Το τελευταίο patch του Fez αποφάσισε να διαθέσει ο προγραμματιστής του

Κι όμως το Fez "ζει" ακόμη μιας και το αριστουργηματικό indie puzzle platformer που κυκλοφόρησε τον Απρίλιο του 2012, απέκτησε το τελευταίο του patch. Όπως είχε υποσχεθεί πριν από ένα χρόνο ο προγραμματιστής του παιχνιδιού, Renaud Bédard, μέσω του blog του, το patch 1.12 του Fez διορθώνει πάνω από 120 bugs που ανακαλύφθηκαν τον περασμένο χρόνο. Να αναφέρουμε πως ο Bédard δούλευε στη Polytron, ομάδα ανάπτυξης του τίτλου, ενώ ο ιθύνων νους πίσω από αυτό, Phil Fish, εργαζόταν ως designer και artist. 

Παρακάτω θα βρείτε τις σημειώσεις του προγραμματιστή του για το τελευταίο patch του Fez, που διατίθεται μόνο στη PC έκδοση. 

• Cut dependencies to OpenTK, the platform framework used by FEZ on Windows. I have had problems with it from the start, from sound card detection issues to windowing problems, to VSync and fullscreen issues… I wanted to give SDL 2.0 a shot, to see if it fares better.

• Have more efficient music streaming. PC + Mac versions of FEZ used a C# Ogg Vorbis decoder called NVorbis, which seemed like a good idea because it would run on all platforms. I also wrote the streaming codethat uses NVorbis and OpenAL, and it made its way into the main MonoGame repository! But it’s also very slow, resource-intensive and heavy on disk access. So I wanted to look into a better solution that wouldn’t break music playback in areas like puzzle rooms and the industrial world.

• Have a single codebase for all PC + Mac versions of FEZ. As it stood with 1.11, there was a slightly modified codebase for Mac and Linux that ran on a weird hybrid of MonoGame and what would become FNA, called MG-SDL2. The PC version ran on my fork of MonoGame ~3.0 which I did not do a great job of keeping up to date with upstream changes, because when I did it usually broke in mysterious ways. This is not great for maintenance, and centralizing everything on a clean FNA back-end, with as little platform-specific code as I could, seemed like a good idea.

• Make it the Last Update. Since I shipped FEZ 1.11 I had little intention of making additional fixes or features to the game because I simply don’t have the time with a kid and a fulltime job… and working on FEZ is getting old after 9 years. So I did want to address problems that people have with the game, but I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life. I had spent enough time away from the game that I was somewhat enthusiastic about coming back to it, especially if it’s at my pace, and that it’s my last time doing so.