Jade Spring: 1.0 Release
Is it a plane? Is it a Principal Biomancer? No, it’s the full release of the Guild Wars 2 homesteading and decorating fan-game, Jade Spring, which I’ve been working on over the past year! This update brings new decorations, many bug-fixes, and a bunch of changes which makes the game much more performant and faster to load. I’m very keen to keep adding decoration packs every now and then, but I’m considering the game to now be in a stable state to continue adding onto!
With that being said, you can expect a patch in the next week or two with some immediate small additions I wanna make, alongside the inevitable emergency bug-fixes which tend to crop up. Speaking of bugs, if you run across one, please leave me a report at any of the places listed here; It would be really helpful for me!
Thank you so much to everyone, from the bottom of my heart. The people who tried the game, my QA testers, folk who share their creations, streamers who have played the game, and creators who have made videos about it. Tyria (and especially Cantha) is souper important to me — it feels like home. To have people share in my little fan-creation, and celebrate this world with me, is something too special for words. I hope you continue to find some peace and enjoyment in Jade Spring.
(Note: for all beta players who have an existing save file: I’ve done my absolute best to make sure that this new version is fully compatible! But a couple of testers have reported some weird bugs which only disappeared when they reset their local cache, so you might need to do the same if you run into something really weird. You can find this location by clicking on the folder icon in the main menu. Do be sure to make copies of your settings, save, and decoration files — you will be able to put these back just fine.)
Release changelog
I’ve recorded most of the changes to the game here, but I tinkered with a lot of stuff, and might have misplaced some notes and things… Eep! You can also go back through the previous changelogs to get a broader picture of things that have changed since the original beta release of the game:
Performance improvements
The loading of decorations is now streamed and threaded. They are added to the game in parallel after the map has loaded, reducing (sometimes substantially) the game’s load time. If multiple copies of a decoration exist on the map, the game only needs to load each ‘type’ once.
Increased performance and reduced memory usage—especially VRAM—by optimising the size and compression of textures in-game.
UI panes now load asynchronously, reducing their memory overhead and increasing performance.
Added decorations
Added Ventari’s Tablet
Added Railroad Bridge
Added Drizzlewood Platform
Added Drizzlewood Scaffold
Added Orrian Arch.
Added Rata Sum portal.
Added Jeb’s Windmill.
Changes and additions
Completed story and added additional dialogue.
Added a shadow quality setting (including the ability to disable shadows entirely). This changes the number of PSSM splits used in the shadow pass, resulting in a crisper shadow.
Added an option to invert the camera’s Y-axis.
You can now hold 3 Fish Food at once.
Added a sidebar panel when the Otter’s Enclave is unlocked which indicates that it can now be accessed.
Made the Enclave orb more prominent with a one-time starry marker.
Made the end-game gift clearer with silhouettes and art of that gift.
Added a keybind to toggle VFX and Compendium while editing and placing decorations.