BlastZone 2 News

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.32.3.4) This makes a few improvements to sound system multithreading, including a new sound event handling system. This fixes many very rare crash issues and rare missed sound events. These issues may have never been seen by most players, and required very specific timing of thread collisions, but have now been addressed.

This update also improves the dialog box scripting system. The effects of this aren’t noticeable when playing the game, but makes it easier to adjust dialog boxes from a development standpoint. Also, loading bars have been completely reworked, improving progress smoothing, rendering performance, and being better designed so more improvements could be made in the future with less effort.

For more details, here are the full release notes for v1.32.3.4:

• Reworked the way sound system events are handled
  -Fixes very rare crash bugs related to audio multithreading
  -Fixes very rare instances of sounds not playing
  
• Updated dialog box script file format
  -Uses slightly less disk space
  -Makes it quicker and easier to change dialog text
  
• Reworked loading bars
  -Improved smoothing of loading bar progress
  -Optimized rendering and multithreading support
  -Applies to the game startup loading bar and the leaderboard score uploading bar
  -Unifies all loading bar logic to prevent bugs and makes it easier to make more improvements in the future
  
• Added antialiasing to the startup loading screen and the leaderboard score uploading bar
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.32.3.4” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.32.3.3) This makes a few improvements to the particle system, including a fix for occasional explosion particle flickers. Also, the maximum CPU cores/threads supported by the particle system has been raised from 16 to 128. This allows the particle system to take full advantage of any consumer CPU available. The previous cap was set to prevent bugs before the big particle system upgrade in the v1.32.0.0 release. Extra time for testing was taken since then to ensure stability before increasing the cap.

This update also makes improvements to the texture loader, now supporting full texture format autodetection. For more details, here are the full release notes for v1.32.3.3:

• Fixed occasional flickering explosion particles
  
• Increased the particle system CPU core/thread limit from 16 to 128
  -The particle system now fully scales to 64 core, 128 thread cpus if available
  -Older versions had bugs with using more than 16 threads, but improvements from v1.32.0.0 fixed them
  -Extra time was taken to test high thread counts to ensure stability
  
• Added support for automatic compressed texture format detection
  -Allows for swapping out compressed textures of different formats without needing to update the game executable
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.32.3.3” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.32.3.2) This is a smaller update that improves enemy bullet rendering and a few other adjustments. Occasional Z clipping issues for background enemy bullets have been fixed, and the front of bullets have been made more prominent.

This update also improves the final player death red screen fade. For more details, here are the full release notes for v1.32.3.2:

• Fixed occasional Z clipping issues for enemy bullets in the background
  
• Made the front of enemy bullets more prominent than the tail to improve visibility
  
• Fixed the final player death red screen fade not affecting enemy bullets, particles, or the HUD
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.32.3.2” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.32.3.1) This is a smaller update that makes a few improvements to the player ship booster. The way the booster is rendered has been improved to both fix occasional Z clipping artifacts and slightly improve performance.

Here are the full release notes for v1.32.3.1:

• Fixed occasional Z clipping artifacts for the player ship booster
  
• Slightly optimized player ship booster rendering
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.32.3.1” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.32.3.0) This adds a new “Desktop” resolution option to the game, supporting any resolution not previously listed as a discrete option. This is done by matching the current desktop resolution and automatically adding black bars for any non-16:9 aspect ratio. This also allows support for vertically oriented displays while in fullscreen mode.

This update also changes the default resolution to “Desktop”, making the first time running the game more seamless. All the performance optimizations made over the years should make the game run well at the desktop resolution for the vast majority of systems.

Here are the full release notes for v1.32.3.0:

• Added a new "Desktop" resolution option
  -This auto detects the resolution to run the game at depending on what the current desktop resolution is
  -This allows for running the game at any resolution not previously supported as a discrete option
  -This also allows for running the game in fullscreen mode for vertically oriented displays
  -Any resolution that doesn't use a 16:9 aspect ratio will automatically have black bars applied to it
  
• Changed the default resolution option to "Desktop"
  -This provides the best display compatibility by default when first starting the game after a fresh install
  
• Updated the external configuration program to include the new "Desktop" resolution option
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.32.3.0” or higher. Enjoy!