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Field report 005 · · v1.7.0 · Sinik

Supporter packs, and the heart that crashed a phone

Three cosmetic supporter packs, 3D monuments on the base, and a crash I found through a tester. Releases 1.6.0 to 1.7.0.

The airbase at night: hangar bay, workshop, command center and armory

I said from the start: no ads, nothing that buys power. That leaves one honest way for a player to say thanks. A tip that is cosmetic only.

On 28 October the three supporter packs went live in the game, through Google Play Billing. They are one-time purchases, and Google restores them if you reinstall.

  • Ground Crew Pack, 0.99 EUR. A gold and crimson paint, two bronze monuments and the title Crew Chief.
  • Squadron Colours Pack, 1.99 EUR. Three paints, the Squadron Leader outfit, two gold monuments and the title Colour Bearer.
  • Ace's Collection, 2.99 EUR. Three metal finishes, the Flying Ace outfit, two diamond monuments and the title Ace of Aces.

Each pack unlocks two monuments for the Honour plaza on your base: a jet fighter monument and a mushroom-cloud monument. They are bronze, gold or diamond. Later I added pilot wings that match the pack, shown on the hub header, and two searchlights that sweep the plaza at night.

The monuments were first drawn live in 3D. They looked good. They also crashed the app.

A tester told me that tapping the support heart closed the game on their phone. I could not reproduce it on mine. The cause was a heavy WebGL material that some phones' GPUs cannot handle inside the app process. The fix was not to patch the shader but to remove the problem: the monuments are now pre-rendered images, baked by a script. They look the same. They cannot crash.

This is what closed testing is for. I would not have found that bug by playing on my own devices.

Release 1.7.0 shipped that fix with a round of others:

  • The guest's screen no longer stays white after the host's nuke in co-op
  • A train or fuel depot that is blowing up as a wave ends still pays out
  • Price tags are readable again
  • Menus use less battery, with the idle hangar and base drawing roughly 70 to 80 percent less

A payment that Google still has pending is now shown properly, and Restore says when Google Play cannot be reached.

I changed the app icon too: a jet over the red X on a night-raid sky.

If you want to tip, the Support page lists everything. If you are testing, thank you. A crash report is worth more to me than any coin.

Next: the hangar, where you spend most of your time between runs. It still looked like an app, and it needed to look like a base at night.