Patch Notes 0.6.4 - "Italian Meatballs"

Hi guys! After a lot of coffee, hard work, and little sleep. We are happy to announce 0.6.4! But before I get into the nitty-gritty I wanted to let you guys know that IF you guys don't get characters when you log in after this update. PLEASE restart STEAM! So what does 0.6.4 include? Lots! But mainly a ton of optimizations and fixes! Without further ado:

Main Changes

Frame Rate Improvement The game should run a lot smoother now, we put in a lot of optimisations that should help most people run the game much smoother. Reported framerate improvements for most people have been from roughly 15-20 FPS before this patch, to 55-60 in most cases. A good tip for extra frames is running the game in normal fullscreen instead of windowed mode. Joining Issues This issue has been a big one. And we think we have mitigated this issue for most people. To try to nail this down we invited a group of people with the issue to try out an internal build, after lots of tweaks, downloads and fixes. Everyone in the test group was able to join and play the game.

Smaller but also important stuff

Graphical Changes

1. Removed collision on small objects that players could get stuck on

2. Added collision on trees that did'nt have collision

3. Further balancing of item spawn time- and rate

4. Optimized render distance, culling and shadows on objects far away

Gameplay Changes/Fixes

1. Zombies keep quiet after dying, and their different sounds are better intertwined.

2. First Person / Third Person reload / etc issues fixed

3. No more crazy camera upon death

4. You can now use "Y" for VOIP as well

Optimisation Changes

1. Major cleanout of PhysX actions of zombies & players, much smaller workload for the CPU.

2. Aggressive distance culling of unseen objects, less GPU workload.

3. Proper distance culling of players and zombies

4. Amount of objects in the world minimized and put together into fewer but larger objects, easier for occlusion.

5. As a result of a cleaner world, loading times not as long

6. Previous login fails caused by Steam Connection Timeout, prolonged timeout threshold to allow more people in and hopefully no more connection issues.

7. Culling of smaller objects improved

8. Disabled distance field shadows on smaller objects that never cast visible shadows anyway

PS: This direction of optimization has barely begun but we've noticed a good enough performance to push this up to you guys. We will keep optimizing further!