BlastZone 2 News

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2. (v1.32.3.5) This is a maintenance release that makes a few technical improvements to the game engine.

Terrain loading speed on startup has been improved, primarily for running the game from a mechanical hard drive. The biggest difference can be noticed for VeryHigh and Extreme terrain detail.

For more details, here are the full release notes for v1.32.3.5:

• Optimized background particles CPU load
  -Improves CPU-side performance by up to 38%
  --Combines multiple particle update operations into a single pass
  --The main game doesn't use background particles, so most users won't see a difference in performance
  -Does not affect foreground particles (explosions, bullet trails, etc)
  
• Improved terrain loading speed on startup for mechanical hard drives
  -Makes the biggest difference for VeryHigh and Extreme detail terrain
  
• Fixed a rare issue when the startup loading bar or score uploading bar may briefly not display the correct fill value
  

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.32.3.5” or higher. Enjoy!

The world leaderboards are now fully functional again! Apologies for any inconvenience, as they were down for a while following a server migration. All score data has been fully recovered as well.

Please note, this is a server-side fix and does not require a game client update to work.

PS: I've noticed a number of players have surpassed me (EagleEye) in the leaderboards! I accept the challenge, and will be working hard to regain those top spots! ;)

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!