After roughly four months, PlayStation Home will be receiving it’s latest core client update, v1.35, this Thursday, March 11th. Home users have been clamoring for, for quite some time, regarding the various bugs, glitches and loading time issues that had been plaguing the service since v1.30 on through v1.32, and it seems like most of, if not all of these bugs have been addressed.
Here are the full PlayStation Home v1.35 release notes:
- Home Navigator
- The Home Navigator is a new feature that replaces the World Map.
- The first thing you will see on the Navigator is a message of the day.
- The main interface of the Home Navigator has a variety of categories containing all of the different spaces you can visit and methods for getting there.
- Featured spaces
- This is a regularly changing selection of new and exciting spaces for you to check out.
- Home spaces
- All of the well known core Home spaces.
- Personal spaces
- All of the Personal Spaces that you currently own and the Clubs that you belong to.
- Favourites
- An area to view and manage your favourite spaces.
- In any other area of the Navigator pressing [SQUARE] adds the currently selected space to your favourites.
- There is a maximum limit of 20 favourites.
- Friends
- A list of your friends who are currently in Home, and where they are located.
- This also includes a head shot picture of what their avatar looks like so you can easily recognise them.
- If they are in a public space you can go to them.
- If they are in their own Personal Space you can “knock on the door” and ask to come in.
- Explore
- The place to browse all of the spaces in Home much like the original World Map
- One thing to remember: when using the Navigator, you can press [SQUARE] to add the space you currently have selected as one of your favourites. When are you inside the Favourites category, however, pressing [SQUARE] will remove the selected space from your favourites list.
- Front end
- The way you log on to Home through the front end has been changed.
- Once Home has been launched from the XMB there is no need to press any more buttons to log on.
- The HDD warning message is displayed but no longer requires a button press to confirm.
- There is no longer a screen requiring a button press to “log on”. Connection to the PSN happens automatically.
- If this is the first time you have logged on to Home then you will still have to initially accept the terms of service.
- Once Home is running you are taken directly to the Home Navigator without loading into any other space first.
- From the Home Navigator you can choose exactly where you want to go.
- A lot of the network communication and validation now happens in the background while you are using the Navigator.
Improvements
- The time it takes to log on has been improved quite a lot.
- Relocating between spaces has had many improvements and is a lot quicker.
- There is a new section for “Rewards” on the Menu Pad that contains all of the rewards you have been granted in Home.
- We have made several improvements to the loading bar.
- We have increased the frequency of updates about where someone is in Home so that “invite” and “go to” should be more accurate now.
- Targeting in general has been improved so it should be easier to target various objects of interest to you.
- Furniture
- If you place a new item of furniture into a Personal Space with a lot of other furniture already in place it won’t collide with anything until it is in the clear.
- This will make it easier to add furniture to intricate furniture layouts without knocking anything over.
- It should also help when placing large items of furniture in your Personal Space.
- Reduced the wobble that items of furniture could experience when being placed close together.
- Generally tweaked the physics on furniture items to make them react to each other in a less violent way.
Changes
- The position in the world that you listen to sounds from has been changed and should now consistently be the avatar rather than the camera.
- It is no longer possible to sit down while playing the standing up animation. You must wait for your avatar to completely stand up first.
- It is once again possible to enter a store while playing a mini-game.
- If a portable object that takes over the camera is activated while viewing a poster in full screen mode you stop viewing the poster.
- The inventory section of the Menu Pad is no longer available while sitting down to avoid problems with certain portables being activated in that situation.
- Some of the pop-up colours have been changed slightly to improve legibility in all of the different places they are used. In addition “Yellow” has been replaced with a “Fiery Orange.”
- Changed the phrasing of the legend on the furniture removal menu to make it less ambiguous.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a bug that would let you join a mini-game while a portable item was out.
- Fixed a bug that would allow you to interact with a portable item while inside the wardrobe.
- Fixed a bug that in some circumstances could stop the sound settings from being saved after you change them.
- Fixed a bug that could cause problems while launching Home if your HDD was completely full.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the furniture in a Clubhouse to vanish for some people when the club leader entered.
- Fixed a bug that could occur when previewing male or female clothes in a store without having set up a male or female avatar.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the download queue to stall when attempting to download certain scenes.
- Fixed a bug that would allow PSN notification messages to be captured in pictures when using the camera.
- Fixed a bug that was causing pictures taken with the camera on standard definition televisions to be the wrong aspect ratio.
- Fixed a bug that would cause a crash when relocating via the Home Safe Screen with a portable item out while in the wardrobe.
- Fixed a bug in the store that would cause the “Add to basket” button to become permanently unavailable if you pressed Cancel before the item fully loaded.
- Fixed a bug that was allowing people to join multiple queues at the same time.
- Fixed a bug that would cause the Menu Pad of one person to become unavailable if two people attempted to sit on the same seat at the same time.
- Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when lots of items of furniture are colliding with one another.
- Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when loading items in a space.
- Fixed various bugs within the Pool and Bowling mini-games.
Additionally, the European PlayStation Blog has provided some pics of the new “Home Navigator”, which is definitely much easier on the eyes compared to the in-Home PDA we have now.
Well, to say that this latest update is large is a huge understatement. It certainly seems like Home developers have been listening to the community, as many of the features in this new update have been requested time and time again over the past year. A lot of these new additions will certainly help streamline the entire experience and, if you’re a frequent Home user, these loading time fixes should be a God-sent.
We’ll be sure to keep you covered on all the happenings in Home once this update goes live, early tomorrow morning. Until then, see you all in Home!
