HomeGamesUpdatesPricingMethodology
Steam News3 February 20242y ago

0.7.1 A Cache and a Loading Screen

Hello friends! Things have been pretty quiet here lately while I've been working away at artwork and narrative development, but TODAY we have an optimization and compatibility update.

Full notes

Full Hot Dog Reporter update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

Repeated intro

Hello friends! Things have been pretty quiet here lately while I've been working away at artwork and narrative development, but TODAY we have an optimization and compatibility update.

What changed

0 fixes3 additions3 changes0 removals
  • Performance
  • Compatibility
  • Gameplay
changedHello friends! Things have been pretty quiet here lately while I've been working away at artwork and narrative development, but TODAY we have an optimization and compatibility update.
changedPLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THIS UPDATE AFFECTS PERFORMANCE NEGATIVELY FOR YOU!
addedThis should be obvious in retrospect, but It turns out the Forward+ renderer in Godot leverages Vulkan and broke compatibility with some older hardware, so we've reverted back to the OpenGL renderer. OpenGL means no asynchronous shaders, which introduced micro freezes when activating the platform drop effect. To work around this, we now have a loading screen at the start to cache shaders.
addedThe up side to all of this for EVERYONE is that I went ahead and built a particle effect cache as well! Which means driver updates and fresh installations of Hot Dog Reporter will no longer result in second+ long freezes when a new particle effect triggers.
changedChanged Godot renderer back to Compatibility again. GPU particles in Forward+ were breaking the game on older hardware with limited/no Vulkan support.
addedAdded loading screen at launch for cache creation.

Hot Dog Reporter changes

  • Cachemap
changedHello friends! Things have been pretty quiet here lately while I've been working away at artwork and narrative development, but TODAY we have an optimization and compatibility update.
changedPLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THIS UPDATE AFFECTS PERFORMANCE NEGATIVELY FOR YOU!
addedThis should be obvious in retrospect, but It turns out the Forward+ renderer in Godot leverages Vulkan and broke compatibility with some older hardware, so we've reverted back to the OpenGL renderer. OpenGL means no asynchronous shaders, which introduced micro freezes when activating the platform drop effect. To work around this, we now have a loading screen at the start to cache shaders.
addedThe up side to all of this for EVERYONE is that I went ahead and built a particle effect cache as well! Which means driver updates and fresh installations of Hot Dog Reporter will no longer result in second+ long freezes when a new particle effect triggers.
changedChanged Godot renderer back to Compatibility again. GPU particles in Forward+ were breaking the game on older hardware with limited/no Vulkan support.

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THIS UPDATE AFFECTS PERFORMANCE NEGATIVELY FOR YOU!

This should be obvious in retrospect, but It turns out the Forward+ renderer in Godot leverages Vulkan and broke compatibility with some older hardware, so we've reverted back to the OpenGL renderer. OpenGL means no asynchronous shaders, which introduced micro freezes when activating the platform drop effect. To work around this, we now have a loading screen at the start to cache shaders.

The up side to all of this for EVERYONE is that I went ahead and built a particle effect cache as well! Which means driver updates and fresh installations of Hot Dog Reporter will no longer result in second+ long freezes when a new particle effect triggers.

Here, have a changelog!

  • Changed Godot renderer back to Compatibility again. GPU particles in Forward+ were breaking the game on older hardware with limited/no Vulkan support.

  • Particle effects and shaders are now cached at launch to avoid in-game stuttering.

  • Added loading screen at launch for cache creation.

Source

Steam News / 3 February 2024

Open original post

Changelog.gg summarizes and formats this update. How we read updates.