Ctrl Alt Ego News

Happy Holidays and all that. What's this... A Christmas day patch!? A few minor issues have come up recently and I feel compelled to fix them before they become forever postponed.

• Don't drop the currently grabbed thing when pause + resume game
  Quite funny history here: About 2 years ago there there was a bug that meant the currently grabbed thing travelled with you to the pause menu.
  In a parallel universe that could even be an interesting feature. I fixed that bug a bit lazily (I now realise) by just forcing the thing to be dropped when game is paused. But then as a player recently reported... it was possible to blow yourself up when game paused while carrying an explodable thing. So hopefully now this is properly fixed.
  
• Ensure Ego Fragments can still be collected when they're half stuck in level geometry
  
• Probably no-one has ever noticed but if you broke a MUM apart, one of her broken bits was actually a duplicate of one of her other bits i.e. it was the wrong kind of broken bit.
  

Patch Size: 35 MB

• Controller icons were appearing in the wrong place while in ctrl of a Juice Vending Machine
  

Patch Size: 7 MB

• PUP was supposed to have been rechargeable while inside their cage all this time, pretty sure it was working at one point, Well now it's certainly working.
  

Patch Size: 7 MB

NEW: Ukrainian localization of the game is now available



To change language, navigate to Menu > Settings > Language

Other Fixes included in this patch:

• A Legacy Systems lighting correction that no-one will notice
  
• When in ctrl of a faulting host, the fault effect wasn't showing up, now corrected
  
• Belated hot-fix: Explosions weren't affecting small cages! Oups. Now corrected.
  

Patch Size: 34 MB

I hate Fonts
For the benefit of you few kindly souls who read my patch notes, I'm going to break with tradition and explain why this patch exists before I go on to explain what purpose it serves.

Back in 2015 when work on the game began, it seemed a cool and fun idea to create the entire user-interface using pure fixed-width text characters - as if the user-interface were a pre-GUI retro-console display screen overlay.

For example, these characters:

┏━━━━━┓
┃━━━━━┃
┗━━━━━┛

in-game are used to draw the EMU:



And the background isn't a black image.... it uses one or more of this character: █

So the UI in Ctrl Alt Ego is essentially a text buffer if you know what one of those is, with weird characters and rich-text markup to tweak colors and sizes.

It's been absolute hell to work with. Don't ever do it.

I have implemented so much weird mathematics to get the UI to lay itself out and resize correctly. It's been 9 years of pain. Localization added a whole new layer of pain on top... because now all my weird mathematics has to account for different fonts.

I'm saying weird mathematics, because I never really understood why i was having to synchronize background characters with the foreground drawing glyphs. They're all using the same font, I thought. The font is monospace fixedwidth, right? Why are there any calculations to do? Just render a background character in one layer, then render the drawing glpyh over the top of it and they should line up just fine, surely?

I have gone 9 years not really understanding why. 9 years! Mostly because I was too lazy (or too busy if I'm being more generous to myself) to drill down and try to understand what was going on.

Well a week or two ago, the publisher dev team working on the console ports discovered that the user-interface was rendering very strangely indeed in their console builds. Some characters were aligned very badly, and some characters were.... missing!

And, they informed me, and this is the punchline really, the characters I'm using to draw the user-interface aren't even defined in the font!

So what has been happening all this time - and that includes 2 years of the game being out there - is Unity (the game engine) has been quietly detecting the characters are missing and choosing a fallback font on the target system to use instead. That includes both on my development PCs and on player's PCs - I mean who knows what some players have been seeing all this time if their system isn't a fairly standard Windows platform.

And so that brings me to this patch. Basically I have gone through all the user-interface code to ensure it is using well-defined font characters. Can't have the game relying on chance to render the UI properly! This has meant having to change the look of the UI slightly in some cases (hopefully not very noticeably different though).

List of other Changes in this Patch

• GameController LeftStick can now be used to navigate menus
  
• Language Selector UX improved
  
• Yet another font related technical fix - to spread the cost of rendering too many textures all at once on level load
  
• I've reduced the default GLOOM level for new players, been getting several complaints about game being too dark
  

Patch Size: 41 MB