Over the past month, a number of technical improvements have been made to BlastZone 2, split across a few update releases. Most of these improvements focus on improving performance for the particle system and greatly improving the startup loading system.
The particle system now automatically detects the optimal number of threads based on the number of detected CPU cores. This eliminates the need for the “Particle Threads” option, which some people may not have taken advantage of anyway. Now, the particle system takes the best advantage of everyone’s system without needing to explicitly set it up. Also, there are a few general optimizations to the particle system that significantly reduce CPU load at high particle counts.
The startup loading system has been completely revamped as well. This was required to fix a “Not Responding” issue on lower end machines during the loading screen. Even though everything was working properly, Windows may have falsely detected BlastZone 2 as crashed before this update. The new loading system also significantly reduces load times, taking better advantage of CPU cores and scales up to a higher number of CPU cores. Also, there is now a progress bar and working spinner to give better feedback during this process. To further reduce load times, the startup loader now supports loading precompressed S3TC textures directly into video memory, eliminating the need to compress textures into memory at load time. This also eliminates the “Texture Compression” game option, as the precompressed textures are higher quality as well, being nearly indistinguishable from uncompressed textures in most situations. This also reduces the game filesize footprint, since S3TC textures have a higher compression ratio than the PNG textures they replaced.
V1.25.3.1 release notes
- More explosion particle multithreading improvements -Eliminated redundant calculations between threads for CPUs with 4 cores or more -This has no effect on CPUs with 1, 2, or 3 cores -More redundant calculations have been eliminated for CPUs with more cores -This improves overall thread concurrency, but should only have minimal performance gains -Reduces overall CPU usage without any negative impact on performance
- Optimized the CPU load per particle when updating particle data
V1.25.3.0 release notes
- Added support for loading precompressed S3TC textures instead of compressing them into memory on startup -Greatly improves startup loading time -Improves the quality of compressed textures
- Replaced many textures in the game with offline compressed S3TC textures -Reduces game filesize footprint -Did not replace any HUD or sprite textures to maintain the highest quality for those
- Removed the "Texture Compression" config option; now many textures are always compressed
v1.25.2.0 release notes
- Added a progress bar and loading spinner to the startup loading screen -Gives more information on loading progress -Signifies that the loader is still working
- Added a new thread to the loading process, bringing the total to 6 -Scales very well up to 6 CPU cores to improve startup loading speed -Also reduces load times for systems with less than 6 cores by better maintaining higher core usage
- Fixed the game occasionally becoming briefly unresponsive during startup
- Lowered the priority of particle update threads to maintain responsive gameplay if other applications slow down the game
v1.25.1.1 release notes
- The particle system now automatically sets the optimal number of CPU threads -Eliminated the "particle threads" config option -Now always optimizes the particle system for best performance based on the number of present CPU cores -Converting to the new config format will disable Kiosk mode on first start, but it can be enabled again afterwards
- Additional checks for model loading metadata -Better handles a few error cases -Better detects cases when metadata files need to be rebuilt -Converting to the new metadata format will force a rebuild of all metadata files on first start
- More explosion particle system optimizations -Significant reduction in CPU load and higher performance at high particle counts -Up to 25% higher performance depending on the system and situation at very high particle counts -More commonly 5-10% performance gains for most situations -Slightly lower overhead when no particles are on screen
- Changed the startup loading logo screen to say "Loading..." as well
As always, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.25.3.0” or higher. Enjoy!