Speedrunner HD Patch 1.2

Today we released the second patch for Speedrunner HD on Xbox Live Indie Games. Scroll down to the bullet point list if you just want to see the changes in this update.

This patch coincides with the release of the soundtrack of Speedrunner HD by Jonathan vd Wijngaarden, just like we had planned! Head over to http://www.speedrunner-game.com/soundtrack to check it out.

Actually though, we had hoped this patch would be released somewhere around christmas last year (that sounds like a long time ago!). However, we didn’t quite make that deadline. What happened?

Well, during a multiplayer playthrough of Speedrunner, back in November, we found some remaining rare bugs which I (GJ) really liked to fix, and we weren't the only ones who noticed either. Because it's a time intensive effort to release a patch on XBLIG we usually like to add some new content as well. So, Casper added some much requested new multiplayer levels, raising the total number of multiplayer levels from 5 to 7.

Industry: Factory is the spike production facility (so now you know where all those spikes are coming from!). It's level where -you guesed it- a lot of spikes are scattered around all over the map. This makes it an expert level, in which the level almost works as much against you as your opponents do.

Industry: Powerplant is more of an experimental level. This level has a lot of falling tiles, making it constantly changing; new shortcuts will become available and other paths will become less effective. So hopefully, this will provide you guys with some new challenges.

Adding a bunch of levels is cool and all, but Powerplant was giving us some trouble. In certain specific areas the map the performance would duck under it's usual stable 60 frames per second to -in some cases- as low as 14 fps. This is not a state we like to release the patch in. After some research I found the root cause of the issue; the collision system seemed not to be able to hold its own with the massive amount of dynamic objects in Powerplant. So I optimized some parts of the collision engine and now it all runs smoothly again.

This little adventure set us back two weeks so here we are two weeks later than planned with the following changes:

  • 2 new multiplayer maps: Factory and Powerplant
  • tweak: optimized collision engine
  • tweak: when winning a game the UI highlights the winning player instead of the losing player
  • tweak: some small graphics improvements
  • bug: the game does not get stuck anymore when pausing the game during point distribution
  • bug: the game does not get stuck anymore when restarting a game in the same level after a game has ended in sudden death
  • bug: hitting a wind tunnel now also resets the immobile state after being hit by an explosive

That’s about it! We hope you will like the patch, and don't forget to check out the Speedrunner sountrack! As always; follow us on twitter, facebook and/or google+ for more updates on the development of Speedrunner and our other upcoming game(s)!

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