Release Notes for The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero

1.4.7 (2023-04-18)

Hi everyone,

in today's update there are a variety of smaller fixes and improvements:

• Fix potential reference leaks when switching resolution
• Fix mouse scrolling on minimap with respect to camera rotation
• Fix drawing intensity of percent progress in camp/records page
• Change initial window color to black

Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game.

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman

1.4.6 (2023-03-29)

Hi everyone,

in today's update there are a variety of smaller fixes and improvements:

• Fixed an issue where window content could be offset from the actual window position on startup.
• No longer confine the cursor while applying changed display settings, preventing a specific issue when reducing the resolution.
• Fixed various 3D map geometry issues.
• Improved the water effect on some maps.
• Tweaked the battle UI HP/EP/CP number placement.
• Back-ported some book text layout improvements from Azure.

Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game.

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman

1.4.5 (2023-03-24)

Hi everyone,

in today's update there are some further improvements to the auto text advance feature.

• Add a visual indicator when auto text advance is enabled.
• Add a bindable action to toggle auto text advance. (Defaults to "R" on the keyboard and "X" on the controller [Xbox layout])
• Tweak the minimum wait time for non-voiced text boxes.

This brings the feature up to par with the release state of Trails to Azure.

Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game.

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman

1.4.4 (2023-01-06)

Hi everyone,

today we have another minor update to fix one specific issue:

• Fix the new water shader feature inadvertently affecting battle graphics in some specific circumstances (turning sprites black)

Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game.

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman

1.4.3 (2023-01-05)

Water rendering, portrait bug fix, auto text advance and more

Hi everyone,

version 1.4.2 brings with it several highly-requested features, a pretty nice rendering feature that wasn't really all that highly requested, an important bug fix, and many minor improvements and fixes. Let's start with the highlights.

Major New Features

• Water rendering update: water now optionally uses a pixel shader which distorts the reflections/refractions. We tuned this for most bodies of water in the game and it looks pretty neat.
• Added an "Auto Text Advance" feature. Note that there are a few events in-game where this will not apply since they require manual advance.
• Check and trigger achievements on loading saves. This means that if you e.g. import a save from a playthrough of a different version of the game, applicable achievements will now trigger. (Note: this mostly applies to collection-type achievements)

Major Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue which could cause portraits not to be displayed in very specific circumstances. If you are curious about what happened there, here is an explanation by Alex:

Like many games, Trails from Zero uses a texture manager, a dedicated component that is in charge of loading, retaining, and releasing textures. The texture manager maintains a fixed number of slots, where each loaded texture occupies one slot. Slots can be reused once a texture has been released (i.e. is no longer needed).

Textures are referred to by their slot index (ranging from 0 to number of slots - 1). However, a special value of -1 is used to indicate the absence of a texture. While -1 is handled correctly by the game, the message box logic suffered an off-by-one error, where slot index 0 triggered an immediate release of the corresponding texture. This unintended release caused the portrait to be missing.

The game loads a handful of system textures at launch, which end up in texture slots 0 and a few subsequent ones. Originally, on other platforms, these system textures are only released when quitting the game; slot 0 can never be used for a portrait texture as it is already occupied. However, in the PC and Nintendo Switch version, these initial system textures are occasionally reloaded (released + loaded), for example when docking the Nintendo Switch or changing the text language. This reload can free up texture slot 0, which can then (potentially and rather randomly) be used to hold a portrait texture, in which case the off-by-one bug described above triggers.

• Implement a number of English localization fixes.

Additional Changes and Fixes

(1.4.2)

• Improve font rendering performance by avoiding unneeded copies and temporary textures. This might be noticeable on slower systems when a lot of text is displayed.
• Map geometry fixes on many maps, and some map collision fixes. Some of these are specific to ultra-wide monitors, but others are visible in 16:9 as well.
• Show correct button prompt in detective notebook for "Details".
• Add mouse support for the casino exchange menu.
• Made direct camp menu save button prompt clickable.
• Check whether detective rank is in a valid range when loading saves.
• Fixed crash when failing to delete saves.
• Allow cancellation of dialogs in the settings menu with the back button.
• Always apply framerate limit, even when VSync is enabled (or forced off). This is to prevent issues when VSync is off globally.
• Fixed an issue where battle character outlines could flicker with high FPS.

(1.4.3)

• Improve auto-text wait time calculation
• Fix an issue where auto-text advances non-voiced messages despite set to voice-only
• Fix message log color handling in some circumstances
• Make prompt in shop menu to switch pages for large parties clickable

Note that you can revert to earlier versions of the game.

As always thanks to all our QA testers who helped with this patch!

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman

1.4.13 (2024-12-12)

Hi everyone,

today we are releasing a patch for Trails from Zero which improves how the game interacts with platform achievement APIs. This should prevent performance issues in some circumstances, specifically when a large number of achievements was already unlocked.

Note that this issue surfaced due to changes in how platforms deal with repeated achievement API calls, and this change affects many of our prior releases in similar ways. We are committed to patching all affected releases, but this has taken some time, especially for cases where we need to re-build games for which we already archived various development resources.

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman, PH3

1.4.12 (2023-08-28)

Hi everyone,

it's been a while! A number of changes have accumulated since the last patch, although most of them are either non-critical or only only apply in very rare circumstances. Here's the full log:

• Optimize text rendering, particularly reducing frametime spikes when rendering new text at high FPS and with the fast text speed option enabled
• Allow the use of multiple controllers simultaneously
• Various Japanese text fixes
• Fix a legacy issue with a wrongly colored chest
• Several fixes to map collision geometry, either to make it impossible to get stuck or to prevent leaving bounds at specific FPS/turbo combinations
• Improved the handling of input rebinding reset
• Fix a minor potential memory leak related to the video player
• Fix rare potential soft-locks when closing shops
• Fix minor text issue in Crossbell Times issue 4
• Improve the description of some game options

Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game.

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman

1.3.7.1 (2022-10-12)

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the great feedback on Trails from Zero! We've implemented some of the requested features and fixed a few issues in this update, see below for details.

Changes and Improvements

• Added a new audio setting to disable message beeps
• Added a new setting to disable rich presence
• Play voice lines in the message log when selected even if the "Other Voices" option is set to OFF

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a potential crash when returning to the title menu
• Fixed an issue where movie sound effects were still played after skipping a movie
• Draw the BGM Info overlay in some additional situations where it was hidden before
• Various localization and map fixes

We've also added an experimental "fast text speed" option: to use it, set "fastTextSpeed" to "true" in the [Game] category in "%localappdata%\Falcom\Zero\settings.toml". This is not intended for general use.

We have received some reports of sporadic crashes specifically on older Intel integrated graphics hardware. So far, we have been unable to determine any specific issue with the game causing these, and in several cases the problem was resolved by updating graphics drivers. So, if you are affected by this problem, please try updating your drivers.

Note that you can always revert to earlier versions of the game.

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman