PROGRESS
One of the most important things we’ve been focusing on for the next Alpha update is ensuring players are logged in to their Skymill account as soon as they launch the game. Earlier today we verified that this is working as intended for both old and new players alike. From here we will be conducting final testing with a small number of players outside the dev team to ensure everything is running smoothly. If all goes well, the next public Combat Arena update will be releasing shortly afterward.
On the stability side, we fixed a problem that was causing the game to use up memory unnecessarily every time it ran certain background tasks. This issue was making some of our QA testers' computers constantly crash when they switched to another program or played the game for more than 15 minutes.
In anticipation of the Alpha update, we’ve been working hard on optimization to ensure that this update will run well on PCs of various different specs.
As a part of this effort, we’ve reduced the RAM usage from 16 GB down to under 8 GB. We also added quality settings: Very High, High, Medium, Low, and Very Low. These settings affect the graphics quality and FPS. While the game defaults to "Medium" with a good mixture of performance and visual quality, players are free to raise or lower their quality setting to better suit their PC. We are seeing the lower quality settings giving more than a 2x boost in FPS over the high quality settings.
We also added a "RenderScale" slider in the display settings. This setting essentially provides a slider with a tradeoff between smoother gameplay and clearer visuals, increasing or reducing the resolution that the game is rendered at. Adjusting quality levels automatically adjusts render scale, but the render scale value can be further adjusted if desired to customize your display settings.
Quality settings and render scale also play a role in memory consumption of the game. We recommend to keep the quality setting and render scale very low if you have 8GB of RAM. 16 GB RAM PCs should have an easier time, but if the game crashes, it may be because the PC ran out of memory due to other applications being open at the same time. Closing other applications or reducing the quality setting in-game may help alleviate this.
We’ve made various improvements to our UI. It now supports ultra wide and 16x10 resolution monitors, dynamically scaling to fit the given screen resolution.
We improved our ability info page UI so that the process of reading ability descriptions is much smoother.
We added controller support for much of our UI. There is still some work left to be done on this front, but we are very nearly approaching full controller support for all of our UI.
We added some prompts in our UI to help make it easier to navigate and use.
We fixed a bug where option dropdowns in our UI would appear lopsided.
We have successfully implemented offline local multiplayer (AKA, LAN battles/LAN co-op). This allowed us to demo PvP between two PCs at GalaxyCon without the use of internet. While local PvP will most likely not make an appearance in the alpha or beta, we are very pleased to have it working, and it opens up some fun options for the base game to potentially allow for offline co-op, trading, or PvP with friends while connected via a cable or private WiFi. Local multiplayer also has the benefit of having essentially zero network delay, which is great for local tournaments!
We’ve re-enabled auto landing when flying and touching the ground. Avieon players rejoice!
Bug fixes:
Fixed a bug with controllers where tapping an ability button too quickly would not fire the ability.
Fixed a bug where Dig could teleport the player up to 100 meters upwards when popping out of the ground.
Fixed a bug where flying characters would play their jump animation when they first landed.
Fixed controllers not being able to end the Dig ability early, forcing the player to wait for the ability to time out.
Fixed a bug where the aim reticles could sometimes go missing and not return until restarting the game.
Community
We had so much fun at GalaxyCon Columbus! Thank you to everyone who came to visit us and try out the game. These past few months, it’s been really special getting to show the game in person to fans new and old, and to see them get excited about what we’re doing. This will be our last convention for a while, but we’re hoping to do more next year! In the meantime, here’s a short video of our booth at GalaxyCon.
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers.
FPS (Frames per second): The number of frames that play per second, determining the smoothness of motion.
Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server.
Remote Client: (aka Remote Player) Any player whose data is being networked across the server to simulate a character's actions. In P2P multiplayer, this is the opposite of the host.
UI: User Interface. The layout of information on the screen, including menus, health bars, etc.
Thanks for stopping by! The team will be taking some time off for the holidays, so we’ll see you for our next newsletter in January. We wish everyone a happy holiday season and can’t wait to show you more in the new year!
