· Settlement Zero has been upgraded to Unreal Engine 5! Currently using version 5.7.0
· Ray tracing and Dynamic Global Illumination ( Lumen ) is now supported for those with graphics cards that support hardware raytracing feature, and both are enabled by default. These features can be disabled in the graphics quality settings menu, for increased framerates. NOTE: The combination of ray tracing with static baked lighting isn't supported, so this option is currently disabled.
· There are now 4 graphics quality settings: LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH and ULTRA.
· Virtual Shadow Maps are now used for shadows for all quality settings, apart from the LOW, that switches to using static pre-baked shadows.
· Volumetric clouds have been added, plus changes to lighting.
· Some minor tweaks to gameplay. This includes the number of ray firing aerial craft having been reduced from 3 to 2, plus the blue humanoid robots ( GX93s ) now only have 2 lives ( from 3 ).
NOTE: You may notice some stuttering when entering the main menu , when you switch quality settings for the first time, and when you start the game for the first time following installation. This is due to the PSO cache being built and written to disk. This is particularly noticeable on lower spec machines. This should only last a few minutes, and shouldn't be an issue the next time the start the game..
Currently in the process of optimizing to prevent this happening.
When playing on lower spec machines, make sure super-sampling is disabled, especially with ray tracing an d Lumen enabled.
Old saves can still be loaded for this build. For all saves prior to version 0.12.5, its best to start new games, as some of the changes in that build affected the overall gameplay.
Now uses OpenXR, so make sure you have SteamVR set as OpenXR runtime in SteamVR if you haven't already. This can be found in the OpenXR tab in settings, on desktop SteamVR app.