Sumo Update #13 - Early Access RC 3

Massive Performance Improvement

Well… apologies on this if anyone on a lower end machine has played recently. A change made several weeks ago had no noticeable impact on my PC, retaining a strong 60FPS, but what I did not realize was that 60 FPS was suddenly pushing my GPU to its absolute limit. Unlocking FPS to benchmark test only got me up to 70-80 FPS. A simple flag in the post processing effect was eating a ton of resources for almost no visual gain. That same benchmark test on my machine now runs the base environments at 220-250 FPS. So, I’m happy to write the patch note…

• Fixed an issue that was cutting your framerate in half or more!

And while we were in an optimization mode…

• Classic Map - Removed two dynamic lights that weren’t providing anything that couldn’t be done with finer settings on the main lights and post processing, reducing lighting rendering time.

• WaterWorks - Culled one unnecessary dynamic light.

• Railway - Culled one unnecessary dynamic light.

• Sumo in Space - Culled one unnecessary dynamic light.

• Classic Map - Culled about 70% of the grass meshes on the foliage and reduced all remaining foliage shadowmap resolution by 50%, reducing the high shadow rendering time this map had.

• All maps - Reduced the frequency of navigation mesh updates by… a lot. This was a source of a large FPS loss in Railway Rumble during the platform collapsing, as the navigation mesh was updating nearly every frame rather than just waiting until the collapse was over to recalculate. In other maps, this fix will still cause a small performance improvement.

We still have more optimization tasks ahead of us but this covers the bulk of the framerate loss that has been hitting some testers recently.

Art Updates

Polished the lengths and timings of the smear frame feature and made it framerate-independent, fixing the smear being more elongated than intended at lower FPS. Naps’ UI portrait has been updated to show her new lotus flower accessory. Audio levels have been rebalanced across the board for all sound effects. Naps and Chuf’s ability visuals, specifically the projectile spit, have been updated with the same vertex morphing smear technique as characters, giving them a much more polished look as a fluid moving object rather than a solid static shape.

Network Improvements

Further improvement has been made to the client update sync functions, this time targeting handling packet loss and better immediate response times for small inputs, like a minor quarter-strength tap on a joystick.

Gameplay Updates

Adjusted offensive quick dashing of the AI to use parameters more in-line with current physics settings. In total, they’ll be willing to try to dash for a kill more often and from slightly farther away, and will now try to ‘overkill’ - dashing into you even if you are already headed off the edge. This used to cause a lot of bot self-kills but with the addition of jumping and better mobility, they can recover if you juke their attempt at a risky offensive dash. When you hit an AI opponent with any ability or quick dash bump, they will take a minimum of 0.2 seconds to react with a dash, jump, or ability activation. This makes them slightly more human in their reaction time rather than immediately calculating and reacting to lethal velocity.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug where Naps’ clones could spawn with a rotated or offset boost bar UI, which stayed rotated or offset if the clone was possessed. This only occurred in online multiplayer on a connected client player. Fixed the score screen UI being layered above the pause menu UI and options menu UI, making it difficult to navigate if you pause at the score screen. Fixed an AI bug where characters would sometimes use abilities regardless of range to their target. This was most apparent when fighting Spectre Bot or Boom-Boom Bot but affected all bots to some degree. Fixed Railway Rumble trains not having any shadows. Fixed two UI resolution bugs, one on the main menu button prompts and the other on the score screen UI, where any resolution other than 1920x1080 caused UI elements to get incorrectly positioned in relation to each other. Fixed the friends list panel showing up when playing offline.