This release primarily addresses performance issues in Level 01 / Paradise Beach and introduces environment-specific performance settings. Until recently, the way we handled different hardware for Levels 1 and 3 was by having different versions of the scene, which does have some benefits (e.g. you can have lower-res lightmaps and a very different lighting setup) but the trouble this caused by far outweighed those benefits.
The approach we have now does support adaptive quality in principle (not just changing the super-sampling dynamically but showing / hiding stuff depending on framerate), but that part is not implemented, yet. But when you enter Settings when you are in the environment (i.e. after loading the level), by entering the pause mode (press the menu button for about a second), and select "Performance", you'll see the level specific performance settings for full control on the left part of the "screen".
One word of caution: Changing the last value (Wave Resolution) causes a rather severe hiccup each time the value changes. We'll replace this with a dropdown-list for the next version. While the hiccups won't go away that way, at least it's much easier to use than a slider that has this issue.
Let us know how these settings work for you via the forums!
Full release notes:
- Fixed issue in old Settings screen (from level selection, when not entering pause): The Unlock buttons no longer worked. Please keep in mind that you can also use the unlock buttons directly on the levels to progress through the Early Access levels.
- Unity has a very nasty habit to somehow change animation speeds when there are performance issues, which resulted in some of our animations sometimes being played too slow, sometime way to slow, which throws everything off-sync. You can set Animators to UnscaledTime - but then, pause would not longer work (well, animations would simply keep on playing in pause). Added a little component that switches the update mode based on Time.timeScale: When Time.timeScale is approximately 1.0F (i.e. time is not scaled), we now use UnscaledTime for Animation-updates of the dragons. If it is below 1.0F, we do normal update for the animations.
- Added support for level-specific quality / performance settings. When you open the performance settings in an environment that has support for this (currently only Level 01 / Paradise Beach), a section with the specific settings will show up.
- As we are now longer using different scenes for different performance settings (we only ever did this in levels 1 and 3), there no longer is a need to unload and reload environments, which was broken after the last update. Now changing quality settings is fixed :wink: