Hey, detectives!

Close those case files and drop your fingerprint scanner – we’ve got some important news you need to hear…

Shadows of Doubt is leaving Early Access on September 26th!

That’s right, our sandbox sleuth sim is getting a full release next month and it is coming to both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out the release date trailer below:

Prepare for major new content!

Our full launch comes with a big update that would make any private investigator twitch with intrepidation. We’ll be sharing more details on what to expect in the coming weeks, but for now, please take our word that there’s some really cool stuff coming your way!

We also wanted to give everyone a headsup that we are going to be increasing the price of the game from $19.99 to $24.99 on the 23rd of August. This won't affect anyone who already owns the game before then but will obviously mean the game is more expensive from then onwards.

In the meantime, come join us on Discord for the latest cases, updates and to chat with other likeminded detectives.

Talk soon!

Hey folks, we have a bunch of improvements and fixes going live today. Thank you to those who tested it out on experimental first and gave important feedback!

• More memory footprint optimizations

• City data and save game size reduction*

• Guest passes will grant you access to echelon zones

• Investigating a stolen item on an echelon floor will grant you with a guest pass, enabling you to legally explore the floor’s communal area.

• Some tweaks to red-level trespassing zones

• You can now navigate the menu with the gamepad stick

• New skip control prompt for cut scenes

• Empty input fields for save games, cases etc are now not allowed

• Fixed: The game saved cities with the wrong file name if you renamed them from within the map editor*

• Fixed: Possibility of a basement area for a building contained a power room area which was too small to spawn a telephone router*

• Fixed: Some alignment/scale errors for keyboard control glyphs

• Fixed: Sometimes when the player took photos within air ducts, the ducts weren’t visible

• Fixed: (At least one) occurrence of citizens floating through the air

• Fixed: Commercial coffee machine was spawning in weird places*

• Fixed: Citizens floating while sleeping on bedrolls

• Fixed: Citizens didn't sleep in the correct position when sleeping on the right side of a double bed

• Fixed: Top of wooden fence featured an missing mesh face

• Fixed: Some very small inconsistencies when generating two cities from the same seed

• Fixed: Opening the player’s character in an evidence window would cause an internal error

• Fixed: Text in popup messages could appear too small

• Fixed: Selecting a new perpetrator from your evidence board would not update the arrest resolve question properly

• Fixed: Certain murder resolve questions not working properly when loading a save game

• Fixed: Some first person model animation oddities

• Fixed: Telephone door’s glass did not move properly with the door frame

• Fixed: CCTV tower no longer can spawn backing onto another street objects (preventing access to its terminal)*

• Fixed: Street names no longer being overwritten when customizing streets in the city editor. (Thanks to the patience of one discord user. 🙌)

• Fixed: Fixed some sympathetic bugs caused by city editor UI not updating properly when clearing existing city data.

• Fixed: AI pathing edge-case prevents citizens from spawning at their saved position and being unable to move.

• Fixed: Edge cases of having way too many blood spatter objects spawned

• Fixed: Repeating or confused objectives when you had multiple jobs open on different stages

• Fixed: A very rare RNG bug that could freeze the city generation process

• Fixed: The player now will get crushed if they are pressed against the top of an elevator shaft by the elevator

• Fixed: Upon loading a game, the décor edit button was only displayed if you left and re-entered a relevant address

• Fixed: String display issues on cruncher apps when language is not set to English

• Fixed: Removed some instances of ‘DNT’ appearing in non-English languages

* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see

Any issues please let us know and do join the Discord to get involved in the conversation

After some time to check out the fixes all work on experimental we are ready to push this update live on the default branch now. Enjoy!

• New: Bas Boule television show! Dynamically driven and will be different each time.
• New: 15 new collectable Bas Boule cards scattered throughout the city*
• New: Camera now has a working flash (can turn on/off)
• New: Citizen conversations, notes, v-mails & evidence
• New: Screen space reflection toggle graphics option
• New: In-game poster art (including those by our competition winners)
• Improved controller support (simplified controls, virtual cursor, onscreen keyboard etc.)
• Memory footprint optimizations
• Memory leak fixes
• Updated object icons
• Updated furniture icons
• Price revisions for some furniture and items
• Localization update
• New page-based contents for décor editing as opposed to scrolling list for easier & faster navigation
• Improvements to cruncher V-mail legibility
• Various small UI Tweaks
• Improvements to auto travel navigation
• Improved distant citizen LOD model with correct scale
• Improved ball & grenade throwing physics
• Player can now log in on their own purchased cruncher
• Fixed: Lots of bugs in v-mail sender/receiver logic, tweaked spawning parameters
• Fixed: Added some missing junk item descriptions
• Fixed: Cruncher cursor now properly controlled with ‘Primary’ or ‘Select’ button action
• Fixed: Control glyph was broken for the escape key
• Fixed: Extra dialog option visible in dialog choice menu when in high resolutions (4k+)
• Fixed: In ‘Dead of Night’ it was possible for the flophouse owner to live on an echelon floor and be very difficult to access.
• Fixed: Room contents now updates properly when moving between rooms in the décor menu
• Fixed: Some ‘null’ furniture could be displayed within the décor menu’s current room furniture list
• Fixed: Hanging basket placement position in décor edit mode was wrong
• Fixed: It was possible to ‘resume game’ when there was no game loaded, resulting in a blank world loaded, if you spammed a button during the game’s initial load screen.
• Fixed: An issue where the player was unable to get crushed by an elevator
• Fixed: Turning a camera off and back on again within the security app would cause the camera itself to appear in captures
• Fixed: If visible but far away, citizen photo images could appear blank when loading a game or looking at CCTV captures.
• Fixed: In some languages with some items the object name text when looking at them was not displayed.
• Fixed: Security system breaker box bugs
• Fixed: Using the in-game text input search fields could result in them keeping focus after the case board was closed, resulting in loss of input.
• Fixed: Wooden fence geometry & UV
• Fixed: UI time text could overlap other parts of the UI on certain non-ENG languages
• Fixed: Security disabled states were not saved properly
• Fixed: Elevator controls UI can no longer overlap the containing window
• Fixed: Physics objects could disappear if thrown too high while in certain areas
• Fixed: When starting a new game in sandbox mode and setting 0 starting lockpicks, the game displayed ‘99’ lockpicks in the UI.
• Fixed: Player unable to purchase lockpick kit when inventory was full even though it does not take up an inventory space.
• Fixed: Being able to turn in side jobs multiple times
• Audio: Proper can impacts for wall and floor
• Audio: Echelon barrier now emits sound
• Audio: Sea splashes for chucking different sized things in the sea
• Audio: Minifridge now has its own sounds
• Audio: New music tracks added
• Audio: Grenades now momentarily affect player hearing
• Audio: Flash bomb causes temporary ringing at close range
• Audio: Hyperacusis filter option added (Audio Settings)
• Audio: Bass reduction filter option added (Audio Settings)
• Audio: Retirement sequence music cue added
• Audio: Pick-up object foley added
• Audio: Wristwatch and fists foley added
• Audio: Player bullet impact sound fixed and improved

* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see

Currently the instance is the source of unmoderated trolls, and the instance admin seems unwilling to take action despite multiple reports sent.

We're therefore taking the action of defederating. We'd rather work with the instance admin to keep those trolls in check and minimize the disruption before taking a drastic action like this.

For transparency purpose, you can see which instances we are defederating from by accessing the https://lemmy.ca/instances page and going to the Blocked instances section.

Happy Canada Day everyone.

Related to the outage that happened last night, we rebooted the Lemmy services but we're still trying to figure out the root cause, which seems to point to an out of memory issue in the logs. However it's not what we see in our monitoring console.

In the meantime, we will monitor the service more closely until we are confident the issue is resolved, and we will improve our tools to detect such a problem faster.

EDIT: Also happened at night on July 2nd, still trying to find the root cause..

Apologies for the extended downtime.