AVWW Beta 0.535, "Audio Epitaph," Released!

This one has been a couple of days in the making, and the release notes are still pretty short even so, but it's been a busy few days for sure!  Keith has been hard at work on the multiplayer stuff, and that's coming along well although it's still an uphill thing.

For my part I've mostly been working on the intro mission, both in terms of the framework for it, and the actual implementation of the mission itself.  A very foreshortened version of the intro mission is now in place for when you start a new world; it gives you three screens that you have to get past before getting to the settlement.

Those three screens themselves are pretty much what I'd consider "final pending feedback," but there's intended to be a lot more to the intro mission than just that.  And the actual first-settlement logic still needs some updates, too.  But it's getting there!

My favorite things about the intro mission thus far are: 1) the epitaphs, which I think is a really fun and thematically-appropriate way to give hints to new players about how to get through the mission; and 2) the fact that the very very start of the mission reminds me a little bit of the starting area of the original Metroid game.  You have to really look to see it, and maybe it's just me, but I get that same general vibe from the start of this game now, which I'm really pleased about.

There's also a lot of new back-up related features in this one.  Now backing up your worlds doesn't have to be a manual-in-the-OS process.  The game asks you if you want to do a backup before you load any world (and you can turn that prompt off if it bugs you).  And there's an option for manually backing up a world folder any time you please.

In the last few versions there's been a few crashes, mainly out of memory crashes, experienced by a few players.  I strongly suspect that has to do with the way that the audio playback was altered in 0.531.  Well, as of this version, the audio playback has been altered completely, and now uses a method of playback that will use vastly less disk I/O, that will use a bit less memory, and which should solve the crashes if that's really what they were caused by.

Oh, and I finally got rid of those ice age vent pipes that everyone hated, and replaced them with some more-attractive icicles.  More to come most likely on Monday.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.