Hi folks! What, this? Why, it's only the single biggest performance boost we've ever shipped, why do you ask? :D

Headline features:

• Much faster game simulation!

  
  With this update, even the largest saves we've received from players are now running at or near full speed on our test machines! This is a CPU-side optimisation, and I expect that the biggest improvements will be seen by players with large games, many players logged in at once, and at least three or four active world regions, with bigger savings the larger your world gets. There will likely be little or no difference for people who currently have just one or two regions active, and folks who are GPU-limited due to huge amounts of placed scenery will still be GPU-limited. (But hopefully running the simulation at max speed at least won't make their frame rate actively worse any more)

• More use of background threads for AI!

  
  In this update, all player planning has been moved from the main thread to background threads. This means that (for example) five players all randomly happening to choose the same frame to rethink what they want to do will no longer cause frame rate microstutters! Those big choices about where to go and what to do are all now happening from background threads.

• Compressed model data for all buildings and scenery models.

  
  Making models require less data in VRAM improves rendering performance! (this will matter more for folks on low-end hardware, though)

• Icons as event indicators!

  
  In this update we replace the "+XP", "+LVL", "-LVL", "DEAD", and "IM" floating text indicators with localization-friendlier icons. There are still a few more of these text indicators to convert over to icons, and the specific icons being used in this build are not final, but I feel like this is already a big improvement! These new icons can still be turned off using the view options settings button near the top right of the HUD, the same way the text ones could.

Other notable changes:

• Fixed a bug which caused GMs who are currently searching through game logs to find evidence to incorrectly show their status as "Failed to find evidence" while they're doing it. Oops!

• Fixed a bug during panic logout scenarios where players would not consider nearby potential inns as places to go to logout if the inn had a high price set. (the 'price' on an inn is the price to move into that inn as a permanent home; merely logging out there - especially in an emergency - is always free). This was causing spurious "Couldn't find an inn to log out" messages, even when plenty of inns were available!

• Fixed dungeon ambiance sounds continuing to play if you quit directly from a dungeon view to the in-game desktop.

• Fixed a bug which caused buzz to stop giving any new-subscriber benefits at all if buzz grew past a total value of 1,000. (the intention was for the benefit-per-extra-buzz to reduce at that point, but what was actually happening was that the whole benefit was being removed once you were past that threshhold. Now fixed!)

...and a whole bunch of other more minor tweaks and bug fixes!

So, an update on me: A week ago, I tested positive for Covid. Luckily, this build had entered testing several weeks before that, so I didn't have to do a lot more work on it; just monitor the bug reports from players and QA, and it all went quite smoothly, so delivering this update hasn't disrupted my rest too much! (honestly, writing these release notes is the most work I've done since testing positive!)

In terms of the illness, I actually feel pretty good now; almost all my symptoms have gone away over the last few days, leaving only a small cough and a gravelly voice to remind me that I'm sick. But the rapid tests are still returning positive Covid results, so I'm going to continue taking it easy and mostly just resting until they say otherwise! I'm hoping it won't be too long; I'm *super* excited to get moving on with the next big update!

We'll talk more soon, and I'll post another announcement with how I'm doing if the Covid diagnosis drags on too much longer.

-T