This update is focused around technical improvements. A lot of new features have been added to the game over the last few years, so some game system started to slow down a bit. To reduce lag and stutters while playing the game, various technical improvements have been implemented and I'm sure you will notice the overall speedup while playing!

Memory improvements

The memory management has been improved to reduce RAM usage while playing/editing battle. In addition, some memory leaks have been indentified and fixed to further reduce RAM usage and improve the stability and performance over long play sessions.

Battle loading performance

• On large maps, the game lagged and freezed for quite some time when switching between playing and editing battles. This lag as almost been completely removed and even the biggest maps unload almost immediately now

• The runtime battle loading time has been improved (numbers below)

• Visual scripting compilation performance has been greatly improved

Here are some examples for the loading time improvements:

Other technical improvements

• The engine has been updated to improve stability, performance and enable new features that will help while developing the game in the future

• Removed the exclusive fullscreen option. Borderless is now the default because as it performs much better, while exclusive fullscreen offers worse performance and window management

• There are various changes to the audio system to improve the overall performance when many sounds are playing, and sound priorites should now work much better to prevent situations where gun sounds clip and and out

• The visual script editor performance has been improved and even very large scripts can now be edited with good fps

• Improved AI performance

New features & improvements

• Maps can now be started from the loading UI in the battle editor

• Added an option to the terrain settings to deactivate coast generation (sand in water regions)

• Added scripting nodes to input player equipment, get equipment from a player and to spawn a player with equipment

• Added scripting nodes to start trading with units without having to interact with them

• Added AllowAsTarget node to allow/prevent certain units from being targeted

• Added SetTargetTypes node to select which team each unit will target (blue/red/none or any combination of them)

• Added input nodes for door keys and PickupKey nodes

• Increased max animation duration for custom gate objects

• Added a node to restrict/forbid the 3rd person perspective

• Added CameraDirection, CameraPosition, CameraRotation, PointInFrustum, ObjInFrustum, WorldPosToViewport, ViewportToWorldPos nodes to work with camera transformations

• Added support for importing wavefront .obj files generated with Open Asset Import Library

Bug fixes

• Fixed duplicating ship objects with objects on top

• Fixed various problems with units spawned from unit spawners

• Fixed selection of objects that were rotated by rotating the object they are placed on

• Fixed a bug that caused duplicated script execution at the beginning of a battle in some cases

• Fixed a bug that caused anti air rocket launchers to hit scripting walls without projectile collision

• Fixed bugs related to picking up thrown melee weapons

• Fixed some weapon shadow visual glitches

• Fixed that items could be picked up through walls

• Fixed that units could not target small players

• Fixed ragdoll stretching on big zombies

• Fixed item overlapping in long scripting lists with many public parameters

• Fixed that pasting node settings could result in linked settings between multiple objects