BlastZone 2 News

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.33.3.1) This update focuses on bug fixing for the Steam Deck, which is now a supported platform for the game. All known bugs for the Deck being fixed as of the release of this update, but any bug reports will be greatly appreciated. The list of bug fixes include muted sound, frame hitching, and graphic corruption.

With this update, BlastZone 2 works very well on the Deck at max detail. However, the game has yet to be officially verified by Valve, and submissions are not open to all Steam games yet. This game will probably be reviewed by Valve eventually, but unfortunately the timeframe for that is unknown. Until then, feel free to play the game on Deck and have fun!

Some of the bugs fixed may apply to other systems as well, as some of these issues have been reported in the past, but were never reproduced internally until having a Deck on hand to test with.

This update also fixes an occasional hang issue for background explosions, and updates the design of Mission Area 2 and 6. There are a few other smaller changes and tweaks for this release as well. Here are the full release notes for v1.33.3.1:

• Made a few Mission level design changes
  -Slowed down the 2 dueling enemies near the end of the first section of Area 2 by 50%
  -Made a few changes to a section about 1 minute in to Area 6
  --This is the section when enemies come from the front, then quickly swing behind the player to shoot
  --Lengthened this section to be about 3x as long as it used to be
  --Spread out enemy movement here to give the player more space to move
  
• Fixed muted sound issue for the Steam Deck
  -This has also been fixed for some systems that also had this issue
  
• Fixed frame pacing issues for the Steam Deck
  -This has also been fixed for some systems that also had this issue
  
• Removed 2x and 4x Antialiasing settings for the Steam Deck
  -Using these settings would introduce graphic glitches
  --Fixing bugs with these settings would reduce performance, so removing them is preferable for the best experience
  -It is recommended to use 8x Antialiasing for the Steam Deck anyway, and this setting doesn't have graphic glitches
  
• Changed the default "pause" gamepad bind from the "Y" button to the "Start" button
  -Changed this as the in-game default, and for the external config program
  
• Fixed an occasional game hang related to background explosions
  
• Removed sound muting when switching focus to another program
  
• Removed 60fps cap when switching focus to another program
  
• Removed the 16x Antialiasing option for all systems
  -No consumer grade hardware support this anyway
  -The external configuration program was also updated to remove this option
  
• Fixed a blank default "Monitor" value in the external config program
  -Now properly defaults to "Primary"
  
• Fixed sounds not playing for the online multiplayer client if the server has sound volume set to 0
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.33.3.1” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.33.3.0) This update completely reworks how enemy bullets are rendered, greatly improving performance. The most impact will be noticed for the final boss of mission mode, which has the most enemy bullets by far. The amount of performance gained has a wide range, based on CPU speed. The most performance is gained by very slow CPUs, such as dual core netbook-class CPUs, which can be up to 50% or higher for the final boss scene. Moderate to lower end quad core CPUs gain less performance, but still quite substantial, at about 20% or so. The least performance is gained by modern, higher end CPUs with more than 4 cores, which can be around 2-3%.

From these performance gains, enemy bullet trails are now always rendered at full quality, even when numerous bullets are on screen. Previous versions would significantly reduce bullet trail quality for the final mission boss.



This update also adds weapon icons for all ship selection screens, including the single player, local multiplayer, and online lobby screens. These screens have also been rearranged to make use of them better. This makes it much easier to see the kind of weapon loadouts and hyper loadouts each ship has at a glance as you scroll through.



Here are the full release notes for v1.33.3.0:

• Greatly optimized enemy bullets
  -Bullets render over 10x faster now
  -Improves overall performance by up to 50% for specific scenes and PC hardware
  --Highest gain is for the final mission boss
  --Highest gains are for very low end dual-core CPUs (~50%)
  --Good gains for moderate to low end quad-core CPUs (~20%)
  --Small gains for modern or higher core count CPUs (~2-3%)
  
• Enemy bullets now always render at full detail, even when many are on screen
  
• All ship selection screens have been improved
  -Rearranged the layouts
  -Added weapon icons for every loadout
  
• Optimized the player ship booster
  -Improves performance by up to 2-3%
  
• Fixed rendering errors with the OpenGL 1.5 renderer for clouds, water, and some text
  -These issues were introduced in the previous v1.33.2.0 update
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.33.3.0” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.33.2.0) The primary improvement in this update makes the Training Mission mode more accessible for new players by slowing down the gameplay by 25%. This includes enemy spawn timing, movement, firing rates, bullet speed, bosses, and the environment camera. Player ship movement remains the same though. Player testing has been done and this was identified as a key area to help newer players get up to speed on the game. This also helps align the experience with Training mode of other game modes, as they already have a slower gameplay speed.

This update also contains numerous small optimizations around the whole game that amount to roughly a ~1% performance boost. In addition, a lot of work has been done under the hood in the rendering system of the game engine, upgrading how it operates. This allows for the possibility of big new features to be developed in the future, but they will be announced at a later date. The updates done so far will have no noticeable impact when playing the game.

Here are the full release notes for v1.33.2.0:

• Reduced the speed of Training Mission mode by 25%
  -This includes all aspects of mission mode, except for the player ship
  -This affects enemy spawn timing, enemy movement, firing rates, bullet speed, bosses, and the environment camera
  -This was designed to help onboard newer players into the game better
  -Helps newer players get ready for the more advanced difficulty levels
  
• Optimized general performance by up to 1%
  -Implemented a generalized texture batching solution that affects nearly all objects in the game
  -Optimized menu background box rendering
  -General shader setup optimizations
  -Optimizations for background particles
  
• Improved leaderboard score submission security
  
• Overhauled code organization for the game engine rendering system
  -This lays the groundwork for potential big updates in the future
  -This is purely a game engine design upgrade, and doesn't change functionality for the end user yet
  
• Fixed the connection error message for TCP multiplayer, so it now displays correctly when attempting to join a server
  
• More time is now taken when attempting to join a TCP multiplayer serve
  -More reliably determines if a successful connection can be made
  -Retries the connection multiple times before giving up
  
• Improved robustness when starting and stopping a TCP multiplayer game to prevent potential bugs
  
• Fixed a small memory leak when applying new video settings
  
• Fixed a rare crash issue when applying new video settings soon after starting the game
  
• Renamed the "useParticleHelperThreads" config file option to "useParticleAuxThreads"
  -This will reset this option to "Enabled" when first starting the game after updating
  -If it is desired to disable this option, it can be disabled the normal way after updating
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.33.2.0” or higher. Enjoy!

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.33.1.0) This update adds new mouse cursor lock functionality to the A1 ship. This means if mouse controls are used for this ship, it will always be in the precise position the mouse cursor is. In the hands of a skilled player, this allows for a degree of precise movement around bullets and hazards that otherwise was not possible. The reason why only the A1 ship received this upgrade is because of difficulty balancing. The A1 ship has the weakest armor and weapons, but the fastest speed in the game, so it fits this play style. Giving any other ship this capability would break the game. All other ships will continue using their original mouse behavior, which follows the mouse cursor at the highest speed each ship is capable of moving. A new display has been added to the ship selection screen to show which ships support mouse cursor lock or not, but is only shown when mouse controls are enabled.

This update also includes a few rare crash fixes, mouse button fixes, and particle alpha value clamping fixes. Also, there is a general performance uplift of about 1%. More details are listed below in the full change log:

• Added the ability to lock the player ship to the mouse cursor
  -This is currently only enabled for the A1 ship
  -This eliminates the "trailing behind" effect for the ship when quickly moving the mouse cursor around
  
• Added a new text display in the ship selection screen to show which ship uses cursor lock or not
  
• Fixed a few mouse button bugs that would erroneously have buttons stuck in the "down" state in menus
  
• Fixed a rare crash bug related to player bullet deletion
  
• Fixed a rare crash bug when attempting to parse truncated packets in online multiplayer
  
• Fixed occasional particle alpha value clamping issues
  
• Fixed incorrect world leaderboard display in some cases
  
• Optimized general performance by up to 1%
  -Optimized areas that affect most objects in the game, providing a consistent uplift
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.33.1.0” or higher. Enjoy!

A big new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.33.0.0) This update completely reworks all text displays in the game to support localization. Alongside this update, 10 translations are being added to the game, bringing the total to 11. Localization support has been a highly requested feature for a while now, and this will make the game accessible to a much greater audience. It was a huge undertaking to upgrade the underlying engine to support this, as well as all the translation work for each language.

The languages released so far include English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian. More may be released in the future on request. Also, please let me know if errors are found in any of the translations and they will be promptly corrected. A lot of time went into checking over each translation, but it’s possible a few errors got through anyway.

The localization system uses a new discrete language data file that can be updated separately from the main game binary. Translation corrections can be done, and entirely new languages can be added to the game just by updating this file. Updates of this nature can be quickly released, without having to wait for a new stable binary update.

The text rendering system has also been upgraded to support thousands of new characters, including accented characters from European languages, as well as characters from East Asian languages, such as Japanese, or Korean. Previous versions of the game only supported the 128 baseline ASCII character set, which only supported the English language.

Here are the full release notes for v1.33.0.0:

• Added localization support for all text in the game
  -Reworked all text displays in the game to support dynamic replacement based on the selected language
  -Automatically detects the default Steam language to work as the "Default" language setting in-game
  -Additional languages can be added in the future by updating data files without updating the main game executable
  -Translation errors can be quickly corrected without waiting for the next stable binary release
  
• Upgraded the FreeType text rendering system to support UTF-8 character sets
  -Previous versions only supported the 128 character baseline ASCII character set for text
  -Now, up to 65536 unique characters are supported
  -This enables compatibility with translations to numerous other languages
  
• Now supports 11 total languages
  -Current list of languages:
  --English
  --Spanish
  --French
  --Italian
  --German
  --Portuguese
  --Polish
  --Japanese
  --Korean
  --Chinese
  --Russian
  -Users with any of these languages set as their system language will automatically have the localization setting adjusted accordingly
  -Other users who wish to use any of these translations can change it from the options menu, or the external configuration program
  
• Made numerous adjustments around the game for text positioning, sizing, and menu dimensions to fit several potential localizations
  -This includes centering the menu items for several menus and using two menu selector arrows, one on each side
  
• Greatly improved VRAM usage efficiency for the text rendering system to counteract higher memory requirements for supporting more languages
  -Reduces text VRAM usage when using the English language by about 25%
  -Adding support for accented characters for western European translations only adds about 50% more memory usage for the text system
  --This equates to about 2mb more VRAM
  --Without this optimization, supporting these new characters would double text system VRAM usage (8mb total)
  -This saves hundreds of megabytes of VRAM when East Asian languages are used
  -This consists of 3 main optimizations
  --All non-visible glyphs are no longer loaded into VRAM at startup
  --Only glyphs that exist in the loaded TTF file are loaded into VRAM
  --Extended characters are dynamically streamed as they are used, instead of being loaded at startup
  ---This ensures only glyphs for the current language are loaded
  
• Improved performance of all text rendering
  -Up to a 10% rendering performance boost for text
  -This raises overall performance by about 1%
  -This was done by eliminating draw calls for all space ' ' characters
  
• Made a few HUD text adjustments when running the English language
  -Changed the "XX Left" enemy counter to "XX Remaining"
  -Changed "x mult" to "x multiplier"
  
• Made several adjustments to the English language text around the game
  -This includes descriptions, dialog text, etc
  
• Greatly improved background particle spawning performance
  -Has the greatest effect when spawning many background particles per frame (>100)
  -Internal testing shows over a 10x performance improvement in the background particle creation process in some situations
  -Background particles are very rare in this game, so most users won't notice a difference
  
• Improved general particle spawning performance
  -Improves update thread performance by up to 20%
  -Reduces hitching if numerous explosions are set off at the same time, such as completing a level
  
• General robustness improvements have been made to the sound system
  -Prevents a few potential sound-related bugs from occurring in the future
  
• Updated the external config application to handle language changes
  
• Changed the default value of "Display Switch Compatibility" from enabled to disabled
  -This allows display switching to work better for most users
  -This is only needed for one specific system setup:
  --Using a secondary display when connecting a laptop to an external monitor while using a hybrid passthrough display
  
• Swapped menu item locations of "Online (TCP)" and "Online (Steam)" in the multiplayer selection menu
  -This makes the menu item order more intuitive; in priority order
  -New item order:
  --Local
  --Online (Steam) - This is the best option for most users, so it is more prominent now
  --Online (UDP) - This is the next best online option, should only be used if unable to connect to Steam
  --Online (TCP) - This is a last resort option if unable to connect to Steam and the connection quality is very poor, causing bugs in UDP
  
• Updated the Leaderboard Submission/Download process to eliminate all drive usage
  -Previous versions would download sever data to local files, then read those files
  -Now, all server data is downloaded into system memory, then directly used from there
  -This improves performance of all Leaderboard-related operations
  
• Added a countermeasure to prevent game-breaking bugs if the update thread becomes overloaded
  -This issue was never reproduced under normal conditions, but was technically possible
  
• Fixed a bug in the online server lobby screen that would erroneously display only the second player ship when the second player hasn't joined yet
  -this would occur after previously playing a local coop game with the mouse as the second player controller
  
• Fixed some wave intermission text not being displayed when completing wave 8 of Classic A Training mode
  
• Fixed a rare multithreading crash bug in the particle system
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.33.0.0” or higher. Enjoy!