The last patch before the next patch.
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Undead Blackout: Reanimated Edition is currently going through some huge changes in preparation for release on Xbox One. Less on the gameplay side and much more on the polish and optimisation side. This has been sorely lacking for a while now so it is about flippin’ time.
The original plan was just to launch with version 3.0 on PC and Xbox at the same time, but while going through some early optimisations I realised the game runs TERRIBLY on less powerful machines and so felt the need to push out some optimisation gains early for the PC crowd. Frankly, these should have been done ages ago so very much my bad.
This will then be the last patch Undead Blackout: Reanimated Edition receives before the launch of 3.0. Currently, that is planned for very early Autumn.
FULL PATCH NOTES
Adding Culling Volumes to the levels which is weird as they definitely used to be there. Somewhere in the many updates, they disappeared which is a bit of a disaster. A Culling Volume basically removes objects from the game when we don’t need them as the player is far away. The game can save on memory and performance by not rendering a bunch of floor tiles on the opposite side of the map to the player.
Removed Dynamic Shadowing from some foliage because it was causing some enormous hitches on the Xbox. Most notably on the trees, running near to them with your torch on causes the Frame Rate to absolutely die for a period. Changing the settings here has allowed them to be Culled without the Shadow disappearing from the world, which was a temporary issue I had to deal with. Overall, big performance improvement there.
Reduced the number of meshes in each level to save memory. And boy did we save some memory. On all levels, the number of Actors (things in the level) has been reduced by AT LEAST 50%. In some cases, it is well over 75%. This has been done through a combination of merging meshes where appropriate and creating new, larger meshes that are more fit for purpose. The result is less memory usage and far less strain on mid/low-level PCs.
Sewer Level is more claustrophobic now as a result of me making the tunnels a lot tighter. This gives a much better feel to this level and was something I realised while reducing the number of meshes in the level. This is much less to do with performance and much more to do with aesthetics.
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