A Brief 'How-To' on Installing Pre-4.2 Update: A Guide

[iG.v.Kaiser]

Hello all, and hope you and yours are staying well this holiday season....

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I was not a fan of even the 'politely added simultaneous mode', the UI changes, the lettering/font changes. I do understand the current situation on all of our stated qualms, and do understand the amount of work put into this 4.2 update... this little section before the guide is just to give background information, NOT to air grievances, that is not what this General Discussion forum post is about.

Due to my own personal preferences and having seen some of the issues, bugs, and brutal deaths due to cameras in adventure mode/build mode that people have been having, I've naturally almost immediately gone back to the unproblematic pre-4.2, and saw a few questions about the process of reverting back to that version of the game, and thought I'd post a friendly little guide on how to do so.

Here's how to revert your FtD version to 'pre-4.2 camera fixes' version. This version was the most recent and stable branch where the camera is avatar-relative. Rambot is not optional in this version due to the previous statement, and this version was where "E" is your default keybind for toggle between 'truly' unbound free camera / strategic overview camera, and "Tab" is the default keybind between the two other camera modes, Rambot / 'vehicle-based' free camera.
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To start our reversion process back to pre-4.2, the best course of action is to do a fresh install. We're going to need to navigate to our Library page on Steam.

1st - First, navigate to your Steam library in whatever normal way you'd start FtD. For me, I have it in the "List View" over on my default sidebar, so I just alphabetically pick out FtD from the list. Click on the title once to navigate to the "Home" landing page for that specific game, in our case, From The Depths (or FtD if you weren't familiar with the acronym) where you have tabs to access the store page for that game, DLC, Community Hub, etc, and the page has a big green "Play" button.
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2nd - Second, once we're on our FtD home page where we'd launch the game (or the launcher to launch the game, ahem!), we're not going to launch the launcher this time. We're going to look over on our right hand side at a big Cog, 'lowercase i with a circle around it', and a star symbol. We're going to click the Gear or Cog icon.
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3rd - That will pop up a little 'sub-menu', which is where we will do our third step. This sub-menu has the options Add to Favorites, Add to, Manage, and Properties. We're going to hover our mouse over Manage, and then that will pop up another sub-menu, where we will navigate down to 'Uninstall', and then you can click Uninstall. You'll get a confirmation window, "Would you like to uninstall FtD from this device? It will remain in your Games Library, but to play it in the future, you will need to redownload all of the content."
That is just saying that you'll have to redownload the game if you wish to play it again, none of your saved vehicles will go anywhere. This may mess any personal settings or keybindings you had setup previously, however, (I play everything default, so I cannot verify if a fresh install changes your keybindings, etc.) hopefully you kept it simple or at least remember your own personal preferences well enough to remember to change them back once we get our Beta version installed (our old version of FtD).

Click uninstall once you're very sure, and your device will work on uninstalling your current version of FtD.
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4th - Our fourth step will be to ensure we're not downloading the new update, but we're downloading our old version.
We now are still on our Games Library home page for FtD, but the green button went from "Play" to a blue button, "Install".
Ignore that for the moment until we get our version. Navigate back over to our trusty cog, and navigate that same sub-menu, but now to the "Properties".
This will open what's called a dialog box, or a pop-up window as some call them. The dialog box defaults onto the "General" tab, and over on the left hand side, we can see "General" "Updates" "Betas" "Controller" "Workshop" "Game Recording" and "Privacy".
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5th - Our 5th step will be to go to the Beta tab within this pop-up Properties window. There are only two options on this Betas tab, a "Beta Participation" and "Private Betas" area to input a key for a private beta test.
In the Beta Participation tab, you will see old game versions of FtD. Scroll down that list until you see the most recent update before the camera update, called "pre_camera_change - Stable before 4.2". This will give you the most recent version of Stable branch before the 4.2 update, the notorious Camera/Controls/UI/Unity update. Click the correct version you desire, you can even do the even older stable branch just before fire damage and weapon types were added, if that's what cools your fires, pardon the pun.

This will force Steam to download that available Stable branch update of your game. You can do this same process for any game on the Steam library if you're having a technical issue or consumer issue with a specific update of a game, with the caveat of the condition that the developer has allowed people to access previous versions of the game within the beta test menu.
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6th - Our 6th and final step, just close out the 'Betas' dialog box we had open, and you'll see your version of FtD on the left hand default menu of the Games Library go from being titled "From The Depths", to being titled "From The Depths [pre_camera_change]", which allows you to double check and ensure you have your proper version ready to be installed.

Click the blue "Install" button and do your normal install setup however you'd like, and enjoy your pre-4.2 FtD. If you'd ever like to install another update or even the latest version, even easier, just navigate back to your Beta menu, select "None" option if you'd like most recent version, and you'll sit back and relax as your FtD updates to the latest version.

Hope that helps, and hope we're able to more effectively give better constructive feedback about our desires and wishes about the current and future updates. Until then, I'll be on pre-4.2 Stable if anyone needs me.


Cheers and happy holidays.

Kindest Regards,
iG.v.Kaiser



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[ second edit for grammar and paragraph format]

[third and final edit]: after seeing quite a lot of unhappiness in the forums and social media, I'm not even on the developer team, but it has gotten to a point where it has become necessary to say this and remind each and every one of us, all with our own valid concerns and opinions:

Its quite apparent a very large portion of the community is very unhappy with a large number of the features of this update, and seems to be not just a "one-off" or a "few unhappy customers". This doesn't necessarily constitute 'living in the past', but by the sheer number and the genuine validity of some of the statements, bugs people are having, etc, they seem to now be in the category of actually voicing valid concerns of the direction of something like a video game, a product, or a company, because they truly care and love the company (or game, or product, etc) and its direction in the future. Vice-versa, people are allowed to enjoy and try new things, features, and products, and people are allowed to learn, love, and experience developments to an old love that makes them fall in love all over again.

Being dismissive of another human being, especially their valid concerns, thoughts, or ideas only allows you to further become more and more biased in your own concerns, thoughts, and ideas, and is indicative of a pattern of selfish behavior. No one's opinions, thoughts, ideas, shared here in this comment thread will be deemed 'impossible' or 'soul breaking', even if they are indeed impossible. I will reply to you with as much information as I possibly can, and be as forthcoming as possible, yet I WILL NOT beat you or break you down, nor will I do so to your opinions, thoughts, or ideas... This also goes so far as people being allowed to have their own core fundamental differences in ideas. I hope we can all afford each other these basic, few, core human luxuries, and reciprocate them to one another here, seeing as we're all united by a common love, and we all are humans, we all feel the same love, pain, anguish, depression, elation, euphoria.
Please don't use this section as a "I loved this update", "I didn't love this update" battleground, there are already enough threads doing that already, go find them and participate if you'd like to! Thanks so much.]

[iG.v.Kaiser]

- If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or you'd like to add something in that I've forgotten about -

Feel free to leave a reply, and I'll try and monitor and reply as soon as I can, I am a scientist, so I may be busy.
Thanks so much, and happy holidays again.
If I messed up any of the HTML tags such as ["b][/b"] just ignore them, I haven't used HTML4 in decades.
Cheers lads.

[ausyarr]

Thanks for doing this. I don't know how many people actually know that's possible to roll back some games, Putting it here should help lots of people.

[iG.v.Kaiser]

Originally posted by ausyarr:

Thanks for doing this. I don't know how many people actually know that's possible to roll back some games, Putting it here should help lots of people.

@Ausyarr, thanks very much for your reply, and thank you twice for your kind words. Hope you have a great rest of your holiday season!

[Eggnog98]

Not throwing shade, have you tried with the most recent hotfix? All of the bugs/cam jank issues I had encountered during the initial update have been fixed. There is also a lot of setting options for the UI now. Adjusting font size/color, the annoying green/red haze can be removed. They have put in a lot of work the last couple of days to address the issues we had.

[iG.v.Kaiser]

Originally posted by Korvette88:

Not throwing shade, have you tried with the most recent hotfix? All of the bugs/cam jank issues I had encountered during the initial update have been fixed. There is also a lot of setting options for the UI now. Adjusting font size/color, the annoying green/red haze can be removed. They have put in a lot of work the last couple of days to address the issues we had.

This is a post and guide about reverting to pre-4.2 update.... That's for everyone else to decide on their own. Appreciate your input, though! :-) Have a great holiday season!
[edit: also nice lil shout there to all of the amazing work everyone has been putting in the last few days!!]