upcoming v1.10 patch
 

Hey all,

I just wanted to let you all know that a patch is in the works and it takes into account much of the feedback we've gotten from people who've played the Land of Legends demo. In fact, every feature included in the patch was requested by someone, and we feel like you guys are going to love the improvements in this patch.

Our plan was to have this patch available when the game shipped on Sept 21, but it's become apparent we'll need a few more days to get everything in there that we want, and to make sure it's solid.

For those of you who are curious, this is the change list as of now, and it will be a bit bigger before the patch is released:

Changes in v1.10:
BUGFIX: Changed the 'Create a new account' URL in the login screen to the actual (not redirecting) page.
BUGFIX: Fixed a problem in Gnome2 and Orc3 causing the capitol to not properly be selected at the beginning of each turn.
NEW SKIRMISH/INTERNET MAPS: Crater Lake, Twin Peaks
USABILITY: Attacking units are highlighted with the skill icon, and targeted units with the shield, after each action ability.
USABILITY: Units now fade out on the game map, with a skull & crossbones over them, when they are killed.
USABILITY: All units now show their unspend animation simultaneously, rather than sequentially. (This speeds up phase effects.)
USABILITY: A new checkbox has been added to the options menu to allow battle animations to be skipped.
USABILITY: Clicking anywhere on the game board will dismiss the objectives popup in campaign mode.
USABILITY: A map grid can now be optionally displayed. There is a new checkbox in the options menu for this.
USABILITY: Pressing Escape key while unit is speaking in campaign mission now skips all unit speech until player has control.
USABILITY: 'E' key is now the same as if you had clicked on the 'End Turn' button. (only works when clicking on button would work.)
USABILITY: 'G' key toggles game map grid on and off.
USABILITY: 'D' key now is the same as hitting the 'unDo' button.
USABILITY: Tab key now cycles through friendly unspent units.
USABILITY: 'Q' key now cycles through friendly cities where units can be built.
USABILITY: Space bar simulates a double-click on the selected cell, for purposes of beginning movement for a unit or buying a unit on a city. (actually, it's always done this, but was never announced.)
USABILITY: Escape key now counts as clicking 'Cancel' in all popups that have a 'Cancel' button, or counts as clicking 'okay' otherwise.
USABILITY: Escape key now counts as clicking 'Cancel' in the buy menu.
USABILITY: Space key and Enter key now count as clicking 'Okay' in all popups. (though space key doesn't dismiss popups where you type stuff in.)
USABILITY: Space key and Escape key now end battle animations when they're pressed.
USABILITY: Cleaned up some other misc. keyboard code to make it act more intuitively.
CHANGES: Various spelling and grammar errors were corrected.

If you'd played the beta and gave us feedback, you'll notice that we've acted on that feedback to give you the best game possible.

We definitely appreciate your suggestions, and think you've helped make Land of Legends an even better game. =)

-Hiro_Antagonist

Re: upcoming v1.10 patch
 

The changes rocks!! The patch makes the game much more enjoyable to play. Good job on it!!! I like the short keys and the grid the best. Also thanks for listening and speeding up the little task that made LOL less fun.

Re: upcoming v1.10 patch
 

Will the ability to save games be included in this patch?

Re: upcoming v1.10 patch
 

Yep. You can play-by-mail (or ansychronously), save campaigns, but internet games cannot be saved.

Re: upcoming v1.10 patch
 

Oh, yeah, Andre's right. I can't believe I missed the patch notes for save games! That's the biggest feature!

Just to be clear, we will offer save game functionality for both campaign missions and (hotseat or vs AI) skirmishes.

2 players can then run their own play-by-mail game by emailing the progressive save files back and forth to each other.

-Hiro_Antagonist

Re: upcoming v1.10 patch
 

Sweet http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Usability suggestions
 

Suggestions:

Do all battle animations respect the relative left/right map position of the combatants? (If my character is positioned further west on the map than my opponent, I should be leftmost during battle animation, and vice versa). It seemed like they were sometimes swapped in the demo, slightly confusing.

There really ought to be a way to toggle off the teletype-printing of text. It can be slow or distracting sometimes. A slider to adjust the slide-on speed of the various boxes and panels would be nice too. And (this is my personal and very subjective opinion) the slide-ons would look nicer if they were on an ease-in velocity curve rather than a linear slide.

Possible bugs:

In windowed mode, the window was actually much larger than the game itself, so I could see the offscreen panels appear then slide into place. It's pretty likely due to higher than normal windows dpi settings on my 1650x1080 laptop.

Pressing alt+enter during tutorials can inadvertently pop up the victory conditions window behind the tutorial text, with no handy way of turning it back off. (I was trying alt+enter just to see if it toggled fullscreen mode)

Re: Usability suggestions
 

Hey Jack, The patch will contain an option to turn off battle animations. The battle animations are consitent in showing the characters in their correct facings, but it can be confusing. The battle animation facing is not tied to the units' orientation to each other on the map, but it is tied to player number. A unit belonging to Player 1 will always appear on the left whether he is attacking or defending.

The patch will also contain a shortcut key to skip to the character dialogs. Pressing the ESC key skips passed all the chatter. ESC is also used to close/cancel any dialog box that appears.

Thanks for the bug reports. I'll be spending extra attention on windowing problems and see what else may need to fix before releasing this patch (coming very soon).

Re: Usability suggestions
 

Will we be able to record games? Given the game's design, it would be really nice to be able to review a game, post competition games etc.

Re: Usability suggestions
 

This is close but not completely true. The unit on the left is always the attacking unit, and the unit on the right is always the defending (and possibly retaliating) unit. =)

Andre was right about the changes in the patch though. There are lots of goodies that are direct responses to customer feedback from the demo.

-Hiro_Antagonist

Re: Usability suggestions
 

Unfortunately, this will probably not happen. Although, coincidentally enough, Andre and I were just talking about this very feature, and we're going to architect our future games in such a way that this sort of thing is very easy for us to implement.

-Hiro_Antagonist

Re: Usability suggestions
 

Another thing that a (partial at least) replay would be great for is PBEM games. It's always better if you can actually see what your opponent did vs. just having a changed environment to work from.

installing over beta
 

Got a question about installing the retail game for beta testers. Do we need to uninstall the last beta verison that was released then install the retail. Or can we just install it over the beta version?

Re: installing over beta
 

Pfreak, since they are called two different things, they will not interfere when both are installed on the same drive (or at least I haven't had any issue). However, since the betas were time expired, there really isn't a reason to keep it on your hard drive.

Re: installing over beta
 

yeah, Mindi's exactly right. I recommend uninstalling the beta, though the two are completely independant and won't interfere with one another.

How did you get so omniscient, Mindi? =)

-Hiro_Antagonist

Re: installing over beta
 

Griner, PBEM will work when the v1.10 patch is released (very soon).

Back to the \"patch\"
 

I know this is just anticipation asking but any word on when this might be out? Besides the fact that all the new options will make this easier to play, I have a friend who might be more inclined to purchase with the patch's capabilities. He'd also prefer a download purchase option but that's for a different thread...

Re: Back to the \"patch\"
 

It was handed off to Shrapnel a couple of days ago. They should have it out very soon now.

Beyond that, I can't tell you exactly. =)

-Hiro_Antagonist

Re: Usability suggestions
 

It seems that the ratings site keeps a record of internet games (I discovered this by randomly clicking around in the list of games). You don't get a nice picture of it, though.

Re: Usability suggestions
 

That replay of the game turns is kind of an Easter Egg. It's more of a debug tool for me when there's some sort of problem, I can play back through the turns and see exactly what actions were done to cause a bug or some other type of problem.

But, for the average user it can quickly show the general tide of battle as an interesting piece of eye candy.