Version 1.2 Backer Build

Hola Everyone!

It’s the big day! We hope you’ve all been busy gathering souls and making humans happy, because Lazren returns today! This also marks our very first backer build! The public site will be updated with this patch on April 14th, but you can start playing right now, right here!

[Update 14 April 2020 - The Backer Build is now offline, since 1.2 has gone live and public!]

Play Online: http://www.tcdale.com/sins/abraxas907/index.html 

Play Offline:  Offline Download 

We’re eternally grateful to our backers for believing in Paradise Heights, and this is only the first of what we hope are many, many backer builds to come. As a reminder, please keep this link to yourselves, as this early preview period is something we want to reserve for your guys. There is an important note about down below about playing offline!

Please remember that this is a preview build. Though we’ve worked hard to make sure everything is functional, you might notice slightly more typos, misformatted pages, and rougher edges than our normal releases. Rest assured, we will be working hard to polish up this experience over the next two weeks. If you spot something you think we should know about, post a comment below or at paradise@sinspirational.com. 

We’ve also tweaked a few things even since our patch notes went up on Friday. I have edited the patch notes with the new changes, but I wanted to draw attention to them. Now that Lazren’s initial 14 days is a real deadline, we evaluated the rate of energy gain and found it was a little too difficult to do a ‘perfect’ run and claim all three souls before Lazren returned. It was possible, but some combinations of characters were more difficult than others, and it required taking ‘efficient’ steps such as not actually engaging with your new employees once they were transformed. That’s hardly what we want to encourage, so we raised the starting energy from 1000 to 1200. This is now enough to buy your first building upgrade in addition to the first two small venues, and makes it considerably easier to get all three possible souls with a little practice, and to get at least 2 on your first run. 

 We’re very excited to finally be sharing version 1.2 with you. This version will form the mechanical groundwork that we’ll be building off of for the next several updates. We hope you’ll continue to take this journey with us and, as always, happy hunting!

-Cambion and Luciana  

An Important Note About Playing Offline

If you are playing offline, the Dressing Room mirror to change your appearance may not update your dialog avatar.  We're working on a better way to do this (and if you know of one, please let us know!), but in the meantime, you'll need to do this:

1.  Close your browser entirely.

2.  Open Chrome from your Windows search bar (or other command prompt) by using this command:

chrome.exe --allow-file-access-from-files

3.  You don't have to do this every time to play - only when you want to change your avatar.  Once it is set, you'll have no further problems.

As of this writing, only Chrome will work for this; we're looking for options for Firefox and others.  Remember to close Chrome again and re-open it normally when you stop playing! 

The technical explanation:

When you look into the mirror, you are not seeing an image; you're seeing multiple.  Separate images for your hair, face, skin, eyes, and lips are layered into a composite.  Once you're happy and click the button, a Javascript called HTML2Canvas creates what is called a 'canvas' element, and re-creates the final picture, before saving it in the browser as your avatar.

However, for whatever damned reason, browsers do not like drawing local files (the skin, hair, etc. images) on an HTML canvas.  It's considered a security risk, flagged as 'tainted', and blocks the composite from being created.  So, your avatar is never updated.  The --allow-file-access-from-files flag turns off this security feature in Chrome temporarily.  I haven't found a similar option for Firefox or Edge.

It may be that we simply have to create individual avatars for each combination of features, only for those people who play offline, but I would really love to avoid that.

- Luciana