TaleSpire News

We have put out a temporary workaround to a bug that we strongly believe is in the Unity input system.

The way it manifests is that specific overlapping keyboard shortcuts are triggering at the wrong time. For example, we use "x" as the modifier to start a box selection, and we use "Ctrl-x" for the "cut" action. Due to the bug, performing a cut causes the selection tool to get stuck enabled.

Ironically, the feature that causes the issue is the switch in Unity's input system that was meant to prevent conflicts with overlapping key bindings.

This patch temporarily turns off that feature on Windows to give us a little time to make a proper fix. We've left it on for Mac users as there it is required to get the correct behavior for the standard Mac undo/redo shortcuts.

Back soon with more

On the 12th of September, Unity (the engine we use to make TaleSpire) announced that they'd soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained, and despite them having no reliable way to ascertain the number of installs.
This is our response to that announcement.


Like so many of you, we have been watching the Unity "Runtime Fee" situation unfold with confusion, disappointment, and disgust.

To be clear, we are not immediately affected, and TaleSpire is not going anywhere. However, this is not why we, like many in the community, are angry.

As others have perfectly elucidated, the fact that Unity would even attempt this makes them an actor that, as it stands, cannot be trusted.

We sincerely hope that Unity, at a bare minimum, rolls back these changes and puts TOS protections in place. However, it remains hard to see how the community can move forward without Unity removing the people who championed this debacle.

Despite us having used Unity since 2009, we will be keeping an eye on alternate technologies to ensure our longer-term future. In the short term, we are treating code that ties us closer to Unity as a potential risk and will manage that risk accordingly.

This is the second time this year that a massive player in our space has attempted to wield legal changes to bring a thriving community to heel. It is tough to see how divorced the heads of these behemoths have become from the simple joys of making and storytelling that their companies were ostensibly born to facilitate.

It serves us all to remind them that the systems serve the people, not the other way around.

Happy adventuring, folks.



Further reading:

• https://www.ign.com/articles/why-unitys-new-install-fees-are-spurring-massive-backlash-among-game-developers
• https://garry.net/posts/unity-can-get-fucked
• https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Just a little patch for you today. We have:

• Fixed a bug in Symbiotes that was causing input issues for some folks.
  
• Made some improvements to how TaleSpire handles server maintenance.
  

The Mac release took it out of us for a moment there, but work is going well behind the scenes.

See you in the next release!

The maintenance all went according to plan, but we'll keep a closer eye on things for a little while to ensure all is shipshape.

If, instead, you prefer stories of things going wrong, you might enjoy yesterday's dev log about the Mac release: "TaleSpire Dev Log 411 - The Steam UI choice that is war crimes."

Have fun folks!

Hi folks.

Tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. UTC, we will be undertaking a significant upgrade of our backend infrastructure. This will be our biggest one for a long time, so we are scheduling four hours for the maintenance.

Click here to see the time in your timezone

As mentioned, this is a big one for us. Behind the scenes, we’ve been working on the changes we would need to not only scale the game to much larger numbers of concurrent players but to improve our uptime while doing so. Tomorrow, we land a chunk of those improvements. With these changes, we’ll be able to perform backend upgrades just as significant as tomorrow’s one, with zero downtime.

See you on the other side!