Hey folks,

As the macOS build is rapidly approaching being shippable, I decided to spend the day looking back into how Steam handles multiplatform releases.

I set up the requisite depots and, after a bit of poking around, got the build script how I’d like it. That let me do a manual push, and so now we have:

Of course, this is not available for everyone yet. We still have a bunch of things to do before this can go public. Including but not limited to:

• Changing our keybinding handling so we can make sensible platform-specific defaults
• Tracking down an error that happens on exit
• Performing heavy testing and fixing any critical bugs that appear
• Fixing up Symbiote issues
• Adding in-game info to inform players about the limitations of the current Mac build
• Updating the info on Steam and prepping for release.

Due to not knowing what bugs we will find, we are not giving a release date yet. But if all goes well, it will be soon.

Big thanks to all the macOS folks who have been so patient with us. We hope it’s worth the wait!

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

Heya folks!

Today I come with a screenshot.

That screenshot shows the macOS build working without errors. This is great news in that we are again one more step toward shipping this blighter.

The tradeoff is that, for the first release, we (bouncyrock) will need to build the assets separately for Windows and Mac. That is very normal, but it’s not something we want for modding. We want you to be able to build your mods once and have them work on any platform we support.

To that end, I think we will need to make a custom asset format before we ship creature, tile, or prop mods. That’s fine though. I was expecting that to be the case. Another upside of this is that we untie our assets from the Unity version, so upgrades will be less risky for us in the future[0].

Once we have our own format, we can use that in place of Unity’s asset-bundles and remove these separate Windows/macOS asset builds.

Alrighty, time to go get these changes merged in. Hopefully, next week we can get back to looking at Steam’s process for shipping games on macOS.

Until then,

Peace.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

[0] The worry is that a new version might require that assets be rebuilt to use some feature, and once the community makes mods, that becomes nearly impossible to ensure. This makes us less likely to take that risk, which in turn means TaleSpire can miss out on fixes and feature improvements in later versions of Unity.

Hey folks,

Well, the Symbiotes release was great! There was one simple bug we needed to patch, but aside from that it’s been going very well. We had crossed 10k Symbiotes downloads before Friday ended and it’s been a delight to start seeing community symbiotes rolling in.

With Symbiotes out I could start looking at other things and so I upgraded Unity to see if the macOS graphics fix worked. The answer is: YES!

For context this is what water looked like before.

You might have spotted the little red errors in the first screenshot, so clearly not everything is working, but it’s a great start.

The plan is that @Chairmander and I will begin thoroughly testing the Windows build on Monday. If that passes then we will hopefully get this merged very soon.

The little errors mentioned above are shader related. I’ve started trying to hunt them down but I’m not sure what they are yet. Once they are sorted we’ll get macOS builds set up in our CI and start the testing process.

I’m not happy with the performance on m1, but it might be worth it to mac players to ship sooner and fix the perf issues later. We’ll see.

macOS support has been hanging over me for nearly a year now and I can’t wait to get this out. Let’s hope it’s soon.

I’ve got plenty more little things in the works but I’ll talk about them another day.

Peace.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

Heya folks,

No surprise here. We are fixing bugs and getting ready to push Symbiotes public. The focus is naturally the mod.io integration.

Here is the process of installing and using Symbiotes in our latest internal builds

I don’t want to jinx it, but a release looks pretty close!

Hope you are doing good,

Seeya.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

Hey folks,

As expected, I’ve been working on the community-mod browser so we can have an in-game way to install Symbiotes when we make that feature public this week.

Here is a little clip of that in action:

I’m currently fixing smaller bugs and UX things, and that’s what I’m going to get back to now.

Have fun folks!

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

Heya folks,

Work has continued integrating mod.io (so we can download Symbiotes from within TaleSpire), albeit sporadically, as I’ve had a bunch of folks visiting for midsummer (no ritual deaths involved, in case you wondered :p). The first few days of this week are gonna be a bit hectic for me, so we are shooting for Symbiotes to come out of Beta sometime next week (as in between the 3rd and 7th). I am always hesitant to give dates, as life has a habit of kicking off when I do. But hey, it’s been a while, and I’m ready to make that mistake again!

As you’ve probably seen, we’ve also been adding logs and gathering details on a bug that has given some folks sporadic difficulties logging in. We’ve narrowed it down to the request that fetches the game-environment details[0], but we are still working on minor fixes to address the cases that have been reported.

I hope you’ve had a good weekend.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. It doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

[0] The game-env tells TaleSpire the address for the backend along with some extra stuff like maintenance times

Heya folks,

Currently, I’m looking into whether we can have mod.io support ready in time for Symbiotes leaving beta.

I know we won’t have the in-game upload done for that time. But what if we allow uploads on the website and downloads in-game? That still should be a much better experience for regular players.

It took minimal effort to wire up the community-mod-browser to show the symbiotes, so now I need to handle the subscriptions to mods themselves.

mod.io does have its own mechanism for subscribing to mods, but we would prefer to handle that for a couple of reasons:

1. It makes the code that handles mod.io more sharable with community-run repositories
2. We can let you decide who knows what you subscribe to.

Number two feels important. With that TaleSpire can give you the option of whether to only store your mod list locally or on our servers so that it is automatically available wherever you are playing. If we can provide that choice, we would prefer to.

Right, that’s all from me for today. This week is pretty hectic as I have a bunch of guests over for midsummer, and I need to make sure I don’t just hide away coding :p

Have a great one folks. More coming soon!

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

Heya folks,

Yesterday we were getting ready for the Symbiotes Beta. That involved writing up the release texts, recording gifs and all that jazz. We also tested the build and found a few more bugs that needed investigating, so that’s a pain, but better than we find it than you folks :P

The new backend made it through the first 24 hours just fine, which is a lovely first milestone. It’s great to start seeing the ebb and flow as people play across various timezones. That’s only going to get more useful over the weeks and months ahead.

That’s all for me for now. Back to the bugs!

Ciao!

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

Heya folks, today is going very well so far.

You may have seen us talk about switching to our new backend infrastructure today. That went relatively smoothly, with only a few things to tweak for next time. I don’t want to steal @Borodust’s thunder by going into all the details of what he is doing, but I certainly sleep more easily these days seeing what is being built. We are on the road to a much more maintainable system, and the news insights we have into our servers mean we finally have some tools to start doing a decent job of seeing problems coming rather than reacting to everything. Of course, it’s still early days, but I’m naturally pumped about it.

Next up, Ree, myself, and Chairmander have all been merging in bits and pieces for Symbiotes. I’ve squashed the bugs I needed to handle before the beta, Ree merged in the UI, and Chairmander has the latest improvement to the docs (and supporting code) based on your feedback thus far.

I’ve got a candidate build running through our build system now, so I will go kick the tires on that and see how it goes.

Have a good one!

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

Whoops :D

I released a little more than I expected to yesterday. Let’s talk about that.

I aimed to release some UI we could use during maintenance to make the process nicer for players. However, I forgot to disable a few unfinished things before shipping, so you folks got a little peek.

Big thanks to Ree, who cleaned up my mistakes as I was on the road when you alerted us to this issue.

The first thing that you might have seen is this:

This is the first version of the ‘community mod browser.’ It’s where you’ll be able to find community-made slabs, symbiotes, etc, hosted on mod repositories. It’s currently only pulling from our mod.io repo, but that will be easy enough to expand once the core is complete.

As some of you saw, you can click on a slab to bring it immediately into the game, making the flow of building with community creations even smoother.

Aside from some more testing and adding separate categories for symbiotes and boards, this part is relatively close to shipping. The reason we haven’t is due to the next thing we accidentally shipped.

This is the unfinished UI for sharing slabs from inside TaleSpire. Very soon, it will be as easy as selecting your creation and hitting a few buttons to share your slabs with the world. We are starting with uploading to mod.io but then want to expand to uploading to other mod repositories

That said, it’s clear why this hasn’t shipped yet. The camera controls are borked, the UI is unfinished, and there is no way to set up your mod.io account.

There is one part that works, however. You’ll notice that, when entering the upload UI, TaleSpire isolates just the selection. This is very handy for seeing what is selected, which can be tricky in busy scenes and can help avoid sharing more than you mean to.

This “isolation mode” is a helpful tool in its own right, so we have made it available in the building tools menu.

Also, this feature already works despite being an accidental release, so we’ve left it in. At least that way, you folks get something useful out of my screw-ups!

Today I’m back squashing bugs in Symbiotes. I have an annoying exception occurring when switching to and from dev-mode.

Catch ya in the next dev log.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team