We are skipping v1.19 because this is a major update. A large number of internal changes have been made:
The leaderboard system has been fully rewritten. Previously, it relied on Steam’s built-in leaderboards, which had significant limitations, such as a restricted number of GPUs per user. This affected professional users and reviewers in particular. Leaderboard data is now stored on an external server, independent of Steam.
Leaderboards are now lighter, load much faster, are more secure, offer much greater storage capacity, and are easier to maintain, while also being more versatile and flexible.
The GPU naming and identification system has been improved to prevent unusual or rare models from being misidentified or left without an assigned manufacturer color. They are now easier to recognize both by color and by model name.
A dedicated and explicit shader precompilation step has been added, although previous versions already used various techniques to reduce stuttering.
Some internal variables have been adjusted that, in rare cases, could trigger a crash under specific conditions.
Anti-cheat systems have been strengthened to further improve future protection, even though no cheating cases have been detected so far with the previous systems.
Many other small tweaks, cleanups, and code optimizations have been made to improve data handling robustness and reliability, even though no issues were previously detected.
Combined with the features introduced in v1.18, this makes it the most significant update released in recent months.