Up to my helmet in it

Testing that is! There’s been a ton of it. Between testing with volunteers (and so can you!) and playing two handed with two controllers by myself, there’s been a lot. Probably there should be more, but here we are in the land of the one eyed army or something.

Non-Essential Working

I took a vacation to isolate elsewhere and ended up doing some work! But since it was my vacation and I didn’t bring my dev kit, I decided to work on some non-essential for Xbox things.

Mouse aiming

In my religious crusade to have the mouse pointer not appear during gameplay, I unknowingly broke the “hack” I was using for mouse aiming. I originally implemented mouse aiming on PC with a target shaped mouse pointer, and you could shoot anywhere you clicked. This was far too easy to the point of being a cheat, so I made the mouse pointer invisible and had your player aim in the direction it was relative to the screen. This is important — because I forgot all about this when I noticed the mouse pointer sometimes appearing during gameplay. So when I totally and utterly disabled it I unknowingly broke mouse aiming, as there was no longer an invisible target to aim at.

So the fix is, I calculate the center of the screen position which should have been the way to do it from the get-go.

Keyboard Joining

Since the mouse button is defined as the keyboard player’s “Shoot” button on PC, hitting the mouse by accident would make the player join mid-match with no way to cancel. I initially disabled keyboard player joining all together, as a convenience for testing during Xbox development. This had the unfortunate side effect of not allowing the keyboard player to play Season Mode training games at all. Now the keyboard player can join with the Shoot keyboard key, just not with the mouse button. A small thing but necessary to address for the eventual Steam update.

Cpu-Vs-Cpu

A very excited fan has asked a few times for a mode to simply watch the computer play against itself for a full match. I had put this in the “nice to have” pile and decided I wouldn’t have enough time to get to it. Well, I had time on vacation! It’s not a full mode, in fact right now it’s a PC-only title screen cheat, but the fun part is it will pair up a random AI coach for each team! This wasn’t possible before I wrote customizations for each AI team in Season Mode, so this CPU only match has 7 AI coaches to choose from for both teams: the default AI behavior as well as all 6 custom scripts, not to mention the 6 different players! There’s a lot of combinations.

I must admit it is fun to watch and try to guess who will win! I found some enjoyment implementing this which is pretty rare in all this testing and bug fixing, so cheers “TommySpud”!

More things

It wasn’t all work and work on my vacation, I also got some work done! There was a goofy UI issue where you’d hit a button and then the next menu would open with your cursor on the button that just appeared, it would become active, highlight itself, and… not work when you hit the button on the controller. It’s fixed.

Back to work

Vacation is over and I’m oddly glad to be back home. The world is changing one vaccine at a time and SSDT needs to be couch-ready when we’ve conquered Covid concerns.

Ch-ch-ch-chievo!

I’ve tested all 100 achievements on Xbox One!

See me go.

I have since discovered a few ways you can get “robbed” of a chievo, if there’s a network issue at specific times for certain achievements. So next on my list is a “bullet proof” chievo checker. This is in place for a lot of achievements, but I need it to be 100% comprehensive!

So many bugs

Ohhh right yes, the error-error-10 I nearly forgot that one

I’ve also been fixing all the bugs. Here’s a sample:

  • Several achievements that had progress (x/100 thingy things) weren’t tracking on Xbox, now you get a nifty progress bar on the Achievement Tracker!
  • Inability to pause the game during the rowdy cloud
  • Xbox Switch Profile button wasn’t working
  • Restart Season prompt allowed more than one selection for great confusion
  • Constrained mode fixes
  • Basketball player not aiming correctly in End Zone mode
  • Reset to default button added for all game mode specific options

And a few pre-emptive certification fixes! Those will soon take over all the work I’m doing, but there’s bugs left still. Back to it!

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