Cloudbuilt News

[h2]New Features:[/h2]

• Mouse Pointer Options: We've added support for both hardware and software mouse pointers. You can now choose from a variety of pointer appearances and adjust the mouse trail length to your liking.
  • The hardware mouse pointer is enabled by default for faster response times. If you experience any issues, please switch to the software cursor.

[h2]UI Improvements:[/h2]

• Options Window: To make room for these new features, we've widened the options window and added a new UI-focused tab.
  
• Reorganized Settings: Settings under the game tab have been moved around for better accessibility, making it easier for you to find the important options.
  

[h2]Performance Enhancements:[/h2]

• Startup Time: Initially, the changes increased the startup time by 1 second, but we've optimized it further. Starting the game is now approximately 40% faster. On my PC it now loads and starts in 5 sec.
  
• Loading Times: General loading times are also faster as textures now load asynchronously, improving your overall experience.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes:ːcbturretː[/h2]

• Sound Device Bug: We've identified and fixed the real cause of a persistent sound device issue.
  
• Gate Colors: Fixed a bug affecting gate colors in the game.
  

If you encounter any issues, please let us know. As always, we hope you enjoy!ːdeboostː

[h2]Level select UI Updates:[/h2]

• Fixed an issue with the difficulty indicator which had malfunctioned due to a prior update. Now it’s fixed and more thoroughly tested.
  
• Resolved a problem where hovering over a level, releasing, and then re-hovering at a specific timing could cause incorrect UI elements to display.
  
• Corrected a bug that caused leaderboards to display incorrectly for levels that have not been cleared.
  

[h2]Mouse visibility:[/h2]
I added a small mouse trail in the game when the mouse is visible. This is a countermeasure to a rare issue where some players were unable to see the OS mouse while in full screen. I have only heard and seen of two such cases, so it seems really rare. Though, as it is a pretty tough issue for such players, I wanted to add something simple which can indicate the mouse position even if you don’t see the actual mouse, as it should at least help a bit.

(In case people wonder why we use the OS mouse, it’s because it has the best responsiveness. If we sample the mouse and render it as part of the game graphics, it will likely be one frame behind. Which is why we have not been doing these things before.)

Currently this mouse trail is not configurable, but I will try to add some settings related to this next weekend/soon.

[h2]Settings issue on game reset:[/h2]
Addressed an issue where settings from a previous session would incorrectly reapply after restarting the game with different challenge mode settings. The settings will now persist correctly in all cases as I make sure to save the settings file after the reset has applied its changes.

[h2]Wallrun restart boost fix:[/h2]
Improved the reliability of the boosted wallrun start from wall slide state, which previously could at very specific circumstances fail and revert to a wall slide immediately. The chance of this was usually quite low, but quite frustrating when it happened.

I did a previous attempt to fix this without having time to investigate properly which sadly didn’t resolve it completely. This time a more thorough investigation to understand the full extent of it.

The details are a bit involved, but here is the full rundown for those who are interested. If you have too low velocity in a given frame during a horizontal wallrun, it will end and go into the slide state. Which is how it usually should be, except when starting from this slide state. This only became an issue if you had just the right slide velocity and pushed the right directions, as then the velocity impulse you get from starting the boost would be just enough to cancel out the slide speed and land you at almost zero velocity for the first few frames of the wallrun. This then would make the wallrun exist right away.

I have now made it so that it recognizes that you are starting from this slide state with a boost, which then gives you a leniency time to build up velocity before the velocity check kicks in.

With this fix I have never been able to recreate the bug.

[h2]Minor achievement unlock criteria change:[/h2]
The achievement for collecting all the story logs was set up for the 24 logs of the original game, and didn’t account for the logs you could get from defiance. Meaning players could get a strange and misleading achievement notification when going through the game. It is now updated to reflect this correctly. (This was intentional back in the days when Defiance was not free).

[h2]Voice Over Playback Adjustment:[/h2]
Finally I did another attempt at fixing the voice over when returning to the room. There still seemed to be some players who mid session changed to an alternative sound device and then were unable to hear the VO in the room. But they seemed to be able to hear the VO when manually triggering it from the log window in the room. So I made an attempt to trigger the sound differently now to see if it might help. But as I am unable to reproduce the issue on any of my PCs, I will have to make assumptions and test things this way without knowing for sure. I’m sorry if it were to cause any issues for anyone.

[h2]Level Tweak:[/h2]

• The defiance level Expectations got a little bit of clutter removed at the start, which distracted from teaching the power wires setup for the generators.
  
• The defiance level Chains got a small addition and optional section at the sniper dodge area, aimed at trying to give another hint at the ability to dodge the snipers. We have other areas in other levels intended to teach this mechanic, but as players are never required to use it before here, a good portion of players can get a bit stuck on this part. Having this new area right next to where this mechanic is needed I hope will help this a little bit further.
  

That’s it for this time. Hope you enjoy it!ːdeboostː

This is a minor patch fixing 2 bugs.

1. Some sounds created from scripts didn't get their sample rate initiated correctly, so when they tried to adjust pitch they got bugged and turned off. This was so far only observed on the stationary charge boost sound, but this fix should address other cases too if there were any.
   
2. When changing between challenge mode and non challenge mode on the level select screen through the hot key, the UI could get buggy at times. This should now be better. There might be a small pop, but the resulting state should be bug free.
   

Thanks for reporting issues when you find them! It's thanks to the reports we can find and fix bugs like this.

That's all for this time.

Hope you enjoy!

Due to a request, we just added a new setting to alter the render style. We know that some players dislike the cross hatching style and how it applies to the game. As it is a pretty strong effect and applies to large portions of the game, we can understand where they come from. In fact, this is part of why we added a bunch of rendering settings for Super Cloudbuilt. We just never patched in any such feature to the original game before now, which is something we really should have done earlier.

This is nothing as fancy as the Super Cloudbuilt modes, but there are now 3 presets available.

[h3]Default, which is like it has always been.[/h3]

[h3]Reduced Hatching, which removes most hatching, but keeps some of it on darker surfaces or shadows only.[/h3]

[h3]No hatching, which removes all of the cross hatching from the rendering.[/h3]


As always, if you have any issues with the game, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Enjoy the patch and thanks for playing!

This patch addressed three bugs, added one minor feature, and one tweak to a level.

First of all, the bugs.

• A bug when switching or using different sound devices was fixed.
  
• It appears there were some oversights when optimizing audio playback before. The sound device was not changed properly for all threads, and some sound resources also got buffered and reused, but did not get their device changed properly either. Making some sounds disappear completely when changing audio devices. There were many cases like this, but some examples include the voice lines played when returning to the room, some UI sounds especially in the result screen, and the player boost and weapon sounds.
  
• One more similar bug, is that the 3D audio device settings only got set up for the default device, so all 3D sounds would disappear or get low volumes when another device was used. I am surprised this was not noticed and fixed before now, as it must have left some of the players with very empty sound space. However, the main player character sounds are not actually 3D, so it would not have been quite that obvious.
  
• There was another bug with the level select menu when using gamepads, where the preview hover view of a level would not activate at times. Leading to some strange visuals when using gamepad controls in that menu.
  

[h3]Feature[/h3]
As for the minor new feature, it is a dark theme of the in game UI. As I was looking at the UI code for one of the bugs, and had considered selectable UI themes for SCB, I figured I wanted to give it a quick test here. By default it is turned off, but can be selected in the game options.


[h3]Level Tweak[/h3]
Finally, the level tweak was to improve readability in Redeployment. One of the jumps down was easy to miss, as it didn’t really look like something was in that direction. Especially since there were other blocks looking more enticing to the side. We added some panels and two pickups to more clearly signal that there is a path here.


Some further logging was also added, so if bugs were to occur, we can get some more data on it.

If you have any issues with the game, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Enjoy the patch and thanks for playing!