Preface: Undiscovered World v0.4.0

Our latest update v0.4.0 update is focused on technical improvements to performance, rendering, and more foundational aspects.

v0.4.0 Changelog

Features

• Switched our ML engine to ONNX Runtime (with DirectML as the backend), greatly improving our runtime agent performance

• Implemented a new CPU task scheduler to improve CPU utilisation, parallel execution, and frame performance

Fixes

• Cleaning up rendering code to avoid DirectX 12 leaking resources

• Stabilised raytracing (caching pipelines and avoiding runtime recompilation)

Known Issues

• JSON-based configuration remains fragile. If anything looks wrong, run `reset_preface.bat` to clear stale user/config data

Invisible and Upcoming Work

• Further removal of `boost` (posix_time, lexical_cast)

• Updated our assertion system and replaced any exception-throwing code within Melba

• Launcher/plugin groundwork, made possible by our project restructure in v0.3.0

• This will let us ship features faster without impacting the end-user

• Networking (WIP).

  • We have moved the existing test code into something more production-ready as a demo

• Clouds (WIP)

  • Some progress made, but has been put on hold for now

• Prefabs and Tag-based Procedural Population (WIP)

  • Continuing work on pipelines and tooling to enable iteration on data-driven (tag-based) population

  • Internal testing suggests naive placement of population when switching to tags significantly decreases quality

  • So we are working on improving how placement works before switching to tag-based by default

• Ongoing refactors toward a public C++ API we plan to open-source

Roadmap Update

We've updated our Roadmap to better reflect where we are now, and what we are working on next through 2026.

Thank you for following our development journey, and look forward to our next updates in the new year!