On Hold v0.6.0 "Clocking In"

This update is about the first ten minutes, and about everything after them. Your first shift can no longer leave you sitting in silence. A batch of fixes covers bugs that could freeze calls or erase save slots. And a lot more of the game is now spoken and subtitled in your language.

Heads up: the download is about 0.8 GB, almost all of it new voice audio. Existing saves load as normal.

Reworked: your first shift

Some new agents spent their first shift waiting for a call that never came. Training holds the phone until you read Rajeev's welcome email, and the game did a poor job of pointing you to it. Now:

• MailRoom opens on its own when it's time to read Rajeev's email.
• The first call always comes. If you're still stuck before your first call after about a minute (with the game in front of you), the first training call rings anyway. The email will wait.
• The clock waits for you. It stays at 9:00 AM until your first call, so you never watch a whole shift tick away with nothing ringing.
• The training card gets out of the way. It moves itself so it never covers the icon or window the current step asks you to use, and on wide screens it sits in the empty margin. Drag it somewhere else and it stays there.
• The highlight points somewhere useful. It now glows on the desktop icon you actually need to click.
• No more dead ends. Dropping or bouncing a training call brings in another customer instead of stalling training. Missed training calls no longer count against your stats, stress or morale.
• Your options are always on screen. Answering with Space (or the desk phone) while SoftPhone is showing LINE 2 now switches back to LINE 1, so the dialogue options are right there.

Fixed: calls, saves and achievements

• Frozen call after a social engineer. Offering a callback to a social-engineering caller could freeze the call: no dialogue option worked and the shift couldn't end. Fixed. The compliance strike for that mistake now works properly too, including union rep and certification waivers.
• Dialogue dead for the rest of a session. One error mid-conversation could leave every dialogue button dead on every call until you restarted the game. Calls now recover on their own.
• Silent phone after loading a mid-shift save. Loading a mid-shift save (including Continue after an autosave) on a day with extra calls - D.D., misdials, The Regular, Open Case callbacks, Call Storm - could leave the phone silent forever with no way to clock out. Fixed. Saves that are already stuck will finish their day when you load them, going straight to the end-of-day report.
• Steam Cloud erasing save slots. On a new PC, after a reinstall, or after Steam Cloud restored your saves, saving in one slot could wipe your other slots from the Load menu. Fixed. Slots that vanished this way come back on their own as long as their save files still exist. A slot that was already overwritten by a New Game can't be recovered.
• Career complaints in Night Shift. Night Shift runs no longer receive Rajeev's career complaint emails, which could add stress and complaint strikes and sometimes end a run before its first call. Complaints are now career-only, which covers Shift Race as well.
• Achievements in the wrong mode. Career achievements can no longer be earned during Night Shift or a Shift Race. Per-call skill achievements still count everywhere, and anything you've already unlocked stays unlocked.
• Fired mid-race. Getting fired during a Shift Race no longer throws the career "FIRED" screen over the race. You're listed as DNF, and the race ends as soon as everyone has finished or dropped out instead of waiting 45 seconds.
• A silent cold-call line. The agent's "That's lovely - SO, about your phone bill -" line on cold calls is now spoken and translated. It had been silent and English-only.

More of the game in your language

• Subtitles everywhere. Every spoken line now has a translated subtitle in French, Spanish, German, Hindi and Chinese. That includes the Plan Change call, the business static-IP call, Open Case return calls and Quick Dial calls. A few cold-call and Quick Dial buttons are still in English.
• Real voices instead of placeholders. The Plan Change caller, customers agreeing to a fix, and the agent's "applying that fix now" recaps used robotic placeholder voices. They're now properly voice-acted, and callers keep the same voice for the whole call.
• Newly voiced calls. The business static-IP call (Technical Certification) and Open Case return calls are now voice-acted in English, French, Chinese and Spanish. Open Cases already waiting in your save play voiced too.
• Chinese. About 49 lines that used to fall back to English audio are now spoken in Chinese.
• Spanish. Spanish voice acting has caught up with English, and Spanish callers now have their own young, middle-aged and older voices.
• German and Hindi (Coming Soon). The first German and Hindi voice lines are in: your agent's core lines and common caller reactions. Everything else still plays English audio under translated subtitles for now. The rest of German and Hindi arrives in a later update.
• Quick Dial calls (Life of Pie, Curry In A Hurry, Nimbus IT Helpdesk) are still unvoiced. Their voice lines come in a later update too.

Also

• The business static-IP caller now opens by describing a specific problem: either twelve staff locked out, or the card machines and booking system all down.
• Modders: a mod scenario with missing or blank opening (or resolve) lines is now rejected at load with a clear error, instead of breaking a live call.
• New Throwdown Games logo on the startup screen. Credits updated.
• The game now keeps a small local log of errors and key events at %APPDATA%on-hold-call-center-simulatorlogsonhold.log. Nothing is uploaded. If you report a bug, attaching that file helps a lot.

Thanks to everyone who told us about their first shift going quiet. Those reports are why most of this update exists. Keep them coming.