Fellow Dwarves! Surprise update!
We have been working on the next update over the last 10 days and we are happy to announce we are putting a up an experimental build to the next update branch.
Inside the game you will see, Three Brothers and Three Brothers experimental.
What is Three Brothers Experimental?
Over the last month, we have been swapping out Four major components of Orebound with better versions. It’s taken a lot of player feedback and analysis of where both the CPU and the GPU is hogging resources in the game. We’ve spent hours going over data that has shown us where these areas are.
This update is epicly experimental so we have put the update on “the next update branch”
Let us also warn that these changes are so massive they are NOT backwards compatible to your old games but they also will not break them. So you will eventually see these changes on a new game that you start!
We cannot guarantee this version will be fine so only move onto this branch if you are happy to experiment! There be dragons!
So what have we done?
1. World Rendering and Generation.
We have changed how the entire game world renders. We have managed to gain significant performance gains by testing out various configurations of rendering/loading voxel data. We have managed to gain huge CPU performance in this area and we have also managed to reduce loading times significantly. CPU’s should have a much easier time calculating and the loading time for example has dropped from 120 seconds to around 10/20 seconds. That’s right. We can now load a new world in under 30 seconds. So a massive reduction here.
2. Factory Item Optimisation.
A new backend system for moving items on the belt that is all processed by the graphics card, once again shifting away from use of the CPU and should allow for handling of thousands of items while mitigating lag. This huge change should allow for late game mega factories to have remarkably less lag.
We have also completed the change over of major character stats to using unreal engines Gameplay Ability System (GAS), which is the same system Epic uses for Fortnite for example. This allows for us to a lot of complex and replicated stat modifications relatively easy and we are looking forwards to expanding on this in future updates with new features.
3. Inventory input output Optimisation.
A back end inventory optimisation has been done as well which should vastly increase processing speed, increasing CPU performance. We spoke earlier this year about how input and output was causing lag when dealing with large amounts of objects. We have optimised this once again to allow us to gain more performance.
4. Cave Generation Reconfigured.
Caves are now larger to allow players to build bases without having to dig tonnes of area out. We watched players play and gathered feedback and so many people were telling us they wanted more underground space to build. So we have reconfigured the game to allow more space underground and we have also added tunnels that generate cave to cave so you can discover vertically and horizontally.
So what does this all mean?
It means we now are able to expand into deeper cave layers, and add more to the world. For example we have extended the range and the items in the world. Tree’s will stay loaded in at a further distance. Grass will render further and much more.
These are the changes we needed to make to allow us to push deeper down and load more layers and allow players to make gigantic factories whilst they do so.
Getting the game to run smoothly with massive factories and also voxel worlds has been a huge technological challenge that we are finally starting to crack. This will lay the foundation for the games future.
That's about it for now and please let us know in the discord or the steam forums what issues you get on the new update. Thank you everyone! Below is even more changes and fixes! We hope to set this live after some proper testing ( maybe weeks ) with even more improvements to the game. Thank you so much for your continued support!
Bug and Changes List
Large Deposits are now infinite!
We decided based on player feedback that once you find a large deposit, they are infinite. This means once you go deeper into the world you can set up your drills and keep those deposits. No more moving. We initially thought this might be fun to allow the player to keep exploring. But it wasn't. Enjoy never having to move drills again!
- A new option is added in the settings to disable mouse scroll for the hotbar.
- Food now has unique meshes when on belts.
- Loading game will clean up old corrupted belts.
- Potion bottles on belts texture has been tweaked
- Boar carcasses move on belts.
- You can now sprint for about 20 seconds.
- Camps will now not display until several hundred meters away, reducing lag from faulty rendering.
- Doubled Elevator speed
- New Building Instructions UI to make changing build mode more obvious
- Lowered Build hammer animation
- Take all now plays looting sound
- Removed Guided/freeplay option
- Added new message for some maps
- Added new option to use standard lighting instead of lumen or screenspace.
- Items can now be merged in the hotbar.
Bug Fixes
- Some fixes to the boss orc deciding not to attack the player in certain cases.
- A world generator error that was incorrectly sizing caves of certain size has been fixed, and will take effect in the new experimental world.
- Orcs that float in their camps should now find the floor without having to move first.
- Fixed Bug where blacksmith didn't need gold.
- Fixed Bug where turret damage wasn't upgraded.
- Quit to desktop confirmation now resets when leaving main pause menu.
- Fixed Tnt and demo charge having the same explosive radius.
- Fixed Auto water pump not having coal item filter.
