Massive performance gains and greater view distances! (v1.31.3.0)
A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.31.3.0) This update makes huge performance gains, one of the biggest improvements seen in a single update. Gains range from 15-25% when using lower terrain detail levels, up to 50-60% for Extreme detail settings. This significantly lowers the hardware requirements; If anyone had performance issues with the “VeryHigh” or “Extreme” terrain settings in previous versions, I strongly suggest trying them out again with this new release. This improvement was done by adding lower detail terrain block LODs for areas far in the distance. This has a minor reduction in image quality, but won’t be noticeable in most situations.
This huge boost in performance was also used to increase the view distance for all ViewDistance detail levels. This increases detail for the VeryHigh setting by about 20%, while still having big performance gains over previous versions.
The drawback of this update is more memory usage and a greater workload during the startup loading screen. System ram usage will increase by up to 25mb and vram by 75mb, but any machine that could already run the game should have no issue with this. Also, the startup loader has been improved to scale up to more cpu cores/threads to take on the increased workload, making the increase in loading time negligible in most situations.
There are a few bug fixes as well. For more details, here are the full release notes for v1.31.3.0:
As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.31.3.0” or above. Enjoy!
This huge boost in performance was also used to increase the view distance for all ViewDistance detail levels. This increases detail for the VeryHigh setting by about 20%, while still having big performance gains over previous versions.
The drawback of this update is more memory usage and a greater workload during the startup loading screen. System ram usage will increase by up to 25mb and vram by 75mb, but any machine that could already run the game should have no issue with this. Also, the startup loader has been improved to scale up to more cpu cores/threads to take on the increased workload, making the increase in loading time negligible in most situations.
There are a few bug fixes as well. For more details, here are the full release notes for v1.31.3.0:
- Added support for terrain model LODs to greatly improve performance
-Uses lower detail models for terrain far in the distance
--Has a small reduction in image quality, but in most cases it is barely noticable
-Improves performance by up to 50-60% over previous versions
--Lower terrain detail levels have about a 15-25% boost
--Higher detail levels have the greatest boost - The startup loader now scales up to 9 cpu threads if available
-These additional threads load terrain LODs in parallel
-This does not reduce the overall loading time, only loads more data in the same amount of time
-CPUs with 9 threads or more will see no increase in loading time
-CPUs with 6-8 threads will only take slightly longer to load, and will have a higher and more consistent workload across all available threads
-CPUs with 4 threads or less will take longer to load now
--Previous versions already saturated all 4 threads, and there is a larger amount of data to load now
--Loading times should only increase by a few seconds at most
-For reference, previous versions scaled up to 6 cores/threads - Increased the view distance for all ViewDistance settings
-Increased the "VeryHigh" setting by 20%
--This slightly reduces performance, but overall performance is still much higher from previous versions from the LOD optimizations
-Each of the other settings are equivalent to one setting higher from the previous version
--"High" is equivalent to the "VeryHigh" setting from previous versions
--"Normal" is equivalent to the "High" setting from previous versions
--"Low" is equivalent to the "Normal" setting from previous versions - Fixed the Outer Space background not rendering correctly when using the "Low" ViewDistance setting
- Fixed some screen elements and objects not rendering correctly for low/normal view distance settings on some hardware/driver combinations
-Transition screen wipes and fades
-Final player death red screen fade
-Ship select stat bars
-Distant background color for the cave environment
As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.31.3.0” or above. Enjoy!