A new build is now live for Windows incorporating some changes to how levels are streamed, this time built from a brand-new source control system.
Level Streaming Improvements
Some players may have seen levels appearing in the distance as they played through the game.
This is due to the way Estranged uses level streaming, and means that players with slower hardware may have even been able to catch up to the point where the level hadn't loaded, and fallen through the world.
This update contains a change which means that players which are approaching a not-yet-loaded level are frozen in place with a "Loading" hint. This provides the behavior of Act I's loading screens, however only affects the platforms which cannot stream levels as fast as the player is progressing.
Moving to Git
For a long time, Estranged was developed on a version control system called Subversion. Subversion allows you to keep track of multiple versions of files, and allows you to store large binary files by only storing the differences between them.
Git is a newer, faster version control technology that makes it easier to work on different branches of the code, however for a long time hasn't been good with large binary files. This changed with the advent of Git LFS, which we have completely switched Estranged to use.
Internally we use BitBucket, with a custom Git LFS server which we have released as open source: https://github.com/alanedwardes/Estranged.Lfs
As ever, please let us know what you think!
Alan