Early Access Update 12
build id: 55D63D87 55D6B50F
UPDATE: A patch is now online to fix the bad Ammo Capacity upgrade texts.
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Performance Improvements
This update is mainly focused on improving rendering performance.
We have observed that many players are reporting increased slow-downs post Early Access Update 10, in which we introduced the Astro-Creeps. This makes some sense, as on a saturated level (maximum enemies) this results in twice the number of animated characters. Networked performance is also directly affected by this, not because of increase bandwidth, but because of the way the game is lock-step synchronized at present. See this post for more information on the technical aspects of this.
As a result we took some time to look at what could be optimized, and found that the way we were rendering static models (pipes, chairs, laptops, lockers, boxes, etc) was rather suboptimal. Especially in big Mazes maps we were seeing a very high count of invididual models. After some experiments we decided to optimize some models and to consolidate all of these model instances into "baked" world meshes, and draw them via the same pipeline that the walls, ceilings and floors are being rendered by. Since we are now baking everything, we will continue to look into opportunities to reduce vertex and triangle counts on all environment models, both present and future.
This change results both in far fewer render calls and also submits larger batches to the GPU, both which are good things. In addition we looked into opportunites to do tighter camera culling on the various pieces of the world, and found many opportunities to further reduce render calls based on where the player happens to be looking.
All in all we have reduced render calls for the in-mission scene by at least 50%, and in some cases by as much as 90%. While we have limited capacity to test these changes on a broad range of hardware, theoretically this should be a big win for all GPUs. Obviously we cannot guarantee anything, and players who are having performance issues should still experiment with the various visual options.
At the moment the game still runs on DirectX 9.0c but with all shaders on shader model 2, a profile that is at least ten years out of date. While we like to have the system requirements as low as possible, we are considering implementing hardware geometry instancing in the future to make even better use of available GPU horsepower. The main reason for this is that we still have a large category of objects (aniamted doors and cores) that are still being rendered relatively inefficiently. This change will require shader model 3 hardware, but even this isn't a very high end requirement these days. In any case the code will still have a fallback to shader model 2 (the current system) for GPUs that cannot support geometry instancing.
Reduced Ammo Capacities
We have been seeing games with a high excess of ammo carried over between missions, and as an experiment we have adjusted the ammo capacity upgrades to the following:
- No Upgrade - 500 rounds
- Ammo Capacity 1 - 750 rounds
- Ammo Capacity 2 - 1000 rounds
- Ammo Capacity 3 - 1250 rounds
- Ammo Capacity 4 - 1500 rounds
Initial tests indicate that this change makes better use of the available Armories.
Increased Repair Usage
We have changed Repair stations from single use to 4 uses.
Electronics Damage Repair Priority
While HUD electronics are still damaged randomly, Repair stations will now prioritize repairs in the following order:
- SYS_TEXT
- SYS_FLASHLIGHT
- SYS_TRACKER_MAP
- SYS_VISOR_ICONS
- SYS_WEAPON_DISPLAY
- SYS_INFRAVISION
Miscellaneous
- The advanced party settings configuration is now properly synchronized to non-owner party members.
- The advanced party settings configuration now shows all options for non-owner party members.
- Various polish and material adjustments to our level styles.
- Sparks have been optimized and now bounce in a more realistic fashion.
Our Plan Moving Forward - Improved Networking
We interpret the need for improved long distance internet network play to be a very high priority among our players. We have had a rough technical plan of what to try out in order to improve the quality of the experience for some time now, and this will be our main focus in the immediate future.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
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