Steam invites, Fixes, Performance | Stability Update B293

A small update addressing a variety of things.

Fixes

• Steam invites now work

• Graphics and resolution settings should now work for all users. If you don't see any changes, try toggling the screen mode to something else, then back again. This should refresh the engine. Weird quirk of UE4.21.

• Graphics settings will now update when you select "Use recommended".

• Fixed various issues with the game's reading of the current screen resolution.

• Improved handling of bolt spawns

• Fixed some issues with roar audio/location

• Fixed pyrite rock spawn location inconsistency

• Routine maintenance & updated various online service modules.

• Cleaned up old/broken leaderboard entries.

• Code of Conduct updated; just neater wording and widget.

• Removed no longer needed debug prints.

• Fixed (fingers crossed) bots getting stuck on the back wall of Chasm.

• Fixed various visible lava mesh placement issues on Lairworld.

• Fixed various parts of Lairworld, Castle, and Regolith that didn't react to material sounds or deal collision damage.

• Various performance improvements to Castle and Lairworld.

Changes/Improvements

• Slightly reduced time-to-explode on pyrite.

• Made several UI animations a bit snappier.

• Added more sound to Countdown animation.

• Magic pickup value reduced to 25 from 35, Health pickup value increased from 50 to 75.

• Re-implimented some camera shake that was attached to footsteps (it’s extremely subtle).

Performance

• Removed some unused plugins and editor content from packaging, game may launch faster now.

• Improved map loading time by ~2 secs.

• Added LODs to waterfall particles.

• Added LODs and crunched polys on several procedurally spawned assets; foliage, meteor frags, etc.

• Disabled atmospheric fog material permutations required for shaders - since we’re not using this (materials require less to compile then)

• Slightly improved cost of rendering Magic and Health pickup particle effects

• Reduced LOD 0 polys on terrain pieces in Castle from over 900k to 39k. Massive chunk of render time there.

New feature: Looking for players

I'm doing everything I can to give players the tools they need to enjoy this game with a low population. Press M in the server browser, or when in a battle, and Skyfear will send an anonymous message (via bot) to the Skyfear Discord server, saying that someone is online and looking to play. Your games can easily be found in the browser then. I've intentionally made this anonymous and usable without a Discord account because I know there are plenty of players who don't use Discord. However, those who are there will see these alerts and I hope this encourages response and connection. This is, however, experimental and we'll see how it goes.

See full Commit log here. See full Roadmap here.