Patch 1: Notes

[Michael_Russell]

If any of these issues still effect you, make sure you have Sin Episodes set to Update, right click in Steam on Sin Episodes to set this

Okay, we just uploaded the first patch to Valve. If all goes according to plan, the patch should go live tomorrow afternoon.

These are the patch notes for this release (in bold) and the plain-English version afterwards:

- Fixed a bug sometimes causing the challenge to never ease up on the player, making it unforgiving.
This was a bug with some triggers that caused the Personal Challenge System's internal clocks to become confused. This meant that the system was not working as intended, preventing the system from correcting itself when the game became difficult. Everyone is affected by this patch because the game will reset some variables in order to compensate for some variables possibly being changed incorrectly. If you resume a saved game it may still be too hard for the first few deaths--but shortly thereafter the system will readjust itself accordingly.

- Fixed a bug that may have been causing sound-stuttering issues for some players.
This fix was recommended by Valve, as it was their fix for this same issue for HL2. We have included the fix, but have also included a command-line flag to disable this fix, in case it does not help some users. The command-line switch to disable this fix is -mode2. We do not think many people will need the command-line switch, but we added it just in case.

- Fixed a bug where changing the FOV made you a cheater.
This enables players who need to change the fov in order to not become nauseous can now change it between 75 and 110 degrees without being considered a cheater. This change is being provided as a community service, and is otherwise not supported.

- Fixed player stats not always reporting while you are in the car or otherwise locked in place.
- Fixed the instantaneous challenge rating sometimes reporting 0.
Both of these were sometimes causing the game to seem like you weren't getting stats. These could affect stats saving and reporting.

- Fixed a texture problem that was causing a lock-up on some video cards when loading in U4Labs.
- Fixed a texture problem that was causing a crash on some video cards when fighting the Quadralex.
- Fixed a texture problem that was causing a crash on some video cards when inside of green poison gas.
These were the big crash bugs that were being reported on the forums.

- Fixed a path-finding issue preventing the game from progressing after talking with Radek at his headquarters.
This occured in U4 Lab 02. If Radek was blocked or something happened that caused him to miss a waypoint, the player would get stuck in a 10x8 room for eternity. While this will fix these issues for people who are just now entering into the room, if you have a save game with you in the room, you will need to load an earlier save game.

- Reduced point-size on some fonts to fix some close captioning to not fit for some languages
Some people were having problems with excessively long close captioning lines not displaying. This fixes the vast majority of those issues.

- Fixed a path-finding issue with one map.
This would only affect people in a non-interactive cinematic, and only occured on an extremely small percentage of systems.