Islands of the Caliph News

A couple small but important updates:

[h3]Fishing[/h3]
Fishing has been changed. When you catch a fish now, the bubbles are put on a timer and will reappear a bit later, as long as it is during their active time of day.

This has two important effects on gameplay. First, previously the fish bubbles would only reappear if you left that level and returned, or if you left the game and reloaded your save. This had the unfortunate effect of making it possible to miss an important fishing opportunity for some players who were being very patient and fishing for something quest related.

The second effect is that you can no longer spam the fishing by just reloading the game. You have to wait for the timer whether you caught a fish, or reloaded the game, so it cannot be easily exploited, and it should feel more like a natural part of the game world.

[h3]Bug in Story Dialogue[/h3]
When I updated the game to work with controller input I replaced the "TAB" menu toggle with the "Approve" key ('y' by default) so that it could be easily mapped to the controller without having to add an additional key-binding entry to the options menu. Unfortunately I failed to test this when you get a story ending message, and players got stuck, unable to remove that message.

This should be working as intended now.

Thanks again to all the players who are providing helpful feedback. It may sometimes seem like a minor issue, but I really benefit from hearing about these things.

There is a thing that did a thing one way, but it was supposed to do the thing a different way. i have now fixed the thing, and it does the thing the different way.

Okay this is a fairly big update with a number of new features.

1. Shared Treasure Chest in Cities
2. Version Checker - IMPORTANT
3. Controller Functionality

[h3]Shared Chest[/h3]
Each city has a special treasure chest that can now be used to store items. The special chest is the same chest in each city, so items you store in one city will be available in all cities. This feature was requested by players, and i hope it helps!



[h2]IMPORTANT[/h2]
[h3]Version Checker[/h3]
Because of some of these changes, I have included a version checker that will prevent players from loading old saved games. If you are not ready to stop your existing playthrough, you can load the old version of the game (1.0.5) by going to "Islands of the Caliph > Properties > Betas" and select "version1.0.5 " from the drop-down menu.

The main reason for the incompatibility is the shared treasure chest mentioned above. I will write a post about how to transfer your old game to the new version. There are a few steps involved so I feel it requires a separate discussion thread. Check here shortly: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1845670/discussions/0/6644556627480836068/

[h3]Partial Controller Support[/h3]
Controller should now work through the in-game Options Menu. The game is still designed for keyboard only controls, but players who really prefer using a controller can now set it up to work.



Ideally it would be better and more compatible to use Steam's controller configuration tool. It has a more robust interface and will probably be easier to set up.

However the new version allows you to change numerical values by pushing up or down (forward and backward keys) and also has the controls menu tied to the approve command ('y' by default) instead of the TAB key.

NOTE: There are a small number of rare occasions where you will still be prompted to enter a number. Some players may never actually reach these places. The Steam interface allows you to pull up the on-screen keyboard for these situations. I am not sure if or how that would work with the in-game controller configuration.

If you are unable to set up the Steam controller, then try the following. Just go to the: "main menu > options > key-binding" and select the commands you want to assign to your controller. When prompted hit the controller button, joystick direction or directional pad to rebind the controls.

I found a bug in the previous build that basically disabled all your commands if you hit 'escape' while in the key-binding menu. Hitting escape there basically resets all your controls to those that were in the options file when you loaded the game, however I forgot to update that function after adding controller support. So it was trying to apply controller based commands assuming they were keyboard commands and it just couldn't do it.

Now it should all be working as intended, and I think the game is pretty much controller friendly now.

Even if the interface is not particularly elegant, the game will also work better with the Steam controller configuration tool. The splash screen and controls menu used to be kind of hard wired to 'enter' and 'tab' but they are now linked to the 'advance dialogue' and 'approve' commands ('enter' and 'y' by default) so you will not have to use the keyboard when starting the game.

Also when entering a number you can used the "forward" and "backward" commands ('w' and 's' by default) to change that number, instead of having to type into the keyboard.

I mentioned this in previous updates but I am just saying it again for anyone who missed it.

I will test this out a bit more and then set it to the default branch, probably tomorrow. Note, the update has a lot of other new features including a shared treasure chest in cities, and it will require starting a new saved game.

However, I will also provide a work-around for this, in case anyone wants to keep playing their current game.

To try the test branch go to "Islands of the Caliph > Properties > Betas" and select "Public_Testing" from the drop-down menu.

Note, I just found out you also have to turn off Steam Input for the in-game dialogue to work.

If you have already assigned your controller in Steam, and it's working fine for you there is no need to use the in-game dialogue. Only people who, for whatever reason need "native" support for controller input should use the in-game key-binding dialogue to set up their controller.

There was a major issue in version 1.1.1 that prevented certain controller buttons from working. I believe that is fixed now. Let me know how it goes.

As for creating customized button names, it seems it may vary a lot from one controller type to the next. I do not plan to use different controller layouts, but it might be possible to make a separate text file with the button names that users could customize.

I want to get it working first before attempting any kind of fine tuning or customization though. And there may be bigger issues to deal with, so it's definitely not going to be a priority at this time.