v0.2.0

Known Issues

• The new ML model produces occasional straight-line artifacts at tile edges; a new base map is planned to fix this
• Waypoints have been reset to accommodate for changes to terrain generation
• Terrain horizontal displacement is disabled until camera system support is added, to avoid the camera going under the terrain
• Enabling 'Hardware Raytracing' while setting 'Hardware Raytracing Mode' to Off may cause the app to crash after some time

Features

World

• New ML terrain model with improved mountains & elevation
• Work has been done to improve the appearance of all in-game population assets (LOD's, normals, impostors) (PST-2998)

Rendering

• Ray-tracing (experimental) can now be enabled via the settings menu (PST-1748)
• Added tone mapping & colour-grading to make the world look more vibrant (PST-3171)
• Added FSR & DLSS support (PST-3130)
• Added FSR & DLSS based anti-aliasing support (PST-3320)
• Added two-pass HiZ occlusion culling to increase rendering performance
• Updated SMAA to the latest version
• Lazily loaded the cloud textures to improve performance
• Impostors support cascaded shadow maps (PST-2084)

Gameplay

• Iterated on waypoints
  • Interact with a waypoint to get a periscope view and 'race' to visible waypoints in the distance (PST-3076/3077/3334/3335)
  • Users can now create up to 10 waypoints, up from 4
  • Created waypoints spawn in front of you (PST-3333)
  • Owned waypoints are now white, non-owned are black
  • Waypoints are now updated every 10 seconds, allowing you to see waypoints placed in near real-time (PST-2478)

Application

• Added a splash screen which covers up the planet until it's ready to be shown (PST-3344)
• Showing input hints for undocumented controls (Q & E - up and down) and fix conflicting inputs
• Added a setting to invert vertical mouse movement (PST-2486, https://github.com/PLAYERUNKNOWN-Productions/Preface-User-Support/issues/3)

Fixes

• Resolved multiple existing ECS issues, uncovered by moving to a type-safe API (PST-3070/3072)
• Fixed incorrect waypoint colours and waypoint sound-streaming crash (PST-3078/3257)
• The latest notifications are now always downloaded from the server on start-up, even after reinstalling
• Fixed a crash when taking a screenshot after changing resolution
• Fixed some of the lighting on the dark side of the planet and on the GPU grass
• The title bar now stays on screen when switching to windowed mode (https://github.com/PLAYERUNKNOWN-Productions/Preface-User-Support/issues/9)
• Fixed various GPU crashes and rendering issues
• Analytics are now sent to a more appropriate back-end environment
• Stopped tracking VRAM usage each frame, increasing performance
• Time of day should match for anyone at the same location (PST-3188)
• Cleaned up and improved speed of shader cache generation
• Fixed various errors that appeared when exiting the application
• Fixed various UI scaling issues (PST-3354/3356)
• Waypoints no longer flicker briefly when refreshed (PST-3337)
• Postcards and waypoints windows can be closed by the same button that opened them (PST-2271)
• Include meta-data for postcard PNG's (PST-3395)
• Disabled horizontal displacement, to be reimplemented with CPU support (PST-3345)
• Hide terrain unloading during shutdown (PST-3209)
• Make UI elements more consistent and conforming to design style by unifying and reusing more code (PST-3279/2532)
• Stop loading screen audio when starting the game via deep link (PST-3264)
• Waypoints stream in and out at a consistent distance (PST-3339)
• Motion blur setting re-added to user menu (PST-2310)

Invisible / Upcoming Work

Engine

• Rewrote ECS back-end
  • Refactored existing implementation to comply to common constraints, making it possible to switch between ECS back-ends
  • Integrated and evaluated several existing ECS back-ends (EnTT, Flecs)
  • Replaced sparse array-based storage with a sparse-set based storage to reduce memory waste and cache misses
  • Moved from a macro heavy API to a templated type-safe API to prevent accidental misuse and fixed various issues that it surfaced
  • Deferred commands that write to the ECS for safer multi-threading (PST-3363)
  • Separated API into public and private parts (implementation details)

• Worked on networking / replication fundamentals
  • Serialization
  • RPC's
  • Registry
  • Testing facilities (PST-3149)
  • Replication demo

• Iterated on asset import tools to convert assets and import them directly into a running game (PST-3440)
  
• Worked on tooling & workflows to more easily author data collection, processing and retrieval in-game to allow for further interactivity in the future
  
• Added in-game voting system to solicit user feedback
  
• Integrated various monitoring and profiling tools (PresentMon, GameProfiler)
  
• Set up the project for more robust testing (starting with Replication)
  
• Integrated robot-framework for more elaborate automated testing
  
• Tracked more relevant information when a crash occurs (unsupported hardware, assert callstacks)
  
• Added meta-data to the executable file
  
• Moved to C++17 and started using supported features
  * Nested namespaces
  * Replace boost filesystem with std::filesystem
  
• Adopted LLVM code guidelines
  
• Worked on headless mode for the app & tooling (PST-2711)
  
• Worked on project / solution generation to improve easy of use and maintainability (PST-2927, PST-3318)
  
• Add automated tests for the Data & Privacy Settings popup (PST-2923)
  
• Iterated on internal logging tools (PST-2849)
  

Rendering

• Implemented new GPU-profiling subsystem (PST-3190/3191/PST-2100) * Timestamp / statistics queries * Thread-safe context * FPS histogram & debug UI
• Integrated IMGUI multi-viewport features to support more advanced engine tooling
• Prototyped oceans