v0.4.1: Halloween Update

Hey everyone,

The Halloween update is here! This update adds a new sewer system under the Hyland Point. You’ll need to get ahold of a sewer access key to get down there. The sewers offer a new way to navigate Hyland Point without having to worry about police and cartel members, but it isn’t without it’s risks…

There’s a new ladder system which opens up a bit more vertical navigation – these ladders can be found in the sewers, as well as on several buildings around the map.

There’s also been some work done towards optimization. Most of this work is in the form of small tweaks and reworks, but it should all add up to provide a decent (10-15%) boost framerate.

Sorry this update is a couple of days late – I was originally planning on skipping the open beta and going straight to full release. At the last minute released I should probably play it safe and publicly beta test it for at least a day.

Additions

  • Added sewer system.

  • Added climbing system.

  • Added ladders to various buildings.

  • Added sewer maintenace office property.

  • Added sewer access key.

  • Added 2x1m plastic table.

  • Added trash crown.

  • Added garbage throne.

  • Added water step sound.

  • Added ‘sewer king’ NPC.

  • Added ‘sewer goblin’ NPC.

  • Added meth LODs.

  • Added new ‘replication queue’ system to help stagger network traffic when a player joins a multiplayer game.

  • Added loading dock to west Gas-Mart.

  • Added 5 more graffiti locations.

Tweaks/Improvements

  • Refactored the environmental FX and post-processing system to support transitioning between different visual zones.

  • Changed fog color and density to be controlled by day-night timeline instead of a basic curve/gradient.

  • Tweaked occlusion settings for more aggressive culling.

  • Tweaked shadow cascades.

  • Tweaked various LODs.

  • Disabled vehicle FixedUpdate calculations when vehicle is static.

  • Optimized compass rendering.

  • Disabled a light optimization technique that wasn’t actually providing any performance improvement.

  • Changed a lot of calculations to be on-demand instead of every frame.

  • Disabled additional light shadows when quality is set yo medium or below.

  • Changed various cooldowns to use global time (Time.timeSinceLevelLoad) instead of manual time tracking.

  • Removed unnecessary update loops from a number of scripts.

  • Replaced some MeshColliders with primitive colliders.

  • Cached animation string hashes on start instead of recalculating on use.

  • Turned off shadows for a bunch of small objects.

  • Tweaked graffiti surfaces to only generate texture data when required instead of when the game starts. This was causing a ~1s hitch and unnecessary memory allocation whenever loading a game.

  • Reorganised the structure of the main scene. This shouldn’t have any visible impact but makes my job easier in the future :)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed police global vision events not working properly (this allows police to ‘share’ their knowledge of where a wanted player is.

  • Fixed a bug where NPCs would shoot at the player even when not visible.

  • Fixed some duplicate GUIDs.

  • Fixed police officer vision getting bugged if killed while searching for the player.

  • Fixed ‘cuke effects’ and ‘energy drink effects’ utility items being usable in item slot filters.

  • Fixed not being able to pickpocket unconscious NPCs if you have recently failed a pickpocket.

  • Fixed null reference error that occurred when inserting cash into a storage entity.

  • Remove some unnecessary Player.log spam.

I’ve discovered that a lot of the connection issues in multiplayer are likely due to bandwidth limits being exceeded – I’ve made an effort in this update to mitigate this, but there’s still some more work to do. This will be my focus for the next week or two, and a patch for this will be releasing before the Shrooms update.

Thanks for reading, and happy (late) Halloween!

Tyler