jordan Speer, and they're great! Go check 'em out!

--

And then finally, with this update I believe I've squashed the save/load error bugs once and for all. The fix required a rather large refactor to the system, but I was able to test it with someone who had been consistently getting these errors and they confirmed it fixed the issue for them. Additionally, I got some outside QA support to stress test the save/load system to make extra sure this change didn't break anything new. If you wanna read a bit more about what the problem was, I talked about it a little bit on twitter (https://twitter.com/thomasastle/status/1446280906885328899).

Thanks for your patience with me while I got all of this figured out! I've got some very fun stuff in the pipe as I look ahead towards the game's full launch next year. I'm so happy to see people enjoying the game, and I can't wait to keep making it even better.

Hey everyone! Just a round of bug fixes and a few tiny performance optimizations. I was on vacation last week so there's not quite as much here as there would be normally, but I wanted to get some of this stuff in without waiting too much longer. As always, I'll be keeping an eye on this update to make sure it doesn't introduce any new issues!

Bug Fixes:

• The plants update introduced a bug that could result in a duplicated Dog Core in the event that you tried to memorialize a core on top of a plant without having previously gone into Placement Mode since last loading into the pens.
  
• If a dog is too large to fit inside of a den, they'll now correctly inform all the relevant systems of this fact when being teleported back out of it. Previously, this could result in the skybox shifting to a black void while looking at your pens. I still need to come up with a more generalized design solution for when dogs are too large to fit inside of a den, but that will be for a future update.
  
• Fixed a batch of bugs surrounding systems that would break if you were petting a dog while it disappeared (easiest to reproduce with ghosts).
  
• I recently introduced a change to try and stop game files from getting corrupted if there were arbitrary save/load issues. While this seems to have worked, in the short term it's also made save errors more visible, with a small subset of players consistently getting errors when trying to save the game. After looking into these logs, the issue seems to be surrounding the game being unable to access your save file because it's still opened and in use, likely from a previous save attempt. While I have been unable to reproduce this issue myself, this update refactors how I handle opening/reading/writing to save files. These operations should now be even more safely wrapped than before. If I've correctly targeted the issue, then I believe this update should stop these save errors. I'll be following up with users who reported this bug to see if it goes away, and if not, I'll continue to investigate.
  

Performance Optimizations:

• Some very small performance boosts for a few physics-related components, including some reduction in generated garbage. You'll likely not notice any changes, but these little optimizations can add up over time!
  

Super tiny hotfix patch to address a floppy dogs issue from yesterday's larger patch!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1424330/announcements/detail/2941402621039170676

Bugfixes:

• The new roll over behavior introduced in yesterday's patch had a bug where if it got interrupted early, the dogs would get stuck with floppy legs. Dog legs now restore their standard springiness.
  

Audio:

• The doggy bopper hit sound has been slightly adjusted.