Dear reader,
It is always hard to begin something or rather to get the first visible results after making a start. Even though Chiru actually was not our starting point in its true sense, it was a separate half that required us to go through many processes we did not touch since Episode 1. While we could have done things faster in theory, that would not have gone along with our principles, and it took as long as it took. To prevent you from waiting any longer, click here to sign up for α-testing of the 5th episode.
We hope that those getting tired of formal and fairly useless replies on the forums will feel relieved and satisfied.
As for the other highlights, we would like to thank and congratulate our colleagues working on the Brazilian Portuguese translation. In addition to 5 episodes in English and Russian we additionally include support for the 1st episode in Brazilian Portuguese by Knox Translations. We plan to continue our collaboration and will release the following episodes as soon as they are fully polished. If you are interested in getting our release in your own language and think that your team has enough skills and patience to make it possible, you are suggested to join our Umineko multilingua project.
There of course are several technical improvements targeting better compatibility and usability. The central part of the technical changes definitely is Android support. It was very convenient to be able to take the game anywhere by just copying it to an iPad, and we were asked multiple times to support Android tablets as well. Fortunately one of the team members got his hands on a suitable tablet, and as a result if you have a device that runs Android 4.1 or higher, supports at least OpenGL ES 2.0, has 2 GB of RAM or more, you will be very welcome to try our initial Android support.
Another bonus will be improved Windows support. We received several bug reports about OpenGL drivers not doing things properly on all sorts of hardware on Windows, and after a serious discussion added DirectX 9 and 11 backend renderer support via ANGLE. As a result this should make the game compatible with a wider range of hardware running Windows even if it did not launch before.
That makes it for the news post. Thank you for your continuous support, reviews, and comments which add to our motivation.
Umineko Project