Hello our players,
In this patch we focused on critical issues as very long loading times of bigger castles, which behaved like the game is not responding. Which was few times reported as a crash. We also reworked terraforming little bit and added an option to paint stone paths. Also french & polish are new languages you can select from.
Changes Made:
- Faster castle loading after minimap appeared, lag reduced from hundreds of seconds to around 5s on the bigger sized castle and our devices.
-Terraforming is painted by the brush of custom size, also removed slope limitations.
- Blocks will no longer modify terrain when built/removed
- selected units have a circle beneath them.
- Save positions now use own folders (To make your older saves please working follow instructions below)
- Stone Path tool.
- New Mode selection screen (Peacefull mode is available only for testers at this moment)
- Distant fog color now changes with a sky.
- New donjon corner tower, with doors, to be able of making a walkable roof.
- Unity engine update (from 5.5.0 to 5.6.2), means we are now using GPU instancing, which shall reduce scene rendering complexity.
-improved stone wall shader, which removed the need for multiple materials.
What does this mean?
Faster loading:
With better performance, bigger castles were built. Unfortunately in the algorithm, which detects corners of blocks to add for example stones, or hide multiple columns worked well on a low number of blocks, but its calculation time slows with every built block more than with previous one. And so it might take several minutes to load the save as a result, when you built around 20 000 blocks... Fortunately, we drastically changed this and improved performance that these calculations will not take longer than 0.5s. But there are more things, which are calculated and later can be also optimized, but we are talking now about feasible 5s on the same castle in contrary to several minutes. Beside loading time, it also improved the performance of building multiple blocks at once. And even very little reduced the lag of building a single block.
Terraforming :
Blocks will no longer modify the terrain. So it will not destroy your changes. Terraforming can change size from 3m diameter to 13m diameter. You can change brush size by rotating mouse wheel. Slope restrictions removed, so it will no longer limit you in your design.
Stone Path:
In the terraforming section, there is a path tool. Unfortunately, due to triangulation one diagonal direction does not look smooth in all directions. But as with a lot of stuff we will improve it one day, when more important things will be done.
Save Folders:
There was a little bit messy in save folders, so we decided to make a folder for each save position separately. Now it is easier to sent us save, in case of any issue (just pack that folder). In order to load your old saves. Start a new game and save the empty world on any position. It will create folders. Then take a look to game folder/World_of_Castles_Data/Resources/Saves/Map/
Then all files with indexes move to the corresponding folder to that index (e.g. blocks1 -> SaveGame1) Then remove indexes (blocks1 -> blocks). Sorry, we would have to do it one day and it is better sooner than later.
Optimization:
We moved project onto new engine versions allow us to reduce the number of drawing request for your graphics card. To support this feature to work at best we also reworked stone walls, which was before done with many materials, which randomly tiled together to keep it seamless and not showing a pattern. This was merged into one material, so it should be also easier. Unfortunately, we did not see great improvements as we got in our other game runaway train (there was scene complexity for GPU reduced almost 200x). In WoC we see it works, but we did not notice any such improvement as probably rendering is not a bottleneck anymore on our testing scene and our device. But for sure your GPU will thank us, that it is melting little bit less. As a side-effect updating engine caused that lot of data has to be downloaded again and so this patch will be around 2.3GB. In this patch, we did just minor model optimization.
Release status
release sheduled around 30.th July 15:00 UTC