There have been complaints about de-sync problems in the game, so we have been digging through netcode a bit again. Few problematic areas have been identified and reworked in a much neater way. Namely, update information regarding marine death, revive and ailment grants have been reworked as separate packages. Code for detonating explosives has also been reworked and optimized. These changes should both prevent the desync issue and reduce the network load.
We are aware of some additional problematic parts of the netcode, most pressing ones being connected with the synchronization of boss monster behavior and damage. We are still working on those and hope to have them fixed in the near future. In the meantime, if you notice any de-syncs please let us know. Any information that would allow us to pinpoint when exactly the problems happen is very valuable.
It has also been noticed that some updates ago, game experienced a drop in a general frame rate. Some time has been spent profiling for bottlenecks in the code and several has been identified and fixed. Users testing the version so far report a considerable improvement in that area. It is worth noting though that few users have been reporting performance drops on the final waves. Again, please let us know if and under what circumstances you experience any problems, so we can better identify and fix them.
While profiling for performance drops, it has been noticed that loading of certain resource files from the disk caused major performance problems, specially noticeable issue was with the boss monsters, where game would noticeably stall waiting for the sound resources to load. Same issue was noticeable at the beginning of the game where certain objects and textures were not loaded in time and were displayed as black or white squares. In order to combat that, a preloaded system was introduced. It will upon game start immediately begin loading certain resources and keep them in the working memory for as long as the game is running. This should make the game run much more smoothly and with much fewer bugs caused by resources not being loaded in time. It could increase the game's memory footprint, so you might choose not to use it (or use it only partially) if you are low on RAM as it is. In the Options menu you can choose which types of files you wish the preloader to load. Please note that it is still an experimental feature, so if you encounter problems, please try playing with different preloader settings (game needs to be restarted for preloader features to be turned off), and let us know about your results.
You should also now be able properly select default HUD options for monster and item names display from the HUD tab of the options menu.
The way game calculates damage has been a bit problematic in the past, so it has been changed, with percentage modifiers now being applied last, after the value modifiers. This new, in our opinion more logical way of calculating might have an impact on some skills and weapons. There might be adjustments in the future to keep the gameplay balanced.
There is a problem with game lobbies we have hoped we managed to solve with this update, but turns out it is still present. It has to do with the workarounds we were forced to apply in order to make full 8 man lobbies visible from the "games in progress" list. It manifests with some users entering a lobby but not being to connect or see other players. It has been noted that re-creating a lobby fixes the issue. We apologies for leaving this issue and will handle it as soon as we can.
On a more positive note, I can report that much work has been done on the singleplayer mode, with some new features being implemented, and first missions being made. Some of our users who have made special contribution, either by contributing financially or by promoting and testing the game will quite soon be given the opportunity to participate in early singleplayer testing.
Have fun!
The Red Solstice team