This patch has several performance improvements:
- We switched to a different method of streaming terrain tiles, which should (a) reduce the degree of stuttering sometimes and (b) make it less likely to find yourself in a spot (hunting an elk herd for example) where you repeatedly trigger the loading stutter because you're running around within a small area.
- We optimized the some code to reduce micropauses when animals are spawned.
- We found a few other things to optimize with vegetation spawning.
All this should make the game play more smoothly. We are still working on several more optimizations, including overall reduction in the terrain loading stutter.
FIXES:
* Wolf neck distorted when sleeping and stalking.
* Wolf walk and stalk animation speeds wrong.
* Wolf drinking audio plays too soon, lasts too long.
* Inappropriate animation on wolf when male ungulate charges it.
* Various terrain and river refinements.
* Various text errors.
* Several quirky things with grizzly bears issues (walk speed, snow).
* Several cougar animation issues.
CHANGES:
* Switched to new method for loading terrain chunks. Worst stutter is unchanged, but may be less frequent (that is, less stutter some of the times).
* Optimized animal spawning code.
* Emotes panel will tell you if the Favorites group is full when you try to add another emote to it.
* Modest reduction in RAM memory usage.
(Out for Windows now, Mac update coming shortly.)