Hidden Deep News

Hello everyone!

I'm happy to announce that Multiplayer for Hidden Deep is here!

I have to admit that the last month has been the craziest coding marathon of my life.
I told myself I couldn’t let you down again, and I was determined to deliver on time this time - before end of 2024. That meant working at a ridiculous pace, and unfortunately, I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to. I got so close to the goal I’d planned, but time is merciless, and you just can’t stretch it no matter how hard you try.

With just a few hours left until Christmas, family dinners waiting, and no more time to spare, I’m giving you what I’ve got. So, here’s where we’re at:

- The game is playable but can be quirky from time to time.
- The netcode has issues - I'm aware of them and already have ideas on how to fix them, but I ran out of time.
- Because of this, I’m releasing the build under the EXPERIMENTAL-PUBLIC branch. Anyway it is still be Alpha version even if working very well. It is new beginning for Hidden Deep.
- I had to disable some things that didn’t work well enough, so there’s only one map for now with only old monsters. New ones are too quirky at the moment.
- I'm going back onto this right after New Year Eve so expect a big update in January.

This is a very emotional moment for me. There were so many times I thought I wouldn’t make it, but here we are. Thank you all for your patience. I promise I will fix all the bugs :D

I would be grateful for suggestions as I generally play single player games and the co-op world is not very familiar to me.


PS. If you are not familiar with betas in the Steam application go to the Hidden Deep page, click properties->Beta and select Experimental-public. The game should update automatically.

--Luke

Hello everyone,

I’ve seen the comments and messages, and I just want to say - Hidden Deep is NOT abandoned. I’m still here, working on it every single day. This game is my baby, and there’s no way I’m giving up on it.

That said, I owe you an apology. I know it’s been a while since the last update, and I get why some of you are frustrated. The truth is, working on multiplayer has been... a beast. There were moments where I felt totally stuck, like maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew. But I kept going, slowly but surely.

Honestly, I’m not great at keeping everyone in the loop while I’m deep in the code. You deserve better communication from me, and that’s something I’m going to work on. I really appreciate everyone who’s stuck around and kept believing in the game - it means a lot to me.

More updates are coming the first one will be before Christmas.

Thank you for your patience and support.

--Luke

This fix will hopefully address the game crashes on Directx 11 that some users have reported. Unfortunately, neither I nor my testers were able to replicate this error but I did found possible problematic spots in the code.

PS. Multiplayer news soon.

Greetings explorers!

I have a long-awaited fix for you: UI scaling to high resolutions. All main UI elements have been redrawn to achieve a high level of detail.

Additionally, the patch includes:
- performance optimization for DirectX 11
- fixed problem with key assignment, especially on AZERTY keyboards where there was a problem with the Z key
- fixed loss of stability when playing on a gamepad
- some minor fixes

ALSO I have one more little bonus this time only on the EXPERIMENTAL branch:

- In Survivors mode, I added an anti-fall jet engine. When you start falling, you can press the space bar and the engine will turn on and run for a maximum of 7 seconds. The next use of the engine will be possible after 1 minute (the icon in the window at the bottom will light up)
- This gadget has not been sufficiently tested yet, so it is in experimental branch
- You can select branch in Game properties->Beta (in Steam)

Well, as they say better is the enemy of good. There were new DirectX 11 rendering engine with many optimisations but it turned out that not all PCs liked it :( So I temporarily rolled back to old DirectX11. Of course all the newest game features stays. This will fix following issues:

- Black screen when going into game menu in fullscreen mode
- Crash on Steam Deck
- Crash on game start (rare but was reported too)

I hope this time all will work fine. The only feature taken back is you cannot choose GPU Adapter in SafeMode launcher. If you need to change the adapter use the routine described in troubleshooting post.