As you probably have noticed, there was no January update – the reason for that being that we took a long-overdue break after spending the last two weeks of the Year battling the (still on-going) hack attempts on our site, and celebrating various superstition-based events.
We returned mid-January to work with renewed zeal on SpellShokked. This (and the next) release will feature improved graphics. Since we got our long-overdue graphics hardware update, we were able to finally test the update to the graphics that underly the 'I want even more pretty stuff' preference. The graphics tune-up is on a by-scene basis, as we must hand-tune each scene individually.
For each scene, we individually calibrated color saturation, contrast, and hue. We also provide (in some scenes) a subtle sub-pixel sharpening. The last update is causing is some headache (luckily not literally, just a figure of speech), as whenever display text (as in the Aftermagic display), the sharpen render effect produces some artifacts.
We have added the new, improved visuals to the following scenes:
- Splash / Welcome
- Intro (Blink Tutorial)
- Home
- Library
- Tutorials (Missile, Shield, Fireball/Meteor Strike, Ice Shard, Shokk Range, Channeling (Shield, Lightning, Guided Missile, Invisibility)
- Duel Selector
- Solo Fights (Skeleton Rush, Necromancer, Cliffs, Darkness)
In other words: all tutorial- and solo levels have been updated, the network levels are planned to be updated for the next release.
There have been some other changes under the hood, but they are mostly minor. And of course there are lots of minor bugs and annoyances that we (hopefully) removed permanently.
On a negative side, this release is PC-only, as we still need to macOS-proof the grphics update (which, given the Mac's poor performance even with a Vega64 graphics GPU, will only a few people notice). The macOS support for increase eye-candy will follow in four weeks at latest.
Finally, this update provides full support for Vive PRO.