BlastZone 2 News

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!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2. (v1.36.3.0) This update adds high frequency update support! This means, even if the game is running at 60fps, the game input and simulation could be running at up to 200hz. This allows for the responsiveness of a high refresh rate display without the need for one. This is similar to other low latency technologies, such as Reflex or Anti-Lag, but this is a single solution effective across all graphics vendors. Other game engines require synchronizing input and simulation updates with the render frame rate, but the BlastZone 2 game engine has been architected in a unique way. It allows for the rendering and input/simulation systems to run completely asynchronously from each other, making high frequency updates possible.

This is an exciting new technology, and I can’t wait to hear about everyone’s experience with it!

This update also includes a few bug fixes. Here are the full release notes for v1.36.3.0:

• Added support for independent update rates from the frame rate
  -Allows for running the game/simulation update at a much higher frequency than the frame rate
  -Allows for snappier, more precise controls, even for low frame rates
  -If the frame rate exceeds the target update rate, the update rate will dynamically increase as well to prevent duplicate frames
  --The target update rate acts as an update floor, only taking effect for frame rates below it
  -Defaults to a 60hz update rate, but can be adjusted in the range of 30-200hz
  -In previous versions, enabling game update multithreading had a small latency penalty in exchange for higher performance
  --Running a higher update rate allows for having the performance benefits of multithreading, with lower latency at the same time
  
• Doubled bullet firing density for the Boss 4 first bullet firing pattern
  -Addresses a safe area exploit that made this area too easy in previous versions
  
• Added an "MSAA" suffix to all applicable antialiasing settings
  
• Fixed bugs that would occasionally make the player ship too large or too bright during level intro/flyin animations
  
• Fixed broken enemy bullet rendering when disabling the VBO render code path
  
• Slightly optimized enemy bullet rendering
  
• Updated the external configuration program to support the new UpdateRate setting
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.36.3.0” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.36.2.0) This update focuses on multithreading improvements, and a few performance improvements. This includes reduced frame hitches, up to 10-25% particle system performance gains from improved memory bandwidth efficiency, and a general 10% performance gain from adding support for SIMD FMA cpu instructions.

Here are the full release notes for v.1.36.2.0:

• Most of the advanced multithreading options can now be applied without restarting the game
  -This includes the following options:
  --Game Update Multithreading
  --Particle Multithreading
  --Auxiliary Particle Threads
  -Core elements of multithreading management were updated to make this possible
  -The "Sound Multithreading" option still requires a game restart at this time
  
• Improved thread management of the particle system
  -More of the startup loading process is done asynchronously, slightly improving the game startup time
  -Reduced frame hitching when many particles are on screen
  
• Optimized memory bandwidth performance for the particle system
  -Results in up to a 10-25% particle update performance gain
  -Greatly cut down on memory fragmentation
  
• Added support for SIMD FMA CPU instructions
  -Improves general performance by up to 10% for CPU's that support these instructions
  -Matrix multiply operations on the CPU side benefit the most from this, being over 100x faster
  -Uses an SSE2 fallback for older CPUs that don't support these instructions
  
• Enabled anisotropic filtering for several HUD elements and sprites to improve sharpness of them
  
• A few small optimizations to render matrix calculations
  
• Small optimizations to localization text data management
  
• Fixed a few potential bugs
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.36.2.0” or higher. Enjoy!

This is a small update that makes the following changes:

-Cleaned up a few unused data files
-Added particle aux thread runtime readouts for the ingame debug display

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.36.1.1) This update makes several improvements to the 2nd person shooter sequence in Mission Mode Area 5, including fixing enemy bullet bugs, and fixed effect alignment and timing. This gives an overall more polished sequence as you dodge from enemy fire, while you’re in their sights!

Here are the full release notes for v.1.36.1.1:

Improved enemy bullet firing behavior for the 2nd person enemy in Mission Mode Area 5
-Fixed alignment issue between the "charge up" animations and fired bullets from the enemy
-Slightly reduced the enemy bullet speed in this sequence
-Improved timing for charging/firing bullet events, improving animation smoothness
Improved enemy tracking bullet behavior for varying framerates
Fixed incorrect Z tracking behavior for tracking enemy bullets
-This is most noticeable for the 2nd person sequence in Mission Area 5
-This makes each tracking bullet enter the gameplay plane multiple times
Fixed some stationary enemy bullets disappearing too quickly
-Also fixed these bullets quickly shrinking after being fired, even when they are supposed to increase in size
-Many of these bullets are used in the 2nd person shooter scene
Fixed a 'divide by zero' bug when spacer sections are used for enemy firing scripts
-These are generally used when there is a long waiting period between enemy bullet firing
-Generally applies to bosses and mini-bosses

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.36.1.1” or higher. Enjoy!