After spending the last 4 weeks in beta, v2.2.2 is now live for all players. Thank you to everybody who took part in the beta and provided feedback. I'm thrilled to hear so many of you are enjoying a boost in performance! Below is a copy-paste of the original announcement posted when the beta was launched, for anybody that missed it. All these changes are now live for all players.

Optimisations and more

This update is all about building a foundation upon which Megaquarium can continue to grow. After the launch of the remarkably popular DLC, Freshwater Frenzy, last year and the continued success of the game's Steam Workshop, it became clear to me that some parts of the game needed a significant overhaul if the game was going to be able to continue to grow.

Performance boost!

The major feature this update is a big performance boost which should allow every player out there to build bigger aquariums and enjoy a smoother framerate while they do it. The exact improvement you will experience will depend on your specific hardware, but I'm expecting most players to see a 50-100% boost in average FPS. This has been achieved by a complete rewrite of the game's rendering engine. Almost every object in the game (including modded objects, more details below) are now integrated into my own specialised rendering pipeline. This pipeline takes advantage of direct memory manipulations to get the vast arrays of mesh data from where they are stored to where they need to be, in record time. In addition, much of the per-vertex computation (offset, rotation, scaling and animation blending) has been shifted onto the GPU to lesson the load on the CPU. If that weren't enough, I've introduced an experimental feature called 'Multithreaded rendering'. This feature is designed for players with CPUs with at least 4 physical cores. In this case, 3rd and 4th cores will be used to do rendering calculations, freeing up even more headspace for the main two cores. The trade-off is that this feature may cause a slight animation delay, especially on less powerful PCs. If you try it out, let me know what you think. Believe it or not, there is still further optimisation to be done - especially around pathfinding and memory allocations. But I decided to leave these for a future update so that you, the players, could start enjoying this one!

UI redesign - bigger text

The secondary feature of this update is a redesign of much of the game's UI to devote maximum space to text and maintain a minimum text size wherever possible. This was made a priority after several players came forward complaining of having difficulty reading the text in some areas of the game, especially on lower resolutions. Check out the following before and after screenshots to get a feel for the impact of these changes.

The effects are most noticeable if you open the two images in two separate tabs and flick between them. I hope you'll agree that the changes are significant and make a big difference to the ease of reading all those complicated tank stats! In some places, where the text is too long to display in full, the text is truncated and an ellipses (...) is added. Most of the time, the full text can be seen via a tooltip when hovering over the text. Finally, a small feature that has been requested several times over the years: there is now a setting which makes the per object count in the build menu visible at all times without needing to hover over it. Like the performance boost, these improvements are about getting the foundations of the game into a great place so it can continue to grow.

What's next?

The perceptive among you will notice that I keep alluding to the idea of the game "growing" in this post. I think it's finally time to announce that new content is indeed in the works. I'm tremendously excited about it and can't wait to start sharing the details with you, but that will have to wait for another time. A big thank you to everyone who's been waiting so patiently. steamhappy

Modding

I've worked hard to try to make the optimisations included in this update as compatible with mods as possible. With that in mind, mods are now automatically assigned a "voCollection" on load to enable them to integrate with the custom rendering pipeline. This means that mods should now run roughly as fast as vanilla objects!* *Models will still run slower the more meshes and vertices there are, so try to keep these to a minimum where possible. In my testing of over 30 of the most popular mods, I didn't find a single mod that failed to work with the update installed. However, I did discover some mods which are "incompatible" with the optimisations. These mods continue to work but could cause the game to run slow, so they are marked with an 'unoptimised' icon in the Mod Manager. Thankfully this should be easily remedied. Currently the only cause of incompatibility is the use of multiple materials within a single mesh. To make a model compatible, the modder needs to divide meshes up so that each one only has a single material. Additional sources of incompatibility may be discovered, so please check the game's log file and the mod's info panel for issues with specific mods. If you spot any issues with any particular mods while playing with the new update, then please let me know via the Megaquarium Workshop Forums and I will see if I can solve the issue. The changelogs associated with this update can be found here: v2.2.0 v2.2.1 v2.2.2

[ 2021-06-03 11:21:30 CET ] [ Original post ]