Avorion News

[h2]Simfest 2023 is happening and Avorion is part of it![/h2]

We are thrilled to announce that Avorion will be part of Simfest – the Steam festival celebrating all things related to simulation games: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/simfest

From today through the 24th of July, 10 am PDT 2023, you can save 40% off all Avorion DLCs. In addition to that, you will also be able to experience some of the latest and greatest simulation titles and see what the future holds for the simulation genre with coming soon games. From simulators that cover hobbies you would love to experience to job simulators that revolve around your dream career (even out-of-this-world ones), Simfest will feature a wide variety of titles in the genre.

Simfest is a Steam festival co-hosted by Auroch Digital and Stray Fawn Studio. This year’s event will be the second Simfest, after Simfest: Hobby Edition took place in 2022. Join Avorion and many other incredible simulation games in Simfest 2023. We hope to see you there!

[h2]Future Updates[/h2]
In addition to all DLCs being discounted, we also have news on future updates that we're working on! We'll reveal more about those very soon, so stay tuned!

Hey Space Pilots! 🚀

After all the battles, farming, building, and exploring, we got some exciting news to share with you!

Avorion will be participating in the Steam Summer Sale this holiday with an astronomical 50% discount! Make sure to check it out, this is something you don’t want to miss!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/445220/Avorion/

[h2]Performance[/h2]"While working on our next free content update (more on that here) we've made major improvements to sector loading times, as well as some adjustments to our RAM management, that we didn't want to keep from you, so, enjoy!"

• Improved performance of base game loop (client & server) by 0.6ms (ca. +4% better performance at 60FPS)
  • Note: This was on our office workstations, impact on other machines can differ, but there should be a notable impact especially for older hardware
• Improved performance of loading screens when ambient shuttles are enabled, but none are active in the sector
• Drastically improved performance of loading screens when there are lots of asteroids and shaders are set to "Normal"
  • Note: 24s loading screen down to 6s loading screen for massive asteroid fields on our workstations at the office
• Improved general performance of scripts
• Strongly reduced memory usage of scripts
• Improved server performance when leaving rift sectors
• F10, /profile and /status no longer stall client/server during the output filedump

[h2]Modding[/h2]

• Dev-Script lib/entitydbg.lua is no longer added to everything by default but when pressing F4

Hello dear space farers, pirates, miners, explorers, and faction war wagers!

It's the end of the (work) year for us here at Boxelware and we'd like to take the time to share our plans for Avorion for 2023 with you.

Sadly, it looks like we were a little too ambitious with some things on our 2022 update schedule, so some features will have to be postponed to 2023. We've been hard at work, but some things just take time and we want to make sure to deliver only the best updates in the future.

For 2023, we now have a clearer schedule/roadmap/milestones (call it however you want) for the planned updates (yes they'll be free) which you can find on our updated roadmap! They include more content, blocks, a photo mode, and also some improvements to factions. With each update we also always want to include quality-of-life improvements, content, bug fixes, and, if possible, performance improvements.

Some of the latest performance improvements that we were working on are already available on the beta branch, and you should definitely check them out! Over there, we have improved general performance, but also greatly reduced loading screen times and memory usage of Avorion.

If you want the full overview, check out the updated roadmap here:
https://avorion.fandom.com/wiki/Roadmap

We hope you have some great fun with whatever solstice festivities you celebrate, happy holidays and a wonderful new year 2023.

We'll see you then!

- Boxelware

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'Beta Branch - Newest Changes & Experimental Features'.

[h2]Performance[/h2]"While working on our next free content update (more on that later this week) we've made some adjustments to our RAM management, that we didn't want to keep from you, so, enjoy!"

• Improved general performance of scripts
• Strongly reduced memory usage of scripts
• Improved server performance when leaving rift sectors

[h3]More Performance Updates 2022-12-21[/h3]"More performance updates as a small christmas gift for y'all!"

• Improved performance of base game loop (client & server) by 0.6ms (ca. +4% better performance at 60FPS)
  • Note: This was on our office workstations, impact on other machines can differ, but there should be a notable impact especially for older hardware
• Improved performance of loading screens when ambient shuttles are enabled, but none are active in the sector
• Drastically improved performance of loading screens when there are lots of asteroids and shaders are set to "Normal"
  • Note: 24s loading screen down to 6s loading screen for massive asteroid fields on our workstations at the office
• F10, /profile and /status no longer stall client/server during the output filedump
• Mostly for modders: Dev-Script is no longer added to everything by default but when pressing F4