Preface: Undiscovered World v0.4.1

A smaller update brings a range of fixes and performance improvements to Preface: Undiscovered World.

v0.4.1 Changelog

Known Issues

• Performance drop when ray tracing is enabled while standing near a waypoint

Features

• Improved shadow performance at dusk and dawn (up to 60% faster)

• Improved DX12 resource cleanup performance

Fixes

• Fixed ocean animation consistency at varying framerates

• Fixed visual noise in ray tracing during darker hours

• Fixed visual artifacts at coastlines

• Fixed notifications not loading properly in the escape menu

• Fixed stale user config issues - configs based on older engine versions are now automatically discarded

Invisible and Upcoming Work

• Boost removal

  • Completed removal of all Boost dependencies (filesystem, asio, beast, exception, stacktrace, algorithm)

  • Added replacement utilities (hash helper, toLower, etc.)

• Render Abstraction Layer (RAL)

  • Large-scale cleanup across RAL codebase

• Screen Space Shadows (WIP)

  • Integrated open source solution

  • Added user-facing options (currently devgui-only)

• Population and Gameplay

  • Entities within the area of interest around a player are now 'real' - groundwork for future gameplay

  • NPC system scaffolding (character API, movement, steering behaviours)

  • Sprite rendering system with instanced billboards

• Prefab and Asset Pipeline

  • Custom prefab token processing

  • Asset change notifications and file watcher improvements

  • Resource API consolidation

• Networking (WIP)

  • RPC registry convenience layer

  • Multiplayer lobby UI refactored

• JSON and Config

  • Migrated to nlohmann::json across codebase

  • Non-throwing JSON parse with better error recovery