Published: Nov 15, 2017 by scoy
Hi everyone, time for a new Kodu update. The focus this release is mostly on making touch input work better and just fixing lots of little (and not so little) bugs. Thank you to everyone that has reported bugs either here in the forums of via our support email KoduSupport@microsoft.com . Your help is very much appreciated.
Here’s the list of changes:
New Features
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Updated the tutorial system so that it works properly with touch input. Also updated the 6 basic tutorials that come with Kodu to work with touch.
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Also in tutorial mode, when showing text in a modal dialog have it change to reflect which input mode is active (keyboard/mouse, touch, gamepad). So switching between input modes should work smoothly.
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micro:bit – When running your game, you can now use the micro:bit buttons to close the text dialogs that you have programmed. This way you don’t have to put down the micro:bit and use the keyboard in the middle of your game.
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Terrain editing with touch is now better. Previously it required you to tap the Paint button each time you changes materials or brushes. Now it remembers what you were doing and should act as expected.
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Restored the full screen anti-aliasing. For people running in HiDef mode this should result in a much better looking worlds. You can see the effect this has by manually turning it on/off in the Kodu Configuration Tool (grey icon on desktop). The item is called “Smoothing (FSAA)”. This got stuck in the always off position some time ago. And I finally figured it out.
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You can now detect the SeaGrass object using the Bumped sensor but it won’t block your motion. This allows characters to swim through it if they want, or bump into it and eat it.
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The New World level is now loaded with the camera facing due North. This should help with lessons that rely upon a specific orientation.
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Disable the F2 key. Previously this allowed the help overlays (upper left hand corner of screen) to be turned off. It turns out that this is never used on purpose and causes all kinds of problems when accidentally hit. So it’s gone.
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Increased the maximum number of simultaneous thought balloons from 20 to 50 so everyone can talk at once.
Bug Fixes
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Fixed a bug when programming changes to the sky color or light settings. Sometimes this would just lock up and get stuck on the dialog where you chose the new setting. This should no longer happen.
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Fixed a minor bug when using the darker light settings. When editing the world we should always use the full “day” settings so you can see what you are doing. Sometimes it would get stuck with the “night” settings in the editor.
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Fixed a couple of places where clicking on a dialog was being detected by the terrain under the dialog causing unexpected edits.
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Fixed a bug when working with the gamepad that caused it to take 2 buttons presses to run the level rather than one.
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Fixed a minor bug in the SaveLevel dialog that was adding extra spaces to the end of the level description. While the spaces weren’t noticeable, they did cause the system to think that this was a “new” level and treat it differently.
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Fixed a bug in the cylinder collision detection. This was causing the collision shapes for the straight pipe sections to be twice as long as the pipes. So if you tried to go around the pipe, at one end it would be fine but at the other you would be blocked.
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Fixed a bug when programming the mouse to create objects. For instance if I program WHEN Mouse Left DO Create Apple the program should create an apple wherever I click. But, with the bug it also registered a bumped event with the character the programming was in. In some cases this could cause the newly created apple to be immediately destroyed.
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Fixed bug in mouse movement programming. Previously if you programmed WHEN Mouse Left DO Move Forward it would cause the character to move even when the mouse button wasn’t pressed. Now it works as expected.
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Fixed a bug with the Turtle. His altitude wasn’t being restored properly after he opened and closed. This would cause him to rise up into the air.
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Fixed a bug with the Inline tile where it wasn’t being applied correctly for levels started via Resume.
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Fixed the saving and restoring of camera positions. This was causing the camera to be in the wrong place when loading some levels. The idea is that when you save your level, the camera position also gets saved wherever it happens to be. This allows you to set the starting position for the camera in your world. This still isn’t perfect but it should be a lot better now.
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Fixed bug where sometimes the tiles on the Add Item menu would be blank. This usually happened if Kodu was left running while the machine went to sleep.
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Minor tweak to how the text is drawn on the programming tiles which makes them a bit crisper.
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Restricted the Winner tile to allow a winning Color or Player, but not both. Also fixed bugs in Winner and GameOver display. There were some cases where the display wasn’t working correctly.
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Fix problem with input from sign-in dialog also selecting Main Menu items under the dialog.
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Fixed problem with Kodu not starting due to error reading Locales.Xml file. This is the file that tells Kodu what languages are available. Normally we try and download a new version when Kodu starts up. Now, if this fails we do a better job of falling back to the version of the file that is installed with Kodu.
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Removed Creator button from screen during edit mode. It was just cluttering things up and wasn’t useful at that point. Now it only appears when useful, eg Main Menu, Home Menu, Load World, and Community pages.
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Removed invalid options that show up for WHEN Mouse Move. The only valid verbs are Move and Turn.
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Make WHEN Mouse Move DO Move actually work.
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Fixed some bugs in the collision system related to immobile and frozen characters.
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Fixed bug causing trees to flicker on some systems.
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Fixed crashing bug sometimes caused by Closest selector.