Sorry for the long period between patches, folks–I just moved to a new apartment this Sunday, and I only just got my internet turned on last night. Despite these delays, I’ve been working on new features and fixing existing issues. Here are the changes in version 1.033:

• fixed a bug in which doors which are set to Locked with an OnLoading-triggered script action would sometimes glitch out and become impassable.

• addressed some of the remaining slowdown by directing AIR to call garbage collection whenever a player’s turn starts (while the “Player’s Turn” splash is displayed onscreen), and whenever an attack sequence ends. Unfortunately, this is not supported in the version of AIR that is used in the Linux version of the game.

• put in a process to clear listeners from inventory slot boxes after they load, which should help optimize the game a smidge.

• fixed a bug in which the game would get stuck in a loop in the conversation preceding the caravan battle if Louise Legerdemain is dead.

• fixed a bug in which the game was not applying the tag to reduce the Energy cost for certain attacks (as with the promoted psy classes in the main campaign).

• fixed a bug in which it was possible to move between spaces with large elevation differences using Swim.

• made some balance tweaks to the Assassin class in the single player campaign: dropped the backstab multiplier for Knife from 2.25X to 2X, for Stab from 3X to 2.25X, and Mega Stab from 3X to 2.5X. Increased the sidestab multiplier for Mega Stab from 1.5X to 1.75X.

• Annel Stormhunter now has a bit of dialogue when he leaves the group after the battle in Coria’s streets (assuming you talked to him and he survived the battle).

• removed the “Promotable” tag from Sarn Kamina (as there is no promotion class for Gasul).

• fixed a bug wherein Siripent had the wrong class name (Lizardman instead of Barudit), which in turn glitched out his class promotion.

• fixed a bug where Malcolm Eichan’s name and portrait were mistakenly shown instead of Harriet Glaive’s during the final line of Malcolm Eichan’s death scene.

• fixed a bug in which Oliver Spenks would not be added to the player’s roster of useable characters after landing on Kovit.

• fixed a showstopper bug in the game that would occur if playing in Windows and you had no audio device enabled for playing sounds on your machine.

• fixed a bug in the basement of the bandit fortress that permitted players to advance before recovering the map to the mines.

• and finally, I added in an important feature that has been requested by folks working on custom campaigns: you can now include custom artwork right in your custom campaign folder, and the game will autodetect it and load it at runtime with no further effort on the end-user’s part! Custom sprites that now work in this way include: character portraits, character sprites, destructible object sprites, item icons, and attack icons. More info on how to make sure the game detects them here and here.

That’s it for now, but I’m continuing to plug away. I’ve recently learned that the inventory bugs have survived my most recent attempts at killing them–I’ve decided that a complete rewrite of the inventory code is in order, as small tweaks beneath the hood are clearly not getting the job done. That will be the focus of version 1.034. Once that is done, I’ll be doubling down on optimizing the game and killing off all of the remaining causes of slowdown that I can.