Summer sale and version 1.0.58!

Greetings, tactics fans! Telepath Tactics Liberated is now 40% off in the Steam Summer Sale--and to coincide with that, I figured now would be a good time to push an update incorporating all the improvements I've made to the engine as part of developing TTL's follow-up game Together in Battle.

Without further ado...

[h3]Miscellaneous improvements:[/h3]

combat objectives now auto-display at the start of each battle! No longer will you have to infer your victory and loss conditions from dialogue (or manually open the objectives menu)--the game now simply gives this information to you automatically.
gasuls now gain a new, distinct spriteset upon promotion!
in battle, the "I" key now serves as a hotkey to open the current selected character's inventory. (Of course, this just amounts to opening their character screen, since that is where the inventory resides--but this should still be an improvement for new players who missed that in the tutorials.)
move tiles, along with the step numbers and path arrows that appear within them, now have outlines to make them visible against snow and lava tiles!
I was dissatisfied with the aesthetics of the New Turn box in battle, so I redesigned it with new, hand-animated painted banners. (I seldom have time to paint much new art myself these days, but I'm quite happy I did so here--I think they look a whole lot nicer than before! 🙂)
constrained the pop-up text animation in combat a bit more to make it easier to follow (and easier to tell which character it belongs to in the event of an AOE effect).
created a new sound effect that plays when a character takes environmental damage from being in lava.
AI improvement: the game now scores the destination-and-facing back cover factor for a move relative to how dangerous the destination space is, preventing situations where the game overvalues a move because it protects the unit's back in a spot where no enemy is near enough to reach it.
AI improvement: I capped the AI's space danger modifier at 3.0 for short-range moves to avoid situations where the AI chooses not to make optimal moves merely because the current unit is too low on health.
lit battlefield objects (such as braziers, candelabras, campfires, and lamps) can now create islands of visibility within fog of war maps.
decoys now have a tag that causes the AI to treat them as attack targets on par with other characters.
added shoulder button support to the character inventory pop-up window within the reserve supplies screen when playing with a gamepad; the shoulder buttons now automatically switch to the next/previous character in the roster.
added shoulder button support to the shop screen when playing with a gamepad; the shoulder buttons now automatically switch to the next/previous item category.
when switching item categories in the shop in gamepad mode, the game now jumps the selector over to the first item in the new category instead of leaving the cursor down among the category buttons.

[h3]Bug fixes:[/h3]

fixed: status effects would hang around on units after a battle if the scene was switched without the battle formally ending in a victory or defeat.
fixed: non-flying, non-bridge units and objects created on chasm tiles would not immediately fall in.
fixed: the game was not recognizing chasm tiles as instant-death spaces when calculating the value of knocking enemies in (and the danger of parking a character on top of them), leading to situations where the AI--on its highest settings--would nonetheless choose moves that damage a character in lieu of simply KO-ing them.
fixed: the AI was not creating a move tracker for enemies it enthralled during its turn; thus, if the AI enthralled a unit and that unit's best move was a non-turn-ending attack, the game could get caught in a loop.
fixed: an off-by-one error in the game's experience staling tracker was effectively causing all skills to grant an additional, unintended 12.5% experience if they'd been previously used on a different target during the same fight.
fixed: the AI's scoring bonus for self-healing moves when very low on health was being applied to moves attacking allies, which in some circumstances could lead the AI to regain health on near-death units by attacking their allies with Feedback.
fixed: the AI's scoring bonus for self-healing moves when very low on health was being applied even when the target was completely immune to Mental attacks, which in some circumstances could lead the AI to target objects and other things with 100% mental resistance when using Feedback.
fixed: the AI could throw a range error when processing swim-back-to-land moves under certain circumstances.
fixed: AI-controlled characters who were both immobilized and drowning in water or lava would nonetheless use items and skills (other than Swim).
fixed: on certain occasions, the game could throw a key-not-found error when silently promoting an enemy in battle, causing the game to freeze.
fixed: the promoted bronze golem's stomp animation wouldn't play on accompanying skills if they weren't facing downwards.
fixed: the game could spawn a pop-up asking to auto-equip weapons or armor during the enemy's turn too, not just the player's.
fixed: characters learned alternate skills from earlier on in their base class skill progressions upon promoting, resulting in characters having too many skills (and reducing diversity among promoted members of the same class).
fixed: upon promotion, the game was overwriting the levels for any existing character skill progression, resulting in the character learning all remaining skills at once.
fixed: the character screen always displayed 100 as the experience characters needed to level up even when characters had traits (such as Eidetic Memory) which reduce that number.
fixed: in some rare cases, a counterattack could be processed twice (causing double damage).
fixed: the game was not allowing objects to be thrown over other objects of the same category.
fixed: item sacks would not collide with other units.
fixed: fog of war tiles would not update when unequipping a torch or other Perception-affecting item.
fixed: if an AI-controlled character blinded a player-controlled character in a fog of war map, the game would suddenly treat the AI army as if it were player-controlled for purposes of updating the fog of war, thereby revealing most of the map.
fixed: the game was still showing the actions bar and portrait for AI-controlled characters hidden in fog of war.
fixed: the game could show incorrect actions bar information for AI-controlled characters moving after an ally hidden by fog of war.
fixed: the "Neutralized" status effect was missing from the localization file and causing the game to throw a null error when applied.
fixed: the Transfer and Transfer 2 skills were causing screen shake.
fixed: the AddStatus script action was no longer announcing the applied status effect.
fixed: the game would still show the dialogue menu in the very first branch of dialogue even if the branch contained a HideDialogueBox action.
fixed: characters using Light attacks and Staggering weapons could attack spiked barricades and fires without taking damage.
fixed: due to a formatting error in the new, modifiable item attributes table, poisoned and blazing weapons were bugged and could freeze the game upon being equipped.
fixed: on-death attacks were being applied twice, resulting in double damage (and double application of status effects) from explosive charges.
fixed: at some point, the UI arrows had ceased appearing on reply buttons during dialogue when playing with gamepad.
fixed: when playing with gamepad, the UI arrows were no longer appearing in their intended spots on buttons within the reserve supplies screen during deployment in battle.
fixed: when playing with gamepad and using the reserve supplies screen during deployment in battle, the game would inappropriately shift gamepad cursor focus to the battlefield when hitting "B" to back out of an individual character inventory.
fixed: the game was displaying character health bars when mousing over a character under an attack tile, thereby blocking the player's view of the hit chance text.
fixed: when playing in gamepad mode, the game was pulling focus away from the confirmation window for auto-equipping newly grabbed equipment, essentially freezing the game.
fixed: character tooltips could remain onscreen when dialogue was triggered mid-battle (particularly when playing with gamepad).
fixed: it was possible for character tooltips to pop up over the top of the promotion screen when a character promoted in battle when playing with the gamepad.
fixed: Lakshmi's sprites were using the wrong color for the brightest secondary highlights, resulting in the top of her shoulder on their non-crossbow-holding arm appearing red even when her secondary army colors did not include red.
fixed: unpromoted swordsman sprites were using the wrong color for the brightest secondary highlights, resulting in the most highlighted portion of their helmet plumes appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
fixed: promoted spearman sprites were using the wrong color for secondary highlights, resulting in the glossy bits of the top half of their tower shields appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
fixed: promoted shadowling sprites were using the wrong color for secondary highlights, resulting in half of their mask appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
fixed: both promoted and unpromoted cavalier sprites were using the wrong color for the brightest secondary highlights, resulting in the most highlighted portions of their flags and of the designs on their shields appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
fixed: both promoted and unpromoted crossbowman sprites were using the wrong color for the brightest secondary highlights, resulting in the tops of the shoulders on their non-crossbow-holding arm appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: the space selector was inappropriately snapping to bridges and other objects that lay flat when mousing above them, as though they were characters with height.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: the auto-objectives screen could appear prior to turn 0 dialogue occurring after the dismissal of the turn box.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: if a map had BeforeTurn dialogue marked as repeatable, the auto-objectives screen could cause it to re-trigger after the objectives faded, trapping the player in a loop.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: text overlays could appear beneath the auto-objectives screen.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: when selecting Restart Battle, the actions bar would reappear while fading out the scene.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: if a text overlay was onscreen when selecting Restart Battle, it would reappear while fading out the scene.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: the Coria Bridge Battle objectives mentioned keeping the camp from being destroyed even though it does not appear in that battle.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: the Coria Bridge Battle had text stating the victory condition which was now duplicative due to auto-displaying of battle objectives.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: when spawning unique proc gen units in battle via a script, the game could produce units with no gender information and throw a range error upon reaching the name generation step.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: if a character did not have a stat listed among their growths and they gained a trait altering growth for that stat, the game would ignore the growth boost entirely instead of adding that stat to the unit's growths for modification.
fixed in version 1.0.58a: the character generator was not interpreting traits with multi-operation growth effects and base stat effects correctly.

[h3]Improvements for custom campaign makers:[/h3]

new human male portrait hairstyle: balding.
new human male portrait hairstyle: long and curly.
new human male portrait hairstyle: neck-length and wavy.
new human female portrait hairstyle: big and wavy.
new script action: AddDayLog. Creates a log entry memorializing an activity, event, or battle occurring that day. Three parameters: log entry category, log entry body, and (optional) number of days passed (in case you want the log entry to reflect an occurrence on a day other than the current one). These logs are visible to the player on the calendar screen for the corresponding day.
the character creator now automatically marks all equippable items as equipped when you save a character with a built-in inventory.
new object: Ice Patch! Ice patches reduce dodge by 75, accuracy by 25, and cold resistance by 50; non-flying characters who move onto them become Slowed (i.e. they immediately lose half their maximum movement and simply cannot dodge at all) for 1 round.
new special character: -SPECIES-. Gets replaced with the species of the character who triggered the dialogue.
new special character: -CHAR2SPECIES-. Gets replaced with the species of the secondary character in the dialogue.
you can now set one of a unit's coordinates to a valid integer number and the other to -1 to have the game try to spawn them on a random space within a specific row or column of the battlefield.
the SetWinAura script action now supports multiple operations in one call, delimited by commas.
new, optional third parameter for the OnTalk dialogue trigger: Enforce Positions. If set to true, this specifically requires the triggering character to be as described in the first trigger parameter (rather than letting the second talk partner take on the role of triggerer).
new optional parameter added to SpawnUnit and the Generate-Unit-type script actions: Drop Unit. If set to true, causes the unit to drop onto their space from somewhere above the battlefield when they spawn, a la an item drop.
added a safeguard to prevent duplicates of the same character from ever appearing in a roster.
fixed: the game's unit-spawning, unit-generating, door manipulation, change dialogue character, and roster manipulation script actions were still missing minimum parameter checks.
fixed: the "Black" cutscene background was not usable.
fixed: the CastleSandstone tileset's transitions between other tilesets were not working.
fixed: the "Sex" field for procedurally generating units in the map editor did not actually force the resulting unit to be of the specified gender if the unit was a generic.
fixed: when generating a unique named character from a class not defined in Classes.xml using the GenerateUnique script action, if the unit's species was not specified, the game would pull a species of "ERROR," resulting in the character having no valid value for gender, which would in turn cause the game to be unable to generate a name and freeze.
fixed: the FindClosestCharacter script action could cause the game to throw a null error if used with a list of characters to exclude that didn't actually exist.
fixed: golems created in the character creator were not receiving the golem voice set for their babble sounds.
fixed: the SetStringByStat script action was not accepting First Name or Last Name as valid string stats.
fixed: if the Babble script action ran after dialogue text had finished animating (or after its animation was manually skipped by the player), then the babble sound effect would continue without end until the player continued to the next branch of the dialogue.
fixed: swapping positions via the SwapUnitPositions script action (used in skills like Twirl) wouldn't work properly if one of the units was in a position that would ordinarily be unmovable to the other.
fixed: template enemies in proc gen battles without specified names (e.g. the dacoits in caravan defense battles) were not being leveled up to the correct levels, making job board missions much
easier than intended.
fixed: template enemies in proc gen battles without specified names (e.g. the dacoits in caravan defense battles) were having their names inappropriately changed to match their load IDs.
fixed: when multiple scripts were attached to the same skill or item, the second script would have its first action run out of order.
fixed: if OnVictory dialogue was spawned for the enemy army, using a WinBattle action or reply to change it to a player victory would not prevent the game from showing a "Defeated" pop-up regardless.
fixed: strings typed in by the player during dialogue could end up not displaying properly (or at all) if they used commas or quotation marks.

And that's all I've got! If you're enjoying the game, please do make sure to leave a review (when a game has less than 100 reviews, every single review can make a really big difference!)

In the meantime, come join us on The Sinister Design Discord! I'm on there all the time and always listening to suggestions.

Tactically yours,

Craig