Major Update 0.4.1.0 has been released! It combines code from the 0.4.0.0 experimental branch with additional changes.
Performance Improvements
MegaFactory Titan has changed its entire rendering engine from the old OpenGL API to the more modern Vulkan API. This improves graphical performance in a lot of cases. In particular, stuttering due to regenerating graphics assets on the fly has been reduced, because Vulkan supports multithreaded rendering.
Many graphics cards, especially AMD cards, had poor driver support for OpenGL, which resulted in graphical glitches and poor performance. With Vulkan, these issues should be heavily alleviated.
In addition to graphical changes, there have been a number of small general CPU-side performance improvements as well.
Steam Workshop Support
Your Build Templates can now be uploaded to Steam Workshop. You can now give it a description, and then use the 'Upload to Steam' button to upload it. Note that you will need to accept Steam Workshop Legal Agreement to begin uploading. If you subscribe to anyone else's Build Templates, they will be automatically loaded in when you restart the game.
Steam Workshop Legal Agreement
Mod Support
You can now create mods and upload them to Steam Workshop from within the game. There is a button in the main menu which gives instructions on how to make a mod for the game, and it also lets you upload to Steam Workshop directly.
Graphics Improvements
With the new rendering engine comes a few graphical improvements as well. Bloom has been reworked to be more color-correct. Additionally, now the game supports Tone Mapping and HDR. The new patch also includes many more minor graphical tweaks as well.
Difficulty Tweaks
A new 'Easy' difficulty has been added, which is less punishing than the 'Normal' difficulty, while still retaining some of the challenge. It is for players who found 'Normal' too hard, but still don't want to play in Sandbox mode because they want to still encounter enemies and manage their money. 'Normal' difficulty has been tweaked to be slightly easier as well.
Full Changelist
Graphics
- Graphics rendering engine migrated from OpenGL to Vulkan. This manifests as graphical performance speedups in general, however, certain cards (particularly AMD) will see significant improvement.
- Countless graphical glitches caused by OpenGL have been fixed now that Vulkan is in use.
- Vulkan has much better graphics multithreading support, so terrain regeneration "hiccups" no longer occur as they did with OpenGL, which is often very noticeable late-game with many excavators working simultaneously. On Vulkan, terrain regeneration is now seamless.
- Textures generated during runtime are now threaded, smoothing out framerate spikes even more.
- Improved RAM usage. Vulkan is better at releasing memory once it's done.
- Bloom has been reworked to be more color-correct and less cartoony.
- Bloom amount control in the preferences has a much greater effect, so you can adjust for very wide, gentle blooms or very narrow, sharp blooms.
- Tone mapping has been added, enabling HDR.
- Tweaks to a number of graphical effects, including explosion effects, gunfire effects, in-game screens, and screen space ambient occlusion.
- Tweaked white tubes to be a little less bright.
- On very old graphics cards which do not support Vulkan, OpenGL can still be used by passing in the command line argument "OpenGL". This mode will remain available but unsupported going forward. Use at your own risk.
Steam Workshop
- You can now upload Build Templates to Steam Workshop. This can be uploaded in game when selecting a Build Template and opening up its 'More Options' menu. Build Templates subscribed to from Steam Workshop will begin working the next time you restart the game. You may edit subscribed Build Templates made by others, but changes will not be saved on exit. You will need to make your own copy to save changes.
- You can now give Build Templates descriptions.
- Build Templates now show their Steam ID, and tell you whether they are created by the user, or imported via a mod.
Mod Support
- You can now upload and update arbitrary mods to Steam Workshop. There is a new screen accessible from the main menu which includes instructions and an interface to upload or update a new mod to Steam Workshop. Moddable file types currently include strings, fonts, textures, audio, models, and all gameplay data. Core data files with the same name will be overwritten. Core data structures can be overwritten if a mod data structure has an identical name as an existing core data structure.
Difficulty
- Easy Mode - Added in an Easy difficulty, which makes everything cheaper and makes enemies weaker. For players who want things easier, but don't want to play in Sandbox mode because they still want some challenge.
- Made land slightly cheaper on Normal difficulty.
Performance
- Some memory leaks fixed.
- Several loading screen race condition crashes fixed.
- Improved initial game loading time.
- Performance - Countless other small CPU performance improvements implemented in a wide variety number of places: Audio, AI, producer structures, weather, pollution, tubes, terrain, vehicles, lakes.
Other
- Entire gameplay code architecture has been heavily reorganized into a better composition architecture. While this has no directly visible effects yet, it will allow mods to be much more easily integrated into the game (and mod support is coming soon!). Note that mods made prior to this update will now be broken.
- UI - More specific error messages when placing structures in invalid locations.
- A number of other smaller gameplay crashes fixed.
- Demo string fix.
- Bug fix - Sorting House rendering incorrectly.
- Bug fix - Tubes not linking with Sorting House sometimes.
- Bug fix - View overlays wrapping around after 100% back to 0%.
- Crash fix - (Mac only) Startup crash with Vulkan dylib missing.
- Crash fix - When placing two sorting houses next to each other.
- Crash fix - Early game, getting a building mission from another faction.
- Crash fix - When using the destroy area tool on a tube.
- Crash fix - When placing maglev tubes in certain configurations.
- Crash fix - When sometimes switching the view overlays.
- Crash fix - (Mac only) Startup crashed with further dylibs missing.
- Crash fix - Extruder opening recipe for reprocessed slag.
- Performance - Basic performance improvements for tubes.
- Performance - Issue that occurred when a tube blockage happens fixed.
- Performance - Issue with high amount of tube intersections.
- Performance - Fixed Launchpad performance issue.
- Bug fix - Vulkan resize fix.
- Bug fixes - Several race conditions fixed.
- Bug fixes - Multiple low level undefined behaviors corrected.