Update 171: Performance Upgrades - Released!

Hello everyone,

Today we’re happy to be bringing you alpha update 171 of War of Rights, bringing in some much needed optimization upgrades, resulting in quite a performance boost for a number of hardware configurations running the game!

The CPU is the primary benefactor of this update. This means that any system that might be having a slower CPU (processor) than GPU (graphics card) is likely to see a performance increase due to the bottleneck of the CPU. The improvements come from a fairly wide range of changes that all work together to improve the performance:

- Updating various subsystems of characters are now being started earlier in the frame in one big batch for all characters. Previously, the updating of each character was scattered all across the entire frame. This helps significantly reduce the overhead of starting each subsequent threaded job related to character processing and thus helps significantly improve the performance.

- Characters are now skipping animation updates when they are far away from the camera. The amount of frames the animations skip, depends on the characters distance to the camera. This in effect means that at a distance, the animations on characters might look like they are lagging, it has been set up to first take effect at a fairly long range where it’s really difficult to actually notice the animation lag while still contributing a fair amount to improved performance.

- We now hide various character parts at various distances. The distance at which we hide a particular part depends on the size of the part. For instance the small brass belt buckle gets hidden fairly close to the camera where the backpack is one of the very last things we hide at long range. The character’s trousers, jacket and head will always remain visible. This helps significantly reduce the amount of drawcalls each character adds to the overall rendered scene as well as reduce the amount of transforms that constantly needs to be updated for every little part of each character.

- Player characters are now being hidden when they are not visible on the screen. This allows the engine to stop updating a lot of unnecessary elements on the players that are off screen and as you rarely have every single player visible in your current view, this helps improve the performance.

We have monitored a number of in-house systems as well as user feedback from the public test branch running the performance upgrades these past few weeks and have generally seen gains ranging from excellent to hardly any at all (due to whether the CPU is a bottleneck of the particular system or not).

One of our machines consisting of a 2080ti GPU and an i9 9900K CPU running the game with “very high” settings in 1080p saw a benchmark average frame rate increase from 52,5 to 66,2 running the new performance upgrades. That’s a 34,8% performance increase.

Some of the changes for the performance improvements have however been quite invasive and did result in a few bugs of which most have been fixed. Expect fixes for the remaining issues in the upcoming updates.

We have added an initial implementation of Playfab which will later be used to integrate the Company Tool into the game itself. For the foreseeable future the features it will add will be of the behind the scenes type of features. For instance, it will post an entry in the database whenever a game client gets involuntarily disconnected from the server and what the cause for the disconnect was. It will also post the benchmark results as well as a very basic listing of the graphics settings and current hardware setup.

The update also includes a number of other needed bug fixes to issues primarily introduced in the platform system update as well as a few new content additions as well. You can read the patch notes below:

- Reworked Miller’s Cornfield, Antietam. You will notice a new layout of pockets of trampled corn compared to the old area’s setup. It is also no longer possible to trick the corn stalks to vanish in order to gain a clear view of the enemy.
- Fixed an issue with the artillery spawn points on Miller’s Cornfield, Antietam.
- Updated the Saint Peter’s Church model, Harpers Ferry.
- Updates to all skirmish area boundary logic in an effort to reduce or remove various desertion issues upon spawning in.
- Made corpses display at longer distances.
- Fixed the stamina breathing sounds sometimes playing in the main menu after having left a server.
- Fixed the sprint button sometimes getting stuck ON when vaulting.
- Players can now freelook and chat during the vaulting animation.
- Allowed the artillery to set their fuze timer to half a second instead of clamping it at 1 second which helps them make the shell explode at closer targets.
- Fixed a miscalculation with the fuze timer when aiming at a very close target.
- Fixed a single frame A pose when a character starts aiming with the revolver when moving.
- Optimized the remaining cornfields of the game.
- Cox’s Push skirmish area, South Mountain detail work updates.
- The underwater bloodpool particle effect now correctly spawns once again.
- Added cornfield footstep sounds.
- Removed initial delay on third person gunshot sounds in an effort to debug why some of the gunshot sounds seem to be triggering at a delayed fashion.
- School House Ridge, Maryland Heights & Bolivar Heights camp, Harpers Ferry detail work.
- Removed the regimental flag of the 42nd PA as our studies indicate that the unit was unlikely to field such a flag during the Maryland Campaign of 1862.
- Added or updated the following new battle flags to the game:

• 8th Alabama national
  
• 65th Illinois regimental
  
• 1st Maryland PHB national
  
• 1st Maryland PHB regimental
  
• 3rd Maryland PHB national
  
• 3rd Maryland PHB regimental
  
• 114th Pennsylvania regimental
  

- Added a darker, varnished flag pole variant into the mix.
- Added the first implementation of specific specular maps for the battle flags depending on whether they are silk or a wool-cotton blend to better visually differ their materials. In the future this will be expanded in order to make the specular qualities of the paint on the silken flags appear different (much flatter) than the non-painted silken parts (much more shiny).
- The flags raised at the infantry drill camps are now dynamic. They will change to the battle flags of whichever regiment most players in the level have spawned as soldiers of. Note that all sizes of battle flags displayed at the flagpoles of the infantry drill camps from our many featured regiments will currently default to a rectangular shape for the time being.
- Detail work to the fields where the union spawns at the Garland’s Stand skirmish area, South Mountain. The stonewall separating the field from forest now has more holes in order for the union artillery pieces to be easier pushed towards the enemy.
- Fixed the missing CSA flag texture projected above the top of the players when spectating.
- Minor stonewall work, Anderson’s Counterattack skirmish area, South Mountain.
- Artillery crews & their officers can now no longer pick up fallen infantry flags.





War of Rights is currently on offer at a 50% discount at the Steam Lunar New Year Sale! With today’s performance updates & sale there has never been a better time for new players to give the alpha a try. You can grab a copy for yourself or your friends at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/424030/War_of_Rights/
We hope you’ll all welcome the fresh recruits in the ranks and we look forward to seeing you all on the fields of glory!

That’s all for now. Until next time, have a good one!