Interview: The Round Stable

A while back, The Round Stable did a very nice, lengthy write-up on our case 1 demo. I’m happy to report that they also recently conducted an interview with us as well! That can be found here:

http://www.mlponies.com/2012/05/25/interview-my-little-investigations/

Anyone interested in a bit more insight into the origins of MLI, on the team, and on our thoughts on various matters should definitely go check it out.

Recruiting: Audio Engineer!

EDIT: Applications are now closed! Thanks to everyone who applied.

Hi all,

Just dropping you a line to say that, in light of feedback from the case 1 demo, we’ve decided to start recruiting for an audio engineer. The audio engineer will be responsible for a number of audio matters, such as normalization and equalization of dialog, the creation of sound effects, and more. Have a looksee through the recruitment page if it sounds like something that you can and would like to do.

Thanks, all!

Case 1 demo patch 1 released

A bit of an update since our last post – we’ve just put live a new version of the case 1 demo, which you get can here.

The list of changes since the initial release are as follows:

  • Twilight’s voice during the Rarity interrogation has been fixed.  Previously, the audio files had a bitrate of 48000 Hz but were being played back at 44100Hz, causing Twilight’s voice to be audibly lower in pitch than it should’ve been.  The audio files now have the correct bitrate of 44100 Hz.
  • Rarity’s voice has been toned down; she no longer speaks with THIS MUCH VOLUME WHEN ADDRESSING HER SUBJECTS.
  • A POTENTIAL fix for the data folder issue has been implemented, although no promises are made – without local reproductions of the issue on our own computers, it’s impossible for us to know for sure.  If not, we’ll keep at it.
  • The launcher now opens a window before actually launching the game, during which several options can be selected:
    • You can now choose between frame rate caps of 30, 60, and 120 FPS.  Choosing a frame rate cap of 30 may improve performance a little for lower-end machines, while choosing a frame rate cap of 120 may improve quality a little for higher-end machines.
    • In the event of an error during gameplay, you can now opt to save a log of the game’s status and command line output, which can be sent to us (well, to Dawn) in the hopes that it might provide us better insight regarding the cause of technical issues people are running into.
    • Also included are options to account for hardware differences – you can now disable shared contexts and PBuffers.  If you don’t know what those mean, don’t worry – in layman’s terms, they’re effectively optimizations to speed up loading and make the loading screen more responsive.  That’s good, but they’re not supported by all machines, and although we’ve implemented logic that should account for a lack of support of these technologies, you can still opt to just turn them right off to see if that helps anything, if you’re running into technical problems.  Let us know if turning these off does improve things – that’s valuable information for us.
  • Finally, we’ve changed the fonts used in the game.  We do this reluctantly, but after discovering potential legal issues with the ones that were previously in use, we’ve opted in order to ensure there will be no problem to change the fonts to ones that are guaranteed to be free for use.  We’ve done our best to find as close an approximation of the fonts that were previously in use as we could.  Try to take a bit to get used to the new fonts, and if after a while you still decide you don’t like them, let us know, and we’ll see what we can do about that.

This doesn’t fix EVERY issue that has been reported to us, of course – it only fixes the ones that were fixable in a brief period of time.  Rest assured that we will be addressing all of it in due time.

Thanks to everyone so much for all your kind support and wonderful feedback thus far! You all are grade-A awesome.

Demo coming soon, very soon.

“It’s May 5! Where’s my demo!?”

I know, I know; you want it, and you want it now. And you’ll have it very soon. However, we’re currently making some last-minute fixes in order to make sure this demo is as high quality as possible, and we also have a presentation at a Florida brony get-together at which ZeusAssassin is going to be giving a demo of MLI. Once we’re done with both, then the demo will go up in this space. Expect it by end of day today – that’s 11:59 PM Pacific time. Thanks for your patience.

EDIT: I should clarify: this isn’t a delay so much as a clarification. By “May 5” we meant that it would arrive at some point on May 5, not that it would be a midnight release on the dot. However, some people misunderstood, and are now wondering where it is given that it’s now May 5. It’s still arriving today, same as it always has been.