Weekly Update: Mar 14, 2025
Happy Pi Day!
Since the 1.0 graduation update of Starcom: Unknown Space back in September, I've made a lot of updates to the game in terms of both content, bug fixes and QoL improvements. In the last category are a number of incremental changes to controller/Steam Deck support.
During Early Access, Steam had evaluated the game as "playable" on the Deck but not "verified".
After the most recent patch, I submitted the game again for verification. Steam came back with a lengthy list of mostly small things necessary for verification, along with a helpful set of screenshots showing specific parts of the game that did not meet verification.
I've spent the past week going through this list and addressing these issues, as well as finding areas in the game that exhibited the same type of issues, but they had not specifically identified. (Presumably because they can't have their team play every single game through to completion.)
The most common issue was font scaling. If the game detects that it's being played on a Deck it automatically sets the text scaling in Options to maximum. But depending on the UI layout elements, there are some pieces of text that either don't get scaled, don't get scaled enough to meet the required minimum, or scales in a way that looks bad, like a line wrap that overflows the UI container element.
If you're curious how this works technically, every UI element in the game that can display text already has a component attached to it that identifies itself to the LocalizationManager. This is so that if a player changes their language, the game can replace the text with the appropriate string for that language, and if necessary, change the texture atlas which contains the actual glyphs for that language.
When I implemented text scaling, I modified the logic of these components to also scale their text up to a maximum size depending on the player's Text Scaling option. That works most of the time, but there are a number of places where the UI layout simply didn't have enough room to guarantee the text was always at least 9 pixels high at 1280 x 800 (the minimum text size for Deck verification).
The second most common issue was where the in-game help might reference the keyboard or mouse. In general, the tutorial system knows whether the player is using a controller and substitutes in the appropriate input description, but again there are edge cases where either the text was not correct or the help is referencing something that only applies to keyboard/mouse controls.
Finally there are a few menus in the game where some functionality is currently inaccessible via a controller, such as toggling saves for deletion in the save/load menus.
So all that is what I've primarily been working on for the past week and I'm probably (hopefully?) about 2/3 done at this point.
Until next week!
Kevin
Since the 1.0 graduation update of Starcom: Unknown Space back in September, I've made a lot of updates to the game in terms of both content, bug fixes and QoL improvements. In the last category are a number of incremental changes to controller/Steam Deck support.
During Early Access, Steam had evaluated the game as "playable" on the Deck but not "verified".
After the most recent patch, I submitted the game again for verification. Steam came back with a lengthy list of mostly small things necessary for verification, along with a helpful set of screenshots showing specific parts of the game that did not meet verification.
I've spent the past week going through this list and addressing these issues, as well as finding areas in the game that exhibited the same type of issues, but they had not specifically identified. (Presumably because they can't have their team play every single game through to completion.)
The most common issue was font scaling. If the game detects that it's being played on a Deck it automatically sets the text scaling in Options to maximum. But depending on the UI layout elements, there are some pieces of text that either don't get scaled, don't get scaled enough to meet the required minimum, or scales in a way that looks bad, like a line wrap that overflows the UI container element.
If you're curious how this works technically, every UI element in the game that can display text already has a component attached to it that identifies itself to the LocalizationManager. This is so that if a player changes their language, the game can replace the text with the appropriate string for that language, and if necessary, change the texture atlas which contains the actual glyphs for that language.
When I implemented text scaling, I modified the logic of these components to also scale their text up to a maximum size depending on the player's Text Scaling option. That works most of the time, but there are a number of places where the UI layout simply didn't have enough room to guarantee the text was always at least 9 pixels high at 1280 x 800 (the minimum text size for Deck verification).
The second most common issue was where the in-game help might reference the keyboard or mouse. In general, the tutorial system knows whether the player is using a controller and substitutes in the appropriate input description, but again there are edge cases where either the text was not correct or the help is referencing something that only applies to keyboard/mouse controls.
Finally there are a few menus in the game where some functionality is currently inaccessible via a controller, such as toggling saves for deletion in the save/load menus.
So all that is what I've primarily been working on for the past week and I'm probably (hopefully?) about 2/3 done at this point.
Until next week!
Kevin