Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders News

Hello Riders,

Greetings from sunny Berlin! We hope you’re all doing well!

We just released Version 1.0.5. for Steam and Xbox.

The most important changes are the new display settings which should also fix a lot of reported performance problems. Display settings don’t get reset anymore, and we added an optional frame rate rate limit to reduce GPU usage, support for variable refresh rates, monitor selection and more.

There are also a lot of other smaller fixes and changes concerning the multiplayer and the UI in general. Have a look at the full patch log if you want to know more.




[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Critical: Fixed bug that reverted display settings on every restart.
  
• Critical: Fixed a bug that players were stuck on "Initialize Graphics” after the latest patch when they had turned off the imposter generation.
  
• Critical: Fixed various level loading issues that lead to endless loading screens in multiplayer.
  
• Critical: Fixed level not loading when the ghost file got corrupted. We are still unsure how the ghost files get corrupted though and added more logging to better understand the issue in the future.
  
• Major: Fixed automatic mode for render scaling, which always chose the lowest resolution in many cases.
  
• Major: Fixed an issue that the main menu environment scene was sometimes not loaded correctly.
  
• Major: Fixed an issue that broke the spectator mode when another player left the match.
  
• Major: Fixed a bug that sometimes host and clients didn’t load the same level or slope.
  
• Major: Fixed that challenges were not shown as achieved in the endscreen for very close results.
  
• Minor: Fixed that sometimes the wrong loading screens were shown.
  
• Minor: Fixed Team Mode video explanations not being available in the How To Play screen in the pause menu.
  
• Minor: Fixed that environment assets were visually fading in when switching between players in spectator mode or when respawning.
  
• Minor: Fixed wrong timings for sound effects for challenges in solo mode.
  
• Minor: Fixed that settings page tab buttons were making the wrong sound.
  
• Minor: Fixed missing localization for the “Enter Lobby Key” pop-up text field.
  
• Minor: Fixed that dropdown options sometimes were hard to select.
  
• Minor: Fixed gloss effect being broken for achieved challenges in the trail selection when hovering between different trails.
  
• Minor: Fixed that message pop ups for events like host migration would sometimes not appear correctly.
  
• Minor: Fixed that times on checkpoint lines and on the endscreen were sometimes not in sync.
  
• Minor: Fixed that ready up button was not selected by default after a multiplayer race.
  

[h2]Improvements & Polishing[/h2]

• Major: Added support for variable refresh rates on G-SYNC / FreeSync displays.
  
• Major: Added optional frame rate limit to reduce GPU usage.
  
• Major: Previously selected screen settings (resolution, fullscreen mode) are now applied right when starting the game, not at some point while loading the menu.
  
• Major: Simplified display settings to only show quality / performance mode on console.
  
• Minor: Added settings option to choose a monitor.
  
• Minor: Confirmation dialog is now shown when critical display settings are changed.
  
• Minor: Settings options now have explanation texts.
  
• Minor: Loading screen now shows the name, mountain and slope you will play next.
  
• Minor: "New best time" display in solo mode when crossing a checkpoint now has a sound effect.
  
• Minor: The end score display for Team Mode now has a "counting up" sound, and a "threshold crossed" sound for bronze, silver, and gold.
  
• Minor: The “AFK timer” and “end of race timer” now have a notification sound.
  
• Minor: The next trail in a tour starting now makes a slightly different sound than before.
  
• Minor: Polished the Finish screen layout so that it doesn’t overlap with the “end of race” timer.
  
• Minor: Added controller icons for Switch Pro Controller.
  
• Minor: You can now also manually override the controller icons used in the game.
  

We wish you all a great start into the week and as always let us know if you run into any issues, but any feedback is highly apprechated!

All the best,
your Megagons

Hello Riders,

Quick Announcement: Tomorrow (25th of February) we will do some server maintenance between 9:30am and 11:30 am CET. During that time leaderboards won’t work and there will be no rewards in the racing mode. Sorry for the inconvenience!

If you are looking for something to shorten the waiting time, a few of our indie friends have just released their new demos for the Steam Next Fest and we can definitely recommend checking them out.

ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard by Pixel Maniacs
An incredibly good and funny puzzle FPS. If you enjoyed Portal, you will enjoy this one.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3408840/ChromaGun_2_Dye_Hard_Demo/

Mother Machine by Maschinen Mensch
A very charming 1-4 player online cooperative procedurally puzzle platformer with the cutest gremlins to ever hit the screens.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1555980/Mother_Machine/

Reignbreaker by Studio Fizbin
Oozing with style and a must play for every Hades fan!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3384770/Reignbreaker_Demo/

We wish you lots of fun and see you on the slopes!
Your Megagons

Hey Riders,

Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders launched one month ago and we wanted to take the time to thank everyone for your feedback, ideas, suggestions, insane speedrunning videos and for helping us with hunting down all these nasty multiplayer bugs. We are especially grateful to everyone who gave the game a positive review on Steam and Xbox. The game is currently sitting at 92% on Steam and we couldn’t be more happy!



We are continuously working on improving the game in all areas and will release a patch next week with further multiplayer and UI improvements among a whole bunch of other things.

To celebrate the 1-month anniversary our games bundle featuring Downhill and Snow Riders is now available with a special 15% discount for the next 72 hours.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/50060/Lonely_Mountains_Games_Bundle/

We wish you all a great weekend on the slopes!

Your Megagons

Hello Riders,

We hope you’re all doing well! We just released Version 1.0.4 for Steam and Xbox.

Again, this patch mainly focuses on the multiplayer stability and fixes a whole ton of endless loading screen and disconnection issues as well as drastically reduced initial loading times.

We hope we caught most of them now but as you can imagine it is a nightmare to find and reproduce them all. So please continue sending us your logs in case you have any issues. It helps us a lot and we will keep working through all the issues until we squash the last bug.

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback on the Quickmatch timer changes introduced in the last patch. Overall the feedback on the mechanic was very positive but most people seem to agree that 60 seconds is a little bit harsh, so we increased the timer to 90 seconds. Please let us know your thoughts if you feel that it now hits a better balance.

Here are the detailed patch notes for this one:



[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Critical: Drastically reduced loading times on first-time start up.
  
• Critical: Fixed a bug where the menu scene wasn’t loaded when returning from a multiplayer tour.
  
• Critical: Fixed a multitude of bugs that caused an endless loading screen or disconnects from multiplayer matches.
  
• Minor: Fixed a bug that allowed players to select locked items.
  

[h2]Improvements & Polishing[/h2]

• Major: Polished navigation behaviour for scroll lists.
  
• Minor: Fine-tuned UI controls
  
• Minor: Removed minute prefix for timers on checkpoint lines.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Major: Changed racing end timer from 60 seconds to 90 seconds.
  
• Minor: All timers in solo mode now have two decimal points.
  

[h2]Known Issues[/h2]
We still have an issue that very rarely a client can’t connect to multiplayer games anymore when being forcefully disconnected from a multiplayer match before. The only way to rejoin multiplayer matches at that point is to restart the game. If this happens to you we would be very grateful if you could send us your log file because we have a very hard time reproducing this one.


We wish you all a great time and weekend on the mountains and see you next week for the next patch.

All the best,
your Megagons

Hello Riders,

the second big patch is now live on Steam and Xbox. It includes a whole bunch of fixes and improvements but we mostly focused on improving the multiplayer experience!

First, endless loading screens and problems with logging into a lobby should now happen less often but unfortunately we haven’t been able to get rid of them completely. If you are encountering them, it would be much appreciated if you please let us know and send us your log files.

Secondly, we are also introducing a major change to the “end of race”-timer in Quickmatches as we got a lot of feedback that it takes too long to wait for players who are still getting a feel for the game.

From now on in Quickmatch Racing you have 1 minute to finish the trail after the first player crosses the finish line. In Team Mode Quickmatches you have two minutes. Private tours don’t have a timer. If the timer runs out you will be placed on the tour ranking with your current time and rank.

We know that this is a pretty radical change but in our playtests we really enjoyed the new mechanic. It not only reduces the waiting time a lot and improves the pacing of tours, but it also gives an additional thrill and adrenalin boost to finish the trail in time. Nonetheless, we would be really grateful to get your opinion on it! Please give us your feedback in the forum or on our Discord.

We are working full force on improving the game further - tackling issues with the resolution rate which causes a lot of performance issues and the section ghost not working on Xbox among other things.

For now, here is the full log of everything that made it into the patch.

Thanks a lot for being with us on this ride!
your Megagons


[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Critical: We fixed multiple different issues that all resulted in an endless loading screen when starting multiplayer tours or trails but sadly it can still happen sometimes. We continue to work on it further.
  
• Critical: Fixed login issues after suspending the game to the background and coming back to it after a day. This was mostly a problem on Xbox but could theoretically also have happened on PC.
  
• Critical: Fixed a bug that players fell through the terrain when changing or reflection quality settings during a run.
  
• Critical: Fixed various memory leaks which could lead to a crash (mainly on Xbox).
  
• Critical: Fixed a softlock when having the “Quit Lobby”-pop-up open while the race-end timer runs out.
  
• Critical: The invite state for lobbies was not updated in all cases. This improves inviting people to your lobby via Discord, Steam Invite and Xbox Invite.
  
• Major: Fixed Leaderboard navigation, display discrepancies and page issues. Please mind that your best leaderboard time might not be your best local time if you were not connected to the leaderboards at that time.
  
• Major: Fixed trail filter not working in the Result Screen leaderboards.
  
• Major: Fixed leaderboards being cut off on certain aspect ratios.
  
• Major: Fixed that the challenge display did not correctly update when hovering with the mouse between blue and black slopes.
  
• Minor: Fixed that sometimes the wrong player was displayed after selecting them on the leaderboards.
  
• Minor: Fixed a UI issue with the team multiplier icon after leaving a resting spot.
  
• Minor: Fixed a small visual glitch on the balaclava.
  

[h2]New Features[/h2]

• Major: Added an AFK timer. Players who haven’t crossed the finish line yet and who are inactive during the race for 35s in Quickmatch or 2min in Private Matches will be removed from the tour.
  
• Major: You can now choose between different color schemes (like a high contrast UI mode) in the accessibility settings.
  
• Minor: We added an offline notification in Solo Mode so you know that your times won’t be transferred to the leaderboards while you’re offline.
  

[h2]Improvements & Polishing[/h2]

• Major: Improved loading times and performance of imposter generations (imposters are advanced 2D placeholders for objectsthe low level of detail assets that you can see in the far distance).
  
• Minor: Changing a setting option in a drop down and closing it does not reset the navigation anymore.
  
• Minor: Added counting animation when you get new Snowflakes or Exp.
  
• Minor:Updating the experience bar is now in sync with the result screens.
  
• Minor: Polished the emote wheel.
  
• Minor: Fixed overlapping threshold line in the Team Result screen.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Critical: We made a big change to the end-timer mechanic to drastically reduce wait times during tours. In racing quickmatches you now have 1 minute to finish the race after the first person has crossed the finish line, in team mode it’s 2 minutes.
  
• Minor: We exchanged two of the emote icons. 🤚 “Hold” was replaced with 👏 “Clapping” and 🎉 “Celebrate” was replaced with 😂”Laughing”.