Heya folks.

I’ve narrowed the macOS issue down to something happening to the library we use for the Symbiotes web view.

The library itself seems to be innocent, however. My current assumption is that our build process accidentally does something to the library that stops it from loading. The good part, of course, is that we now know where the problem is, so all that is left is the “why.”

That was a bit of a short update, so let’s have a look at something unfinished Chairmander and I have been looking at between other jobs. Symbiote Login Issues.

The speedy explanation is: Lots of websites use other services to handle their login. That often requires some kind of popup where you log in to that service (e.g. google), and then you get redirected back to the site you cared about.

We didn’t have support for that in Symbiotes, and so creators have hit a bit of a roadblock.

Luckily Vuplex (the web view library we use) has a hook for sites trying to open popups, so I hacked together a little test.

The popup has some minor limitations compared to regular Symbiotes. But for login, this will probably do the job just fine. It still needs a bunch of testing and likely some tweaks, but it looks like even more useful Symbiotes will be coming soon!

I’m gonna grab a coffee and get back to it.

Thanks for stopping by.

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

Heya folks!

Coding days like yesterday are great. Issues are clear and don’t get weird when prodded, and fixing them is smooth.

I fixed up a bug around the positioning of bookmark names, font issues on Mac, some bugs on scene transition, and a mistake in our Mac build process.

Today my focus is on the Mac builds produced by our build server. The first issue was that I was putting the assets in the wrong place, which was an easy fix. It also let me dip my toes into writing Jenkins files which was… well, I won’t say nice, but it’s good for me to do!

Now I’m looking into a Mac bug where it seems like the root camera is null. Oddly, I’ve not had this in any of my Mac testing so far. It’s likely that I’ve only been deploying dev builds though so this may be specific to release builds. I’m gonna check that first. Hopefully, this is simple.

Alright, I’m too excited to keep writing. I gotta get back to this.

Seeya!

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

What the hell. Days go too fast. Alright, let’s get caught up.

We are getting the Mac build ready. Testing got delayed by several days because the delivery of the m2 Mac mini took longer than quoted. That was disappointing, but eh, it happens. It was also a good opportunity to work on some bugs.

We’ll have a patch out today containing a group of little fixes and a fix for group selection. The group selection issue was very embarrassing as it was much worse than I expected. It was broken in a couple of ways. First off, the stencil buffer wasn’t being cleared, which meant every lasso shape drawn would effectively be combined with every lasso shape drawn that session. Next, the depth buffer was empty, which resulted in group selections selecting creatures through walls. Both of these things got in when we switched out where we were rendering to allow independent scene and UI resolutions.

I went a little crazy looking at the empty depth buffer bug, as it really looked like it shouldn’t have been the case. We were rendering into a RenderTexture with a correctly set up depth buffer, and it was attached to the camera’s targetTexture property (which is, in our case, how Unity wants you to render into these targets).

Ree saved me by making a minimal test case and finding out that if we ran the commands AfterFinalPass instead of AfterEverything the depth buffer was still populated. Unfortunately, this is before the image effects are run, which means things like depth of field affect the lasso.

It’s not game-breaking, and that’s not the usual angle to be commanding larger groups from, so we aren’t going to hold back the patch for this issue, but we will resolve it in a future patch.

Next up on the Mac front, I’ll look into a weird bug affecting overlay text positioning and our Mac build pipeline.

Have a good one folks!

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

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