▶Official Merch is now available![revolution.co.uk]◀
Currently only available in the UK!

It's finally here, our official merch!

We're starting off with a smaller range of things until we get more confident in how things work, and with the help of your feedback will improve our services over time

GET YOUR HOLIDAY JUMPERS NOW
As in yesterday, as in actually as soon as you can if you want it in time for the 25th! We tried to launch this last week to give you all more time, but it's been A Week and we hope you understand.
These very special, limited edition Holiday Jumpers are made on demand, once you place your order, before they get shipped out to you, so please plan at the very least 9 days for them to arrive.

Our Holiday Collection is available to order until end of January 2021 and features 2 Holiday Jumpers in:
Merry George Green: https://revolution.co.uk/merch/holiday-jumper-george
Jolly Nico red: https://revolution.co.uk/merch/holiday-jumper-nico
and we designed them with a focus on winter, not *just* the holidays to let you get away with wearing them for more than just the festive months!

THE CLASSIC LINE
A line of t-shirts focusing on the iconic box art from beloved Revolution Software games! Available in pitch black, and some even feature prints reminiscent of the original, and slightly distressed look of the official box art of Broken Sword’s first ever physical release. We hope it sparks some memories..

WHY ONLY IN THE UK???
Because there is a lot of legal stuff to sort out selling to the EU right now, and it's all constantly changing. Currently we can only get it set up to ship and charge within the UK, and trying to figure this out was part of our delay in launching this, but we decided it's best to launch it now, and continue to try and see how things develop, then delay any further!
We hope you understand.

WHAT WE'RE STILL WORKING ON
✨More merch, once we know what sells and what doesn't
✨Cooler packaging
✨Super special limited edition runs??? MAYBE???
✨Reappearance of some old faves???
✨Making sure everything runs smoothly, this is a brand new way to do merch for us and it will come with a learning curve!

PLEASE READ OUR SHOP POLICY
We made sure it's short, easy to understand, and very readable.
We're a little strict with refunds & exchanges, and we want to be super transparent about it before you purchase: https://revolution.co.uk/terms-of-service-and-policies

WE HOPE YOU'LL LIKE IT
This has been in the works for a long time, and we really hope you'll love everything on our merch store! If you have any questions you can email us at merch@revolution.co.uk or chat with us on here
Thank you for always supporting us, and being so kind about everything we do. We push ourselves very hard, but seeing how happy it makes you all makes it so worth it. We hope you know how much we appreciate each and every one of you. Lots of love from all of us at Revolution

Before we get started on the Patch & Update notes, we wanted to remind you that it's now less than 24h that you get to grab Beyond A Steel Sky for -40% on Steam
https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/app/1146310/Beyond_a_Steel_Sky/


We've moved to a new Unreal Engine version, and oh my god it's been so much work, but we're so happy with the result, and we hope you'll be too...


Unreal Engine 4.24? Don't know her. We're all about that 4.26 now!
It comes with everything Epic engineers put into the update, and trust us, you do not wanna see that list. Instead we're highlighting the bangers:

• IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
  
  
• IMPROVED STABILITY
  
  
• REDUCED MEMORY USAGE

Everything is just a bit more responsive, and quicker. You might not notice if you're running on the latest and greatest hardware, but for those of us who aren't that #blessed; you'll really feel the difference!


Some of you with lower spec machines would load into Aspiration Gala only to be met by an entire level of frozen NPCs who wouldn't move, and better yet, block you in. Like some sick game of musical statues but at the end you can't leave.
NPCs travel on something called NavMesh, which is kind of like an invisible track for them. These need to be renewed every time anything gets moved or changed in a level, and last time we updated this level someone forgot to reactivate it. Well no more!


Better toilet experience: The camera clipping issue should now be fixed!


Reports of Alonso rolling his eyes into his head in snarky / possessed ways. This took away from his sternness and was addressed with us re-exporting his animations. He's now spooky again.


Snappier loading!!! It's barely noticeable but we're really happy with it and wanted to share!


Please only say good things, thank.
Enabled. Nice.


Do we have an update for you. Don't be mad!!! But due to the new Unreal Engine version not supporting OpenGL anymore, this is a Vulkan only club now, including brand new support for Vulkan ES3.1 which runs way quicker on low spec machines and brings your Linux experience on par with Windows & Mac gamers!


Never underestimate the power of good UI! Which is why we continuously make refinements and additions to the way you experience our games

• CONTROLLERS
  Controllers used to have some erratic behaviour. Especially inside the terminals.
  Fun Fact: Using a controller often just means that the mouse cursor isn't gone, but hidden from view. That meant that on certain screens, things would already be highlighted, even if they didn't seem to be highlighted with your controller. This could make the controller feel like it was selecting items arbitrarily, which it wasn't - it was just interacting on what the invisible mouse was selecting. There was a particular occurrence in Reflections where you couldn't select certain chairs for no sensible reason. Using the controller is now much sleeker!
  
  
  
• ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE
  Starting out playing the game is now much easier, smoother, and more intuitive! Time to turn your nan into a fan!
  
  
  
• TYPOS IN CREDITS
  Pobody’s Nerfect
  
  
  
• WAIT WHICH GAMESAVE WAS IT?
  Well guess no more! They come with timestamps now!!! Technology is incredible.

Join our Discord: discord.gg/revolutionsoftware
We are on there all the time, and we'd love to see more of you there!

We love you all very much, and hope that this reflects in how much effort we continue to put into our games.

Lots of love, your team at Revolution

• 40% OFF Beyond A Steel Sky, as a treat
  
• Developer Commentary Update
  
• Dave Lowe has new music and a documentary

It's been a wild first month of the year..


We're a month into 2021 and it's already been way harder than it needed to be. You deserve a break.
If Beyond A Steel Sky has been on your Wishlist for a while because you just couldn't justify spending money right now, we totally get it.

Beyond A Steel Sky is now -40%
https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/app/1146310/Beyond_a_Steel_Sky/
This is the most we've ever discounted our game.
If you're familiar with our games, you know we pride ourselves on fair pricing, to make gaming both accessible, yet sustainable for us as a small independent company, but we hope that this temporary discount goes a long way for some of you.


Beyond A Steel Sky is almost half a year old and that calls for celebration!
Throughout this time, we have hugely valued our relationship with our community, our players, and your enthusiasm to hear of our development plans.

So a full blown in-depth behind the scenes developer commentary update from the entire team seemed like the perfect fit!

We offer you an insight into our thoughts, our intentions, and our little hidden jokes and references:

👒 Why the beanie?
🏃 What's the benefit of in-house motion capture?
🥓 How do we get Dave Gibbons to talk more about bacon butties?

All those questions, and more, are addressed by Charles Cecil, Dave Gibbons, the scripting team, the animation team, our artists, and many more of the talented people we had the honour to work with!

• Charles Cecil:
  As Creative Director, Charles used his experience of over thirty years to manage the project as a whole, covering every aspect of the games development from big-picture story writing and complex puzzle designs, to the shape and size of the Mini-Knackwurst sausage.
  
  
• Kevin Beimers:
  Kevin was involved in Beyond a Steel Sky since before the first line of code was written; alongside a quirky disposition, Kevin brought decades of writing and design experience to the team, giving life to the characters of Union City with outlandish jokes and unique personalities.
  
  
• Ross:
  After starting his career at Revolution, Ross returned after years of AAA development experience to lead the overall game and level design on Beyond A Steel Sky - this included heavy involvement in the narrative and puzzles throughout the game. You can thank Ross for ensuring no puzzle came close to the trauma of Broken Sword 1’s Goat.
  
  
• Nina:
  As Lead Scripter, Nina was responsible for the implementation of Beyond a Steel Sky - a huge undertaking for the studio’s first project in the Unreal Engine; when she wasn’t writing heaps of killer code, she’d be playing her part in the narrative and puzzle design of the game.
  
  
• Luke:
  Luke was one of the level designers and overall fix-it gurus on Beyond A Steel Sky, leading the charge on the Desert, Reflections, and Land Train Office sections. His greatest battle, however, came in the form of a giant magnetic crane and its sidekick - 4YR.
  
  
• Em:
  Em was one of the leading animators on the game. Specializing in motion capture and facial animation, Em was able to bring life to the ridiculous character dialogue through expressive gestures - it’s all in the eyebrows.
  
  
• Dave Gibbons:
  The man who needs no introduction, Dave Gibbons brings a lifetime of pop culture illustration experience to the Art design - from the characters and costumes of our post-modern citizens, to the shine-polished architecture of Joey’s new regime. His proudest addition, however, is the conception of the Mini-K sausage, inspired by a bacon sandwich he once tasted in the 90’s.
  
  
• Noirin:
  The unsung hero of Beyond a Steel Sky, Noirin keeps the studio aloft as COO of Revolution Games. Using decades of experience with major corporations and publishers, Noirin juggles both the internal and external elements of production.
  
  
• Alistair:
  Working with Pitstop Studios, Alistair composed the soundtrack for Beyond A Steel Sky, combining traditional orchestral elements with more contemporary sounds, and in doing so sought to achieve a tone that brought nostalgia to our traditional audience whilst inspiring new-comers to the sci-fi adventure genre.
  
  
• Matthew:
  As well as his responsibilities for the design and implementation of Beyond a Steel Sky, Matthew managed the games’ dialogue, from writing branching dialogue trees and edgy one-liners, to the casting and voice recording of the English release. Between these roles, Matthew just about had enough time to check his hair.

"OMG HOW DO I TURN THIS ON RIGHT NOW"

If you've played Beyond A Steel Sky before, and click on "New Game" it will give you a pop-up to turn on Developer Commentary.

In an existing game you can always turn it on and off in the in-game options!

If you're a new player, you can also find the Developer Commentary in the options, but we want to warn you; there are a lot of spoilers meant to lift the curtain on the thoughts, challenges, and meaning that went into making this game and its puzzles. So choose wisely..



🎵 NEW CREDITS BOPS
The end credits music now plays a remix of the original Beneath a Steel Sky intro music by Dave Lowe, the legendary 8-bit composer. Very cool.

⛵ SHOWING YOU THE ROPES
We're learning! So we're super pleased with presenting you our new onboarding features.

• Touch devices will now get a small animated tutorial, fresh from scatch!!
  
• Improved how to tell when you can use something from increased range! Fun!
  
• Tutorial text improvements in text, but also in MINOS! We went all out.

This should make it easier for complete newcomers to orientate. Games are for everyone!!!

🌐 BIG UPDATE
This update is pretty sizable, but for very good reasons!
We want to do better, and take up less space on your hard drives. So this update will be re-compressing your files! Exciting!! We were hoping to get away with it since this is the commentary update, but we can't lie to you. We love you too much!


Many of you may be familiar with Dave Lowe, aka Uncle Art, from his fantastic body of work. He is the composer behind Beneath A Steel Sky's soundtrack, and in fact, most computer game music in the 80s and 90s, across over 70 game titles.

Well he's making music again, and it's incredible..
Dave Lowe and his daughters Lucy and Holly have re-interpreted, and re-recorded Dave's incredible body of work in this album titled "A Temporal Shift"

GET THE ALBUM HERE[uncleartretrogaming.com]

And even better, you can follow Dave Lowe's inspiring journey.
If you ever wanted to peek behind the scenes of the intersection between the music industry and the games industry, this documentary is for you.

It's on Prime Video and it's free for those with Amazon Prime, at least here in the UK. We even have a little teaser, and an incredibly emotional Charles..

WATCH THE FULL DOCUMENTARY
"UNCLE ART" ON PRIME VIDEO[www.amazon.co.uk]


Join our Discord: discord.gg/revolutionsoftware
We are on there all the time, and on Fridays we even play games together with our Community.
We'd love to see more of you there!

We love you all very much, and hope that this reflects in how much effort we've put into this game.

All the best from the whole team at Revolution

And oh boy do we have treats for you! Let's get right to it:


You asked and we delivered: Trading Cards are now live!
To give them something truly special and personal, they are largely made up of never-before-seen concept art. Our characters have gone through a lot of iterations through the design phase so you might even find some inconsistencies. All part of the charm (we hope!).


We couldn't give you Trading Cards and not include emoticons.
No literally, that's how the system is set up!
We went through a few drafts and hope we ended up with a variety of emoticons that are both fun, and give you loads of opportunity to use them in conversations. And YES there is a clown, but that's all we're gonna say! Happy hunting!


This is the biggest discount we've had so far, but we felt like it's autumn, and with the year we've all been having you deserve it! You might wanna pick it up now if you're thinking of gifting it to a friend for the holidays cause we're not sure we can match this one so quickly again!

https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/app/1146310/Beyond_a_Steel_Sky/

And now, for our shortest Patch Notes ever (yes this is a lowkey brag! Please be happy for us!).


SEE YOU LATER, ELEVATOR
This one was devious because it was one of those bugs that occurred when you saved and reloaded the Aspiration Gala after the technician had gone up in the elevator.
The elevator then reloaded being on the bottom of the level, wide open and really inviting.. but entering it would do absolutely nothing. It really felt like a blocker, but surprisingly it was even more misleading..

Let's backtrack:
The game essentially relies on hint states, kind of like a stage setting in a theatre!
Hint Stage 6 for example means "elevator down".
But the Elevator itself didn't understand it was supposed to be down. While it was set to be downstairs it did not know what script to reference, because it was literally off-script.
Like a time traveller, or a really bad play with that one kid who never knows what's going on so they made them a tree and they still somehow managed to bomb? That.

The elevator now remembers what part of the game we're all on, and will no longer try and distract you prematurely!


FALLOUT BOY
Someone, not naming ANY names, kept pushing the boundaries - quite literally..
A little secret about gamedev is that if the player can't reach it, it's probably not real.
It takes a LOT of memory to load in objects, and they are not actually necessary to display things! We talked about NavMesh in previous patch notes, which to briefly recap is exactly what it sounds like: a mesh to navigate on. This is used for railroading NPCs, making things have physical boundaries, etc.

Now, when we make these boundaries to keep you OUT of parts of the game, it's because we don't want you to see!!! Cause there is very little we actually waste physical memory on. It's all a sham! Beyond where you can walk is nothing but illusions!!!

But some of you keep finding ways through and we keep patching them up. Probably till forever!
So for now we again, improved meshes, which is fancy for “You can now bump into stuff better” - Enjoy!


WENDELL'S MOUSTACHE
Wendell is a simple guy, but he does take pride in his moustache.
I lied. Wendell has been nothing but trouble. First he walked around blocking everyone. Then he wouldn't stay in his chair, and now he's fully derailing the camera to zoom into his moustache.
God damnit Wendell.

Actually to be fair this time it wasn't quite him, it was his umbrella. When you, the player, would approach Wendell from a specific angle, the umbrella would block the camera, putting it into a tight spot. The camera was using Foster's and Wendell's location to try and find the best angle and tried to make an executive call. Boom: A fullscreened moustache closeup.

We found a super elegant solution to this though: A scripted approach!
So now when you, the player, try to start a conversation from an angle like this, Foster will take a few steps to align himself in front of Wendell. Don't worry it's still his good side.


BIRDEMIC
City Walls now has more bird. We will not elaborate. But you’re still welcome.


REGINALD CONSPIRACY
When Reginald comes out of his little room you were able to examine him, and the game would be talking about him like he was a MINOS terminal. For no reason at all. It now refers to him as a person again. Which he is. Yup.


4YR U SO QUIET
When 4YR gets..... too far for you to reach in a cutscene, it was impossible to understand what he was saying! He even got the little speech bubbles with the dots in them for when you’re too far away to hear an NPCs dialogue. Not very accessible.

You can now hear relevant lines loudly enough, but don't worry - the game will still allow you to walk away if you get tired of his moaning.


CUTSCENES IMPROVED
You transition into them better. Whenever you get to a point to trigger a cutscene it will now slow you down ahead of that, almost stepping into it if you will (and you will).
It looks so smooth and we're all geeking out over it!

MENU REVAMP
We tried something new and exciting.
It's more segmented, cleaner, and features different cards.
We’re super happy with it and hope you are too!


There are some more tiny adjustments and fixes, but what’s a puzzle game without a little mystery..

This patch really showed us how far we've come in a short time, thanks to all of you.
So many of you are in steady communication with us, and it's honestly heartwarming how positive and supportive this community has been.

Let's not sugar-coat it. This year has been a lot, but you all make us wanna finish strong.

For those of you who want to, feel invited to join our Discord: discord.gg/revolutionsoftware
We are on there all the time, and on Fridays we even play games together with our Community.
We'd love to see more of you there!

All the best from the whole team at Revolution

We're proud to make Patch #3 Beyond A Steel Sky's biggest content update yet!

• Achievements
  
• French Voiceover
  
• German Voiceover
  
• 20% OFF: Return of the Launch Sale!

The Aspiration Day Bundle Releases with brand new goodies:

• -10% Discount
  
• a "Complete The Set" Option
  
• Original Soundtrack of Beyond A Steel Sky
  
• FREE Comics!!!

And of course as always

• Bug Fixes & Improvements

Rudeness? Spying?? Stealing?! - Yup, there is an achievement for all those and more!
We heard your cries! 32 Achievements are now activated and encourage you all to play the game in ways you might not have considered before..

Already played the game?
In order for Achievements to show up as earned, you have to play the game and actively unlock them.


Ah.. Paris in the fall.. WAIT, WRONG GAME!
Ah.. Union City in the fall.. Better.
You can now treat yourself to an artisanal café crème as you enjoy a freshly baked baguette in the Bistro, or slap on some lederhosen and Schuhplattler down to the October festivities where we serve up some Brezel & Lager!

German Trailer:
French Trailer:
No that's all nonsense, but you get to now play the game with native French and native German voiceovers!
We went above and beyond casting voices that we felt really fit Foster, Joey, and the rest of our wonderful characters, and we can't wait for you to experience them

Originally posted by author:

Revolution is humbled by the passion of its German-speaking community. Whilst other companies were using text translators to localise into German, Revolution has always sought out talented German translators, and insisted on high quality voice recording. This time around, the COVID pandemic delayed German voice recording - which meant that Beyond a Steel Sky was released with German subtitles but no German speech. We are delighted to now be able to remedy this with the release of an update which now includes full German speech.

- Charles Cecil

Want to hear more? Join us for today's stream at 6PM (British Time) over on YouTube Live where Charles sits down with his old friend Jochen. Lots of Broken Sword talk, it'll be sweet :)

Bonne chance, habt Spaß!


We understand that many of you have been waiting to get this game for multiple reasons:
- For the German & French VO
- For Achievements
- For the game to be more stable
Well, those are all good reasons, and you shouldn't feel like you missed out on our launch sale, so just for you, we're bringing it back for a full week! Thank you all for being so passionate.


As a big surprise drop we present to you Beyond A Steel Sky's Aspiration Bundle:

What's in the bundle?

• Beyond A Steel Sky
  Shocking, right?
  
• The Original Soundtrack
  For the first time ever on Steam!
  
• FREE Beneath A Steel Sky & Beyond A Steel Sky comics
  High resolution PDFs illustrated by Dave Gibbons! Absolutely Free. Our treat because we love you!
  
• A "Complete the Set" option
  Already paid for some of this stuff without the Bundle? Upgrading to the bundle will get you the exact same saving as buying it whole! Pretty neat!
  
• -10%
  Oh yeah and the entire thing is 10% OFF (if you buy it this week, that's on top of the -20% discount on Beyond A Steel Sky, so that's a damn good offer!)

https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/app/1146310/Beyond_a_Steel_Sky/


Here we go, what you're all here for. Some classic Beyond A Steel Sky Patch Notes:



NOBODY'S PERFECT
Songbird round 3: Fight! - This stubbourn NPC has truly bamboozled our poor QA team. Appearing fixed each time we ship, just to then misbehave. We can now with confidence say that "Yeah, Songbird definitely improved since the last update but-"


DESERTED NO MORE
When sliding against a specific wall, you could, against all reason whatsoever, wiggle your way between collision geometry just long enough to push through into the vast expanding desert and glitch through dunes to your hearts content. But no more! We think it best if you didn't wiggle into the desert to die.


SAUSAGES IN ODD PLACES
Please proceed with care, as you can never look at sausages the same way. There is no going back from here:

There is a sausage at the centre of the universe

No, really. There is only one sausage per level and it teleports around on demand. If not needed it is set to return to 0/0/0 and go invisible... Something that did not happen if you saw it lying around randomly in moats.

"If Foster doesn't have his sausage out it should be hidden from the level, but yes there is always a sausage. You just can't see it sometimes." - Matt, Sausage Scripter, numb to jokes

The sausage has now been realigned with reality.


GRETA SEE YA
If a character is in dialogue they are coded to look at the character they are in dialogue with. They will move their eyes a little, sometimes adjust their head when they're sitting. Nothing crazy, just enough to keep immersion.

So.. turns out kneeling is a little too crazy.
Made Greta go all Rosemary's Baby trying to kneel AND look at Foster.
It was all sorts of horrible - Matt
Y I K E S - Wendy


RECYCLING CRUSHER
You could re-activate the Security Droid whist he was in the crusher.
He didn't mind and stayed quite chipper but it almost made it worse. - Luke


JOEY BEING DIFFICULT
What else is new?
You can ask a robot to clean, but will he do it?
The answer is yes, he should, and thanks to a very elegant fix he now also will.

EMBER & THE DEET
When Ember is trying to help you on her test bench odds are that you want to see what she's doing and block her from accessing where she needs to go, so Ember gets confused and stops.
This was very bad news because her accessing the work bench is needed to progress organically.
We fixed it by slapping a cutscene on it. You would have never noticed. Smooth ;)

FOSTER GLITCHING INTO MUSEUM FLOOR
We talked about Unreal Engine's NavMesh before.
All across the world, invisibly, is a NavMesh, and on it we mark locators that tell an object (like Foster) to walk there. These locators are also used for cutscenes.
Most times the command checks for a floor, and then aligns the object to be placed on said floor. Not this time. For some reason Foster got stuck abs first in the Museum floor.

"It was definitely not an issue with someone getting the coordinate numbers wrong again." - Andy, programmer, innocent angel whomst we love

Foster has lost all automation privileges for this level and is now made to walk to the location manually. That'll teach him.


JOEY INTENSIFIES
Some of you mentioned they saw Joey vibrating. We found the issue!
There were 2 commands Joey was trying to observe:
1) Move [somewhere]
2) Turn around and look at Foster
Joey, despite wanting to, went to the marked location, but kept vibrating in disgust as he was made to consistently look back at Foster.
We've told him to never look back in anger.


PIAZZA NPCS ON LOWER LEVELS
Where no player must ever go, the NPCs are roaming free of the bounds and rules of mortal society.
In fact too free..
In fact oh no...

It won't have affected you at all, but it was a massive renovation of realigning the NavMesh, cleaning up and redesigning collisions, and overall revamp of the environment. No wonder the NPCs were confused. We hope they will love their new Piazza levels!


EPIC SCRIPTING VS ANIMATION SHOWDOWN
Charming as can be, Reginald often moves his tablet from hand to hand to scratch his head and wave his arms enthusiastically. This action would often lead to his tablet glitching out and acting possessed.

To not have to add movement to the tablet itself, it is common practice to "socket" items into character hands, meaning the item adjusts to wherever the hand goes. Easy! Except when both the Scripting team and the Animation team had commands for Reginald's tablet. Then it would, understandably, become possessed.

We had to remove one and you might wonder who won:

"No one won, I think we just picked the one that worked better" - Sooch, Technical Artist & Animation Lead

"Animation won big time! I'm not a sore loser but I did lose" - Matt, Scripter


GAME CRASHED AT SPECIFIC ENDING
Surprisingly had nothing to do with the ending itself.
Blueprints works through visually displaying text boxes that are tied together by a string. If you move them around, they will still stay attached.
Now, imagine you tried to switch 2 boxes around. You'd need to visually change their position, and then properly retie them so they wouldn't just be dragged out of place, strings still attached!

You should definitely not do that and then create a NEW string link to the box you just changed places with.
That would create an infinite loop. :)
And we all know what computers think of infinite loops (:



KEYBOARD MAPPING HAS ARRIVED
Sick of the WASD tyranny???
Due to popular demand you can now just change it.
Nothing too fancy, but a little can mean a lot to some of you. Take it for a spin, see what you think!


MORE RESOLUTIONS!! COMPUTER! ENHANCE!!
This one goes out to all you wide screen users!
The game's default range is set to 85 degrees, and now lets you adjust the ranges anywhere between 80 - 110 degrees! We hope this will work for up to 21:9 displays.
Please note that this affect the game & player controlled camera only. Our cutscenes will be played with black bars to suit the range they were recorded in originally. But it has a very western feel to it, so there is that!


UNDER CONTROLL
All elements should now be smoothly interactable with controllers alone. No more backup mouse. Get outa here mouse!!
We also tidied up a lot of issues UI related surrounding the controller, but all you need to really know is that it should work smoothly now!


MINOS TERMINAL
The Bonsai App now responds appropriately
There was a weird conflict involving Bluetooth controllers and navigating the MINOS interfaces around Graham's Apartment, but they have all been addressed and fixed.


SHADERS
Smoother than ever! Heck yes!



We can not overstate how important these markets and communities are to adventure games. We should know. We have 30 years of experience in appreciating them.

Please join us for a wonderful stream today as we focus on the German communities, and touch on all things Revolution, including a bunch of Broken Sword stories! Charles is a wonderful story teller, and we'd love to have you chat to us on stream.

6PM UK time (BST) over on our YouTube Channel via the Live feature! You can turn notifications on, or follow us on Social Media where we will throw out reminders:


https://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

No.. really! We’re there all the time!
We help with puzzles, troubleshoot obscure system errors with you, and generally like to feel closer with people who play our games.

We’re so grateful to have such a strong, vocal, and passionate community around our games, and we know we can not ever say it enough, but we deeply appreciate every single person who has reached out and been in touch with us.

Ever messed around in Piazza and had a robot run off with your precious data? Well no more! You can now reset MINOS circuits in Piazza. No more lurking at the vending machine to get your data back!


Foster knew too much. He now knows less.


The engine now has a better understanding of what the player is thinking


..or as its referred to internally: "Loz's Crazy Palace of Code"
We realized the puzzle was a little strict, and the game now lets you discover things in more than just one order.


At some point during the game, Foster would just wear something completely different for no apparent reason. Unless of course someone had put a space at the end of the costume name the engine tried to reference. That would then lead to weird referencing issues. That would have been embarrassing :)




Do not untag this unless you know exactly what bug we're talking about here:

The infamous Puzzle in MINOS where you divide by 0? YEAH TURNS OUT YOU CAN'T BE USING THE ACTUAL NUMBER 0 CAUSE IT MESSES WITH TRYING TO LOAD GAMESAVES!
It didn't save the number 0 because it assumed 0 changes had been made to the Plinth. "The number hasn't changed" That meant whenever you loaded the game, you loaded the starting state instead of what it should have been. It's a little more complicated than that but if you actually want to know more, we can host an entire stream on this, that's how elaborate it was.. TL;DR: GG. We played ourselves.

Huge shoutout to your fellow gamers over on Steam who shared their gamesaves with us, and walked us through what went wrong. Due to it being a loading issue that got you stuck we had to save the game in a very specific condition, in order to experience the loop people were stuck in.
We ended up deciding to set the base stat to 99
Unfortunately we could not change this in existing gamesaves without risking people without this issue getting strange results, so we have to ask you to reload from your last gamesave.


When standing too close to walls or objects with your back, the camera could sometimes go inside a character model, or even yeet itself into the next room over, which in turn dulled the audio like you were eavesdropping on your own game! - Well no more!!!
Cameras now understand that they are better than walls, and can, in fact, overrule them.


When walking to a very specific spot in Recycling Centre, you could wiggle into a spot that would make you fall through the world, resulting in many being able to walk around the city floor! One of the cooler bugs.

Just collision bounds issues, you wouldn’t understand..
What you visually see in games doesn’t necessarily exist as a solid object. The job of telling you which objects are solid, and what gives you resistance, and by how much, is down to a completely separate system.
A lot of these resistance meshes keep a simple geometry (think hitbox). But yeah. In a shocking plot twist nothing is real in Unreal Engine. Does just what it says on the tin.
Anyway, a small gap did not have enough resistance and it meant you could shimmy down where you should absolutely not!!!


Really, Foster?

It’s not Foster’s fault really. While bin animations were standardised, the height of bins across Union City was not.

When you interact with an object that has a specific animation attached to it, for example the Spankles vending machine, what is really happening is that you the Player, are travelling on a NavMesh:
Imagine the map being covered in green blankets that AI can travel on and when you, the Player approach a location to interact with an object, it has an animation attached to it (like the Spankles vending machine). Now Imagine that NavMesh is not lining up correctly - that would lead to all kinds of nonsense.

Foster is blaming his terrible aim on incorrect bin heights, and standing too far off to be able to make the shot.. okay.




This was a very rare occurrence, but for some players Ember would be impossible to interact with.


This was due to the indicator; the little white circle.
Unreal Engine knows when you, the Player, are looking at for example Ember, and will make the indicator appear, thanks to a timer.
Now imagine someone was constantly resetting that timer because they told Unreal Engine that something moved when it was not looking.

Basically Ember was convinced she had to approach a particular spot that didn’t necessarily exist. She couldn’t cope with that failure and kept resetting.

Never being in one place long enough for you to look at her, and for the indicator to appear, Unreal Engine translated this to: no actions available..

It's like when you ask your dad for something he knows mum said no to. Well, we overruled them both.


The Apartment Cleaning robot was having trouble with a couple of things, including with how much water was currently in it.
This alone is forgivable, but it made life really hard for poor Raquel.


A little similar to the NavMesh issue, when Foster would approach an object, like a door, we would tell your character model to get "in position to THIS LOCATION " to start this animation.
We set the approach location where Z is 0, but because it was relative to another in-engine approach arrow that was slightly moved, and set Z to (for example) -30, basically instructing Foster to limbo through the door.
Foster is an obedient boy.


Foster is not a vehicle and is not allowed to enter Union City without one.
When stepping into the entrance area 2 very helpful lasers will inform him to move his meaty butt out of the entrance zone in 10 seconds or less; or else.

While 4YR is a valued employee bot, and is welcome to shuttle through this zone.

BUT: If Foster interacts with 4YR while lasers are pointing at him counting down from 10, the countdown doesn’t just stop until you two are done talking!
In fact Foster would be mercilessly taken out with a dramatic death scene.

Except, after dying… he’d just get back to chatting up 4YR?!
We put an end to this nonsense!


In a horrific oversight, some of you figured out how to ride 4YR like a steed.


“Step up” is enabled by default and we forgot to switch it off on the battery
So while you can not “step up” on 4YR in general, you could totally do it while the battery was slotted in his back.
Lead to some truly amazing gifs though..


You used to be able to catch another conversation with Greta the Hologram, just when she was about to fade out, making her invisible!
We made sure she can shut herself off in peace now.


In the Museum the father & daughter duo were completely different AI to the generic museum NPCs, and therefore had the intelligence to avoid running into eachother, but did not have the faintest clue to walk AROUND these other, alien NPCs.
No more traffic jams!


Basically there is a scene where Alonso should be leaving the Museum dramatically!
But if you, the Player, left before him, Alonso would just stay there and pout, because you ruined his exit.
It took a while but he should no longer throw a tantrum over the theft of his dramatic exit.


The overbearing little guy used to be able to corner Foster, and make it unable for him to leave. We sorted that out.




ORANA’S SKIRT: Much more comfortable now that it doesn’t clip into her.

ADS: The Advertisements around you now tie in with world building better.




CHAIRS & DESKS: We had to re-explain to some NPCs how sitting works.

JIMMY: Used to be shy about talking in cutscenes. Gave him a little confidence boost.

CUTSCENES: Scrubbed, and now very polished!

FOSTER’S DEATH STARE:
This one was interesting: It only happened after Foster changed into another outfit.
No head or face animation would work anymore, except for lip sync which runs on a completely different system.
We figured out that this was due to the blueprint of the animation being referenced by the outfit. So if Foster’s old outfit was gone this code wouldn’t replace the reference it was looking for until you either entered a transition scene, or reloaded manually.
Foster now uses b e s p o k e live references




HACKING ON GAMEPAD NOW MUCH SMOOTHER: weeeeeeeee

QDOS LOGIC: clearer flow of how Foster learns information

BONSAI: Displays as it should




NO MORE SELF INTERRUPTING:
Sometimes a computer would take longer to load in and start dialogue lines, and that would mess with the timings as those delays were not accounted for, resulting in NPCs interrupting themselves when speaking. We now make sure that the audio finishes before the next one can queue.




GAMEPAD CONTROLS: smoother, better, faster, less awkward

OPTIMIZED CITY SHADERS & GEOMETRY: shiny & pointy

OPTIMIZED TEXTURE COMPRESSION: smaller & snappier

GLOBAL MEMORY REDUCTIONS: less means more

LEVEL TRANSITIONS: more loading, less crashing




We can not overstate how grateful we are to have such an understanding community in these uncertain times. Shipping a game during a global pandemic comes with unique challenges that affect us as a studio, a team, and also simply human beings.

While there is lots more to do, we believe that this 2nd Steam Patch puts the finishing touches on the game we would have liked to have shipped with.

We dearly hope that this will give everyone the experience they deserve to have when playing Beyond A Steel Sky.

Thank you all for your patience, and for rooting for us.


https://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

No.. really! We’re there all the time!
We help with puzzles, troubleshoot obscure system errors with you, and generally like to feel closer with people who play our games.

We’re so grateful to have such a strong, vocal, and passionate community around our games, and we know we can not ever say it enough, but we deeply appreciate every single person who has reached out and been in touch with us.

This game is a huge part of our history, and indeed Adventure Game history.
When Charles Cecil & Dave Gibbons work together great things happen..

15 whole disks it took then.. Feels like yesterday and forever ago all at once.
Very proud of the innovative Virtual Theatre system, Beneath a Steel Sky is a gripping cyberpunk science fiction point and click adventure game. Art directed by award-winning comic book artist Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). It's widely considered as one of the best point and click adventures ever written.

For the first time ever Beneath A Steel Sky is now on Steam, thanks to the warm reception to the 26 years in the making sequel Beyond A Steel Sky, which we released here first.

Beyond A Steel Sky can be enjoyed on its own, but if you want to travel back in time with us, and maybe find some hidden origins of choices we made when world building the Union City you know and love, then we invite you on a journey, back where it all started...

Beneath A Steel Sky:
https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/app/1368340/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky/
After being brutally abducted from his village in the wasteland, his village obliterated, and his kinfolk butchered, Robert Foster escapes a helicopter crash and finds himself alone save for the circuit board of his best friend, Joey, the AI he built as a child. Foster soon resurrects Joey and together they find themselves in Union City, where oppressed citizens live and work in soaring tower blocks, under the strict control of a brutal, fascist, AI dictatorship – whilst the corrupt, covetous and rich live below, shielded from the choking pollution.

In the melting pot of Union City, a not so impossible future, mankind’s worse nightmares are waiting to emerge from beneath the steel sky. It's Man against Man. Man against Machine. Man against Time.

Strangers in a strange land, Foster and Joey must survive long enough to discover the sinister truth behind his abduction - why they specifically came for him - and defeat the evil before it’s too late. It’s a terrifying threat that only you can liberate… Maybe.

AND YES - THIS IS THE VERSION WITH VOICE ACTING IN IT!

In case you missed it, we announced this heading to Steam just a few hours before on a live stream. If you've never seen Charles and Dave interact this is going to be a treat. But tread lightly: When people spend this much time world-building they tend to forget what is and isn't a spoiler ;)
It's rare and wonderful for us to be so close to all of you. The amount of love you are showing Beyond A Steel Sky has been incomprehensibly meaningful to us as developers, and people.
Because of all the love you have shown us, we were able to bring this game to Steam, and therefore, a whole new generation of gamers. And we're on the edge of our seats to hear what you think.

And to those of you familiar; we are so grateful to see you all playing this game, on a whole new platform. After all of those years it still means so much to you.

As developers who have not always had the luxury to be this close to our community, we are not taking this for granted. Thanks to the digitisation of storefronts we are now so much more able to hear from you directly, and we try to always make time to have a little natter / chinwag / hangout session:
discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

For the first couple of hours the platform would not count hour played, and would therefore not let people leave reviews. This has now been fixed! - No update needed!
We hope that you can make up for lost time, queue up the game, and let us know how you find it!

Lots of love from the whole team at Revolution

This game is a huge part of our history, and indeed Adventure Game history.
When Charles Cecil & Dave Gibbons work together great things happen..

15 whole disks it took then.. Feels like yesterday and forever ago all at once.
Very proud of the innovative Virtual Theatre system, Beneath a Steel Sky is a gripping cyberpunk science fiction point and click adventure game. Art directed by award-winning comic book artist Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). It's widely considered as one of the best point and click adventures ever written.

For the first time ever Beneath A Steel Sky is now on Steam, thanks to the warm reception to the 26 years in the making sequel Beyond A Steel Sky, which we released here first.

Beyond A Steel Sky can be enjoyed on its own, but if you want to travel back in time with us, and maybe find some hidden origins of choices we made when world building the Union City you know and love, then we invite you on a journey, back where it all started...

Beneath A Steel Sky:
https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/app/1368340/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky

After being brutally abducted from his village in the wasteland, his village obliterated, and his kinfolk butchered, Robert Foster escapes a helicopter crash and finds himself alone save for the circuit board of his best friend, Joey, the AI he built as a child. Foster soon resurrects Joey and together they find themselves in Union City, where oppressed citizens live and work in soaring tower blocks, under the strict control of a brutal, fascist, AI dictatorship – whilst the corrupt, covetous and rich live below, shielded from the choking pollution.

In the melting pot of Union City, a not so impossible future, mankind’s worse nightmares are waiting to emerge from beneath the steel sky. It's Man against Man. Man against Machine. Man against Time.

Strangers in a strange land, Foster and Joey must survive long enough to discover the sinister truth behind his abduction - why they specifically came for him - and defeat the evil before it’s too late. It’s a terrifying threat that only you can liberate… Maybe.

In case you missed it, we announced this heading to Steam just a few hours before on a live stream. If you've never seen Charles and Dave interact this is going to be a treat. But tread lightly: When people spend this much time world-building they tend to forget what is and isn't a spoiler ;)
It's rare and wonderful for us to be so close to all of you. The amount of love you are showing Beyond A Steel Sky has been incomprehensibly meaningful to us as developers, and people.
Because of all the love you have shown us, we were able to bring this game to Steam, and therefore, a whole new generation of gamers. And we're on the edge of our seats to hear what you think.

And to those of you familiar; we are so grateful to see you all playing this game, on a whole new platform. After all of those years it still means so much to you.

As developers who have not always had the luxury to be this close to our community, we are not taking this for granted. Thanks to the digitisation of storefronts we are now so much more able to hear from you directly, and we try to always make time to have a little natter / chinwag / hangout session:
discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

Right in the beginning of the game 4YR used to get stuck and there was no way to get around this. This has now been fixed, including in existing gamesaves - so no need to start over!


Every character has a floor angle they can travel on, and 4YR’s was set to 0.
When 4YR experienced anything more than 0 he got anxious and told Unreal Engine that he was, in fact, currently falling.
And Unreal Engine was very understanding and worried about him and chose to wait… and wait… and wait.. And wait..
UE4: are you-
4YR: nope still falling
Unreal:...
4YR: ….

We added a little more angle and now he understands what the floor is again.

We also noticed that you could offer 4YR something from your inventory while he was (spoiler) hanging in the air and it would set him FLYING. Distracting 4YR like this is very rude since he’s clearly busy, so now this option has been removed!!
Shoutout to Luke from the Scripting Team who tracked this down and found an elegant solution


In an extremely tense and story-plot heavy scene the camera suddenly changed over to show absolute nonsense, including a door, and a literal pile of rubbish. Horrifying.


The entire array of Dialogue participants was empty, so when the camera tried to "look at" for example Foster it couldn't find him!! Camera went to 0,0,0... TRASH!


This was an extremely hard bug to reproduce, even when 6 different people spent several hours on it.

Lead Scripter Nina only found the bug because so many people came to Discord and shared their gamesaves with us;
"It's such a rare bug, but thanks to the save game provided, I was able to discover what it was, and it's just so satisfying SMASHING bugs and I get all excited about the fact that it's going to make a real difference to people out there. I can't wait for them to be able to continue their playthrough all the way to the end!!!"


This should fix a lot of the issues some of you have reported about crashing just before level transitions. Hopefully this is a huge boost to some of you who are trying to play this game without access to one of those impressive streamer battlestations :P

We’ll keep it short and sweet cause we know you value efficiency

Gone are the times when NVIDIA cards where overwritten by Intel

It’s nice to have options

And that should resolve the crashes some of you have experienced

Joost (who is so integral to Revolution, he doesn’t have a coherent title) and his old friend from his ScummVM days, TMM have teamed up and brought you these fixes thanks to the thorough feedback we’ve received from all of you!


Users can now boot the game, but it’s not intended to be played with VR in mind

When graphics were set to Low Detail there was an interactive object missing, but we put it back

Further optimisation and stability improvements



A very rare conflict will result in getting stuck on a puzzle without solutions to get unstuck. We can not stress how rare this bug really is, but due to the difficulty of the actual puzzle, there are a lot of false reports on it and we’re trying to close in on what is actually happening here, and how it might be conflicting with other potential reports.
And for that we would love for you to help us with! Are you stuck in Graham’s Apartment?
Hop over to http://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware and let’s talk about what you are experiencing.

They're coming, and are currently being tested to make sure they're all firing correctly

We are continuously looking at everything that's known to us, and applying priorities on a few factors like how busy the Scripter for that exact thing currently is, how much time an investigation and fix needs, how important it is to the overall game's stability, and what is worth putting through QA in that moment.

http://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

Many of you are very aware how much time and effort we have put into working on improving this game with your help. We’re incredibly active over there and it helps us a lot to be this close to you.

We’re so grateful to have such a strong, vocal, and passionate community around our games, and we know we can not ever say it enough, but we deeply appreciate every single person who has reached out and been in touch with us.

COVID has thrown a real spanner into our personal and professional lives, as it probably has for all of you too. A lot of us are used to being a lot more collaborative in our task flow, and it’s just hard when our equipment, testing gear, and team are not all together in one space.

There is lots to do still, but doing it together makes this all a lot quicker.