Improved player and enemy bullet trails and other updates (v1.29.3.4)

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.29.3.4) This is a smaller update that makes a few improvements to enemy bullet tails, including a more consistent animation and improved performance. Previous versions would look just fine at 60fps, but would get distorted when running a framerate above or below that. Now, they look perfectly consistent across any framerate. Also, particular care was put into how the animation works for high refresh rate displays (144+ hz) to make it look as smooth as possible. Optimizations have also been made to significantly reduce the CPU load when many enemy bullets are on screen. This was done by increasing the amount of reused data from previous frames, thus eliminating a significant amount of redundant calculations. Player bullet trails have been improved as well, but the biggest difference there is better particle distribution when running a framerate below 60fps.

Here are the full release notes for v1.29.3.4:

• Greatly improved enemy bullet trail animation consistency across all framerates
  -Used to look best at 60fps, but have distortions above and below 60fps
  
• Added 1 more enemy bullet trail shadow to improve animation smoothness for high refresh rate displays
  -Updated enemy bullet trail detail scaling to maintain the same performance of previous versions
  
• Optimized enemy bullet trail matrix calculations by reusing more temporal data from previous frames
  
• Evened out the player bullet trail particle distribution for framerates above and below 60 fps
  -Makes the biggest difference below 60fps
  -Makes player bullet trails look the same for all framerates
  

Another hotfix update was recently released to fix a few smaller bugs and issues. Here are the hotfix release notes:

• Fixed a bug that wouldn't reset the LevelSelect state when playing an online multiplayer game after previously playing a level select game
  
• Changed the default online multiplayer GameOver menu option for the client player to "Return to lobby", instead of "Disconnect"
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.29.3.4” or above. Enjoy!