Tower Unite News

We've added 29 new holiday items to celebrate this year's holidays!

Changes

• New Holiday 2020 items added to Santa Claws: Carrot Nose, Christmas Tree Hat, Christmas Tree Star Hat, Corn Pipe, Hot Chocolate, Sleigh, Throwable Ornaments, Toy Train Hat, and Spirit Of Christmas
  
• New Holiday 2020 items added to Celebrations: Elegant Fireplace, Fireplace, Snow, Snow Bleachers, Snow Bridge, Snow Flags, Snow Cabin, Snow Cabin Lamp, Snow Crystal Light, Snow Fence, Snow Fence Gate, Snow Fence Post, Snow Wood Track
  
• Added Canvas Pile 1, 2, 3 to the D.I.Y. store
  
• Added Openable Present canvas item to D.I.Y. store
  
• Added 40 new condo materials to use, including snow and sand
  
• Added Beauty Cone Plaza milestone
  
• Presents now spawn around the Plaza area, instead of the beach

New Condo Materials Added

• Snow
  
• Ceiling Tiles Dark
  
• Stone Path
  
• Casino Counter Top
  
• Casino Tile 2
  
• Concrete Basic
  
• High Roller Wood Floor
  
• High Roller Wood Cube Floor
  
• Red Plaster Wall
  
• High Roller Wallpaper
  
• Casino Walkway Carpet
  
• Casino Ceiling
  
• Casino Wall
  
• Nightclub Wood Wall
  
• Nahnia Cabin Wood Trim
  
• Nahnia Cabin Wood Wall #1
  
• Nahnia Cabin Wood Wall #2
  
• Nahnia Cabin Wood Wall #3
  
• Nahnia Cabin Stone Brick Wall
  
• Snow Brick Wall
  
• Nahnia Cabin Carpet
  
• Pool Tile Floor
  
• Nightclub Screen Wall #1
  
• Nightclub Screen Wall #2
  
• Prism Tile
  
• Blue Star
  
• Checkered Tile
  
• Oasis Tile
  
• Oasis Sand Wall
  
• Oasis Marble Tile
  
• Sand Brick Wall
  
• Oasis Glyph Wall
  
• Paradise Wood Wall
  
• Woodlands Tile
  
• Woodlands Marble Floor
  
• Woodlands Wood Floor
  
• Woodlands Acid
  
• Woodlands Brick Wall
  
• Woodlands Concrete Floor
  
• Sand

Join our Discord for development updates and community fun! https://discord.gg/pixeltail
We love awesome people like you!

We're also active on Twitter! https://twitter.com/PixelTailGames

Follow our developments on our Trello in near real-time:
https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

Take a peek at what's being worked on every week in our weekly dev logs! There's bound to be something interesting every week! http://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/devupdates/weekly-dev-logs

Please report bugs & submit suggestions on our forums. We're active everyday & here to help.
For bug reports: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/bug-report/18
For suggestions: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/suggestions/7

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Weekly Dev Log for December 21st, 2020, detailing all the changes that have happened since December 14th, 2020. Note: Devs that don't appear in the weekly log are not necessarily away or not doing work, but may be working on things currently not announced or backend work that doesn't need to be detailed.

[h2]Update 0.13.2.0 (Winter Update Part 2)[/h2]
After finishing the Hotfix 0.13.1.1, work began on Part 2 of the Winter Update (0.13.2.0). This update is slated to bring some new holiday items, as well as some bug fixes. You can read about what's planned for this update here.

[h2]Update 0.13.1.0 (Karaoke Rooms) & Hotfix 0.13.1.1[/h2]
Last week we released Update 0.13.1.0, which brought back the Winter Plaza and Holiday Events, as well as introducing Karaoke Room, rent-able private Nightclub rooms!

We also released a hotfix (Update 0.13.1.1), which fixed some bugs and introduced some new features, such as complete player blocking.

You can read all about Update 0.13.1.0 here, and the Hotfix 0.13.1.1 here.

[h2]Accessibility Suggestions[/h2]
We've created a forum post asking the community for suggestions on how we can improve gameplay for players with certain conditions such as colorblindness, dyslexia, or anything else that might affect a players ability to use the standard presentation and controls of the game.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, and possible solutions on how to solve a particular issue, please check out the forum post here.

[h2]December 2020 Condo Contest[/h2]
This month, we're running a winter / festivity theme condo contest! This contest runs through the entire month of December, ending on January 4th, 2021. First place winner takes home 1,000,000 units, and participants may be rewarded 75,000 units!

You can read more about the contests, as well as the rules here.

[h2]Miscellany[/h2]

Caboose700 set up a status website for quick monitoring of the Plaza and AGCs, which can be found here.

Johanna worked on polishing the exterior of the Bumper Cars building in the Plaza.

JJosh worked on a Trash Can model, and finished up all of the NPCs for the Arcade. He's also working on finishing the Tool Glove and Arcade Prizes.

macdguy worked on releasing the Karaoke update and fixing some bugs with Billiards. He also started working on new Holiday items and fixing some long-standing bugs.

Madmijk continued working on a new condo "Transformer" tool, which will allow for the quick application of translation, scale, and rotation to individual items. He also is working on some new Holiday items.

Sketchman worked on optimizations for the AGC.

Wheezwer continued working on Steam Trading Cards, finishing the Arcade Trading Card. She also helped Johanna with the Bumper Cars exterior, and started working on the NPC for the Information Desk in the Arcade. She also finished the concept art for the Oasis NPC.

Will continued working on music for the Oasis store, and went through several levels and cleaned up their sound actors.

[h3]Arcade: Pizza Store NPC WIP[/h3]



[h3]Steam: Little Crusaders Card Art & Sun Emote WIP[/h3]



[h3]Condo: New Items[/h3]



[h3]Billiards: Fixed Shadows (Before / After)[/h3]



[h2]Wrap It Up[/h2]
That about covers everything that happened since December 14th, 2020 at PixelTail Games. We'll see you all next year on January 11th, 2021!

---

Join our Discord for development updates and community fun! https://discord.gg/pixeltail
We love awesome people like you!

We're also active on Twitter! https://twitter.com/PixelTailGames

Follow our developments on our Trello in near real-time: https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

Take a peek at what's being worked on every week in our weekly dev logs! There's bound to be something interesting every week! https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/devupdates/weekly-dev-logs

Please report bugs & submit suggestions on our forums. We're active everyday & here to help.
For bug reports: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/bug-report/18
For suggestions: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/suggestions/7

This hot fix addresses several issues you've reported. We got more fixes in the works as well.

Changes

• Your own model no longer fades while playing games
  
• Updated Candy Cane stick to be like the minigame version
  
• Added teleport volumes around the karaoke rooms to prevent mischievous individuals from glitching into karaoke rooms they're not meant to be in.
  
• When you have a player blocked, they will no longer visually display for you in Plaza or Condos. All their weapon sounds and FX will also be muted just for you. (unless they are in Laser Tag or Minigames with you)
  
• Bubble Gun, Sparkler, Glowstick are now available to use in Nightclub or Arcade
  
• Improved AGC stability to prevent the arcade AGC from going down
  
• Improved AGC connections, reducing the amount of time it takes to connect to the AGC
  
• Hot bar clean up: Combined Potion & Morph categories into Magic
  
• Hot bar cleanup: Added a Toys category for weapons that are toys, reducing the amount of weapon items in the weapon category - making it easier to find the friendlier weapons
  
• Hot bar cleanup: Fixed vehicles and food items showing up in "Other" category. Moved some items into food category (such as Throwable Popcorn) as that's more accurate to what the item are
  
• Renamed Fruit Launcher to Throwable Fruit

Bug Fixes

• Nightclub: Fixed the nightclub media player sometimes not starting, specifically when you teleport to it using the in-game map fast travel
  
• Condo: Fixed not being able to interact with tool settings HUDs
  
• Fixed workshop models being translucent when they shouldn't be
  
• Optimized nearly every particle system in the game
  
• Billiards: Fixed issues where billiards would end immediately in singleplayer mode
  
• Fixed "Cold Killer" achievement not incrementing
  
• Little Crusaders: Fixed taunting not letting you rotate the camera during the taunt
  
• Fixed Plaza maps in the transit station not being interactable
  
• Fixed minigame HUD not removing sometimes
  
• Fixed minigame kills not counting correctly in the achievements for all minigames that have those
  
• Fixed bumper cars exterior having the wrong collision
  
• Fixed player fade setting not disabling fade feature properly
  
• Fixed a bug preventing you from clicking on the fishing result UI
  
• Fixed christmas lights being shifted off of the fishing pier
  
• Fixed nightclub post-process volume being disabled
  
• Fixed shadows not showing up on billiards balls in certain areas (nightclub) and under certain settings
  
• Billiards: Fixed first ball pocketed not giving you points
  
• Fixed fruit launcher weapon icon not being really useful to what the item is
  
• Nightclub: Fixed missing collision

Join our Discord for development updates and community fun! https://discord.gg/pixeltail
We love awesome people like you!

We're also active on Twitter! https://twitter.com/PixelTailGames

Follow our developments on our Trello in near real-time:
https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

Take a peek at what's being worked on every week in our weekly dev logs! There's bound to be something interesting every week! http://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/devupdates/weekly-dev-logs

Please report bugs & submit suggestions on our forums. We're active everyday & here to help.
For bug reports: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/bug-report/18
For suggestions: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/suggestions/7

It's that time out of the year to bring out the cheer and good times. Holiday Coins are back and can be earned by playing any of the games in Tower! Santa Claws is back in town.

The Winter Plaza is now here just in time for the festivities.





The nightclub now has private karaoke rooms you can rent out and sing songs with your friends. Show your friends your singing talent, or just relax and listen to tunes in an upscale modern private room. All rooms come with a fully featured bar!



We also improved the voice chat quality significantly so you won't miss out on your friends' wonderful voice cracking and off pitch singing! (also added voice wall muffling so you can run away from them)


We've added a new billiards room to the Arcade. These modern billiards tables allow you to earn tickets while playing! Play with a friend or challenge yourself.





This year we have enhanced the previous snowball minigame. It now has a completely new arena and gameplay.




Now when you are playing games, player models (no matter what size) will fade out when clipping with your camera. This will prevent other players from distracting with you HUGE models while you're playing games.


We've tackled crashes and optimized more of the game in this update.





Changes

• Start of Holiday/Winter Events 2020
  
• Winter Plaza 2020
  
• Added Karaoke Rooms to the Nightclub
  
• Completely redid Snowball Battle gameplay
  
• Plaza: Brand new Snowball Battle Arena
  
• Added Anti-Harassment Player Fade System
  
• Arcade: New Billiards room
  
• Arcade: Added Billiards (earns you tickets instead of units)
  
• Nightclub: The minibar in the billiards room now serves drinks as well
  
• Nightclub: Increased scroll bar width of the media queue
  
• Added report button to media items that aren't currently playing but are on the queue
  
• Optimized Plaza screens (map boards and game port screens), increasing FPS on GPU end
  
• Optimized Arcade (reduced overdraw and other LOD improvements)
  
• Optimized Plaza (reduced render overdraw and CPU usage for collision)
  
• Added Streamer quick settings for streamers
  
• Plaza: Removed the windows in the Tower Lobby, giving it a more open-air tropical feel (just in time for the cold winter storm to blast inside)
  
• Little Crusaders: Added Mystic Grove achievements
  
• Added a label on how many drinks/bites are left on food items
  
• Media volume slider now hides if you open the bottom inventory
  
• Text hat text will no longer display if you have chat disabled
  
• Added new music to Kalleria's store
  
• Updated graphics scalability settings: Setting shadows to low now uses very cheap low detailed shadows instead of incorrectly having no shadows render at all. Other shadow settings now have a steady progression in quality per setting.
  
• Updated graphics scalability settings: Low effects settings no longer cause odd visuals in the game (materials were being set to be completely metallic).
  
• Reverted Viewself (right click) back to what it was before, no longer rotates the camera when ending viewself
  
• Improved the Throwable Snowball item
  
• Added voice chat occlusion. Now when players are behind walls their voice chat will be quieted/more muted
  
• Improved voice chat quality by increasing sample rate from 11kHz to 32kHz (it's quite a difference!)
  
• Reorganized/simplified gameplay settings as it's a bit overwhelming. Added an "advanced settings" toggle button. Made the settings titles more visually noticeable
  
• Updated pause menu to support the new help/tutorial menu
  
• Added a camera mode (F5 key) that toggles off all HUD elements and name tags for all games
  
• Chat, achievements, voice chat, EXP, FPS counter, and more now hide when in camera mode (camera item or new F5 mode)

Bug Fixes

• Billiards: Fixed balls sometimes not pocketing properly
  
• Billiards: Fixed balls sometimes going off the table
  
• Billiards: Fixed an exploit
  
• Mystic Grove: Fixed the sword sometimes not restoring
  
• Mystic Grove: Better night vision for Dragon
  
• Fixed Knight milestone not being able to do taunts
  
• Fixed a serious hole where players could get stuck in sunrise isles track 1. Specifically, the middle of the fork where the path splits into two bridges.
  
• Fixed the ambient nightclub sound coming from the nightclub doors in the casino from doubling up
  
• Nightclub: Doubled stream buffer size to help with visualizer not loading songs or stopping halfway for some users
  
• Condo: Fixed the active item slot index not being copied by the copycat tool
  
• Condo: Fixed undoing changing the item alignment slot on an item not working
  
• Fixed audio driver issue for AMD users hopefully resolving long standing issue where voice chat being on would cause stutters/audio failures
  
• Fixed a bug where opening the collection book in the pause menu would end the tab you are currently on until you switch back to that tab again
  
• Plaza: Fixed condo NPC not letting you select which condo you'd like to host
  
• Various crash fixes for workshop
  
• Fixed a crash related to workshop thumbnails

Join our Discord for development updates and community fun! https://discord.gg/pixeltail
We love awesome people like you!

We're also active on Twitter! https://twitter.com/PixelTailGames

Follow our developments on our Trello in near real-time:
https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

Take a peek at what's being worked on every week in our weekly dev logs! There's bound to be something interesting every week! http://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/devupdates/weekly-dev-logs

Please report bugs & submit suggestions on our forums. We're active everyday & here to help.
For bug reports: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/bug-report/18
For suggestions: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/suggestions/7

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Weekly Dev Log for December 14th, 2020, detailing all the changes that have happened since December 7th, 2020. Note: Devs that don't appear in the weekly log are not necessarily away or not doing work, but may be working on things currently not announced or backend work that doesn't need to be detailed.

[h2]Update 0.13.1.0 (Karaoke Rooms)[/h2]
Work continues on the next update to Tower Unite, Update 0.13.1.0. Snow has fallen with this update, as the Winter Plaza and Holiday Events return.

This update will also contain Karaoke Rooms, which are rent-able private nightclub rooms you can reserve for you and your friends, along with improved Voice Chat quality (11kHz to 32kHz).

This update will also include bug fixes and new features, which you can read about here.

[h2]Accessibility Suggestions[/h2]
We've created a forum post asking the community for suggestions on how we can improve gameplay for players with certain conditions such as colorblindness, dyslexia, or anything else that might affect a players ability to use the standard presentation and controls of the game.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, and possible solutions on how to solve a particular issue, please check out the forum post here.

[h2]December 2020 Condo Contest[/h2]
This month, we're running a winter / festivity theme condo contest! This contest runs through the entire month of December, ending on December 31st. First place winner takes home 1,000,000 units, and participants may be rewarded 75,000 units!

You can read more about the contests, as well as the rules here.

[h2]Miscellany[/h2]

JJosh continued working on the Pizza NPC for the Arcade.

Lifeless continued working on the Virus map, "Theme Park".

macdguy worked on finishing the Karaoke room booking system. He updated the Snowball Battle minigame to be about throwing snowballs (with better physics and collision) instead of shooting, and worked on a new Gingerbread Smash plaza minigame. He added streamer quick settings, and re-organized the settings menu to make it a bit simpler for newer players, while the more advanced options are in an advanced toggle. He added a camera mode (F5) which when enabled will remove all HUD elements for taking videos and photos to all games.

Madmijk worked on trying to resolve Soundcloud sync issues with the Nightclub. He also worked on a new condo "Transformer" tool, which will allow for the quick application of translation, scale, and rotation to individual items.

Sketchman continued working on crash fixes, solving issues with the original static mesh workshop model code, and worked on Steam badges.

Wheezwer continued working on Steam Trading Cards and Steam Emotes. She also continued working on the concept art for the new Oasis store NPC.

Will continued working on store specific music, specifically Oasis and the Fishing Bait shop.

[h3]Steam Trading Cards WIP[/h3]



[h3]Steam Emotes WIP[/h3]



[h3]Steam Badges WIP[/h3]



[h3]Condo: Transformer Tool WIP[/h3]



[h3]Plaza: New and Improved Snowball Battle WIP[/h3]



[h3]Nightclub: Karaoke Room Check-in WIP[/h3]



[h2]Wrap It Up[/h2]
That about covers everything that happened since December 7th, 2020 at PixelTail Games. See you all next week!

---

Join our Discord for development updates and community fun! https://discord.gg/pixeltail
We love awesome people like you!

We're also active on Twitter! https://twitter.com/PixelTailGames

Follow our developments on our Trello in near real-time: https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

Take a peek at what's being worked on every week in our weekly dev logs! There's bound to be something interesting every week! https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/devupdates/weekly-dev-logs

Please report bugs & submit suggestions on our forums. We're active everyday & here to help.
For bug reports: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/bug-report/18
For suggestions: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/suggestions/7