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v1.38.3.0 - Improved cave environment shaders, kb/mouse latency, texture loading

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v.1.38.3.0)  This update improves the cave environment shaders, keyboard and mouse latency, and compressed texture memory consumption and loading times on game startup.  Full details are below:

  • Big improvements to all the cave environment shaders

    • Improves lighting quality of the cave backgrounds

    • Improves shader performance of the cave environment by about 30%

  • Improved keyboard and mouse player control latency and rapid action handling when using update rates higher than the frame rate

    • Gamepad input already takes advantage of this and didn't need to be updated

  • Optimized the compressed texture loading process

    • Uses 33% less system memory per texture during the loading process

    • Improves compressed texture loading times

    • Texture VRAM usage during gameplay is unchanged

  • Renamed the "auxiliary threads" advanced option to "boost threads"

  • Updated localization in many areas for many languages

  • Refactored areas of the codebase

    • This shouldn't affect the game experience at all, but improves code design to make it easier to maintain moving forward

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.38.3.0” or higher.  Enjoy!

Below shows the difference with the new cave shaders. The old shaders had overblown specular highlights, and the new shaders are more accurate. This was done with a ~30% performance boost at the same time.