After a couple weeks of debugging, we’re finally making public the corrected build that replaces the revert from earlier this month. The patch primarily addresses the root cause of the disappearing TOZ34 and related strange behavior related to saving/loading. Here’s what went wrong:
In multiple scenes, notably Arcology, Apartment, and Memorial Tower, some items were disappearing or behaving erratically. The list of items isn’t long and would probably slip under the radar, but one of the affected items was the TOZ34, both a starting item in the first level and a popular gun among Peri’s numerous hobos. The symptom was primarily the gun disappearing on load, out of Marie’s hands and those of enemies – leading to their AI becoming confused and numerous null reference errors clogging up the log and hogging memory.
Obviously, you’d think the issue was with some change to the save system, which is still the focus of our endeavors to improve the player experience. After numerous internal builds, git reverts and combing through log files and specific commit changes, and cursing, we discovered that the issue was in fact not any of our code, but rooted in how Unity handles serialized prefab references in scenes. Under the hood, the issue can be summarized thus:
- Unity retained stale prefab references, often replacing base prefab references with their variant equivalents in scene files.
- Unity’s serialization didn’t report anything wrong in the editor.
- But builds failed to include the proper prefab GUIDs, causing dictionary lookups, save data, and runtime instantiation to break.
- This issue didn’t show up in-editor unless thoroughly recreated, making it extremely painful to track down.
All affected scenes were manually corrected to restore proper prefab linkage. To prevent future situations like that, we’ve added internal checks during build to detect broken prefab lists and duplicate PIDs. A build will now throw a warning if it detects that base prefabs are missing or duplicated.
Important note to other developers:If you’re working with nested prefab variants in Unity: touch your scenes. Merging scene files from different branches without saving them in the editor afterward may cause corruption that will silently make it into builds. Unity doesn’t always update what it should unless you explicitly tell it to.
Important note to players:If you made a save in build 20250703.16370, 20250627.15469 or 20250626.22303, the TOZ will likely not reappear in the affected scenes. Please load a previous save or restart the level if that’s the case for you.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled updates. This version restores all the fixes and changes introduced before the revert (and, of course, the TOZ34) and also includes the following additions:
- Added an option for crouch toggle
- Made the hot slot bar behave better in 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions
- [REC] Made the save room mechanic more explicit
Our patrons and backers are currently playing around with a cool new feature we’ll be showing off this Screenshot Saturday. Once we gather enough feedback and make sure it won’t cause any issues, it will become available to the public.
Thank you again for your patience.