Shadows of Doubt News

Hey everyone, after some time spent in the experimental branch we're now happy to move the main branch of the game to 34.04. Check out the list of fixes below!

- Fixed: Instances of player unable to sit after loading a game.
- Fixed: First person model was visible in photographs taken. (appeared in 34.01)
- Fixed: Items could spawn in the wrong top 2 mailboxes.
- Fixed: A rare occurance of the game failing to generate a city and getting stuck on the load screen.
- Fixed: A rare error occuring when the game tried to remove a button object.
- Fixed: 'Placing' money already in the room from the décor edit menu could result in infinite money.
- Fixed: First person guide arrow no longer appears in in-game photos
- Fixed: Screen blue now no longer effects the destination text.
- Fixed: Hospital dialog options appearing after passing out from getting mugged.
- Fixed: Some Z-fighting in the first person hand models.
- Fixed Guest pass status icons were not being removed from display properly.
- Fixed: Visual Glitch with basement standing water on very large cities.
- Fixed: Instances of certain actions like 'Talk To' not being available if they player had been witnessed doing something illegal.
- Fixed: Certain specific room lighting configurations could result in a rendering error (like tv static)
- Fixed: Errors resulting from placing certain types of furniture in décor edit mode.
- Fixed: Player being unable to scan fingerprints on street lights.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to all players using the experimental branch for their feedback, and are pleased to note we are making good progress regarding the games optimisation.

Hey everyone!

As you may have seen we wanted to test out a performance improvement but in doing so we had to update the Unity version we were using, so there is some potential for new bugs or instabilities. With this in mind we wanted to use an experimental branch so that players can opt-in to test it out first before we push it out for everyone.

To opt-in you have to right click on the game in your Steam library and select properties. Then click on Betas and from there you will have the option to select the beta you would like to opt into. Once there click on that dropdown and select experimental.

These are the patch notes for this update:

• Improvements to performance
  
• Fixed: Memory leak to do with loading materials in the game
  
• Fixed: Problems with dead bodies being discovered by citizens after loading a save game
  
• Fixed: Hovering over the text on an inventory item could cause the game to not register selection on that square
  
• Fixed: Wooden cabinet door could appear invisible
  
• Fixed: V-sync should now work with frame cap enabled
  
• Fixed: Laser scale was wrong, resulting in it appearing through walls
  
• Fixed: Problems with inconsistent red citizen outlines past a certain range
  

A quick note on new builds; occasionally changes we make can effect how the game generates a city using a seed. For example, if we add a piece of furniture, the game will generate a city featuring it whereas previous versions wouldn’t; this can have a knock-on effect that changes other things in the city if you compare it to one that was generated with a previous build. Therefore it’s worth stating that city seeds often won’t be fully compatible with previous versions. What does this mean? Not much in effect; if you have your previously generated city file any save games that use that city will continue to work with it (unless we state otherwise in an update- but we’ll try and keep this to an absolute minimum).

It only really matters if you were to delete the city file a save game uses, then try to load that save game with a newer version: It will attempt to recreate the city using the seed saved in the save game, but the city generated could be slightly different, therefore causing inconsistencies. I don’t foresee this as being a big problem, but I’ll be looking at ways to mitigate this in the future.

TLDR: Don’t delete your city files for save games you still want to play on.

Hello everyone!

I’m back from a bit of downtime, really excited to get back to work on the project. While I’ve been gone, Josh has made some really promising progress on performance optimization. Specifically, we’ve updated our Unity version which has allowed us to make some decent improvements to the batching, and therefore performance.

We’re keen to test it out, but to do so we’re going to open up a public ‘Experimental’ branch; which will contain the latest version of the game that we’re working on, but will be more untested that the default branch. Once we’re confident in those builds they will get pushed to the default branch. You’ll be able to check out the experimental branch featuring the latest build next week! I’ll post more details when it’s available.

So it is back to work and I hope you are looking forward to more fixes, optimisation and content to come over the next few weeks and months!

Hello detectives! Wow, what a crazy few weeks! The early access release has gone a lot better than I think any one of us was expecting, which is of course fantastic news. I've loved seeing the reactions to the game but mostly I've been working really hard to get the bigger fixes in place for the more prominent issues that you've been reporting. I'm aware there's still ground to cover (especially with controllers, memory usage, performance, twitch features etc), but the last couple of patches have hopefully gone a decent distance to enabling a smoother gameplay experience.

However, I'm in need of a break for a couple of weeks— I've been working flat out on the game for a long while now and these last six months or so have been especially intense! So I'm keen to take a step back and regain some headspace. While I'm off though, fellow developer Josh will be continuing to work on the game, along with Monomoon and Stark on audio and writing respectively. So we should have another update good to go not long after I return towards the end of the month.



It's worth noting that there's been some activity on our Discord around modding, which is awesome. This isn't currently something we can officially support (as the game is in early access there's a lot of internal stuff subject to change before we can do that), but we're keen to see what we can do to help implement that along our early access journey. We've put together a quick form where you can send us ideas if that's your thing.

There's still a lot to come during early access, when I return we'll be looking forward to our first content update; themed 'Cheats & Liars'. Exciting! Thanks for all your support!

/ Cole

- Fixed: Issues with existing placed furniture items disappearing on purchasing something else

- Fixed: If you attempted to select a new furniture item from the shop while placing an existing one, décor edit mode would close

- Fixed: The weapons dealer now has enough employees to sustain a full work week (this was causing problems on some cities forcing it to be closed on certain days or even most of the week!) Requires a new city generation.

- Fixed: Some items could fall through the floor when being thrown

- Fixed: In rare cases the AI investigating a flipped light switch could cause errors

- Tweaks to low health and damage indicators