Hello, Stranded Survivor! ⚓
We're back! Our team has been working hard to bring you this massive performance patch for our demo.
We've added a ton of QOL improvements to controls, UI, and building interactions, as well as visual updates and new audio. Expect some gameplay rebalancing, bug fixes, and major performance optimizations.
A quick shoutout!
Before we get into your demo update in detail, we want to take a moment to thank our local game-tech supplier, Game Room [www.gameroom.lt]
We've been getting reports of stuttering on some beefier computers. Turns out, ironically, the high-end 5000 series Nvidia cards were consistently showing these symptoms of stuttering.
We don't have these cards (yet, waiting for release hehe), so we reached out to our Lithuania's Game Developers' Association. We got a nice lead to ask Game Room [www.gameroom.lt] since they sell pre-built machines and might have something lying around.
We were really lucky to get this beastly machine with GF 5900 to test on... for free! The guys at Game Room lent us this monster to dev on. We then successfully identified the issue - it was our Voxel Ambient Occlusion precalculation taking up to 200ms per city-change. We were able to optimize it down to insignificant numbers and also improve the visual quality.
Here is what to expect from our Demo update!
Input
- Stop building if the building category of the active target is closed.
- Ladders auto-rotate.
- Increased camera vertical limit.
- Allow copy-pipetting clear-voxel objects.
- Remember the previously paused speed when leaving the escape menu.
- Add an option to have alternative controls.
- Use shift to flood-paint buildings.
- Support arrow keys for alternate movement.
UI
- Fixed social group UI button sorting.
- Draw contextual gatherables for Huts, Boats, and Cranes.
- Show the collapse bubble even if the building is flooded.
- When paths are disconnected, display the best potential positions for joining missing path connections.
- Don't allow assigning to a flooded building.
- Better research lab research production icon and tooltip.
- Glowing UI for happiness milestone unlocks.
- Show missing research and no buildings warning on marking tooltip.
- Smooth fade-in weather flood preview plane.
- Workplace UI shows that the building is flooded.
- Use icons instead of text for controller inputs.
- Add progress bar for event videos.
- Changed gathering icon colors.
- When paths are disconnected, display the best potential positions for joining missing path connections.
Here you can see missing path connections being drawn
Gameplay
- Unmark and forget depletables beyond interaction depth.
- Explosives now ragdoll citizens only in the collapse range.
- Tweak starting map.
- Tweak events.
- Reworked Explosives balance.
- Tweaked watchtower influence.
- Fixed missing junknado achievement.
- Fix various random-related values in Event graphs to make them more consistent.
- Rebalanced interactions with Social Group Leaders.
- Rebalanced Influence - it is now harder to get, making it more impactful.
- Fix Event data not being loaded correctly from saves.
- Tweak auto-gather priorities for various gatherables.
- Allow overflow of leisure servings.
- Lots of new music and sounds.
- Citizens don't take resources from the workplace if they can't store them.
- Docks now check clearance to see if access to the boat is blocked.
- House quality is now additive instead of averaging all its stats. Make base and maximum stats different for each house.
- Rebalanced decoration values for new house stats.
- Metal vents work as environmental pipes.
- Gain back resources for exploded insta build buildings.
- Allow to detonate from further away.
Visual
- Touched up morning/evening shadow visuals.
- Fix citizen position extrapolation between ticks - makes walk animations smoother.
- Better water horizon fadeout.
- Correct floater position interpolation.
- Lerp buoyancy position.
- Improve crashed boat visuals.
- Rotated a bunch of buildings for better thumbnails.
- Paintable wood paths and stairs.
- Better Extending Wood Crane Graphics.
- Reduce specular highlights on water if the sun is dark.
- Improve storm mist particle visuals.
Performance
- Optimize citizen personal space counting.
- Do not update citizen animators manually, scale their animation speed instead to keep them synced with the game - makes them much more optimized.
- Optimize collapsing building stress drawing.
- Optimized buoyancy calculations.
- Fix flames material using the wrong shader type (unlit sprite), which prevented them from being batched.
- Optimize citizen path scheduling.
- Optimize the nearby-buffing building search algorithm.
- Cache various production building values and only update them when something relevant happens to those buildings.
- Optimize boat navigation and data pre-calculation.
- Autosave is done in a separate thread - autosave produces a much shorter game pause.
- Simple city marking optimization.
- Don't update selected Citizen UI twice.
- Optimize multiple building repositioning and building.
Wishlist & Play the Demo now!
Thanks for reading Survivor! Follow ALL WILL FALL: Physics-Based Survival City Builder to stay updated.
Have any feedback for us? Visit our discussion page here or join our Discord server to let us know.
Keep building, just don't crumble!
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