Winkeltje: The Little Shop News

Salutations shopkeepers. Today marks a major update due to the sheer number of changes required for this update. A grand total of 85 new furniture options are available with the introduction of hybrid storages and display storages allowing for more variety in how your shop can look. On top of that, you can now enjoy much better light effects on 7 decorations and 6 counters. Finally, footstep sounds are now supported for 5 times more surfaces than before. If that gets you excited you should surely keep on reading.


Display cupboards now have partial storage options allowing for some slots to be used to display items, and some slots to be sacrificed to increase storage capacity.
In addition to hybrid storages, you now also have the option to dedicate all display slots of a cupboard or shelf to storage. This allows for more customization options for your storage room.
Hybrid storage and dedicated storage displays are unlocked alongside the original display. We look forward to hearing your feedback on this feature.


Point and cone lights were initially explored as a feature for Winkeltje several years ago but sadly abandoned due to poor performance and feature support in the game engine at the time. After finally reaching feature parity we could upgrade the game engine last February allowing us to revisit this feature with much better results.
With the introduction of lights it now also makes sense to add Bloom as a post-processing effect option. This basically adds a soft glow around really bright areas on the screen. Please let us know how it looks and performs on your computer.


You will no longer have to listen to the same footstep sounds on all surfaces as footsteps now sound more varied with the introduction of unique footstep sounds for dirt, grass, wood, stone, and snow.

[h2]New[/h2]

• Art - Seasons now transition continuously instead of discrete.
  
• Audio - Added footstep sounds for dirt, grass, wood, stone, and snow.
  
• Furniture - New hybrid storage displays and shelves as variations of existing displays and shelves.
  
• Furniture - New storage options where displays and shelves are purely used for storage instead of displaying.
  
• Lights - Community - Added lights to certain furniture pieces.
  
• Lights - Community - Decoration lights now default to NightOnly. Clicking on decoration lights allows for cycling between NightOnly, AlwaysOn, and Off.
  
• UI - Community - Added hotkey "i" to open the inventory menu.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Art - Tweaked color channels on room divider, tub, and logs texture to be slightly less pale.
  
• Balance - Changed how display buyprices are returned in order to correct prices.
  
• Balance - Lowered the price per storage capacity of storage cupboards a little to better convey the difference between the idea of compact storage of pallets and the less compact new storage cupboards.
  
• Lights - All counters should now have a lantern light.
  
• Performance - FPS cap was mistakenly disabled. It should be capped to 60 for now.
  
• UI - Changing shadow settings will now also affect furniture lights where shadows are allowed.
  
• UI - Refactored labels to use the same system (furniture labels, tutorial hints, general warnings, dynamic appeal, overburdened).
  
• UI - Reduced the size of the cost indicator and added it to the labels system.
  
• UI - Tweaked screenshot settings for better image quality at similar file size when saving a shop.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Art - The glow shader on the Stove was not rendering correctly.
  
• Art - Fireplaces were not correctly showing glow and distortion effects.
  
• Customers - Customer would remain interactable after their patience would run out.
  
• Furniture - Increased the collision boxes of some of the pallets to prevent clipping with wall objects.
  
• Furniture - Community - Hybrid displays would initialize after being loaded, resulting in conflicting data.
  
• Furniture - The divider will no longer remain highlighted when placed. Furniture that has colliders in child objects would not unhighlight or highlight when these colliders exited or entered the influence range of the shopkeeper.
  
• Furniture - The divider will no longer remain highlighted when placed. Furniture that has colliders in child objects would not unhighlight or highlight when these colliders exited or entered the influence range of the shopkeeper.
  
• Gameplay - Fixed error when leveling up your store when no counter is placed.
  
• Lights - Community - The light on the solstice tree was offset appearing elsewhere in the shop as a rogue light.
  
• Objectives - "Decoration 2" & "Decoration 3" were never started, resulting in unobtainable unlocks.
  
• Planters - Huge Planter did not have its navmash obstacle enabled.
  
• Traders - Traders would sometimes not have an inventory due to spawning with the wrong specialization.
  
• UI - Dynamic appeal label for anywhere objects will now only show when the appeal is actually higher than 0.
  
• UI - Selecting a shop builder option would not be clearly indicated in the preview when subsequently hovering over other options.
  
• UI - Long names in the catalog menu inspector will now be wrapped.
  
• UI - Camera zoom would put overhead icons at wrong positions.
  
• UI - Community - The commerce menu item sub-total should now correctly show the amount of items you have of that quality.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• v6065 - Unlock notification would show for the shop upgrade when it shouldn't
  
• v6066 - When the customer pays at the counter, it now clears its AI queue. Hopefully preventing a rare issue where the customer goes back into the queue after paying.
  
• v6067 - Placing an "anywhere" object and then moving it out of bounds would throw an error.
  
• v6069 - Indirectly removing a light using the shop builder should now remove the light from the manager class.
  
• v6071 - Optimized farming HUD instantiation and activation effeciency.
  
• v6071 - Optimized icon lookup efficiency.
  
• v6072 - Fixed a critical loading issue for that 1 person who managed to keep a save file around using a scenario that shouldn't be usable anymore.
  
• v6073 - Attempting to place a variant in the shopbuilder before selecting it could cause an out of range error.
  

Update: v6064
Hotfix: v6073

It's time for another update, as our overhaul of the interface continues. In this update you'll find the newly updated Inventory UI and in addition to that you can look forward to checking out some sweet new decorations to spruce up your store alongside a slight decoration rebalance. Let us get to it!


This time around the Inventory UI received it's long overdue overhaul. It is now a lot easier to see what you have in storage (and on display!) and there's more information available for all items.


A new set of decorations have been added to the game which can be unlocked by simply leveling up your shop, these decorations will surely give your shop a more cozy feeling.

[h2]New[/h2]

• Decorations - Added a new set of decorations that can be gradually unlocked by leveling up the shop.
  
• Community - UI - Unlocking farmable items will now indicate you can grow it instead of craft it.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Community - UI - Updated the inventory menu.
  
• Decorations - Adjusted colliders of several decoration pieces.
  
• Decorations - Adjusted appeal value of several decoration pieces.
  
• Decorations - Decorations with a circular footprint had incorrect calculations to calculate the appeal and now have more accurate appeal values taking their footprint into account better, these will all see a rise in appeal.
  
• Decorations - Basket now has a capsule collider instead of a box collider to allow better placement fitting the shape.
  
• Decorations - Flower Barrel now has a capsule collider instead of a box collider to allow better placement fitting the shape.
  
• UI - Unlocking the ability to farm or craft an item will now only show if you have the relevant station or planter unlocked.
  
• Art - Seasons now transition continuously instead of discrete.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• UI - Changing filter mode in the catalog menu would not refresh the selector.
  
• Gameplay - Removing furniture with items on it would cause an error.
  
• Community - UI - Fixed an issue where the wall masking and auto hide catalog settings were not set, stored, reset or applied correctly.
  
• Trader - When a specialized seed trader would have to show up, an error would be thrown.
  
• Other - Corrupted persistent.data shouldn't crash the game anymore.
  
• Other - Loading a shop would not always unlock previously unlocked items.
  
• Performance - Removed 2-3 get component calls per shop object when loading the shop by pattern matching the derivative class.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• v5989 - Placing a display for the first time causes an error when it shouldn't.
  
• v5990 - Opening an empty inventory menu with a controller would cause an error.
  
• v5991 - Opening an inventory menu with a controller after having obtained an item would not clear the menu correctly.
  
• v5996 - Pot of the Stove crafting station did not have a collider and could clip with wall decorations or double shelves.
  
• v5999 - Hovering the cursor over a catalog item after having clicked on a different item would use incorrect item settings.
  
• v6002 - Changing the shop entrance would not correctly update the shop sign icon
  
• v6003 - Reverting double-width walls would in some situations not destroy the temporary wall.
  
• v6004 - Added an additional index reset before adding modes to the dataview dropdowns.
  

Update: v5988
Hotfix: v6007

What a wonderful day to tend to your shop. In this update you will find a number of farming UI improvements, quality of life changes, and a lot of bug fixes.


The new replanting feature will remember what you planted last and attempt to replant with the press of a button.

Selecting seeds will now show you useful information.

Running with furniture is now allowed so you can achieve your dream interior in record time.


[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Audio - Added sound to selector change when using controller.
  
• Community - Gameplay - Moving furniture will no longer prevent running.
  
• Community - UI - Added a replant feature to the farming menu.
  
• Community - UI - Seeds tooltip now shows growth days and bonus seasons.
  
• UI - Updated the look and feel of notifications.
  
• UI - Multiple plant withered notifications are now grouped.
  
• UI - Seed tooltip now also indicates that the seed is returned.
  
• UI - Controller selection in crafting and farming menu should now automatically select the relevant slot.
  
• UI - There should only be a single selector present in the crafting and farming menu for more clarity.
  
• UI - Items that can't be crafted or farmed will now indicate so by means of a red background in the crafting and farming menu.
  
• UI - Updated the controls section in the settings menu with crafting menu controls.
  
• Objectives - Added new item trashing tutorial objective that requires players to trash an item in return for a monetary reward.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Community - Art - The terrain material lost its reference to the snow texture. Snow should look better now.
  
• Camera - Switching scenes would not update the camera's depth of field settings.
  
• UI - Empty crafting material slots will now pulse consistently regardless of type.
  
• UI - Crafting material slots in the crafting menu should now show material options in all cases.
  
• UI - An active menu will now prevent the awareness loop from selecting the closest furniture when using a controller.
  
• UI - Switching from mouse to controller would activate the item selector even when the inventory is empty.
  
• UI - Attempting to favorite an item when the furniture menu is empty would cause an error.
  
• UI - The catalog menu inspector info value label was not centered when more than one value label was pooled.
  
• UI - Updating objective tasks should now trigger an update to the objective positions if there is a change in the label height.
  
• UI - Navigating to the center panel from an empty side menu in the crafting or farming menu should now also be possible with the dpad.
  
• UI - Canceling furniture placement should now deactivate the selector in the catalog menu and prevent the issue of the selector showing up over an empty furniture item.
  
• UI - Navigating back to the main menu using a mouse should no longer show the previously pressed main menu button as selected.
  
• UI - The header prefab now has more space for long menu header entries.
  
• UI - Trader percentage in item price breakdown used wrong value to calculate percentage causing the percentage to be wrong compared to other percentages.
  
• UI - Item price breakdown would sometimes show the trader percentage even if the value was 0.
  
• UI - "Vegetable" type items weren't added to the trader inventory list causing them to not be among the possible offered items when the crafting ingredients was any of the vegetables.
  
• UI - Appeal label for "Anywhere" shop objects now doesn't show up until it's being positioned over a spot where placement is possible.
  
• UI - Spam removing decorations when at the appeal limit could cause two unlock reminder buttons to appear.
  
• Scene - The character customization scene was not longer zooming on parts of the character when using the UI sliders.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• v5922 - Added a null check to UI code to prevent a potential error.
  
• v5923 - Updated all translations.
  
• v5924 - Added additional check before an objective trigger to ensure it doesn't run before the game is done loading.
  
• v5924 - Added additional check to ensure furniture colliders are not null.
  
• v5925 - Added additional check to attempt to catch a rare error in the trader.
  
• v5926 - Extended error reporting on an older issue.
  
• v5927 - Added exit time between the 'done' and 'idle' clips in the game event animator to address a warning.
  
• v5928 - Quitting the application while a dropdown was open would call an event that should only be called when closing the dropdown. This event is now cleared when quitting the application and before the dropdown is destroyed.
  
• v5929 - Added a check to prevent a null error that could happen if the player movement class was being used before it was initialized.
  
• v5930 - Quitting the application while a dropdown was open would call an event that should only be called when closing the dropdown. This event is now cleared when quitting the application and before the dropdown is destroyed.
  
• v5934 - The catalog menu dropdowns could sometimes cause an error.
  
• v5935 - Updated Spanish translations.
  
• v5936 - Using the controller selection feature could cause an error if a customer is nearby. Customers now have preview bounds so this should now be fixed.
  
• v5937 - Favoriting an empty side panel in the crafting or farming menu would cause an error.
  
• v5938 - Using the new crafting menu with a PS4 controller was set to call the "xbox_square" prompt.
  
• v5939 - Sales were counted twice for objectives, once when picked up from a display and once when paid for.
  
• v5940 - Harvesting crops were only counted once for entire harvest for objectives instead of per item.
  
• v5941 - An 'Anywhere' object would always be flagged as needing to be sold if the tile it was on was modified. 'Anywhere' objects now remain if they are not colliding with anything and get their values adjusted if the tile they are on changes inside/outside state.
  
• v5947 - The objectives header button now checks if UI is null before opening the objectives menu.
  
• v5948 - The build menu could appear blurred and using a controller would switch zoom levels each time the build menu was exited.
  
• v5949 - Removed the possibility for the catalog menu to have a negative selection index as this could cause an error.
  
• v5953 - The farming menu should no longer be showing an item skill level before any item is selected.
  
• v5954 - Deactivated menu category tabs were blocking raycasts, preventing clicks on active buttons lower in the hierarchy.
  
• v5957 - Added a null check to prevent a null error when closing the game while playing with a controller.
  

Update: v5921
Hotfix: v5957

Greetings Shopkeepers! Today we are looking at a couple of changes and improvements. There is more on the way but these needed to roll out sooner rather than later. Keep an eye out for more content in the next update.

• Community - UI - The crafting and farming menus now have permanent side menus.
  
• Community - Balance - Decorations that can be placed outside & inside now have different appeal values depending on where they are placed.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Balance - The first crafting station unlock is now at level 5 instead of level 3 (3 -> 5).
  
• Balance - Players can now unlock a new crafting station every 5 levels.
  
• Balance - Anywhere shop objects now have variable appeal depending on if they are placed outside or inside.
  
• Balance - The following objects are now "Anywhere" objects: "Barrel", "Basket", "Autumn Wreath", "Large Blue Banner", "Small Blue Banner", "Large Red Banner", "Small Red Banner", "Decorative Pumpkins", "Wall-mounted Lantern", "Table Lantern", "Winter Wreath", "Winter Garland" and "Solstice Tree".
  
• Objective - Moved crafting objective to level 5 so the objective launches at the same time a crafting specialization can be chosen.
  
• Community - UI - The crafting and farming menus now have permanent side menus.
  
• UI - When moving anywhere shop objects the expected appeal based on where it will be placed is shown.
  
• Community - UI - The crafting repeater should now search upwards in item quality from the preferred choice before searching down and stay limited to the vegetable type that was chosen.
  
• Community - UI - Closing the catalog menu before the animation was done playing could make the menu appear half visible.
  
• Community - UI - The item info tooltip can sometimes go off-screen. When that happens, it should now be repositioned so that the tooltip remains within screen bounds.
  
• Layout - Anywhere shop objects now get sold when shop structure is removed or added around them
  
• Community - Audio - Buy swoosh sound should no longer play when a customer pays at the counter.
  
• Community - UI - Added quality sort options to the commerce menu.
  

[h2]Performance[/h2]

• Performance - Hovering the mouse over furniture would slow down the game significantly.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• UI - Added a delay before the main menu becomes interactable to prevent interactions while the main menu scene is fading in.
  
• UI - The game saving notification animation was not using unscaled time.
  
• UI - All items in the commission menu should now have a quality indication.
  
• UI - Changing the UI scale could cause the furniture menu tiles to not show on initial presentation.
  
• UI - The inventory capacity HUD will now remain visible if the inventory is empty.
  
• Art - Some winter decoration outlines were incorrect.
  
• Art - Lifted up the farming slots by a minor amount on planters because some seeds were not visible under the soil.
  
• Objectives - Milestone Objectives couldn't start because their objective group list it was checking against never got populated.
  
• Objectives - Autumn and Winter objectives had too many days to complete the objective, they should now properly stop after the last opening of the season.
  
• Scenarios - Item values were set up wrong in the Relaxed Scenario leading to incorrect prices being displayed at the trader.
  
• Scenarios - Displays did not receive the appeal upgrade when upgraded in the Creative Scenario.
  
• Other - Furniture with multiple colliders would incorrectly select/deselect when entering/exiting the player's awareness range.
  
• Other - Some decoration materials could cause big areas of shop objects to be highlighted when in range.
  
• Other - Cached colors and updated outlines on all furniture.
  
• Other - Cached colors and updated outlines of all entrances.
  
• Other - Old graphics preferences could cause the game camera brightness to appear black. This value is now clamped to so the resulting brightness is no longer black.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• v5834 - Outlines on alpha clip materials should look normal again.
  
• v5835 - Removed an obsolete delay method call that could potentially cause an error.
  
  
• v5836 - Fixed issue where old shop files would have an out of bounds shop level.
  
• v5836 - Fixed issue where old shop files would throw errors when they would not have obtained certain items.
  
• v5837 - Specialization weights would not be cleared correctly if the player opened the shop without placing anything on a display.
  
• v5838 - Fixed edge case when no specialization exists, no items are in inventory and no items are on displays.
  
• Community - v5840 - Canceling the placement of outside furniture while this furniture was outside of the shop bounds would break the game.
  

Update: v5830
Hotfix: v5840

Greetings Shopkeepers! Today we bring you a somewhat smaller patch than last time, but one that's very much needed on our side. We finally updated our engine, which doesn't only give us shiny new toys to play with, it also allowed us to do some performance optimizations.

• Upgraded Unity to 2020.2.1f1.
  
• Traders now bring goods based on your specialization.
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Community Request - Furniture - Counter appeal is now variable and based on the unlocked sets and max appeal upgrades.
  
• Community Request - UI - Crafting material quality preference should now be stored and used when possible when playing in the same session.
  
• Furniture - All counters are the same price.
  
• Trader - Changed the trader to have items based on your specializations, instead of what items you have unlocked.
  
• Trader - Specialized Traders can now make an appearance offering primarily goods and crafting resources fitting their specialization.
  
• Trader - Improved the amount per quality item offered by traders a little.
  
• Commission - Crop commissions now have qualities attached to them.
  
• Assets - Refactored the outline system due to shader changes.
  

[h2]Performance[/h2]

• Performance - Merged several (custom multipass) shaders into a single shader.
  
• Performance - Added shader keywords to generate lightweight variants.
  
• Customers - Added a pooling system for all agents, this should reduce some of the performance spikes we're seeing.
  
• Performance - Increased the memory usage of resource loading, should speed up the loading of assets slightly.
  
• Analytics - Disabled analytics until we figure out a way to optimize the serialization.
  
• Performance - Caching some calculations so that they don't have to be ran twice when opening the shop.
  
• Performance - Converted a Linq statement to normal C# a few times.
  
• Performance - Disabled prompts refreshing on every disabled interactable when the shop opens, and instead do it only once at the end.
  
• Performance - Moved the caching of the MilestoneObjective list to the loading of the game, instead of the first time opening of the store.
  
• Performance - Cached the IsDisplay method since that isn't dynamic anyway.
  
• Performance - Minor GC alloc fix.
  
• Performance - Added a check so that the awareness isn't updated for every decoration on shop open/close.
  
• Performance - Spread out some of the calculations on shop close over a few frames to reduce the stuttering.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Commissions - Removed crafting resource commissions from appearing.
  
• UI - Traders should no longer appear to have an empty inventory.
  
• UI - Pressing tab while hovering an item in the commerce menu would favorite the item and show a spriteless graphic.
  
• UI - Hovering over a locked crafting target would show a tooltip.
  
• UI - The seed/material crafting menu did not always show the correct number of items compared to the inventory.
  
• UI - Closing the farming menu while hovering to destroy a crop should no longer show the destroy graphic when reopening the menu.
  
• Creative - Fixed issue where the maximum shop tier would go higher than 5.
  
• Other - Removed instances where an item was added by ID or reference because it could lead to some items no longer being unique.
  

[h2]Hotfixes[/h2]

• v5753 - UI - Hovering over a planted seed in the farmnig menu would not show accurate chances.
  
• v5753 - Fix - Turned VSync back on
  

Update: v5748
Hotfix: v5753