Hello Shopkeepers!
We're incredibly excited to be bringing you this update today.
It addresses multiple features that many of you have suggested would improve the experience of exploring the Island.
We also know performance has continued to be a source of feedback, so we spent some significant time on this update profiling, investigating, and implementing some new performance improvements. These performance improvements should make the experience of navigating the Island smoother and and more enjoyable!
We really hope you appreciate everything in this patch, and we look forward to hearing future suggestions!
Highlights
- New Compass Items
- Custom Map Markers
- New Mini Map Item
- Quest Indicators Above NPCs
- Dialogue Listening In for Multiplayer
- NPC Shop Bulk Purchasing
- Major Improvements to Performance and Hitching
- Melee Accuracy QoL Improvement
Compass Items
We know this has been a major request from a lot of you.
So, we're happy to be adding Basic and Advanced Compass items today! You can research how to craft the Basic Compass in the Research Board, and it will show you which direction you're looking, as well as the quest marker for your current tracked quest when you hold it or equip it as an accessory.
You can learn the Advanced Compass recipe fromCaptain Latchby completing the quest he gives you. If you've already completed this quest, you should have the recipe unlocked when you load your save.
The Advanced Compass shows the direction and quest like the basic compass, but it also shows you the locations of other players in co-op, nearby deathbox locations, and where your custom map markers are.
Mini Map Items
In addition to the Basic Compass, you can research the Portable Map on the Research Board which will let you craft a small map that you can equip and hold in your hotbar to view a mini map while adventuring.
The downside of the Portable Map is you can't use any other weapons while you have it out. But remember, in Saleblazers, everything is a weapon, so if you get surprised by some unfriendly Ronin, you can slap them around with the map itself instead of pulling out a different weapon.
The Portable Map Glasses have you covered if you want to equip a minimap without impeding your hands or hotbar.
These advanced shades are hard to get, though. You'll have to completeAndrei Barnaby's quest inSnowvilleto learn the recipe. Again, if you've already completed this quest, you should automatically unlock this recipe when you load your save.
Custom Map Markers
Another new feature to make navigating the Island easier are custom map markers! You can now double click on the map to place a marker and add a name for it.
These markers will save until you right-click on them to clear them. They should allow you to mark resource locations, enemy outposts, runes you want to bring your friends to later, or whatever else you'd like!
Plus, if you have an Advanced Compass, you can easily navigate with these markers without opening the map again.
NPC Quest Indicators
Another point of feedback we've heard is that some of you want to be able to identify important NPCs more easily.
We originally wanted to make the discovery of these NPCs more free form, having you talk to new people you come across to see what they need and rely on directions from other dialogue to guide you to the next NPC.
But we understand that the game world is big, and there are a lot of NPCs around between the customers, other shopkeepers, and residents of the villages. So it can feel overwhelming talking to everyone and worrying that you might miss out on a quest. Because of that, we're introducing quest indicators above NPCs.
These indicators will show you if the NPC has a new quest for you, if you're working on a quest for them already, or if you're ready to turn in a quest to them.
Quests that are part of the main storyline will be marked gold, while sidequests will have white icons.
NPC Shop Bulk Purchasing
One of the biggest roadblocks for using NPC shops is the fact that you have to purchase items one by one.
This isn't so bad when you're buying one piece of armor, but if you're trying to stock up a lot of items to sell or craft with, this can be frustrating. So in this update, you can now set the number of items you want to purchase from the shop before you checkout.
We're looking forward to seeing more runs to the market in Kazai Village or Snowville's main street as a way to stock your shop!
Additional Quality of Life Features
We've been monitoring the Steam Forums, Reviews, Discord Channels, and the In-Game Report feature for any quality-of-life features and improvements you've requested.
The compass, map markers, mini map, and NPC shop bulk purchasing were all top requests, but we're also bringing some smaller QoL features to help round out the minute-to-minute experience.
New Deposit All Items Button for Containers
This should help you drop off your stuff between adventures and get you back in action more quickly. In addition to our other recent inventory improvements, you can now deposit your entire inventory (or as much of it that will fit) into a container at the click of a button.
This will never move the items in your hotbar, so you can keep them with you for the next adventure.
New Size Filters for Employees in Container Options
In a previous patch, we made employees more likely to look for containers of a matching size when restocking, but we heard that for some shop setups, this still wasn't enough, and it would be better to have more direct control.
Now you can set specific filters on your containers to only accept items of certain sizes for your employees.
Added Waist Light Toggle Button and Key Bind
We know a lot of you use the waist light and don't want to go through the hassle of unequipping it during the day.
Now you can turn it on and off with a hotkey! The default binding is H, but you can change this in the Gameplay settings.
Droppable Pickup Range Now Ignores Height
When you're rebuilding a section of a structure on a higher floor, particularly roofs, it can sometimes be frustrating for the dismantled materials to fall down below you and have to climb down your structure to collect them while building.
Now, the spinning floating materials dropped from mining or dismantling can be picked up regardless of the height difference between you and them.
This will also help with any situations where people may have experienced a bug causing bamboo to get stuck in the air. Now you can run underneath it and collect it normally.
You Can Now Rename Save Files
We heard a lot of stories of people who have built up a lot of save files and wanted a better way to organize them.
Now when you're in the load save file menu, you can press this edit button and change the name so you can more easily keep track of your different worlds.
Dialogue Listening In Feature for Multiplayer
We hear that some players feel left out from private NPC conversations if another player engages with them, so in this patch we've added a new feature where you can see and hear other players' dialogues!
Combat Adjustments
Based on overwhelming player feedback, we've improved melee targeting, removed mantle stamina cost, increased player bullet speed, and rebalanced NPC dodge rolling this patch.
Combat should now feel much more consistent and satisfying.
UI Banner Improvements
The Minigame banner UI and the Shop VIP Wave Banner UI have been polished up and improved so they take up less of your screen and more seamlessly provide you with the information you need.
They've also been updated to work better with ultrawide aspect ratios.
Optimizations
Improving game performance is a constant goal for us. We want to give you all the smoothest gameplay experience, and allow more players with lower end rigs to join us adventuring on the Island.
Over the past couple of weeks we've been pushing for some major optimization improvements and we're happy to be bringing you some significant updates today.
Standing Framerate Optimization
Tree Optimizations
We identified that our tree models and shaders were heavier than necessary and were also not effectively using levels of detail meshes and billboards. We went through every tree and greatly optimized it at all distances, improving the impact of its level of detail meshes and billboards.
We also optimized our tree instancing so that trees farther away from you are not loaded at all which further saves performance.
Finally, we also improved the serialization for saving trees, which will reduce your save file size.
Introduced Cave Chunk Loading
Prior to this update, caves were loaded as part of the normal chunks of the world that are loaded when you get to them.
However, some of our cave systems are quite large, and it isn't necessary to load all of that data while you're still above ground. So, we added load zones at the entrances to every cave that load and unload the cave areas so they are only loaded when you actually need them.
Improved VFX Spawning Logic
This improvement will help anyone spawning a lot of particles and other VFX throughout a play session.
These effects will now spawn more efficiently, be grouped more efficiently, and despawn more appropriately, eliminating cases where VFX costs could add up over time.
Optimized Enemy Spawn Distances
Enemies now spawn closer to you in a more intelligent way that reduces the number of enemies that are loaded but not visible to you.
Rig Optimization
We went through the character rigs for all of our enemies and animals and optimized their bone structure to greatly reduce the impact they have when animating.
We also optimized the distances where they fade in and out and added that fading functionality to player rigs for a boost in multiplayer.
Loading Hitch Reduction
One of the main performance pain points we identified was hitching, both major and micro, experienced while navigating the world.
This was primarily due to loading in new chunks of the world as you explored. We implemented a number of features to address this hitching and have found significant improvements. While you might still notice a bit of a hitch when loading hub areas like Kazai Village, we found that many of the micro stutters and hitches have been eliminated, and the major ones have been reduced. To accomplish this, we did some of the following.
More Extensive Pre-Pooling
We're now preloading more weapons, enemies, and NPCs so that they don't have to be loaded when you first encounter them. This moves that loading cost into the loading screen instead of occurring during gameplay.
Dynamic Object Spawning
Some areas have many small props and objects inside of their respective chunks and because the world is divided into squares and loaded by section, entering a square with a high concentration of items could cause a hitch.
Instead, all the small props and items are now loaded in a radius around the player which spreads this cost out so it's no longer concentrated to the few frames when you load a new chunk, reducing the hitching.
Dynamically Spawning Stationary NPCs
Prior to this update, many of the stationary NPCs, often used for quests, were loading with the chunk of the map they occupied, adding to the cost of loading that area and contributing to the hitch.
These NPCs are now dynamically spawned, similar to our enemies, so their cost is not concentrated on the frames when the area loads. They will still be in the same spots and should seem unchanged to you.
Hub Area Mesh Combine Optimization
Specifically in the hub areas, we noticed a major cost was loading the large combined meshes that make up the buildings and floors in these zones.
We went through these areas by hand and optimized a lot of their meshes to improve the loading times and reduce the hitch caused by loading them.
This optimization also has two other benefits in that these optimized meshes have a smaller memory footprint, and the way we divided them up allows for subsections of the zone to render at lower levels of detail while you're inside the hub, which wasn't the case before, improving the standing framerate in these areas.
Improved Multithreading Implementation
We offloaded more operations to other threads and improved our use of other threads, in general, to vastly reduce the impact that various load operations had on second-to-second gameplay.
Improved Single Thread Load Times
One of our test rigs has limited thread support and we noticed that where higher end rigs saw major improvements after our multithreading optimizations, this rig was falling behind.
To address that, we added some logic to better distribute many of the load operations over more frames which should reduce their contribution to loading hitches.
Improved Addressable Streaming Logic
We updated the system that streams textures when you load new items, particularly clothing and pickupable items. This will reduce the disk read-write cost when loading new areas. Playing on an SSD will still have a noticeable improvement over an HDD, though.
Memory Optimization
The memory improvements are made up of a much higher number of smaller impact improvements, so I won't get into calling them out one by one, but you should see some initially lower memory usage, and the usage over time should not grow unsustainably.
We improved our use of texture atlasing and compression to get the most out of everything we're saving to memory, fixed some areas where memory could grow over long play sessions, and removed a lot of unnecessary items from memory.
The lower memory footprint should also improve your overall performance, especially if you were using most of your system memory before this update.
Optimization Results
Based on our testing, you should see a 10% to 25% increase in frame rate, a 0.5GB to 2GB reduction in RAM usage depending on the scenario, and a major reduction in loading hitches while exploring.
Many of the optimizations will help with performance in general, but for the area-specific optimizations, we did focus on all of the hub cities and the area around Pop Pop's Shop Plot, so you should see the largest improvements there.
We ran comparison tests on a variety of systems, but of course our testing sample size is much smaller than the breadth of systems the community as a whole is using.
If you'd like to share the performance details after this patch with us, feel free to make a post on our Discord! We'd love to hear about it and maybe we can find other areas to improve performance.
Using the data from our latest performance tests, we have adjusted the minimum system requirements on the Steam page and added recommended system requirements.
We will continue to keep an eye on performance and include improvements in future updates.
Czech and Danish Language Support
It was brought to our attention that while we added support for Czech and Danish in a previous patch, there was a bug that prevented users from properly accessing these language options.
This has now been fixed so for anyone hoping to play in Czech or Danish, you should be able to with ease now!
As always, please let us know if you have any issues with language support for any language and we will make sure to address it as soon as possible.
Update on Dedicated Servers
We decided to switch gears to work on this patch's performance optimization and quality of life features based on player feedback.
Since this patch is now complete, we'll return to work on releasing our Saleblazers Dedicated Server. It's in its final testing phase, so hopefully it won't be too long before it's available!
Community Corner
New Community Advice
- "Just before you fall to the ground from a height, dash to avoid being damaged." - Kirin
- "Telemed doesn't know about the money you have stashed away. Avoid rebirth fees by storing your earnings before adventuring." - Anonymous
Shoutout to Kirin for this tip! If you have a tip that you want to submit to add to the loading screens in game, make sure to share it in the #loading-screen-tips channel on our Discord!
Community Creations
This incredible mountain house shop on the Smithrock shop plot was built and shared by user 10cat on the Discord. We really liked seeing the detail and the creative use of beams and props. The vibes are really great here!
User KatVet shared this amazing 3D print they designed, printed, and painted of a lovely Bellcoat.
We think this is so cool and thought you all might too. KatVet even shared a link to the STL file they created so anyone could download and print it for free themselves if they wanted to!
If you have some cool builds, outfits, or anything Saleblazers related that you want to share with the us and the rest of the community, definitely post it in the #share-your-creations channel in our Discord.
Maybe we can even showcase it in future patch notes!
v0.14.8 Patch Notes
➡️ Changes
- Added basic and advanced compass items
- Added minimap item
- Added minimap glasses item
- Added custom map marker feature
- Added NPC quest markers feature
- Added the ability to purchase items in bulk at NPC shops
- Increased melee lunge speed
- Increased melee lunge max distance
- Damaging an enemy no longer disables lunging, to allow the player to keep up better with the enemy
- Lunge is more accurate now
- Melee lunge now sets your rotation to face the enemy better
- Bullets shot by the player are now 100% faster for more fun gunplay
- Increased Katana move cancel timing
- Increased dash impulse and removed dash invincibility frames for all NPCs (except bosses) to improve combat experience
- Aiming down sights, walking, and crouching are no longer allowed while gliding
- Readjusted global lighting to have better visibility in general outside midnight hours
- Heavy attacks now have uniform charge times between 0.2 and 0.8 and thus are much quicker to release in general
- Large box heavy attack slowed down to compensate for faster charge time
- Shop VIP wave UI now shrinks after the initial large display
- Chat sender names are bolded and yellow for better visibility
- When a player engages in a private conversation with an NPC, subtitle text will display and audio will play for nearby players so that everyone can listen in
- Mantling no longer has a stamina cost since NPCs can now properly chase you when mantling
- Reduced the HP for boars in the starting area
- Reduced the knockback for the boar's charge attack
- Slightly re-terraformed the hill past the Shepherd ruins on the way to Kazai Village to reduce terrain seams
- Zena now drops two special weapons at various rarities
- Reduced durability damage on all shotguns
- You can now enter the small uninteractable sheds in Kazai Castle. There may be some small rewards there
- You can now craft stronger potions by combining multiple weaker potions
- Snow and Desert Wolf variants now properly drop loot, more than there Bamboo Forest counterparts
- Dropkick attack now has a lower base damage but will scale significantly better with vertical distance travelled
- Dropkick attack now holds until landing
- Stepping on characters will now produce a softer footstep sound
- Employee filters now always work for items that fulfill all of the category and size filters, or the item filter "whitelist"
- The sort inventory button is now slightly larger to make it easier to press
- Added a mini map and compass to the main menu
- Added carpet footstep sounds to beds
- Repositioned and enlarged interaction prompt UI
- Added 5 new runes around the map
⚙️ Optimizations
- Moved expensive nav mesh chunk calculations off the main thread, which should reduce hitching when traveling
- Improved pre-pooled enemies, weapons, and NPCs to reduce hitching. You may experience slightly longer initial loading phase
- Optimized tree meshes for lower rendering costs
- Created new LOD meshes for all trees to improve performance for rendering trees at a distance
- Improved tree data serialization to reduce save file size and improve loading speed
- Improved tree billboarding in the distance
- Reduced shadow distance and optimized shadow resolutions
- Converted most preplaced objects into a distance spawner that will load them in within a radius around the player instead of in discrete chunks
- Massively reduced combined meshes file sizes in hub areas
- Converted many quest NPCs to be spawned in instead of preplaced in the level
- Removed extraneous variables on dash code for less memory usage
- Reduced expensive operations on streamed assets (materials, scenes), which should reduce hitching when traveling
- Distributed scene chunk load across more frames, which should reduce hitching when traveling
- Addressed reasons why meshes were sometimes not batching properly which reduces the number of draw calls
- Improved player and character mesh LOD functionality
- Optimized most character rigs and animation tick rates for better performance
- Better split up the floor and building meshes in Kazai Village so we can LOD out farther away parts of the village more accurately
- Removed many extraneous objects from the scene that were no longer required
- Set up cave loaders that load and unload most caves when you enter and exit them so they no longer have to be loaded when in the open world
- Optimized some static meshes that are used in hub areas
- Removed duplicate meshes in hub areas
- Fixed lag hitch when first seeing dying UI
- Optimized enemy spawn distances
- Improved addressable material streaming logic
- Improved VFX spawning logic
- Optimized spawners in the prologue
- Reduced number of draw calls in the prologue
- Reduced the density of some NPCs in the prologue
- Reduced tick rate of non-demanding AI behavior trees
- Removed many unused spawners across the map
- Removed unused map references to improve memory usage
- Compressed terrain proxy atlas texture to improve memory usage
- Disabled AI body part combining to prevent memory consumption when visiting hubs
- Optimized visibility and spawner code to use less memory
- Compressed and improved atlasing for terrain detail textures to prevent memory from growing as much during long explorations
- Improved shader caching to reduce load times
- Optimized lag when opening the map
- Removed lag when pinging on the map
- Greatly optimized how AI clothing is rendered on bodies to reduce memory usage for stored body meshes
🛠️ Stability Fixes
- Fixed various animation and logic issues with gliding in combination with crouch, walk, and jog states
- Fixed opening inventory while sprinting with a gun equipped causing the sprint to end
- Fixed an edge case that causes some item to keep respawning
- Fixed not able to pick up some droppables sometimes
- Fixed character body mesh sticking out of some clothing pieces
- Fixed gathering and crafting employees using trash cans and return boxes to deposit items sometimes
- Fixed an edge case that causes infinite loading to pop pop house during the quest
- Fixed enemies dropping random or extra loots and have empty slots in deathboxes
- Fixed employees stuck not able to regain comfort needs after sitting in chairs in some cases
- Fixed a case where employees were occupying chairs in the shop without actually using them
- Fixed a couple issues with displaying employee characters in hiring desk UI
- You will NOT able to join a random person’s lobby from their steam profile page now
- Fixed backup files not being removed when deleting world/character causing back up loading weirdness on future saves
- Fixed VIP customer wave count and customer count not syncing properly for clients in certain situations
- Fixed VIP customer wave notification not reappearing when leaving and coming back to a wave
- Fixed case where starting a conversation wouldn't properly clear the last hovered interactable
- Fixed a spacing issue in some randomized customer dialogue
- Fixed potion thumbnails
- Fixed the Copper, Iron, and Gold Knight Armor sets clipping with the body
- Fixed the Stone Armor sets clipping with the body
- Fixed the Samurai clothing set clipping with the body
- Fixed Construction worker clothing set clipping with the body
- Fixed a loot table in Snowville that could drop stacks of non-stackable items
- Fixed some floating trees around Kazai Village
- Polished terrain painting near Kazai Village
- The winery security guards will no longer use Ronin names
- Fixed the mesh on the desktop mouse item
- Fixed a handful of UI issues for ultrawide and 32:9 aspect ratios
- Corrected some clipping and z fighting at the winery
- Fixed the name of the oil lantern before it is interacted with
- Fixed the floating banner sign near the Bazaar Outlaw Outpost
- Corrected the missing colliders on the roof of Aiden's house
- Fixed floating rocks near Invasion Island
- Corrected misplaced ziplines in the Desert
- Fixed colliders and sizing issues on Desert House meshes
- Added colliders to fill gaps on the Desert Manor
- Removed some duplicate unlocks from various Research Tree nodes
- Fixed some floating trees and props in the Ronin Valley
- Fixed a floating lamp near Hillside shop plot
- Fixed items that were despawning when you got close to them near the Dojo shop plot
- Salad display should no longer turn invisible
- Fixed a house in the bazaar with offset props and rooms
- Removed unneeded game zone logic from wells
- Fixed a rare issue where if the game disconnected during a fade screen, players could no longer rejoin servers until they restarted their client
- Corrected the level of detail mesh for Pop Pop's Visor item
- Updated the colliders on Zena's arena so you can no longer drive or ragdoll through them
- Player totems now correctly display the name you set for them when you click on them in the map
- Adjusted the LODs for the Blue Fish item
- Fixed a number of NPCs with bad unique character implementations
- Fixed various disconnects
- Fixed animation issues with dropkick attack
- Fixed knockup and knockdown animations not actually replicating over the network
- Fixed an issue with employees not being reset properly after getting scared
- Fixed a flickering light above Barnaby
- Fixed some spawned object with the wrong names or IDs
- Fixed stuttering appearance of interaction prompt UI when hovered NPC is moving
- Fixed 1 frame lag of interaction prompt UI
- Removed duplicate Fast Travel Totem mesh
- Fixed a case where player crafted totems could no longer be traveled to by a client
- Fixed a case where NPCs that pursued you after a crime would not stop running once the crime encounter was finished
- Fixed a mesh issue on the berry bush
📜 Known Issues
Edit: These issues have been fixed in hotfix update v0.14.8.02, released on 11/18. We appreciate your patience while we resolved them.
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The Basic Compass can sometimes have the quest markers get stuck and stop moving if you load in with a lot of other markers that it is trying to ignore (death markers, custom markers). This issue does not occur on the Advanced Compass. Clearing these other markers should fix the issue until a hotfix is ready -
There is a very rare bug where preplaced objects will sometimes stop showing up for host if more than one player leaves a cave chunk in rapid succession. We have not found a consistent way to reproduce this so if this happens to you please let us know on Discord, the Steam Forums, or the in-game report function
Looking forward to seeing you for the next update! Thank you so much for playing Saleblazers.