Community Newsletter: December 14, 2024

Progress

• One of the most important things we’ve been focusing on for the next Alpha update is ensuring players are logged in to their Skymill account as soon as they launch the game. Earlier today we verified that this is working as intended for both old and new players alike. From here we will be conducting final testing with a small number of players outside the dev team to ensure everything is running smoothly. If all goes well, the next public Combat Arena update will be releasing shortly afterward.

• On the stability side, we fixed a problem that was causing the game to use up memory unnecessarily every time it ran certain background tasks. This issue was making some of our QA testers' computers constantly crash when they switched to another program or played the game for more than 15 minutes.

• In anticipation of the Alpha update, we’ve been working hard on optimization to ensure that this update will run well on PCs of various different specs.

  • As a part of this effort, we’ve reduced the RAM usage from 16 GB down to under 8 GB. We also added quality settings: Very High, High, Medium, Low, and Very Low. These settings affect the graphics quality and FPS. While the game defaults to "Medium" with a good mixture of performance and visual quality, players are free to raise or lower their quality setting to better suit their PC. We are seeing the lower quality settings giving more than a 2x boost in FPS over the high quality settings.

  • We also added a "RenderScale" slider in the display settings. This setting essentially provides a slider with a tradeoff between smoother gameplay and clearer visuals, increasing or reducing the resolution that the game is rendered at. Adjusting quality levels automatically adjusts render scale, but the render scale value can be further adjusted if desired to customize your display settings.

  • Quality settings and render scale also play a role in memory consumption of the game. We recommend to keep the quality setting and render scale very low if you have 8GB of RAM. 16 GB RAM PCs should have an easier time, but if the game crashes, it may be because the PC ran out of memory due to other applications being open at the same time. Closing other applications or reducing the quality setting in-game may help alleviate this.

• We’ve made various improvements to our UI. It now supports ultra wide and 16x10 resolution monitors, dynamically scaling to fit the given screen resolution.

  • We improved our ability info page UI so that the process of reading ability descriptions is much smoother.

  • We added controller support for much of our UI. There is still some work left to be done on this front, but we are very nearly approaching full controller support for all of our UI.

  • We added some prompts in our UI to help make it easier to navigate and use.

  • We fixed a bug where option dropdowns in our UI would appear lopsided.

• We have successfully implemented offline local multiplayer (AKA, LAN battles/LAN co-op). This allowed us to demo PvP between two PCs at GalaxyCon without the use of internet. While local PvP will most likely not make an appearance in the alpha or beta, we are very pleased to have it working, and it opens up some fun options for the base game to potentially allow for offline co-op, trading, or PvP with friends while connected via a cable or private WiFi. Local multiplayer also has the benefit of having