Spirits of Xanadu News

Last week I released the fourth and fifth updates to the games, apologies for just posting the patch notes now. In addition you can now download the soundtrack by Adam Williams (and a bonus track by Arthur Lee) here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/387080/

Now for the changelog:

-More fixes for the crackling audio a few people experienced. This should further improve sound quality for most people.

-Minor adjustments to sound levels, in particular guns are now quieter and doors are louder.

-Workaround for the falling through floor bug a few users encountered.

-Minor performance improvements.

That's all, these were pretty small patches. If there's anything you'd like to see improved or bugs you'd like to report, please visit the forum or comment here. Thanks!

I sat down with Phil Owen recently and had a chat about the game. He wrote a wonderful article about it for Animal, check it out! http://animalnewyork.com/2015/making-spirits-of-xanadu-a-retro-sci-fi-adventure

Now on to the update.

This update contains a few minor fixes relating to AI, a few performance tweaks, second pass at fixing the sound bugs, and some debug keys to figure out the root cause of a sound issue a few of you have been experiencing.

edit: A couple of hours after this update went live, with the help of a few people, I managed to alleviate this bug on their machines. So another patch went out to hopefully address this for those people experiencing sound issues. If the problem still persists for you, please read the rest of this announcement and follow the forum thread.

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The following keys are only for isolating the source of the problem and are not meant as a fix. Since none of us have hardware that can replicate this bug we're unable to test these, as a result we're reliant on those that have the issue to help us out. Please follow the link below if you're affected by this:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/312230/discussions/0/523890681424065082/

Debug instructions (press these when in game, not on the main menu):

Hold left shift and press F4 to change the output to mono (may freeze for a second or two).

Hold left shift and press F5 to disable sound post-processing on everything but the loud speakers.

Hold left shift and press F6 to disable sound post-processing on everything.

Hold left shift and press F7 to disable three dimensional sound. WARNING! Make sure you turn the volume down real low for this as you'll hear every sound on the ship.

You'll have to reload the game to revert these changes.

If any of these have any impact on the crackling/stuttering please let me know. Thanks!

I've just released the second update to Spirits of Xanadu.

This includes the addition of a new difficulty (Iron Man, which erases your save on death) and subtitle captions for French and German languages as well as various bug fixes.

• Added iron man difficulty mode
  
• Added French and German subtitles
  
• Fixed respawn behavior of robots (were spawning too frequently previously)
  
• Fixed a few spelling errors in the subtitle captions
  
• Light power outages are less rare
  
• Robots no longer spawn in the showers
  
• Various other minor fixes I forgot to write down
  

Edit: A few more bugs came to my attention so I pushed out another update and took care of those.

• The first patch(?) broke the water reflections and color in the third ending, this has been fixed.
  
• Attempt at fixing blank screen bugs in Linux versions for the endings.
  

I've just released the first big patch for the game, which addresses some issues some people were having and includes some general improvements and difficulty balances.

If a bug you've experienced isn't on this list head over to the official bug reporting thread and provide as many details as possible and we'll try to address them in the future.

If you have any other feedback, suggestions, or complaints be sure to let us know in the forums. We're always interested in improving the game, so if there's anything we can do to improve the experience be sure to let us know.

• Fixed player walking through trees (arcade)
  
• Fixed crosshair appearing on invisible wall boundaries (arcade)
  
• Fixed suicide droids not resetting their positions under certain circumstances
  
• Fixed issues related to the gun charge tooltip implemented in the previous mini-patch
  
• Fixed security cameras being able to prevent player from accessing the elevators
  
• Adjusted terminal text to avoid misclicks
  
• Robots are more likely to speak
  
• Enemy respawn delay shortened
  
• Save game no longer erased after triggering an ending
  
• If you die on 'hard' difficulty the game will reload at your last save and you will lose all unsaved progress
  
• Adjusted player health values for high difficulty to balance out the above change
  
• Various other difficulty tweaks for easy and normal levels:
  
  
  
  1. Normal: Slightly more health
     
  2. Easy: Less enemy respawns and suicide droids won't instantly kill you if you're above half health.
     
• Minor performance improvements
  
• Crouching in front of robots will no longer save you from their fire