Fog Visuals, Stability, Updated Demo, And Optimization

Fellow Mixonauts! I bring more stability and optimizations!

A lot has been going on over the last few months, life has been good but also busy! The goal of this update was to try and fix issues related to people freezing during load, crashing in certain spots, and in general improving performance. From my testing, the game should be around 15-30% faster to render and also be much nicer to lower end machines when setting everything to low. I am also excited that for the first time in a year or so I will now be focusing on features that will improve the audio production aspect of the game! Stay tuned and checkout everything below for more details on what's new and coming next!

New Fog Visuals Comparison and Performance Results

Steam post imageSteam post image

Bug Splat integration allowing me to see crash reports!

Filling in crash reports and sending them is incredibly valuable and helps me get an idea of how stable the game is!

Full List of Changes

• Engine upgrade to Unreal 5.6 to take advantage of megalights. This will become more important in future updates. Currently the HQ is the only place that uses it.

• Turned off Unreal Nanite (Wasn't worth the cost for how little the assets in Mix Universe use it)

• Turned off Unreal Lumen (Might turn this back on later, visuals aren't any different)

• Made a custom asteroid model to replace the nanite version that looked bad on lower end machines.

• Upgraded the Voxel Landscape System to be much quicker to update and free from splits and chunk updates.

• Added custom foliage generation system for the voxel landscape (Will be used later for generating other things for the game)

• Added ability to change voxel landscape type per node. (This will be expanded upon in future content updates)

• Updated foliage for landscape so that it scaled density based on foliage quality.

• Updated Fog to be particle-based which is 50% cheaper to render than the previous fog solution. This also scales based on Visual FX quality so that there are less particles on lower end machines

• Disabling view fog will also reset the fog simulation texture so that it doesn't leave artifacts behind.

• Fog texture for clearing out fog around nodes will now scale based on settings and also not compute after a certain distance to the camera.

• Fixed issue where modulator and radar node rings weren't using the right fog settings.

• Updated Steamdeck graphics settings so they automatically get set unless you turn off the automatic settings. This ensures that players get the best gameplay/visuals/performance ratio out of the box.

• Fix Crash/freeze when loading into mixes due to multiple calls of flush async loading.

• Fix Crash caused when being rate limited by modio

• Fix Issue where when offline, mod status was invalid

• Fix Issue where when being rate limited from loading too many mixes, soft fail until the rate isn't limited anymore. (Somewhere around loading more than 60 images a minute causes rate limiting)

• Fix memory leak related to not clearing loaded images from the galaxy map

• Loading images in the galaxy map is now based on which mixes you can actually see.

• Universe Mixes should load more reliably now and not be as easily rate limited as before.

• Turned on GPU Simulation for all particle FX related to nodes and links, should be much cheaper on the CPU for rendering larger mixes.

Also, the demo is now aligned with the current version of the game.

The demo version of Mix Universe was rather outdated and full of bugs that were fixed in the full game, but never ported back to the demo version. Now the demo is aligned with the current version of the game and hopefully will come along with the newer updates as well.

• Demo play area size is now bigger as requested by a few mixonauts.

• Demo Universe is offline to prevent people from being able to mess with the universe mixes without the full game.

What's next?

1. The Sample Library Update

This update will be a huge deal and try to cover a few things. No promises, but I am trying my best to hit all of these.

• Allowing Players to own 100% what they make in the game for commercial use and identifying samples in which do not allow this. (Certain drum samples fall into this category)

• Controlling the attack, decay, sustain, and start time of a playing sample.

• Some other cool ideas I'll talk about later.

2. The Modulation Update

The goal of this will be to allow automation of modulation elements. This I am hoping to pair up with movable nodes which I think will take mix creation to the next level and allow for things like filters to change much easier over time and more dynamically.

The Universe

We now have 188 mixes in the universe! Seeing these over the past few months have really shown me how talented and creative the mixonaut community really is. I truly enjoy them at any complexity. Some must-play mixes! Four Towers https://mod.io/g/mixuniverse/m/5105269 Secondia https://mod.io/g/mixuniverse/m/4921020

Night Duet https://mod.io/g/mixuniverse/m/5126784 Plenty more in the universe! Thanks again to everyone who has played the game so far! If you haven't already, leaving a review helps a ton! Also consider joining the discord to share what you make and say hi to an amazing community of Mixonauts!