Terraria: Ver. 1.0.4 for 3DS sent to Nintendo for lotcheck, list of changes/additions/fixes
On Friday, 505 Games announced that the long-awaited update for Terraria on Nintendo 3DS was finally ready, and had in fact already been sent to Nintendo for lotcheck. It should be released before the end of the month, if everything goes well.
What’s in store for this new update? A lot of things! First, there’s the mandatory stability fixes, which was the development team’s #1 priority. They spent 50% of development time on bugs/stability (with over 100 general bug fixes!), 40% on Expanded Worlds, and 10% on community requests.
Here’s some examples of issues the developers fixed for this latest version of Terraria on Nintendo 3DS:
- Fixed an issue where an NPC would occasionally wander outside the confines of the game world, and would therefore report impossible positional data to the game. The game wasn’t prepared for this, and would fall over. This was hard to debug, because on a crash you’re looking for what the player did immediately before the issue. But in this case, the badness was happening off screen. Because the world is so alive, you’re looking for the one faulty part across the entire map. Most of which you can’t see at any one time.
- Fixed an issue in multiplayer where the code that governed the growth of trees would get itself into a loop of sending too much network data and crashing the game. If your multiplayer game got
caught in this – and thankfully the repro cases were rare – it would create ongoing instability.- There was a latent instability in the wiring system that would only reveal itself after many, many hours of play. The wiring system keeps a list of which tiles it already checked so it does not keep
checking the same tiles over and over again. This was only reset when the player pushed a button/switch. So depending on how much wires and how much time between button presses the list of tiles that did not have to be checked anymore grow so large that it would write over other very important data and kill the game. Every time you hit a pressure plate you reset the clock on this
issue, which made it very hard for us to work out what the root cause was.- Fixed multiple issues with falling sand, which lead to a crash. Most notably, making a load of sand fall at once could cause important data to be overwritten. We even saw sand falling upwards as a
symptom – let us know if you see anything weird like this, because it might be the clue we need to look in a certain area!- We also fixed edge cases around looting items from chests, grapping around minecart tracks, rendering the item placement ‘preview’ directly after you’d teleported – and a ton of other stuff.
But that’s not all: this update will also bring expanded worlds to the Nintendo 3DS version of Terraria, but only on New Nintendo 3DS due to the extra power required to run them. What do the developers mean by “expanded worlds”? How big is the expansion, exactly?
Well, why don’t you check that out for yourself:
But the increased world size is not the only benefit of the expanded worlds: they also fix some issues such as weird deformations, created by the game trying to cram everything in too small a space (smaller than the original PC worldgen processes).
Unfortunately, since expanded worlds are a New Nintendo 3DS-exclusive feature, that means players on a Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo 3DS XL or Nintendo 2DS will not be able to join if the game is taking place in one. Of course, no problem if you’re playing in a regular-sized world!
Next: rebalance of the boss characters in the game. Terraria’s Quality Director spent quite a lot of time replaying the bosses, in order to find the right balance. They are now tougher, but they still take into account the smaller viewing area of the Nintendo 3DS screens.
Finally, here’s some of the changes/additions that were made following community feedback/requests:
- Ability to hammer platforms into stairs. We always said 3DS was 1.2 plus a few extras, and we pulled this in from 1.2.3 on PC. Houses just didn’t look right without them!
- Music from 1.3 You asked, we looked into it, and here it is. Note: we’ve not got all the events 1.3 has so some of the tunes were not applicable, but you’ll hear a few new tunes as you play.
- Beetle husks. This kept coming up again and again, so we grabbed a coder for a couple of days and made it happen. If you’re not sure why this is big deal, the veterans on the forum will fill you in.
This new update for Terraria on Nintendo 3DS should be released before the end of the month.
Source: 505 Games
