Greetings, Hard Chip players!

A long development cycle later, here back at it again with some updates and a release! Introducing a fully functional "4 Bits Program Counter" challenge, a new Story Mode test for the game, and much more! (I am not listing more mainly cause I lost track of everything.)

1. Program Counter Challenge and Edge Detector Challenge: those two new challenges will push the limits of how you can build something in the game. Regular build techniques won't cut it here. You would need to rely on homemade Blueprints to make this work! 
   
   
2. Test Story Mode: to build up a sense of purpose and to play with some rendering techniques, this release introduces a short story mode with a specific task: build a Program Counter to escape the pod you are in! This Story Mode uses a lot of new systems to work and is relatively early and might have some issues, performance, and bug-wise.
   
   
   
3. IO Validators update: now the Input/Output validators validate if the circuit can hold the desired output for a specific period. Also, input can be held for a particular period as well (useful for clock-like behavior).
   
   
   Holding input value or expecting to hold an output value, is crucial for circuit that are dependant of a clock cycle. It allows to have puzzle that demand specific output values AND that those output are stable enough to be used somewhere else. 
4. Main Menu Rehaul: new Main menu with new pieces of music and a fresh atmosphere to reflect the new Story Mode.
   
   
5. QOL, Bug and Crash fixes: a few changes were made to make the Editor more effortless to use:
   1. Right-click to Move around the circuit.
   2. Double right-click to activate "Select Mode" from any other mode.
   3. The gimbal lock on the camera should be reduced.
   4. Editor's shaders optimization should be smoother.
   5. New tooltips were added to different interface's buttons in the Editor.
   6. Blueprint ghosts are now shown with the optimized renderer, allowing to create/use of large ones without performance issues.
   7. Countless others things that I lost track of to be quite honest :D.

1. Failed or Not-Quite-There-Yet: new section here for transparency! Level Editor for the story mode (I spent way too much time on this for not much as of today); Raymarched volumes rendering and physics with FPSCamera in those (rendering used, physics not yet there); Fractal volumes (based on the previous but mainly for fractal, not used yet); Reconstructing Z-Buffers from Raymarched and Fractal volumes to allow to mix it with rasterization.

What's next? As of today, the campaign cannot be terminated. You can complete all puzzles to open the air lock but the game stops before that. This will be done in the next 0.0.3.2 release. Overall the campaign has really rough edges and needs some love. Last part, there is only 5 challenges it. I think we can explore some register challenges (the simulation can already do that as the simulation benchmark is running a basic version of memory cells already).

As always, your feedback/suggestions/comments are instrumental in the making of this game!

Thank you for playing Hard Chip, and stay tuned for more updates and new features!