40% off, major improvements and native Linux support!

We kick off this sunny (albeit for some of us very cold) Steam Summer sale with perhaps our biggest update yet. We've spent a lot of time during the past few months maintaining the code and optimizing everything we could. There's still room for improvement and we'll keep going, but so far we achieved a massive reduction in size, faster loading times and smoother framerates. The Steam Deck in particular has benefited from a huge gain in performance, along with other nice quality of life tweaks. Plus, an all-time low 40% off!

Read on for a bit of technical mumbo-jumbo and additional notes!

How the heck did we manage to trim off 20gb?!

It's not like we were lazy, the process took quite a bit of time and research. As you may know, given ASYLUM has mostly pre-rendered graphics, the game relies on a large amount of big textures (truly thousands). Up until now, those textures alone took up to a whooping 15gb in size. That in addition to cutscenes and hundreds of little video patches, amounting to another 8gb.

In preparation for the Linux version and upcoming console ports, we reprocessed all those textures and videos. Previously, the videos were encoded in regular MP4, yet the playback wasn't natively handled by Unreal but the platform itself, which resulted in a number of headaches both for you and ourselves. We had to manage different packages of movies for Windows, Mac and even the Steam Deck itself, since Proton didn't like MP4 very much.

Enter Bink. Support for this legendary video format was added in Unreal 4.27, the last version before UE5. Alas, the Bink API in UE4 wasn't quite ready and features a number of bugs. Since migrating the entire game to UE5 was out of the question, we had to sit down and work around those bugs, as well as update many portions of our code, in addition to reconverting the movies themselves. Good news is that now all platforms play the exact same video file, and we managed to save some nice 3gb during this work.

But the textures are the big deal — further compressing them meant a lesser visual quality in the game, yet we found something cool: my understanding was that a popular texture format called Oodle was only supported in UE5, but turns out it was also added at the last minute in 4.27. That allowed us to efficiently recompress all the textures without loss of quality. And it gets even better: something I always wanted to do was upgrade all textures to the better BC7 compression (default in Unreal is BC5/DXT11), which results in less macroblocking yet bigger files. Since a 30gb download was already too much, that was out of the question... except Oodle likes BC7 and yields better compression rates.

So this means we actually managed to make the game look even better in a 10gb package! And since the texture content is smaller, walking around the Hanwell Mental Institute feels snappier. Everything in general seems more performant and smoother, and we're eager to hear your experiences!

Linux notes

ASYLUM now works out of the box in Linux platforms without the need for Proton. In my tests, performance was smooth all across the board. However, we're defaulting to "Low quality" since some visual effects seem to be demanding for current Vulkan drivers. Feel free to experiment and let us know. We'll keep working on improving performance.

There's another caveat: at least on my PC, the game crashes on exit. And I do mean exit, after the entire process is out of our hands. Apparently this is a frequent issue between Vulkan and Unreal and not anything I can fix right away. Since all the rest is performing so well, we decided to release the build anyway. You may or may not experience this crash — please let me know.

Steam Deck notes

We found that Proton is still more performant on the Valve device, so we let Steam decide what to install. Default settings are fine. If you still want to try the native Linux port, you must force a compatibility tool and choose "Linux Runtime".

Also, the game defaults at 90 FPS (it will still be 60 FPS on the LCD device). See how this works for you — it's super smooth but perhaps too smooth. You can set 60 or even lower as desired. I found that with the latest improvements, even at 90 FPS the fan is quiet and battery life stays healthy.

Sometimes the Deck (or rather Unreal) may incorrectly detect this setting when you open the menu and fall back to 60 FPS, so it's a good idea to double check the setting you get.

macOS notes

All these improvements also made it to the Mac, but the update is going live later this day.

Since this is a pretty drastic one, there may be some issues, so please be sure to let us know. Still, we extensively tested everything on 7 different devices so hopefully everything will be OK 🙏

—Agustín

And so, without further ado:

Patch 1.5 codename "You've always been the caretaker"

• New: Extensive optimization of game resources resulting in a far smaller download and disk footprint.

• New: All cutscenes and movies are now in Bink format which is more lightweight and eliminates weird issues with certain platform setups.

• AddedNewAdded an extra input for the Steam Deck so that you may walk and interact by clicking the trackpad. This is one of my favorite tweaks as I play all adventures on the Deck that way!
• AddedNewAdded a post-credits scene that explains the ending of the story in great detail. Haha, just kidding.

• Fix: Default game resolution and frame rate are now correctly calculated in the menu. Setting the desired resolution and frame rate should feel less glitchy.

• Fix: The game should correctly detect the system language now when launched for the first time.

• Fix: Frame rate defaults to 60 FPS on desktop platforms and 90 FPS on the Steam Deck.

• Fix: Some German text strings had leftover English text or translator notes, but no more.

• Fix: Sometimes videos of opening doors would show a brief instance of the door closed before walking, which shouldn't happen anymore.

• Fix: A glitchy door in the Low Risk corridor leading to the Low Risk Cell now looks better. Nobody noticed that, but it looked really odd.

• Fix: Spanish game settings had an infiltrated line in portuguese. Nobody knows how that happened.

• RemovedFixA very inappropriate tutorial on Mac featuring buttons that don't exist has been removed.

• Build string: version 1.5.0 (test with CTRL + V).