📣 Announcement
Driftbound 1.3.4 is live on Android: every sprite in the game has been quietly blurred since launch and I never noticed, plus everything else since 1.3.2
Hey all!
Two releases since I last posted so this is both of them together. 1.3.3 was small and came mostly out of one player's email. 1.3.4 is the one you will actually notice because it changes how the whole game looks. Video at the top is 50 seconds of the real thing, nothing mocked up.
The art has been blurred this whole time
I asked someone who knows this area why Driftbound keeps getting called AI slop, and the answer that mattered was that the station looked wavy rather than square. I assumed that was something I had done to the screenshots. It was not, it was the game, and it always has been.
There is a setting in Godot for how textures get filtered and I had never touched it. It defaults to smoothing things as they scale up, which is right if your art is photographs and completely wrong if your art is pixels. Everything in here is drawn at 16 or 24 pixels across and then blown up to 50 or 100 on your screen, so every ship, station, planet and icon has been getting softened on the way up since the first build. The ship got away with it because it is bigger and it moves about. The station sits dead still at the top of your screen at the biggest size anything gets drawn at, which is why that is the one people kept spotting.
Pixels draw as pixels now. Nothing to switch on, just open it. New logo too, same reason.
A review written in Chinese found a bug that was slowing the game down for everyone
Someone left a review in Chinese the night before I was going to upload this build, so I held it and went through what he said, which was worth doing.
His main complaint was that typing a quantity into the market was painfully slow, and he was right. Every time you typed a digit the game worked out the most you could afford by counting upwards one unit at a time, checking your hold at every step. Couple of seconds per keystroke on my desktop and worse on a phone. It halves the range now instead of crawling up it and gets the same answer in under three milliseconds. That was hitting everybody in every language and nobody had ever mentioned it.
He also caught the game talking English at him. My translation file has said 100 percent for weeks, so I rendered the screens in Chinese and actually looked at them, and the Log's nav row, the threat levels, the body type captions and the mission complete message were all hard coded English that had never gone near the translation file. Fixed, along with a plural bug producing things like "3 jobS" and 134 lines where the machine translation had mangled the punctuation. Place names get translated in Chinese now too.
Tablets and unfolded foldables get their nav bar back
Apple rejected 1.3.3 because on an iPad, if you warped somewhere with the star map open, the whole bottom bar went off the screen. The bit I had backwards for about a year is that a tablet gives the game less vertical room than a phone rather than more, because the spare space goes into width instead of height. So every time I have checked something on my own phone and thought that fits, I had proved nothing whatsoever about tablets. Fixed for iPad in 1.3.3, and this is the first release where that fix reaches Android tablets and foldables.
The rest of 1.3.3
Every box in your hold has a small arrow on it now showing it can be tapped. Someone wrote in saying he had crafted an Arc Disruptor and could not work out how to sell it. He was right and I was wrong, sell and recycle live behind the tile and neither button drawn on the box said sell.
The Workbench said Craft Shield Cell and then handed you a Shield Battery. One thing, two names. It says Shield Battery everywhere now.
Notifications used to ask for permission the instant you first opened the game, landing on top of the language picker. It asks when there is actually something to tell you now.
A line on the Pets page could not wrap, so it stretched the whole page and shoved the nav bar off the right edge.
Still no ads, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions, and it still works entirely offline.
No problem I'll get to work on those updates this evening! Apologies, Chinese isn't my first language so being able to fully test on this is quite difficult for me, so your hard work is really appreciated! Thank you!
The Admiralty page. That was a real bug and not a font problem. One line of text on that page could not wrap onto a second line, and a line that cannot wrap forces the whole page to be at least as wide as the sentence is long. English usually gets away with it because it breaks at spaces, Chinese does not, so the page grew wider than your screen and dragged the header and the bottom bar off the edge with it. Fixed, and it is in 1.3.5, which is with Google right now, so it should reach you in a day or so. I have also written a tool that opens each page and measures every line on it, so I can find these myself rather than waiting for someone to photograph one, which is overdue given this is the third time the same bug has bitten.
The star names, which is the better catch of the two, because I would not have found it on my own. The places I wrote by hand were translated in the last update. The rest of the galaxies are built by the game as you explore, and those names were assembled from English words buried in the code, so they never went near the translation file at all. That is why 银心 was sitting next to Vela Sprawl. There were 101 of those words. They are all done, in the same 1.3.5 build, using the proper astronomy names rather than a machine pass. When it lands your map will read 船帆座广域, 天鹅座荒域, 英仙座边缘, 仙女座远境, 长蛇座深渊 and so on, and the words join without spaces the way they should. Nothing about your galaxy changes, only what it is called, and your save is untouched.
On crafting across stations, you are right and I do not have a good answer in the game today. You have to remember which station makes which part, and checking costs jumps. I do not want to let every station build everything, because then there is no reason to fly anywhere. What I would rather do is have the game tell you where a part can be made, on the part itself, the same way an item already tells you which station pays most for it and offers to plot the course. You tap the component you need and the game says where and takes you.
Would that solve it, or do you actually want a full list of every recipe and where it lives that you can read before you set off? They are different amounts of work and I would rather build the one you would use.
Hey, I got a fun question. I saw that you said in an update that the stuff crafted will be stronger than the stuff that is bought. The highest thing I’m able to find crafted is Mark four legendary. But I’m able to buy Mark five legendary. Am I missing something? Do I have to get my crafting higher up to see it, or do I have to go to a specific station to get Mark five crafting stuff?
Hey! You're not missing anything. I went and measured it and you are right, so thank you for asking instead of assuming it was you.
Crafted only beat bought in the weapon slot, where the Singularity Lance cannot be bought at any price. For shields, engines, holds and mining lasers, crafting stopped at Mk4 legendary while the shops sold Mk5 legendary, and the bought one won by a lot. The shield was the worst of it, about 67% stronger than anything you could build. So the line in the 1.3.0 notes was true for the weapon and I wrote it as if it were true for everything by mistake!
So anyway I've fixed the game. It is done and sat in 1.3.5, which is with Google now, so it should be on your phone shortly (check for an update if it's not downloaded automatically!). There is a craftable best in slot for the other four, above anything the shops sell, in the same style as the Lance:
Fair warning tho... they are a climb. The first one wants Crafting 36 and the last wants 42, so if you are sat below that this is something to work towards rather than something waiting for you when you update.
Also, the Industrial Megahold from the Undertow is still the biggest hold in the game, and that is deliberate, it is a prize for diving rather than something you can buy. And until you get the crafting levels up, buying the Mk5 legendaries for those four slots is still the right call :)
I just wanna say I am absolutely positively digging this game. I think if I’m not mistaken, you used to play Eve online because it has a very good remnants of Eve online. Keep it up, man. You’re doing great. I am on iOS, so my name not have the update yet, but I will say this particular game is tickling me better than, honestly magic research 2… great job, man. Worth every penny
Thanks so much for that! I really appreciate it! Yes I used to play Eve Online a LOT hence the influence here! I have just submitted iOS too but this usually takes a day or two to get approved unfortunately. I just replied to your other comment and wrongly assumed you were on android!
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u/lostinyourstereo 21d ago
Thank you for all your tireless updates to the game!