Technical Update 2 (v0.3.0)

A new version of Freefall is now live! Technical Update 2 focuses largely on performance improvements. If you were seeing a low framerate previously, your performance may increase by up to 400%, but this will depend on your hardware. Here's a list of the notable changes.

• Chromatic aberration can now be enabled in Options -> Graphics. Enabling chromatic aberration may decrease your performance slightly.

• Menu config options are now available for Master Volume, Music Volume, and Effect Volume. These can be found in Options -> Audio.

• The UI has been updated to be a little bit cleaner and more consistent. It should also be slightly more efficient now.

• Text rendering has been rewritten to draw text per character. This vastly improves performance for dynamic text such as the in-game level timer.

• Assets can now be loaded asynchronously to avoid stalling the game while loading. For example, music files now begin loading at start-up while you're in the menu, and they should have finished loading by the time they're needed.

• Audio assets were previously being loaded in a super inefficient way. Now they're being loaded in a better, faster way.

• Shader variables are now uploaded to the graphics card in batches rather than immediately, which should offer a slight decrease in CPU overhead and a slight increase in graphics performance.

• The build date/time being printed at the beginning of the engine log no longer shows July 16, and now shows the real build date/time.

• Various other bug fixes and tweaks, and a couple of minor optimizations that won't affect most players.

I'm going to post another announcement soon, focusing on the changes coming next month in Technical Update 3, the current state of things, the plan for the future, as well as a few other interesting things...

Hue?