While starting work on the upcoming free winter expansion I was able to make some performance improvements and fix various issues found. This update makes a lot of changes to various level geometry and shaders, so why it is a few hundred MB. Normally I try spread updates out but due to certain fixes being made and the decent improvements to performance I didn't want to delay it till next week. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1914980/Golfing_In_Aether/

Performance Improvements

Before I get into explaining the improvements I just want to say as always the FPS in this game is certainly not low, pretty far from it. None of these changes are reactionary, its simply a case that I continuously like to make improvements where and when I identify them. While users running mid-high end systems already will have fps in the hundreds, improvements like these can let lower systems reach higher settings easier as well as save on energy when running identical settings if a battery powered portable for example.

Reflections

Ive managed to come up with an additional way of reducing the reflection pass, by around 40% this time. Essentially what I went and did was disable the full lighting pass from being executed in the reflections. Now normally this would of course leave you with essentially full bright meshes and it would look horrendous, but by going a step further I instead set specific meshes for the reflection capture with identical color to what they would have previously been when shaded. Essentially, youll be able to notice no difference from a visual standpoint but with a 40% reduction in rendering cost of the reflections.

Shader Costs

A second idea I came up with was to reduce the shader cost of rocks either surrounding ponds or those closest to the track. Basically the rocks normally have a form of terrain blending so they arent sharp against the connecting terrain of the island and this is relatively costly to perform. But what I noticed was in a lot of levels if you have a stack of rocks, only the very outer rocks actually connect visibly with the terrain, so from your gameplay perspective most rocks dont actually need to perform this function. Of course these rocks are generally the closest to ponds as well, so a bonus benefit here is the secondary rendering cost of these going via the planar reflection is reduced as well.

Shadows

Next refinement was to manually optimize shadows for specific levels and geometry. Due to the unique circumstances of having isolated floating islands, and each level being independent this gives real opportunity go that extra level with tailoring the shadows to certain setups. Essentially if a level is small the shadow range can be decreased, meaning a side effect is the resolution over range increases, thus this and the cascades can be reduced boosting performance. In fact due to these tweaks the relative shadow resolution has actually been increased at the same time as performance being increased. A number of meshes I also gave custom geometry for shadows to help reduce noise. With such targeted shadows you start to notice things like normal irregularities and general quality issues more significantly, so I also did a full pass on every single track mesh to really bring in line the seamlessness of the modular parts. I also noticed some bizarre behavior in one of the shaders relating color between pipe meshes, rocks a couple other things and have fixed this.

Various Other Fixes

I identified one of the season select menus had an issue with dpad navigation after the recent update (thumbstick worked) so thats been fixed. There are also various collision and physical material related issues on different levels and these got tidied up as well. If you encounter any issues let me know as I can often hotfix them pretty quick.

Patch Notes

Environment

• Fixed several very minor visible seams on grass where track pieces connected.
• Fixed some collision gaps with some wall mesh types, such as found around the edges of the ponds in Ponds of Rage.
• Fixed a coloration mismatch between rocks with moss/grass on top vs ones without.
• Added significant performance optimization to shadows so that the render cost is around half of that previously while also improving the overall resolution slightly.
• Added performance optimization to water reflections by faking the lighting pass on the meshes inside the reflection.
• Fixed various wall gaps on Rock Bottom.
• Fixed a coloration miss-match between different parts of pipes.
• Added some assets and tweaked existing to provide support for future Winter Expansion (December).

Interface

• Fixed an issue with navigating one of the season select menus when using the dpad.

Discord Server

Be sure to check out the official discord server with channels for Golfing In Aether and my other various projects.