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OUYA System Update “Abominable Snowman” – November 21, 2013

by on November 21, 2013
 

Watch the video and read more below! =)

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Hey Guys and Gals,

For the holidays, we’re ready to drop our biggest update yet.  It’s a lot to cover, so I’ll just jump straight to the notes =)

  • External Storage is in open beta!

    • Just plug in a USB drive to get started. Please see the list below for details and known issues.

    • We support NTFS, FAT32, and ext4 file formats.

    • Games on external storage are currently associated with the OUYA they were downloaded from (so you can’t use the storage to transfer a game from one OUYA to another. Sorry!).

    • If you’ve modded your system with apps like Link2SD, you’ll want to undo your changes in order for external storage to work.

    • You may notice some slowdown while a game is installing to USB. This is expected and is something we hope to address in future updates.

    • After downloading a game to external storage, sideloading an app will put it on external storage.

    • Some games do not properly move their saved game data when moved to an external drive. If this occurs, you can move the game back to its original location to recover the save files.

    • When connecting a USB drive, scanning can take a few minutes if lots of games (100+) are installed. We plan to improve this in future updates, but if you download all of DISCOVER, scanning will take a while.

    • Occasionally on bootup with an external drive attached, the screen wil go completely orange while the scanning takes place. You can wait for the scanning to finish, or reboot.  We are looking into a fix.

    • When ejecting the USB drive, sometimes it will say a download is still going even if one isn’t. We are working on a fix for this.

  • UI revamp! We’ve made some significant changes to the look and feel of the UI. (A few screenshots at the bottom of the post)

    • OUYA is now more intuitive, visually appealing, and better able to feature your games. It’s even got built-in functionality to allow us to update featured games and the wallpaper on the fly.

    • All game titles are now underneath the tile art, for easier browsing.

    • Tiles have new icons for installed games and game with available updates.

    • Controller icons now appear for all connected controllers and will give a low battery indication.

  • Double tap of the OUYA button will now bring up a System Menu instead of instantly exiting a game.

    • The System Menu allows you to exit games, eject a USB drive, turn off controllers, or put OUYA into sleep mode.

    • Games can now be set up to allow purchases from OUYA menus. Games that have enabled this will have a “Buy” button in their System Menu.

    • We’ll be expanding and adding more functionality to this menu in the future.

  • Support for faster system updates. We’ve enabled “Incremental Updates”, which means updates (after this one) will be much quicker. NOTE: If you’ve modified your system files, you’ll continue to get the full updates.

  • Developers can now create links that allow you to download their game to your OUYA from the web. These links aren’t just confined to the ouya.tv site, they can be placed on any webpage. Keep an eye out for these links! You’ll see them start to appear on our newsletter, which you can sign up for on ouya.tv.

  • Update Notes are viewable on the console. They appear after an update, or you can go to MANAGE -> UPDATE NOTES to view them.

  • Good ol’ fashioned bug fixes

    • Fixed an issue where users could not access the Internet because the system clock had reset, causing certificate problems.

    • Fixed an issue where the download button didn’t always display the proper text.

    • Fixed an issue where holding the analog stick to the side didn’t auto-scroll

    • Many minor issues

  • R2 and L2 can be used to scroll quickly in both PLAY and DISCOVER

One other feature that we think is pretty cool is the ability to run A/B tests on OUYA. If you’ve not heard of A/B testing before, you can read about it here. Part of us being open includes letting you know that we’ll be running A/B tests and gathering results to make the OUYA better for gamers and developers alike. To start, we’ll be testing things like different DISCOVER layouts, different featured games on the Home screen, and auto downloading games for new users. It requires no changes on your end… just know you and your friends might have different experiences =).

Cryptid Info

As for the cryptid, we’re going holiday/snow themed with the Abominable Snowman (aka Yeti): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeti.

Besides being tough to say out loud, the Abominable Snowman has recently made news, as some scientists are claiming that he’s actually related to an ancient species of polar bear :O  You can read more here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131021-yeti-abominable-snowman-bigfoot-polar-bear-cryptozoology/

Help us make OUYA better!

We’ve created a survey to have you help us determine which features to focus on next. It’ll take literally just a minute to fill out and we’ll use it to determine what our next set of features are. Y’all have made OUYA successful so far and we want to make sure your voices continue to be heard. Take the survey here: http://www.instant.ly/s/wg7ZD

 

We hope everyone has a great holiday season!

-James, Producer Dude

P.S. we got some fun art for the update too:

abominableSnowman_big_solid

AbominableSnowman

newUI1

newUI2

 

Source: Ouya.tv