A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! The focus of this update is to greatly improve particle multithreading and fix the broken client side communication for Direct IP online multiplayer games. There are a number of other bug fixes and improvements included in this update, here is the full change list:
- Numerous general code improvements across many areas of the game; prevents many potential issues
- Greatly improved thread timing and synchronization for multithreaded particles -Improves overall parallelism and performance when many particles are onscreen -Reduces overall cpu usage by up to 25% -Improves visual smoothness of particle animations -Allows particle updates to scale beyond 60hz for high refresh rate displays -Improves efficiency even more when running on a slow machine that is unable to maintain 60fps
- Fixed broken client side communication for Direct IP online multiplayer games
- Fixed incorrect rendering for client side powerup items for online multiplayer games
- Small tweaks to the frame pacing algorithm
- Adjusted description text positioning for game mode and difficulty selection screens to have less overlap with menus
- Tweaked the enemy explosion start frame to transition from an unexploded ship better
To make sure you have this update, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.22.5.0” or higher. Enjoy!
** Update ** Two additional updates have been released since this announcement was made. The version number is still v1.22.5.0. Updates include:
- Additional multithreaded concurrency improvements to further improve performance when many particles are onscreen for multicore cpu's
- Fixed a menu sequence break bug when pressing Fire2 or Escape during the level addon pack selection screen