AVWW Beta 0.932 "The ATI Salve" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/04/avww-beta-0932-ati-salve-released.html

This one has a whole lot of cool stuff in it, and you should totally check out the release notes.  I'd tell you more about it, but I-am-so-exhausted.

The brief version: massive performance boost on ATI in particular; control scheme improvements for non keyboard+mouse players; miscellaneous fixes; less insanely difficult battlefields.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

[Penumbra]

The buttons! So many beautiful, beautiful buttons.  Awesome!

Are you guys code freezing Thursday? Hope you get a full weekend before the release!

(I probably missed this for versions and versions, but I finally tried to talk to people in town as a Draconite, and, well, wow )

[Toll]

The battlefield missions are looking pretty good now, I think. I let the minions do their own thing first, and they managed to knock down two or three towers before any real threats reached them, and at that point they held up relatively well, but were overwhelmed before too long. At that point the enemy forces got to the headquarters pretty quickly, and I had to kill them all off so they wouldn't destroy it. After that I ran alongside the minions and cleared out all the towers and started laying siege to the enemy headquarters, and when there was a nice number of minions with me (about six or so), I stopped firing. They weren't able to destroy the headquarters on their own though; the spawning enemies were enough to eventually kill them all off.

Is that kindof the balance you had in mind for the battlefields?

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Wow, I dunno what you guys did in this one, but the performance of the game just feels a lot smoother.  And I've got a Nvidia card.  Cool. 

Keep up the great work!

King

[eRe4s3r]

Same here, whatever this "batching" change did does something really well on nvidia cards Like... there is no frame-rate-spikes anymore. It's more steady and actually sticks perfectly to my target frame rate... weird

I have a question, is there some way, by deleting or console command or whatever, to wipe a continent and start again with that character but a newly (or differently) generated continent?

Can I just delete the files in the worlds folder, and which ones? Particularly I need the settlement to reset, like completely. But I wouldn't mind a complete restart in terms of what is generated ;p

Those new help texts are infinitely better!
Really like the changes done to balance

And another question:

The slots show Left Click / Right Click on 1 and 2 but... they are not showing Mouse 3 | Mouse 4 | Mouse 5 for the slots where that is mapped.. would be nice if it did that ;P (Edit: Or wait, Do i have to map the mouse buttons to mouse actions instead of normal spell slots?)

Also..

Sometimes In buildings with a "low" starting location where it only goes higher and not lower, the GUI elements in the lower left are above the ground and hide the character in my case entirely. The Health Orb was in this instance occluding the door and where my character stood ;P

It would be helpful if GUI elements (And with that, I really only mean those poking into the game-window) would fade to 50% opacity when they occlude my character. Or just have a defined opacity that we can set freely, because I'd rather play with them being more or less transparent.

[Castruccio]

This fixed the ATI problem!  See my post in the original tech support thread.  I get a constant 60 fps now, which has never happened before.

[keith.lamothe]

This fixed the ATI problem!

Hallelujah!

Now the ponies can be released from "making the video card more enthusiastic about its job" to more productive labor

[x4000]

Cheers all!

Very short on time, but a few notes:

1. Yes, we're intending to code freeze later today.  It's just "safe" types of cleanup from this point on.  So things like making the supply depot missions more interesting with 4 kinds of crates will have to wait until post-1.0, sadly.

2. As I commented in the other thread about the framerates, I'm super jazzed about it.  And actually on nVidia cards this is clearly also making a big difference not just for you guys, but also for my Mac laptop.  Was going to mention that in release notes but apparently forgot.  There is still a big bug in the ATI drivers themselves, or their firmware or whatever it is, but it's a bug that only affects certain kinds of games running in certain kinds of modes.  A lot of older games use "immediate mode" and are likely to run into this exact issue, for instance.  But those same older games might just be running in DirectDraw mode or similar and thus not actually have problems; or their target framerate is 30 rather than 60, and their max resolution is low enough that the GPU load stays super low, etc.  Our problem was the combination of a target 60fps, 1080p, and using the immediate mode of drawing.  But despite the bug in the ATI cards, obviously the onus wasn't all on them; improving some things on our own end really helped things substantially, obviously.

3. Sounds good on the battlefields.

4. There's not a way to reset your whole continent, or your settlement in particular, sorry.

5. The slots showing left and right click was just as a guide, mainly.  The others are still mapped, just not shown there (and they never were).

6. There should NEVER be a case where the lower GUI elements are coming in front of your character.  I know that happens sometimes, but it's not supposed to.  The camera is supposed to pan lower so that the GUI elements go below the floor of the building, thus keeping them out of your way.  If anyone has repro steps on this, I'd love to try to tackle that today.

[jonasan]

great to hear you sounding enthused and positive chris.

as a ATI mobility radeon owner i can confirm once again the massive performace increase you have just achieved.

my FPS went from fluctuating 20 - 45 to a constant 60!!!

very very cool. many thanks, and once again - good luck with the release.

[x4000]

Thanks a lot, jonasan!

By the way, there are a couple of things you can do to make your framerate even more if you have some reason to:

1. If you adjust the target framerate in the graphics tab, you can crank that all the way up to 120.  Unity isn't very good at listening, though, so it keeps the "target" as a "very rough guideline."  So at 120 it tends to be pretty darn unbounded and is just flying up to like 200fps and such for me.

2. If you turn on VSync, that will automatically clamp your fps to whatever your monitor refresh rate is.  Typically 60 or 80.  That reduces tearing, but can make things "floaty" when the game is lagging.  Happily, it should be a lot less floaty now with this version and vsync on.

[x4000]

6. There should NEVER be a case where the lower GUI elements are coming in front of your character.  I know that happens sometimes, but it's not supposed to.  The camera is supposed to pan lower so that the GUI elements go below the floor of the building, thus keeping them out of your way.  If anyone has repro steps on this, I'd love to try to tackle that today.

Nevermind on this one -- I can easily duplicate it and am looking into it now.  Thanks!

[Mánagarmr]

I haven't had time to check the newest version yet, but less fluctuating FPS sounds like a winner for me. I have a 120Hz monitor so my target was naturally 120 FPS. But it would dance everywhere between 60-120, leading to some rather choppy gameplay sometimes. Constant 60 is better than jumpy 60-120. Naturally, I'd prefer a solid 120 xD

Will try this when I get home.

[Bluddy]

Super job on the input choice buttons. Very clear and it's cool that you can easily switch back and forth.

[x4000]

Super job on the input choice buttons. Very clear and it's cool that you can easily switch back and forth.

Glad you like it!  Since you happened to have a mantis issue right on the same day we'd just designed out those buttons, I was really curious what you were going to think.   Whew!

[jonasan]

just cranked up the desired FPS and flipped off vsync for fun (following your suggestions) - and blow me down.... topping out at 105 fps - nothing floaty, no visual tears - i think my radeon finally decided it like AVWW! cheers chris. here's hoping we get a massive new player base from the steam release and three fabulous years of valley!!