A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.29.3.3) This is mostly a maintenance release, but fixes and improves a few significant areas. Specular highlights have been improved for numerous objects in the game, being more accurate and better performing than before. Objects affected include enemies, bosses, and player ships. However, the biggest specular lighting improvement is in the cave background, showing much more depth and detail.
This update includes greatly reducing Boss hull damage on the player. This was previously too harsh, so the damage was cut in half to balance difficulty better. Animation hitching has been greatly reduced as well, making gameplay much smoother than before. This was a thread timing issue that affected some CPUs more than others. Also, a particle-related crash issue has been fixed; apologies to anyone affected by this.
Here are the full release notes for v1.29.3.3:
- Improved specular highlight accuracy and performance in the shaders for all enemies, bosses, player ships, and the cave background -Only affects the OpenGL 2.0/3.0 renderer -The cave background has the greatest improvement, adding more depth and detail to the lighting
- Reduced Boss hull damage from 50 to 25
- Reduced hitching from thread timing improvements
- Increased the framerate cap to 60fps when running in the background
- Increased ambient light for the OpenGL 1.5 renderer to match the OpenGL 2.0/3.0 renderer
- Fixed an occasional crash when a large number of particles are on screen
As usual, to make sure you have the latest version, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.29.3.3” or higher. Enjoy!