The third free expansion to Golfing in Aether is here, and the first update of season two, bringing ten new levels for all modes and themes. Update also brings a significant performance increase for lower-end systems, along with several quality of life improvements. There is also a 66% discount on purchasing the base game till Monday! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2293060/Golfing_In_Aether__Leviathan/

Free DLC - 10 New Levels

Above is a link to the free DLC (it should be downloaded automatically). The levels will work with all previous themes and in all game modes.




Slightly more levels this time around than previous expansions, as well as distinctive titular level featuring the large leviathan skeleton. The level breakdown is as follows, one large late game level, four mid-game, and five early. Remember in a previous update there was the added ability to indivudally pick levels you want to feature in a session, as well as preset playlists such as 'early only' or 'mid and late' only depending on how you wish the play the game. This setting can be found in the custom sessions menu.

Improved instancing and LODs

Levels are now constructed internally quite differently through a more efficient instancing (switched from using newer auto instancing with static meshes to instead using traditional hierarchical instant static meshes which does give greater performance) along with a fresh pass at the LODs of nearly all meshes to really push greater performance gains in the specific area of triangle rounds and render primitives. This is something that will effect low end systems more, but will also benefit high end systems when rendering all 9 islands at once, specifically if youve manually chosen to play on just large levels for example. Below is performance numbers from testing on a Ryzen 3200G, no dedicated gpu, 1080p, medium settings. If comparing to a Steamdeck do note that not only is the deck slightly faster but it only has to handle 800p in handheld mode.

Small Levels

Gentle Swing, 94% reduction in prims, fps increased from 84 to 95 fps. 11 fps gained. Around the pond, 96% reduction in prims, fps increased 68 to 81 fps. 13 fps gained. Tee Time 94% reduction in prims, fps increased 69 to 81 fps. 12 fps gained.

Large Levels

Waterhole, 97% reduction in prims, fps increased from 51 to 67 fps. 16 fps gained. Go For it, 92% reduction in prims, fps increased from 75 to 84 fps. 9 fps gained. See you on the other side, 95% reduction in prims, fps increased from 68 to 86 fps. 16 fps gained. Larger levels will typically see bigger gains as there was more in them to begin with, but most small levels tested still gained at least 10 fps. There is a greater jump playing with other islands checked, which means rendering 9 islands at once, and average frame rate jumped from mid 30s to high 50s on average. It will be other factors such as shader cost and or shadows now being the bottleneck for this hardware.

Improved Navigation History

When navigating menus previous navigation states will persist if you return to a previous menu if the current game state allows for it. This really helps for example if in practice menu, you pick a season then press back, the level you had selected will remain. The same will also happen when returning to the practice menu after playing a level.

Various other fixes and improvements

Also included are various bug-fixes to issues found or reported which you can see in the full notes below. This is a very big update so its quite possible some minor issues slipped through testing, so if you encounter any then please let us know so they may be promptly fixed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1914980/Golfing_In_Aether/

Patch Notes

General

• Added restructure of backend code to better handle platform specific code i.e. Steam. Platform ids are also handled to make them independent of any specific platform sdk, this will help with error prevention and make it easier to update sdks.
• Fixed a potential issue with camera fade behaviour when returning to the main menu from a practice session.
• Added improved interfaces to reduce initial main menu memory usage. While the overall memory is low at about 1.5GB this will specifically help very low speed devices by spacing out when assets are loaded into memory.
• Added a new customization applying system backend to help target some memory savings. Specifically this will separate out textures used in the front end and in-game, and specifically load in-game textures asynchronous instead. This will make memory savings of around a hundred mb.
• Added new backend system to improve how levels are constructed at runtime. This should see big improvements on low end devices.
• Fixed an issue where if playing hotseat mode in singleplayer and you launch yourself into some water from the tee, your ball would be hidden.
• Added tweak to random level selection by increasing the no repeat pool once youve played all levels at least once to be based on number of DLC (the free expansions) you have active. For every expansion enabled (which are enabled by default) the no repeat pool will increase by 9 up to half the total level count. So for example if you have no expansions active this number will be 10, but with all 3 expansions it will be 30. This means no matter how random or not random the level selection is, a level will not be repicked until other levels have been picked for the next 30 levels. Do note that a level is a level is only stored in this system if it has actually been played, so if you quit on e.g. hole 3, levels that would of made up 4-9 are not stored as you didnt play them. If you deactivate an expansion the no-repeat pool will shrink again accordingly.

Environment

• Fixed a rock clipping with a wall near cup on level behind the tee.
• Fixed appearance of some island meshes that had excessive amounts of grass covering on their underside. Only a few levels had this issue and as its on the underside it was quite hard to spot, but Ive done a check of all 50 levels to be sure.
• Added Leviathan expansion assets and content.
• Added improvement to error prevention for the background construction of island meshes.
• Fixed the flag raising detection on Tee Time not fully covering the bamboo path so the flag would raise up and down slightly initially.
• Added improved LODs for nearly all wall and dcor meshes to bring about performance improvements.
• Fixed and improved culling behaviour on leaf particles.
• Added distance fade to the snow of fences and trees when the camera is close similar to base mesh behavior.
• Added tweaks to the collision of the center part of windmills.
• Added tweaks to the flag raise position of various levels.
• Fixed a waterwheel rotating the incorrect way on take swing.

Interface

• Added new navigation history system to remember navigation states as you go back several steps. For instance, if you selected practice, a specific level and then a season, as you press back on each menu the previously selected element will be the default selection when the menu opens. This works with both mouse and gamepad navigation, and you can interact with one menu with mouse, switch to a gamepad and previous navigation will be seamless. Several menus had selective history for the previous step but this unifies the system and expands to all menus with no limit to the steps.
• Fixed an issue with the timer display flashing (as if time is running out) during the start of a new level if you were to receive a time out via the six stroke limit while the game has no set time limit in the previous level.
• Fixed a potential issue with button click handling in graphics settings menus.
• Added memory improvement to all level preview pictures through repackaging with better compression.
• Added memory optimization to the intro logos by only referencing specific assets on demand. This is a minor saving but basically means a few MB of textures dont need to be loaded on first visiting the main menu.
• Fixed an issue with saving theme settings from accessibility menu on first start of the game.

Discord Server

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