Windward Horizon News

- Created an optimized way of the water shader rendering up to 64 lights with one draw call, so explosions will no longer drastically affect performance.
- Day/night transition performance optimizations.
- Lighthouses will now have a slightly lower performance cost during the day.
- Fixed provincial town inventory size not being based on the size of the town.
- Added 12 more sail patterns.
- Various changes related to raid support, such as the ability to set the respawn timer and the new cultist faction.
- Fog now affects sight range by default, matching the night time sight range.
- It's now dangerous to use grog on tentacles.
- If faction rep ranks aren't specified explicitly, they will now have reduced rep requirements for solo challenge campaigns (1000 rep for rank 3 instead of 2500, for example).
- Ship (Ship Names.txt) and town names (Town Names.txt), as well as pirate phrase translator files (Pirate Phrases.txt) can now be included in mods.
- Fixed the missing resolution choices on macbook devices above M1 by adding them manually.
- The resolution size selection will now persist properly on macbooks.

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- Player ship will no longer save until after it successfully spawns. So if some odd issue occurs where player fails to spawn, game will no longer save at all.
- Province names will now generate with 2 syllables first before falling back to 3.
- Made the screen shake much more subtle and less jarring.
- Reverted the change that made explosion sounds too quiet.
- Fixed one dialog branch in the Alvana/Rowdy conversation that was blocking the ability to confront Alvana, thus always leading to a bad outcome.
- Fixed the night sight value not saving properly in world options.
- Fixed the erroneous tower/lighthouse placement bug.

- You can now encounter signs of the upcoming raid boss out in the world. I recommend caution.
- Added an optional camera screen shake effect when firing volleys, mortars, colliding with ships or receiving a lot of damage.
- Night-time performance optimizations.
- You can now edit player pref values directly via /set key = value. For example: /set resolution = "1280x800", or /set screenShakeStrength = 0.25
- Being near a light now shares unit sight with others, so using skills like Taunt counters night time's sight reduction and sight sharing penalty temporarily.
- Night sight range is now configurable in world options.
- Fixed the holding shift while placing towers not working as intended. It will now correctly prevent you from placing a tower if it's not max size for this region.
- If a resolution is requested via -screen-width and -screen-height command-line arguments, it will now always be shown as one of the possible choices on the list of available resolutions in options.
- Fixed the skybox star texture being sampled incorrectly.
- More Steam Deck compliance changes, chasing that elusive Steam Deck Verified mark.
- Some platforms appear to not have a list of possible resolutions when queried by Unity (for example M2 Macbook Airs). As a work-around, I now manually add the native resolution and its half size.

[p]July brought a quieter patch cycle as I focused on improving core systems and prepping for major upcoming content, but it wasn’t without some big updates.[/p][p]The biggest addition this month was the introduction of optional nighttime, along with new world visual settings, better performance with reflections disabled by default, and improved UI and visibility systems. I've also added more anti-aliasing options, fixed lingering issues with ship swapping and continued improving the world map's dynamic features.[/p][p]Here’s what that shipped in July:[/p][h3]Patch Notes [/h3]

• [p]Added an optional night time to the game. It can be turned on via world options.[/p]
• [p]Added new options to world options: day length. This is only visual, and is separate from the in-game day duration (which is always 6 minutes).[/p]
• [p]Unified game's day length and visible day length to match one another. Before they did not.[/p]
• [p]Various effects now provide night-time light sources, even if only temporarily (explosions, fireworks, grog, etc)[/p]
• [p]Fixed the town UI's player inventory becoming invisible after swapping ships with inventory open.[/p]
• [p]Ships won't share sight at night (unless they are near a light).[/p]
• [p]Sight distance is reduced at night.[/p]
• [p]Added the ability to ask in town gossip for "story" to see if anyone in the world needs to speak with the player.[/p]
• [p]If reflections are turned off, they will still render the skybox to fix water reflections at night.[/p]
• [p]Wind particles will no longer be affected by the wind past a certain distance from the player, saving a bit of performance.[/p]
• [p]Added more anti-aliasing options, including temporal AA.[/p]
• [p]If holding shift while building a tower, only allow the largest possible tower to be built.[/p]

[hr][/hr][h3]Looking Ahead ːsteamthisː[/h3][p]Next month is shaping up to be the biggest yet. New raid content is in the works, and I'll be sharing details very soon. Thanks to everyone who has been submitting bug reports and feedback; it has helped guide every step.[/p][p]Until then, enjoy the calm waters... while they last.[/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p]