We're sending Dev patch 8184 your way! This patch refactors the NWSync client-side storage concept in a major way. Data is now sharded out to multiple databases, to support Android file systems on MicroSD cards, where files cannot grow larger than 2GB, give or take. As part of this refactor, the game will both save and load faster as de/compression, reading and writing can be done in parallel (on multi-core systems with fast SSDs at least). Additionally, this change will make it much easier on the system to vacuum deleted data in the background, and free up disk space. Unfortunately, part of this change means that previously-downloaded data will be left sitting in your userhome/nwsync/ directory, as it is not migrated automatically. You can delete the file "nwsync.sqlite3" if you still have it from testing previous dev patches. To backfill this data, a re-download will be required.

Features

• NWSync client-side storage is sharded out to many databases in a round-robin fashion, as described above.
• We bumped the default maximum texture memory to 256MB. Previous settings of 64MB are rewritten to this value. The new minimum is 96MB. The bigger-by-default texture memory should improve stability in some situations.

Fixes

• We fixed a regression we introduced (when porting platform-specific code to C++14) where CodeBase database files ("Bioware Campaign Database") were written out corrupted on Linux and Mac, resulting in crashes. Unfortunately, the only way to revert from this is to manually delete the affected database files (in userhome/database/).
• The base shaders have been fixed to once again correctly render UI elements on older/obscure hardware.

Upcoming/Errata

• There was no time yet to address the question of documentation and use-cases with HOWTOs. This has not been forgotten, and will be done before the next patch.
• Specifically, things left to do before NWSync can hit the Stable branch include (Warning, technical stuff!): Handling out of space errors gracefully; Improvements to the serverside repository format and download process to use fewer, bigger files and range requests; Potentially automatically expiring and removing deprecated persistent world data when their data set updates; Providing tools for players to manually remove data inside NWSync they don't want anymore.