This month we are deep diving into some performance optimizations, application load times, and other low hanging fruit. Characters were copied from live as of July 8th, 2025 2pm Central.

July 9th

• Fixed character creation / edit from not functioning.

• Fixed an issue with macOS performance when "None" was selected for the framerate limiter.

• Added new tech to optimize terrain chunk LODs in overland zones.

• Adjusted nav mesh links near the lake in Ibaxus to limit mobs from climbing up rocks.

July 8th

Improvements

• Set animators to cull completely when not on screen. This should yield some minor performance benefits - but please let us know if you notice any funny business when animated things (creatures + players) come into view.

• Revamped the entrance to Freehold as a solo area. A wall was added to more clearly separate the solo area from the group area.

• Improved wording on the error shown when you cannot connect to Steam.

• Corrected material category on Mangrove logs.

• Ability UI elements now properly use Alchemy execution and targeting parameters when selected.

• Auctions that have bids can no longer be cancelled.

• We are sprucing up our loading screens by including various renders of our custom creatures & props that correspond to the region you are currently loading.

Application Startup Optimizations

The last few patches have ballooned our application load times to an unacceptable level. On application start we are pre-loading a lot of data all at once which can cause the client to show as "not responding". To mitigate this issue we have deferred some loading until the first loading screen is shown. This means that your first "zone in" may take slightly longer than it did previously, but subsequent loads will return to normal.

Please let us know if you see a considerable improvement here when compared with Live.

UI Performance Optimizations

As mentioned in the opener, I have done a deep dive into what can be done to improve performance of the game. One area we identified was how our UI windows interact with Unity's backend UGUI system.

Currently, all hidden windows have an alpha value of 0 and are not raycasted against, which means that they cannot be seen or interacted with. When a window is shown, we transition the alpha from 0->1 for a fade in, and enable racyasting for interactions. As it turns out, even though a UI element is not being rendered or raycasted against we were still paying a performance overhead in UGUI to keep them registered and available.

This patch adjusts how we handle hidden windows within our UI system. Once hidden, a window's game object is now completely disabled which removes them from the UIGUI system entirely. The downside to this, is that there is a slight performance hit for disabling and enabling objects like this (which is why we did not do it previously). However, this performance hit only lasts a single frame on open/close rather than us paying for having it registered with UGUI on every frame.

We have done a fair bit of internal testing and everything appears to work as usual. In theory this change should not even be noticed - outside of the performance boost. On average I was saving upwards of 4ms per frame which isn't a giant leap forward, but it just may be enough to make a difference.

Please let us know how this QA build's performance compares to the current Live build, or if you notice any oddities with UI windows.

Future Experiments

To further improve performance we will be looking into moving client builds to IL2CPP. This would allow our code run as "native code" on your device, which in theory should yield even more performance benefits. Once we get these builds going we will need a heavy bit of testing from you all, so please stay tuned!