Spent some time working on performance and graphical tweaks to allow for further view distances after the previous camera angle update. Fixed a bunch of inconsistencies with the distance fog, rendering transparent objects and effects.
There is a new view distance slider in the graphics settings, defaulting to 50% which is what the game was previously. Keep in mind that at 75% and above the game will need to load more chunks in the distance to show the objects there, this will cause a much greater load on the CPU while loading/unloading chunks during exploration. Let me know how performance is for you, I'd love to hear how the game performs!
Note: most of the game's shaders were replaced in this update to help accommodate the new fog rendering. There may be a few graphical issues from this migration, please let me know if you spot anything that looks weird.
Features:
- New view distance slider in graphics settings, allowing you to see more in the distance if your hardware can handle it
- New "Speed-up camera blur effect" checkbox in gameplay settings to allow disabling of the blur effect when speeding up time
Performance:
- Faster water reflection rendering - changed rendering pipeline a bit to avoid doing various setup processes to save a bit of time every frame
- Greatly reduced game logic CPU cost every frame - world generated objects like sticks and stones no longer take up processing power to update themselves, wetness from the rain is now handled in a much more optimized way. Also greatly reduced the processing time every frame needed for physics based objects. These optimizations will only be present for items in chunks generated after updating to this version
- More upfront memory use to pre-allocate a bunch of items/resources to make their creation during the first bits of gameplay faster
- Misc optimizations across the codebase to make things a tiny bit speedier
Visuals:
- Reworked distance fog rendering a bunch to fix up how transparent objects and particle effects look in the distance to be fully consistent
- Reworked skybox rendering to look better across various cloud density and time of day combinations
- Adjusted a few level of detail settings to avoid pop-in of trees and other objects
Fixes:
- Fixed missing attack cursor when holding a melee weapon like an axe or knife (issue introduced a few updates ago)
- Fixed crafting queue not stopping if forging on an anvil that breaks
- Fixed refresh rate not being stored and loaded properly when the game is launched again - note that non-default refresh rates only work on the "Exclusive fullscreen" setting
Other changes:
- Reduced generation of bushes that make a sound and slow you down in forests