I am pleased to announce the release of v1.3.0 of the demo for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men. With this update, the game is now running on Godot 4.1.1 (previously it was on 3.5.1). This was planned a while ago (but overlooked in the roadmap), and was necessary for bringing in new features, bug fixes, performance improvements and more.
Release Notes
- Upgraded the engine to Godot 4.1.1
- Added a new decal-based blood effect. Go wild painting the maps red!
- Improved the fog effect. It now uses the new volumetric fog, and has been coloured to look like lingering poison gas. Let me know what you think of this new look in the comments
- Improved performance (in Map 4 especially, but also in the other maps. More on this below)
- Fixed the camera clipping through walls in some places in Map 4
- Added a setting to the graphics options for limiting the number of decals
- Added a warning for when incompatible saves are detected (more on this below)
- Several other bug fixes
Known Issues
With such significant changes, there were bound to be some issues which I would not be able to fix right away. While I have tested the demo in full several times now, and have done my best to fix as many things as possible, there are still a few things that should be noted.
- Save games from v1.2.1 and before will no longer work. This was the reason for the "incompatible saves warning" - anyone who has played the game before will see this. Unfortunately, the reason for this is an internal engine change that I have no control over, but I did use this opportunity to clean up and refactor the save system code.
- Performance on integrated GPUs may be worse than before. I know I mentioned performance improvements, but unfortunately I found out today that these will only be relevant for those with dedicated GPUs. It turns out, in Godot 4.x there is a distinction between the full-featured, "desktop" renderer and a faster but lower quality "mobile" renderer. To get the game working properly again on integrated GPUs, I will need to spend more time optimising specifically for them, but as the majority of Steam users have dedicated GPUs anyway the priority for now is just to get the game finished. If you do rely on an iGPU, rest assured I will not release the full game like this as I do have a laptop to test it on.
- The physics don't work quite as they did before. I have tried my best to tune it so it works just as well, but you may encounter some differences in behaviour compared to the previous releases.
With this in mind, why did I choose to release this update now? Well, I have been working on it for a while already, and I decided it would be nice to have some feedback on the new features. There will likely be more updates to address the shortcomings before the full release.
Reverting to v1.2.1
If you have issues running the game following this update, or just wanted to finish your current save game, don't worry. I have added the previous version of the game as a "beta" so you can switch back to it. The instructions for this are below:
- On the game's library page, click "Manage" (the gear icon) -> "Properties"
- Click the "Betas" tab
- Select "v1.2.1" from the "Beta Participation" dropdown
[ 2023-07-21 20:49:21 CET ] [ Original post ]