Hey everyone, Rainy here!

Since the launch of the beta branch only two days ago, the community has been invaluable in finding ways to improve SunnySide. I’m happy to announce that today we’re releasing another, this time, pretty big performance and optimization overhaul to the game!

What’s changed?

We are now loading the content of the game very differently, this massively improves the stuttering for most players, in some cases, we got reports of them completely vanishing, at the cost of higher overall memory usage, but testing so far shows a net gain in performance.

After further investigation, I found that instead of the usual approach of loading parts of the map as the player approaches them, we can instead load most of the content at the very beginning. This is somewhat uncommon, but it seems to work best for our game.

As I mentioned above, this eliminates most of the stuttering or big rubber banding that players have experienced, especially using faster vehicles in the game.

While most players reported an overall improvement in performance and a steady framerate, this update might not work too well on certain hardware, which is why we’re allowing you to chose if you’d like to use this new system.

How can I try this new update?

This change is now live on our latest patch! If your game version says 1.15.21 at the bottom of the screen in the main menu or while pausing the game, you’ve got the update. Now, I understand that for some players this change might cause problems, after all this increases the memory usage for a smoother experience. For this reason I firstly recommend you guys play with the settings and see if things improve, especially draw distance, shadows and texture quality.

If you still prefer how maps loaded in the previous version, worry not: as I mentioned, we’re allowing you to turn off this new method of loading in the general settings. Just navigate to the Settings on the Main Menu or through the pause screen, and untick “Load all Sub-Levels”. Keep in mind that changing this setting mid game means you will need to return to the Main Menu in order for the change to take effect, but this will revert map loading to how it used to be before this update.

What else is new?

Alongside this change, we have also managed to squash a few bugs. Not as many as we would like to do for an update, but we thought it was important to get this new change to you all as soon as possible.

Patch Notes for this update:

• The esc key no longer occasionally becomes unresponsive. This was happening if you interacted with the omamori purchasing box, but had already purchased one that day. Upon receiving the error, your esc button would become unresponsive. This is fixed now.
• Your phone screen should now consistently be fixed if loading a save after which you had already visited Hiro.
• The Ores on the level 0 of the caves should now work a lot more consistently.
• If you pass out in the caves, upon returning to SunnySide all the water should now load fine.
• Canceling the gift giving menu will now return the placed items back to the player.
• "Watch the sunset" activity at the promenade should work fine now.
• Fixed a number of time sensitive activities that were always unavailable due to a math error.
• Invites from NPCs to hangouts should no longer occasionally end when arriving at the location.
• NPCs should no longer jump around when interacting with player.
• NPCs should no longer invite you out during a thunderstorm or blizzard.
• When closing a sell menu, gift giving menu or letter sending menu, if the player is holding an item on the cursor, it will be placed back in their inventory.
• The objective "Sell Wool to Debonaire in Higashi" in the quest "Homesteading" can no longer be completed before receiving the objective by selling items to other higashi vendors.

As always, we will continue to work on more optimization, fixes and improvements as you all continue to play SunnySide.

Thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you in the next update!