In this Early Access Build we see the introduction of the usage of NextGen Soft Shadows, for all lights, torches and effects. This will have the benefit of having softer, nicer shadows at a lower performance cost than before, but has required me to re-author all lights and shadow-settings from scratch. This will require a lot more testing to find edge-cases, but if you experience any issues with shadow ache, peter panning issues or any light-bleed through dungeon-walls, please report them.
In the last Early Access Build we saw the introduction of Vulkan being used - this was set as the primary choice, with a fallback to Direct3D11 when lacking it. This turns out to be not a perfect solution, as there is a chunk of players with graphics cards from the last 2-3 years that never update their drivers - making them stuck on a very early and incomplete version of the graphics API, either causing them performance issues or in worst cases crashes due to driver-issues (reported as sourced from nvdisp.dll etc).
So in this build Direct3D11 is back as the default choice - but when starting the game via Steam library there will be a popup to optionally start the game using Vulkan. This gives you as a player full control what API to use and is also the approach some other games have opted to do things for now.
Full Changelog
* Added NextGen Soft Shadows
* Adjusted DirectD11 to be primary Windows graphics API and Vulkan being reached by the Steam startup dialog
* Adjusted Healing amount of Small healing Potion to 20% from 10%
* Added graves and additional Healing Small potions to L3.R3 area
* Increased Spider_small amount to 2 from 1 in L1.R1
* Added 4 free-roaming Spider_small's to L1.R2
* Added 2x Spider_Small spawner for L2.M1, second to trigger after opening gates to exit Throne Room
* Fixed audio-cue missing on Secret Wall opening on Level 3
* Fixed a texture-misalignment issue for Secret Wall actor
* Added Candles, lit by distance, next to the tables in L3.R3
KNOWN ISSUES
The reporting-tool is currently limited to 1 report per play-session - depending on size of log and content of the written report-part, a second or third report may be rejected (reported as an error to upload the report). This is known, reproduced and we are looking into solutions for it.