42 Techdoid

First off a quick heads-up on the forthcoming 41.66 patch. It’s now content locked, and is now receiving required fixes reported by our internal testers. We will look to put it out into a new unstable beta branch as soon as we can.

The full current changelist can be found here for those interested.

Next up, a few details on our Build 42 work.

As previously mentioned the core MP team will be sticking with Build 41 patches to improve life out on the servers for the immediate future, but work on the next big build has nevertheless now begun/continued in earnest.

Already announced for Build 42 was a major expansion of late game crafting and a major focus on game balance – details on which can be found here.

There are a few other irons in the fire for this build too though. As ever, no ETAs on any of this.

We are very much still in the early versions of this build, and indeed much of the late game crafting update is currently in the ‘pen and paper’ planning stage. More on this in future blogs.

Engine Tech Improvements

We have recently taken some time to get rid of a bunch of our longest standing issues with the game’s engine.

Whilst this is definitely not a b41-style level of disruption, we’re digging deep inside our renderer and looking for ways to get rid of the quite severe problems that have been baked into our engine for a long time in terms of both capabilities and performance.

Performance

Of course, the biggest issue our engine struggles with daily is the extreme CPU and GPU heavy requirements of having a map composed of so many unique tiles, shaders and other stuff without the ability to use a z-buffer to let us render in an optimized way like most 3D games.

Ironically the fact that its ‘a simpler looking 2D game’ is what works against using a lot of the power of the GPU to render the map fast. This results in large FPS drops, particularly when zooming out due to the mind meltingly inefficient draw method that the ISO perspective forces on us.

We’ve had a few rather bold ideas on how to solve this, using the caching of chunks that have already been rendered, which we hope will vastly increase the FPS in B42.

It’s early days, but looks promising. This tech requires heavier use of the GPU memory, however, so it may be that this optimization will only be able to benefit cards with a few gigs of free VRAM. We’ll have to see which generations of GPUs will be best able to leverage it when its dev time is a little further down the line.

Speaking of not being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way: in actual fact, we’ve also been working towards being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way.

This essentially frees us from having to slot the draws of zombies, vehicles or players in between the appropriate tile draws in ‘back to front’ order.

We’ll be able to simply draw all the characters and vehicles on-screen at the end, their pixels then discarded if they are deeper into the scene than an existing building object’s pixel.

This should massively optimize the rendering speed of zombies, and allow us to sort them