BlastZone 2 News

[p]A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v.1.38.0.0)  This update improves motion fluidity for all objects in the game, including the player, enemies, bosses, projectiles, terrain, and more!  This also makes the game feel more snappy and responsive while the frame rate is fluctuating.[/p][p][/p][p]The purpose of motion smoothing is to even out position deltas of objects between frames, because when a frame hitch occurs, the larger gap in object positions after the hitch is more noticeable than the frame hitch itself.  Now, the drawbacks of doing this are completely gone![/p][p][/p][p]The time distortion issue of motion smoothing calculations has been fixed, using much tighter timings than before.  This would manifest in slight speedups and slowdowns in object movement during fluctuating frame rates.  Refinements have been made so all object motion is integral-correct as well, improving the accuracy of object velocity and acceleration.  This improves the consistency of object movement and improves control responsiveness.  Also, motion smoothing is now applied at all frame rates, including high refresh rate displays.  It was previously limited to 60fps or below to mitigate side effects.[/p][p][/p][p]Here are the full release notes for v1.38.0.0:[/p]

• [p]Greatly improved the motion smoothing system, affecting everything in the game[/p][p]-This system is used to smooth out the appearance of frame hitches by seamlessly transitioning time deltas between frame updates[/p][p]-The time distortion issue for fluctuating frame rates has been resolved by tightening up evaluated frame samples to only neighboring frames[/p][p]-Motion smoothing is now applied to all frame rates, including high refresh rate displays[/p][p]--Previous versions only supported motion smoothing up to 60fps to prevent worse time distortion issues at high frame rates[/p][p]-Refinements have been made to ensure integral-correct time updates, improving the accuracy of object movement, including acceleration and velocity updates[/p][p]-Tightens up control responsiveness of the player ship, particularly during fluctuating frame rates[/p][p]-Improves motion consistency and fluidity for all objects in the game, including:[/p][p]--Player ship(s)[/p][p]--Player projectiles[/p][p]--Enemy ships[/p][p]--Enemy projectiles[/p][p]--Bosses[/p][p]--Item pickups[/p][p]--Terrain movement[/p][p]--Water ripple movement[/p][p]--All particle movement[/p][p]--Camera movement[/p][p]--Client side prediction for online multiplayer[/p]
• [p]Moved all player ship and boss matrix calculations from the render thread to the update thread[/p][p]This significantly improves cpu thread workload balancing, improving overall performance[/p][p]A substantial rework of the player ship handling code in particular was required to make this possible[/p][p][/p]

[p]As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.38.0.0” or higher.  Enjoy![/p]

[p]A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.37.2.1) This update fixes a potential crash bug for CPUs that support the FMA3 optimized code path, as well as an optimization for that code path that results in a ~1% gain in overall performance. This update also prioritizes high performance discrete graphics hardware for laptops using a hybrid graphics setup. Previously, some laptops would erroneously use the slower iGPU, which would greatly reduce game performance.

A broken install issue has been resolved for some users who purchased Steam keys from outside Steam. The 64bit binaries are now part of the primary Steam repo, so all users will have them by default, unless 32 bit binaries are needed instead. Previously, both the 64bit and 32bit binaries existed in secondary repos, and some users who purchased Steam keys outside of steam wouldn't have access to those repos, making the game unable to launch. This issue has now been resolved, apologies for the inconvenience!

All high quality terrain DLC has been merged into the primary repo, so the "VeryHigh" and "Extreme" quality terrain settings are always available now. These DLC packages have always been free, but were made as optional downloads to cut down on drive space, and using them had high system requirements at the time of release. However, since those DLC packages were released, the assets have been updated to use a new compressed format that greatly reduces drive usage, and have been greatly optimized so they run fast on the vast majority of systems. Some users also didn't know to download the DLC, so having it part of the main repo makes the process more convenient when downloading a new install of the game. The total game size with all content downloaded is now ~500mb, which is reasonable for modern systems. The high quality DLC repos still exist, but they are empty now. This is to ensure migration compatibility for now, but they may be removed in the future.[/p][p][/p][p]UPDATE: The leaderboards server went down recently, but it has now been restored! Apologies for the inconvenience![/p][p][/p][p]Here are the full release notes for v1.37.2.1: [/p]

• [p]Game rendering now prioritizes high performance discrete graphics hardware for laptops with a hybrid graphics setup
  -This greatly improves performance for hybrid graphics laptops
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed a potential crash bug when running on CPUs supporting FMA3 instructions
  [/p]
• [p]Improved performance for all matrix operations
  -Eliminated a data copy operation for all matrix transformations, including translation, rotation, and scaling
  -Only affects the FMA3 CPU code path
  -Improves overall performance by ~1%
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed screen fade out animations occasionally being skipped or played too fast
  [/p]

[p]As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.37.2.1” or higher. Enjoy![/p]

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.37.2.0) This significantly improves vertex transfer performance for several areas of the game. This includes all particles, bullets, HUD elements, menus, text, clouds, water, beams, and more. This results in better overall performance, and reduced hitching, especially on older or slower hardware.

Here are the full release notes for v1.37.2.0:

• Improved the performance of vertex data streaming
  -Reduces hitching and slightly improves overall performance
  -Has a more noticeable effect on older, slower systems
  -Affects several systems and effects, including:
  -Clouds
  -Enemy bullets
  -Text
  -HUD
  -Meter bars
  -Particles
  -Beam weapon animations
  -Water animation
  -Title screen animation
  
• Slightly optimized gamepad input handling
  
• Slightly optimized spatial audio positioning calculations
  
• Improved the cleanup process for game threads when shutting down the game
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.37.2.0” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.37.1.0) This upgrades the particle system to support a 2-pass approach to particle rendering. What this means is, most particle effects now share a unified alpha channel, and separate the alpha render pass from the color render pass. This allows most particle effects, such as enemy explosions, to maintain their ‘melding together’ effect of adjacent particles, while also being more prominent from the background. The previous additive-only particles would sometimes get blown out or lost in bright backgrounds, or colors closely matching the color of the particles. This new approach leverages multicore CPUs to neutralize much of the increased workload, resulting in only a minor net increase in particle processing time. The rendering side does have an increased load, but is still low enough overall that virtually all systems won’t see a slowdown.

A few bug fixes and optimizations are included in this update as well. Here are the full release notes for v1.37.1.0:

• Upgraded the particle system to support 3 categories of particles; Additive, Subtractive, and Sorted
  -The new category introduced is Subtractive
  -Mirroring particles in both the Additive and Subtractive categories can be used to improve particle image quality
  --Doing this melds together unified color/alpha channels for groups of adjacent particles, while keeping them prominent from the background
  --This works great for volumetric effects, such as explosions
  --This prevents the particle colors from getting washed out when used with certain backgrounds
  -The particle multithreading system has been extended to run the new Subtractive particle category in parallel with other categories of particles
  --This allows CPUs with 4 or more cores to run the additional load with minimal performance loss
  
• Upgraded several particle effects to take advantage of the upgraded particle system, using the new melded/unified approach to alpha channels
  -Enemy explosions
  -Boss explosions
  -Bullet trails
  -Bullet impacts
  -Bullet firing
  -Attaining charge levels
  -Holding charge levels
  -Item pickups
  -Final player death
  -Enemies impacting the mother ship in Classic modes
  
• Fixed the cloud unlock data getting reset when starting the game from a fresh new install
  
• Fixed the autoplay demo from always using the Homeworld background
  
• Fixed the autoplay demo from erroneously using music from the selected background, now maintains the menu music as intended
  
• Optimized all non-gameplay states of the game by eliminating elements of gameplay rendering that are not needed in these cases
  -Improves performance by up to 5% in these cases
  
• Improved accuracy of render thread time readouts when showing debug frame stats
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.37.1.0” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.37.0.0) Substantial upgrades have been made to the OpenAL sound system for this update. This includes 3D positional sound sources, tracking object movement for attached sounds, and remastered sound assets that are compatible with the new system. Also, surround sound speaker support has been added, but all the action is in front of the camera. Sound source velocity and doppler effect support has been added to the sound system as well, but are not utilized yet.

This update also dramatically cuts down on disk space usage, bringing the maximum install size from 1.4GB down to about 530MB. The greatest disk space savings is for when all high detail terrain DLC is installed. This was accomplished by taking full advantage of custom built asset compression formats for the game engine, and maintains identical quality for all assets in the game.

This update also includes many other improvements, a few bug fixes, and optimizations. Here are the full release notes for v1.37.0.0:

• Added support for 3D sound positioning
  -This affects all sounds generated by the player, enemies, bosses, or item pickups
  -These sounds will spatially blend between stereo speakers based on the in-game position of the sound
  -Surround sound speaker systems are technically supported, but are not utilized because sound producing objects are never behind the game camera
  -Also supports moving sounds, including tracking the player ship's position while charging up a power shot
  -Supports sound velocity and doppler effects, but these are not utilized yet
  -All applicable sound assets have been downsampled from stereo to mono to be compatible with positional sound
  -Numerous sound assets had their volume levels increased or reduced to work better with positional sound
  -Several sounds, including menu actions, screen wipes, and bonus feedback are not affected by this upgrade, and will maintain their non-positional stereo mastered playback
  -Much of the OpenAL sound system and data pipeline was upgraded to support positional data attached to sounds and handle the playback of that data
  
• Reduced baseline volume for all music and sound playback
  -Is now at 1/5th the volume it was originally
  -This brings the overall volume of the game closer to most other games at default settings
  
• Improved high frequency update support
  -Improved timing of each update subcycle
  -Evened out the simulation delta of each subcycle
  -Fixed a rare stutter issue for heavy update workloads
  -Increased the update rate limit from 200 up to 800
  
• Slowed down all exploder and cluster projectile explosion progression by about 50% to boost their effectiveness for groups of enemies
  
• Improved the wave intermission blastoff animation
  -The player ship now flies further in the distance before the screen wipe
  -The whole animation now lasts about 1 more second
  -The screen wipe duration has been extended so it is less abrupt
  -The blastoff sound effect now fades out as the screen wipe occurs
  -The next level now always loads when the screen wipe is at full opacity, ensuring a seamless transition
  
• Replaced the menu selector movement sound with a new sound asset
  
• Tightened up the Flurry Shot bullet trail particle effects
  -Condensed the particles closer to each bullet, to make it clearer where each bullet is
  
• Slightly optimized player bullet particle trail cpu usage
  
• Lengthened the particle bullet trails of slow moving player bullets, such as burst shot projectiles
  
• Increased the size and length of exploder projectile particle trails
  
• Added a "/10" suffix to music and sound volume config options
  
• Choosing the "Ship Selection" option from the gameover screen now switches to the menu music
  
• Fixed a bug that wouldn't properly stop charging sounds when both players charge at the same time during a multiplayer game
  
• Fixed a bug what wouldn't stop charging sounds for the final player death animation in a single player game
  
• Fixed burst fire enemy bullets not playing sounds for Survival and Blitz modes
  
• Fixed some single fire enemy bullets not playing sounds for Survival and Blitz modes
  
• Fixed incorrectly rendered particle trails for exploder projectiles fired by the player
  
• Fixed an occasional music playback stutter when starting a new Area/Wave in a new environment
  
• Fixed an occasional enemy bullet flicker issue when running high update rates, or for slow CPUs
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.37.0.0” or higher. Enjoy!