Full notes
Full Darwinia update
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What changed
- Performance
- UI and audio
- Fixes
- Gameplay
- Server
- Maps
There have been several changes since the previous release, v2.2.0-296.
Major changes:
- Vulkan/MetalMulti-sampling Antialiasing (MSAA) performance is dramatically improved on some systems. When supported, we now use Multisampled Render To Texture (MSRTT) instead of a render followed by an explicit blit to resolve. This benefits tile-based rendering GPUs especially (e.g. Apple M1/M2, etc), since Vulkan and Metal can both use very fast temporary “memoryless” textures for the multisampled color and depth buffers.
Vulkan/Metal: Apple GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuffers, which dramatically reduces memory bandwidth and improves performance.
Vulkan: AMD GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuffers (DCC, or “Delta Color Compression”), which improves performance.
Vulkan/Metal/Direct3D: On systems with multiple distinct GPUs (e.g. laptops with integrated graphics + discrete GPU, or with external GPUs), you can now select which device you want to render on in the Screen preferences.
- Vulkan/MetalFixed some awful-looking incorrect shading results around the edges of primitives affected by lighting. There seems to be either a shader compiler or hardware bug causing this, but we have worked around the problem by setting a [[sample_mask]] output in the Metal shader (even when multisampling is off). Unfortunately, this same bug is still present in Apple's built-in OpenGL-on-Metal implementation, and a workaround is impossible there since we have no influence on the generated Metal Shading Language code. It's strongly recommended to only use the Vulkan/Metal renderers on macOS.
- OpenGLFixed a bug where glTexStorage* calls were incorrectly being used on OpenGL 3.3-compatible systems which did not have the GL_ARB_texture_storage extension.
- Direct3DEnabled support for DirectComposition, to allow using the D3D "Flip" model.
- SMAA/FXAAFix sampler bugs on some systems, which resulted in a completely black screen when either of these antialiasing methods were enabled.
- SoundFixed some significant channel mapping bugs if using fewer channels than the device supports (e.g. 2-channel on 7.1-channel hardware)
Renderer: Shaders are now pre-compiled on startup, which should eliminate a lot of random frame hitches.
Renderer: Textures are now pre-loaded on startup, which may eliminate frame hitches when previously unused textures are required.
Renderer: Implemented caching for shader binaries and render pipelines.
Renderer: Worked around a long-standing Windows AMD Vulkan graphics driver bug that caused the game to crash whenever alt-tabbing out of full screen mode.
Renderer: Borderless Fullscreen mode now respects the resolution preference, and scales the image to fit the desktop resolution.
- RendererReduced memory usage for several textures that internally require only one or two color channels.
Windows: The FPS overlay (Shift+F5) in the top left now can display system and GPU memory utilized by the game.
Windows: Fixes for filesystem unicode path handling on Windows versions older than Windows 10 build 17134.
- macOSImproved performance on Apple Silicon.
- WindowsImproved audio latency.
- CameraFixed some FOV bugs with cutscenes.
- CameraFixed some movement bugs when skipping cutscenes.
- DarwinianFIxed some bugs with Darwinians not detecting nearby enemies quickly enough.
Darwinian: Now will recognize certain building types as enemies and flee from them.
Spiders: Made spiders look less ridiculous when landing after a jump.
Gun Turret: Now will recognize certain building types as enemies and attack them.
Fixed broken savegame behavior for Launchpad (the Prologue game map).
Modified automatic UI scaling to better handle ultrawide aspect ratios (e.g. 21:9).
Fixed another bug where Spiders might stetch in weird ways to attempt to attack Air Strike units.
Greatly improved performance of the sphere world's "Internet" render.
Sound system performance is much better and more consistent.
Updated
Source
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