RomTerraria TModLoader Experimental Fix

If you are experiencing crashes with using RomTerraria with TModLoader, I have an experimental build here that might fix a specific subset of crashes.

Give it a shot and let me know.

Update 8/19 7:29am: Looks like Terraria 1.3.5 may be released today.  No version of RomTerraria will be compatible with v1.3.5 due to the severe amount of changes that are going into it.

Crashes With tModLoader and RomTerraria

I've been getting several reports of crashes when people take tModLoader and apply RomTerraria on top of it.

While the latest version of RomTerraria includes updates to handle the base cases, I'm still trying to figure out the cause of a race condition with rendering that appears to be affected by certain mods.

If you are experiencing crashes with a modded Terraria with RomTerraria applied, please reply to this post with the list of mods that you are adding.

Update 3/26/2017 4:23pm: Fix coming shortly.

Update 4/3/2017 7:04pm: I'm still working on a global fix. The major cause of most of these problems (and crashes with non-retro lighting) appears to be assumptions about the state of the SpriteBatch object. If a mod works in retro mode, but not in other lighting modes, it's a bug in the mod. I'm working on a deeper fix, but it's going to take a bit more time.

Nightmares

I need to get back to having nightmares about work.  At least something productive comes from those.

Last night, I had a nightmare about becoming a brain in a jar.

I was marched down a long hallway and when I got to the room at the end, someone behind me injected me with something that caused immediate paralysis.  I was slowly lowered to the floor while panic was setting in.

Shortly after reaching the floor, I felt a sharp pain and I felt like I couldn't breathe and that my heart was stopped.  Having my vision shift so that I was looking down on my decapitated body quickly led to further panic.  It was followed by a brief sensation of pressure on my skull and then...nothing.  No external stimuli whatsoever.  Just me, alone in my own brain with my thoughts.

A fate worse than death.

The Future of RomTerraria

Sounds like there is a rumor going around that large monitor support and UI scaling support will be added to Terraria as part of 1.3.5.  I'm hopeful.  The XNA alternative that is used on the Mac and Linux ports doesn't have the XNA texture size restriction that limits them to 2048x2048 and lower resolutions on PC, so if they just use the same codebase for Windows, all will be good.

So, if the number one feature of RomTerraria gets put as a feature of the main game, what will happen with RomTerraria going forward?  I don't know.  In the past, the main feature of RomTerraria was the minimap, and that was brought in.

If I had to guess, assuming nothing blows up with the retail release, RomTerraria as it exists will be retired completely come the release of v1.3.5.  I'll likely take a break from Terraria modding for a couple of months, then come back with something new.

Blue Asterisk Instead Of Red Cross

I noticed this article on Kotaku about the developers of Prison Architect running into trouble when they used the Red Cross to denote health.  We encountered something similar back when we were developing SiN Episodes: Emergence.

If you play SiN Ep, you may notice that all of the health containers have a blue asterisk and have the initialism F.T.R.C. emblazoned on them (standing for the Freeport Trauma Recovery Center).

What you may not know was that this was a response to me forwarding an article from GameIndustry.biz to management (link to summary), and the artists deciding to put in a response that a) lined up with the color of the healing spray, b) was not in any way able to be mistaken for a red cross or red crescent, and c) was a subtle way of putting in an initialism for "Fuck The Red Cross."