Hi folks! We have a second part of the Accelerator update today, plus a bunch of bug fixes and more! Stay tuned below the changelog for an update on me.
Major Changes
When we rolled out the Accelerator update two weeks ago, some players (mostly AMD users) had rendering problems, and so I hastily rolled back all the rendering-related optimizations and fixes from that update in a hotfix build. But thanks to some heroic testers whom I'll never be able to thank enough, we found the bugs and now we're ready to roll those rendering optimizations back out to everyone again, and that's most of what's in this update! Rendering data is now smaller and draw calls are now faster (and under the hood, the engine's rendering code is nicer! But probably nobody cares about that last part but me.). It's a small improvement if you compare it to the scale of savings from the CPU-side optimizations that went into the last build, but every little bit helps, right?
Other Improvements
Fixed rare planning-related crashes immediately after destroying NPCs, Monster Zones, or after social circles disband. (we've seen about five of these reports in total over the last two weeks)
Added a game option to disable alerts about character types which don't have basic attacks. This should be considered an expert-level option, as it's basically removing the guard rails that prevent you from accidentally making character classes who can't fight at all (or who run out of juice partway through combat and then get completely stuck).
Fixed manually moving a player who is in a party which was traveling in formation so they actually get moved. (previously they ignored being moved and immediately teleported back to their party)
Fixed a visual bug in the network system which could cause some network cables to show themselves as carrying negative bandwidth.
Increased the amount of CPU time devoted to offscreen monsters, who sometimes weren't getting enough time in really *packed* regions to keep up their combat effectiveness.
Fixed parties getting stuck if the party unexpectedly got split up across multiple maps.
Fixed a bug which could result in a toon getting stuck at a dungeon door forever.
Vastly sped up drawing the new icons used for XP, death notifications, level-up, and etc.
Fixed a possible crash if you quit the game while viewing the "Release Announcement" view.
Fixed a critical bug in text formatting of certain floating point numbers, which could sometimes cause incorrect values to be displayed.
Fixed the tool "cost" string not being visible when the "System Cursor" option is set.
...and a bunch of other, more minor fixes and improvements!
As always, huge thanks to everybody who reported issues and with an extra special shout out to those who were affected by the rendering issues on certain AMD cards and helped me remotely debug what was going wrong to cause them!
Okay, so now the update on me. Last time we talked (at the release of the Accelerator update, about two weeks ago), I had just tested positive for Covid. I've spent most of the time since then continuing to test positive, and *mostly* staying in bed and resting to try to recover.
It seemed to be a relatively light case (as far as Covid goes), and I was feeling mostly okay apart from a lingering cough by the end of the first week (even though I was still testing positive), so I started spending an hour here or there doing little bits of work while still technically sick, which is where almost everything in the update above came from.
On Wednesday last week I finally began testing negative for covid, but since I still have that cough I'm still mostly trying to take it easy; I don't want to risk long covid or anything like that by overdoing it immediately after recovery! (But also just resting for the whole day gets *so* boring, so I have to at least touch code from time to time!)
Assuming all goes well, I'm planning to return to something closer to a normal work schedule and presence in the discussion boards and in our discord on this Wednesday, as the 1 week anniversary of when I first tested negative. I'm hoping that my cough clears up by then, too! But if not, I'll continue working from home until it does.
Thanks so much for your well-wishes everyone, as well as for all the bug reports and suggestions!
-T