(Midway Branch) Penkura Patch 0.2.0 MW 4

Patch notes are a combination of patches MW 3.1 / 3.2

In this patch, we heavily upgraded our weather and atmosphere system. In Penkura weather and atmosphere was always very important, the weather already affects solar panels, wind turbine but thanks to the added upgrades we will start to introduce proper dangers from natural sources.

Changes made to the system affect the lighting within the game, clouds, and fog will now change the light intensity, making some nights very bright and some pitch black. Because of that, we made nights a little bit shorter, nights will now start at 21:00 rather than 18:00.



As mention above we made heavy changes to the fog system, it will change its color depending on the time of the day, current weather, cloud intensity, and most of all, light itself. Light will now penetrate the fog simulating volumetric fog.

Performance of Penkura was and will be always important, because of that we do our best to find a compromise between the features of the system, it's not always possible but, extra steps allow us to take advanced features of complex systems, while still keeping GPU/CPU usage to an absolute minimum. Light coming from the sun will now affect fog density based on its angle, this will "simulate" fog changes very similar to those that normally would happen in volumetric fog. Simulation is not as perfect as proper volumetric fog but, we drastically lowered the system requirements to do so.

Thanks to that, players with weaker PC will still be able to enjoy Penkura on maximum settings.



The entire system above is fully automatic, and it's very easy to adjust for new biomes making our work a bit easier, while also speeding up game development. The system can be easily balanced in the future in case of nights becoming too dark, or whether to aggressive.

In case of any problems with transferring the save to the new system, always feel free to contact me here on Steam in Sub Forum "Midway Branch of Penkura"

Link ---> https://steamcommunity.com/app/739720/discussions/4/

or contact me personally on Discord.

LINK ----> https://discord.gg/2ukYHQm

With this release, we are going back to work on the Monorail station, which will connect the player with new levels, additional missions, dialogs, and player-requested changes to UI.

A small tutorial on how to access the Midway branch is available in the link below.

Link ---> https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2357998690

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.

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Patch 0.2.0 MW 4
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⊞ Bugs/Errors ⊞
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◈ Minor typos fixed.

◈ Buttons in the Options Window were unaffected by volume settings.

◈ Command Center Main Door, wrongly set state indicator to red (close) when it was open.

◈ Some sound effects made by M.P.S were unaffected by volume settings.

◈ Eating flowers sound effect was unaffected by volume settings.

◈ Close proximity message from Bot on Follow Command, had a visual error when presenting the character to follow.

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⊞ Improvements / changes / additions ⊞
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◈ Added 5 new thunder sounds to the weather system.

◈ Clouds now cast a fake shadow on the entire level using light function property. Shadows move with the same speed as the clouds, simulating roughly the size of the clouds.

◈ Gas Giant Planet, now properly shows a light shaft with the proper color.

◈ Mouse sensitivity is now split between the player and the bot.

◈ Added Bot mouse sensitivity.

◈ Added vehicle turret/camera mouse sensitivity.

◈ Added new Sub Menu Option for Game & UI, "Game Behavior"

◈ Added ESC button control button for RTS mode to "Game & UI > Game Behavior"

◈ RTS UI will adjust its appearance to the ESC button control switch.

◈ Added new weather mode "Light Storm"

◈ Added new weather mode "Super Storm"

◈ Clouds will now adjust their color depending on the weather type (example: Storm will now make clouds darker, lowering sun-bright orange color.)

◈ Fog will now change its color to blend with the sun color with adjustments of cloud coverage and fog density.

◈ Global Light will now adjust its strength not only to the time of the day, but also to fog density, cloud density, sun/gas giant position on the sky, and weather type.

◈ Day Starts at 06:00 and ends at 21:00 hours rather than 18:00.

◈ Solar Panels now work till 21:00 rather than 18:00

◈ Remove automatic weather calculations made by the sky system. Moved to a manual system to speed up the game.

◈ Added new Input (Dive) Used only in swimming mode.

◈ Added new Input (Ascend) Used only in swimming mode.

◈ Improvement to Ray Traced Cascade Shadow Calculations made by Gas Giant and Sun. (Minor performance improvement).

◈ Visual and Performance improvement to height fog.

◈ In-game fog will now move up and down, covering more background space depending on the type of weather, time of the day, and player position.