Ahoy Kontras! This is Kingdom-Crier #8!
Mod Contest #1
We're excited to announce the winners of the Noble Fates Mod Contest #1.
Without further ado....
1st Place
Kultural Tileset by Karma Drak
At the end of the day it came down to which Karma Mod was worthy of the top position. There were several contenders, but Kultural Tileset stood out in our minds because of its wide adoption and praise, the complexity in standing it up (*cough* roofs *cough*), and the sheer breadth of what it offers.
2nd Place
Flintlock by krisvirtus
Adding a new tier of weaponry and embracing the bits system, this mod is polished, popular, praised, and sweet.
3rd Place
Lizardmen by Thrice-Crooked
Race mods are the most popular mods on the Workshop, and Lizardmen are the grandfathers of them all. Thrice trailblazed here - helping to work out the intricacies of setting up a new race and added a number of visual appearance options for them.
Honorable Mention
Papa Bizz's NF Weapons Extended
Beyond adding some fun weapons, Papa Bizz's memes meant we had to recognize it.
Congrats everyone!
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Screenshot Contest #1
We thought it might be crazy to run two contests at the same time, but the results were great! There were a number of fantastic screenshots, and we loved going through them all!
Here are the winners:
1st Place
Kingdom by TheSaucyFleet
TheSaucyFleet braved low framerates to build this beauty and it was worth the effort! This awe inspiring Kingdom makes use of more than props, leaving a lasting mark on Noberia.
2nd Place
Winter by Steff
Shots of functioning kingdoms hold a special place in our hearts, and this shot of a nice defensive fortification during a freezing Winter's night stood out.
3rd Place
Interior by Diversiam
We're suckers for a cool interior shots and this one just sings for us. The lighting, the spots where the snow found its way through, and the sense of wonder and adventure that it inspires. Well done!
Congrats to the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated!
Content Updates
With Satoru's help, we were able to release 2 Content Updates over the last 2 weeks!
Content Update #9 - Bandit Decorations
Last week saw the release of Content Update #9, adding a variety of Bandit Decorations and gave Bandits the ability to decorate their home as they saw fit!
Content Update #10 - Cornucopias
Yesterday saw the release of Content Update #10, introducing the Cornucopia - allowing you to sacrifice extra Food to host a Feast!
Performance
Let's talk about performance.
Noble Fates is complex. The world sim is single threaded and runs on the main CPU thread. This handles all of the interactions in your kingdom, storage and command scheduling, and all of the background interactions in the world. The rendering system uses Unity's graphics jobs system - but really it's largely constrained to a second single CPU thread, the render thread, which dispatches the jobs to the other cores for processing during a brief period of time.
Once the main CPU thread is done simulating, it turns the render thread loose to draw everything while it helps where it can for half a frame or so. Once it's done helping, it can move on to the next frame's simulation. This means that rendering can run in parallel to the simulation when things are going well.
Generally speaking, to run at 30fps, your sim needs to take less than 16ms and your render thread work needs to take less than 33ms. Overages on either of these can result in low utilization of your CPU even though we're CPU bound - with the main thread waiting for the render thread to finish the last frame or the render thread is waiting for the main thread so it can start rendering the next frame. VSync can exasperate this problem further by adding an additional wait on the main thread where it synchronizes with your GPU before starting the next simulation step.
As your game progresses and you add more people and build out your base, it stresses both of these threads in different ways, and ultimately increases the likelihood that one or both of them runs over-time and the other is left waiting. In extreme cases, you can end up with your sim taking 50ms and the rendering taking 150ms which resulting in a ~150ms frame time or 6fps even though most of your CPU is waiting for work.
We've previously done a lot of optimization work on the sim, and it's generally in an okay place. The big problem at the moment is render thread performance. We have some work in progress that shows lots of promise here, but it needs some focused time to wrap it up. Based on early tests, it should do as much as double our framerate in these situations!
Given where we're at, with a decently stable early game and more and more of you driving into the mid/late game, we think it's best to attack this issue and increase the breadth of what the game can handle to set us up for the next phase of Early Access.
To that end, we're going to spend the next two weeks focused on performance.
Though it's well underway, this means that the next Feature Update is going to be announced 2 weeks later than usual (4 weeks from now instead of 2) - but we think it's worth it to focus our efforts here for a short while.
if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to leave them below!
What's new in Main?
There have been some key changes since the last Crier, here are the highlights:
There are now Difficulty Sliders!
Kingdom Size Opinion has been refined!
Fire can now better burninate the countryside!
Learning is no longer blocked on prerequisites!
We increased the likelihood that Kingdoms will Offer Peace or attempt to Conquer!
Community Content
This section is taking a break for the Screenshot Contest.
Mods
This section is taking a break for the Mod Contest.
Discord
Join the Official Discord to participate in Development!
Thanks for reading and thanks for playing!
The Noble Fates Team