A Primer to Demigod Patch 1.01

Just some quick news while I'm in-between articles.

Frogboy/Draginol/Brad Wardell posted a log of additional fixes Gas Powered Games have submitted for Quality Assurance (QA) testing on Wednesday.

• Fixed chat history and announcement text overlays interference with mouse clicks.
• Switched order of data calls after hosting.
• Teleportation effect failure handling.
• AI
  1. Adjustments to caution and hazard detection and avoidance.
  2. Adjusted health level flee percentage.
  3. Demigods do not use minions when fleeing, may summon minions in combat.
  4. Improved teleportation.
  5. Increased Demigod planning frequency.
  6. Improved item usage when endangered.
  7. Tower tag improved.
  8. Moving targets in Ability task now properly handled (the famous “Sedna bug”)

Apparently the "Sedna" bug (more commonly known as the "Skill-activation-but-my-DG-won't-do-anything" bug) was isolated by a forumer/forumite and fan bman654. He posted his own fix on 24 May, it was picked up by GPG and rolled into the new patch. Servo, a developer from GPG, tried to explain how it was that they were unable to fix this bug since it was reported in the beta but gave credit where it was due.

Needless to say, if bman654 were to run for any office he would have the unanimous vote of the Demigod player community.

Fans got a preview of what lay ahead in the v1.01 patch on 22 May (last week Friday) with the following promised fixes. These will be included in addition to the new batch of fixes listed above.

• Bandwidth used reduced by 35% (more people with marginal connections able to play). This should reduce some of the “stutter” some people run into when they play with someone with a marginal Internet connection.
• Updated the way stats are submitted to make stat reporting significantly more robust.
• If a player loses connection with another player (or one player with a group of players but not all) only 1 user is disconnected instead of multiple.
• Demigod is better at detecting the difference between quitting and a disconnect (no connection dialogs when someone leaves).
• Significantly better handling of users who have shaky connections to keep them in game without adversely affecting in game performance.
• Favor Points, Achievements, Items stored on server more reliably (thanks to the updated stats system).

The skill activation fix and bandwidth use fix have me really excited. Besides the fact that the skill activation fix was really irritating, the bandwidth use optimisation will dramatically improve my game experience as there's a bunch of us with 128kbps upstream speeds. For those not technically inclined - upload speeds that slow are not even covered by the slowest ADSL spec on Wikipedia and Demigod is very dependent on upload speeds since it uses a peer-to-peer networking system.

Mr Wardell didn't want to make any promises as to when the patch will be made available but did state that it would be put through its paces this week. After releasing the details of the new fixes patch v1.01 will introduce Frogboy said they would test the patch today (Thursday, 28 May) but couldn't say for certain that it would be released today.

He did say that if it's not released on Thursday we shouldn't expect to see it this week. It would seem that releasing a patch on a Friday is hazardous to a game developer and publisher's weekends.

EDITS: Justified text. Typos and some improvements on sentences that seemed to make sense at 1 in the morning.