v1.2.4 PATCH NOTES (December 8, 2015)
Immortal Defense News — December 8, 2015
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
v1.2.4 PATCH NOTES (December 8, 2015)
Summary: This patch adds a new system where you can only have a limited number of medals active at any one time; this is intended to add more strategy to the medals system. There are also some other miscellaneous changes, such as a button to restore default settings and a button to turn the visuals down, and some changes that hopefully will fix a problem some people have been having with running out of VRAM (vertex buffer errors). As always, please report any bugs you find in the forums.
- Imposed a limit on the number of Medals (achievements) that can be active at once; the base limit is now 4 plus 1 per completed campaign. This limit is displayed under the medals. Inactive medals are displayed in monochrome. When you get a new medal, it will start active, unless you are at the limit, in which case it'll start out inactive. To activate a medal, you must be under the active medal limit. If you attempt to activate a medal when you are at the limit, you'll get a sound indicating you can't activate it (so you'd need to deactivate some other medal first).
- Added a bonus medal bonus to some of the medals that had no bonuses previously: the two medals which only gave passwords, and the one medal which did nothing at all, now each increase the maximum number of active medals when activated.
- Reduced the amount of video card memory (VRAM) that the game uses, by using fewer draw primitive calls each step. There were a couple of people getting crashes connected to too much VRAM use. I am not sure if this will solve the issue for everyone, but it will probably help. If you ever get any type of error related to vertex buffers, please let me know on the forums (along with when it happened, such as what level or what enemies you were fighting, and what your video card is).
- In the process of doing that, I had to change the visual appearance of some of the effects in the game: the Nightmare's shield, the Zig Engine's speeding up effect, the healing effect of the Dark Armor / Dark Shield enemies, the Cut Point's shot graphic, and others. Hopefully they still look okay, even though they now use fewer primitive drawing function calls.
- Made the Squalid and Squalid Plus enemies use the healing graphical effect that the Dark Shield / Dark Armors use on themselves when healing instead of only turning green.
- Made the selected Point's portrait have a larger size than the unselected Points (in the bottom GUI bar), for easier distinction of which one is selected.
- Now it should be clearer, visually, from the effect of the charge attack prior to releasing it, which level the charge attack is on.
- Added two icons on the title and on the stage select screen: one to reduce the visuals to a minimum (for people sensitive to flashing light effects), and one to restore default settings.
- There is now an option, in the .ini file, for vertex rendering method -- fast (0), compatible (1), or most compatible (2). Fast is the default; but if it gives problems, try changing the "Rendering" value in idefense.ini file from 0 to 1 or 2. This is only for users having problems with vertex rendering crashes.
- Increased the number of Squalids the player has to kill to get the Squalid Medal from 100 to 200, this makes it less likely that the player will get it too early. Although with the new active medal limit this may not matter, because even if you do get it early, the effects of other medals are often preferable to it.
- Reduced the number of shots that have to exist at once to get the Upborne Medal from 400 to 350. It's still very challenging to get (because the bonus from that medal is significant), but shouldn't be almost impossible anymore.
- Equalized the time it takes to charge up charge attacks a bit; previously the progression was less regular and uneven. Overall, charge attacks take less time to charge up now, and the time between levels to charge them is more regular (although it still slowly increases in duration as the charge attacks get stronger).
- Put a maximum limit on the number of enemies that can exist at once in the final level, because, due tot he special nature of that level, sometimes the enemy count on screen at once got too enormous and slowed the game too much, and may be what is causing the vertex buffer crashes for some individuals. This limit should not affect the difficulty of that level all that much, it may make it slightly easier though.
- Added an alternative stage select song (a combination of Laaaament and Sweeeeden, by "digifish music", via the freesound project, Creative Commons attribution license) as the default; the old stage select song ("Song of the Wanderer (Where Shall I go?)", 1926 by Neil Moret, in the public domain) will be kept as an option. The option is in the third options tab, at the bottom, called "Stage Select BGM".
- Pressing escape will now make the intermission/story text appear all at once, the same as left-clicking, instead of doing nothing. Pressing escape after the intermission/story text has finished advancing or has been skipped forward through will now pause the game instead of doing nothing.
- Neglected to mention this in v1.2.2, but in that patch, added a "level x of x complete" message between medal campaign levels, to make it clearer to the player how many levels remain in that campaign to get that medal.
- Added a pause stat for the game's current difficulty level setting for non-custom levels.
- Added a pause stat for the total number of active medals and the number of medals that you have collected.
- Removed the pause stats for custom levels, because it was misleading to show you, for example, the number of :P's you've killed in a custom level if you were trying to earn the :P medal, because you couldn't actually earn that medal in that level.
- Made the "Path Lv." variable in custom campaigns and custom levels more accurately reflect the challenge-equivalent of the normal set of levels.
- Fixed a bug that made it so you always had 10,000 cache after losing to the second Brother Bavakh instead of the amount you had left over; this was changed so the carry-over from the campaign could be used in the final / Raberata endless level at the end of that campaign, just like all the other campaigns, instead of always losing the money without any carry-over.
- Sometimes Endless / Raberata levels would incorrectly count towards the medals that require you to get 100% success rate at 100 challenge, although sometimes they wouldn't; I made sure that they aren't counted in that calculation/check for purposes of the medals related to them and for the "perfect levels" stat that's shown on the pause screen.
- Fixed the disabling and re-enabling detection rectangle for the medals, it exactly on top of them before (it was off by 5 pixels).
- The "Play" button in the level editor, despite having been coded in long before release, wasn't actually drawing itself or showing up, and I didn't even notice until now; that's fixed now. Now there is a functional button to play the level you just created directly from the level editor interface (provided you saved the level first).
- Previously, you couldn't earn achievements in the *first* level of a medal's side campaign, but now that's fixed, you can now earn all achievements in the side campaigns (but not custom campaigns created in the level editor or downloaded through the Steam Workshop).
- Fixed the mouseover help in English for lives and time, which were switched.
- Fixed some typos in the English text, thanks to adtrav from the forums.
- Fix for text width for options tab in the Japanese translation; now they fit into their tabs better.
- Fixed a bug where nightmares were incorrectly drawing their shield graphic from too far a distance.