Similar to our last blog update, this isn't an announcement for the next patch's release date. However I will admit we just released that one to our internal tester group. We're here to talk about more upcoming quality of life changes, this time with regards to research and frame rates.
Research changes
One of the biggest and most consistent complaints we have heard on the forums has been the RNG grind of trying to unlock all of the little uninteresting research items such as minor hallway connections and other things such as doors. Who doesn't want to grind for days trying to unlock a door? Well it turns out most of you don't. Fine, so we've got a new idea in the works.
The new thing is that we've gathered up all the less interesting research items including the tiny hallway pieces and the doors and the bendy hallway bits and everything between, and now we give them all to you once you've unlocked a certain number of items from a specific research tier. There is even a fancy looking progress bar that shows you how close you are to a milestone and what you will get when you reach the milestone. Research tier 1 items to fill the tier 1 bar, and once you've completed enough items you will unlock all of the tier 1 filler pieces and you can call yourself a tier 1 research master...or whatever.
This feature is part of our new research screen overhaul, and it looks something like this.
Optimizations
There were some serious optimization issues fixed recently which make the game feel like a completely different game.
Terrain is one of the systems that takes a lot of resources. Our engine allows per-pixel collision with a map of terrain objects that is honestly enormous. We have really large sectors and in addition to filling those sectors with really big lists of terrain items, we also render terrain items from other nearby sectors. We allow both AI and bullets to interact with those terrain entities on a per-pixel basis, and so we need to poll the list of terrain items many many times per update. As you can imagine, that means we need to have a really fast way to access terrain from a specific area without touching every terrain item in the list.
As it turns out our system was broken at its core and the system we used to reduce the number of terrain items accessed each time we were checking was actually increasing the number and referencing duplicates. The result was that every call to check collision in a small region that should have contained at most one or two items, was often checking tens to hundreds of items, and rendering all items on screen when there were hundreds of items in view was actually rendering multiple thousands of items. Our system was returning duplicate entries with every call. The result of this fix has changed the number of items rendered in the best case from something like 1300 down to something like 10, and in the worst case we were rendering around 5000-7000 items when we should have been rendering 300-500. Suffice to say, this is a massive fix for frame rate and overall feel of the game, and it will hit hardest on any graphics card that was having trouble running the game due to overdraw issues. It will also fix numerous AI related fps drops that happened when there was a gunfight near some terrain.
In addition, sounds and animations were playing for ships and crew in other sectors. Many people don't realize that sound can be a serious source of slow-down, but playing audio represents a significant source of data that needs to be moved around in memory. By fixing obvious issues of extra sounds and animations we have further increased the framerate and made audio work slightly better overall. The game really does play like a different game, and in play-testing I have found the experience overall much more pleasant.
Stability
We have crash logs now.
However it isn't just crash logs that we've added. The same system that makes crash logs, also tries to recover your game and save progress. In most cases, we have found that bugs which once crashed the game, will now remember your progress up to the exact moment of the crash. Maybe loading back into the save will revisit the crash again, however the addition of a crash log means that now we can actually hunt down the source of the crash and fix it, allowing you to pick up your progress exactly where you left off once a patch is released. We have the game in closed testing right now, and we are already seeing the benefits of this system.
In addition, all character progress is written when your character changes, and all quest progress is written when quests change. This makes it much more difficult to lose progress from bugs or from smashing your computer into bits during a game session. Maybe it will also open up a world of new bugs which arise from crashing the game in creative and uniquely abusive ways however overall the new save philosophy is designed to write more important stuff more often, which always makes recovery easier.
With framerate stability, crash recovery, and less grindy research, this patch is taking many of the unpleasant edges off of gameplay.