Nodrog's Fortress update for 6 March 2023

This release is a quality of life patch to get all the improvements Story Mode has had on development into the live build while everyone waits on the final touches, and should be the last before the Story is released in the coming weeks.

Please see the list of changes and known issues below.

[Improvements / Bug Fixes]

• Rendering Performance has been improved thanks to a new Map Tile shader and other Render Pipeline optimizations. The warnings in known issues have been greatly mitigated, but the suggestions will still be helpful if you see any slowdowns.
• More Options to Toggle various Map FX have been added to the Settings. These should moderately improve performance if disabled.
• Targeting Animations now display the Name of the Ability and the Team Info of the Character executing the Ability.
• Map Objects now fade if the Camera is near (an old feature, resurrected).
• Achievements display a Popup on the center right side of the screen when triggered (this should be handled by Steam, but our implementation to connect with Steam is known to have issues with this so it was time to just make our own).
• All unlocked Achievements are now displayed on the Main Menu.
• Online, only players that have a non-zero score are shown on the Leaderboards and Friends Online no longer incorrectly includes the player's name in its list.
• Various UI tweaks, including better text shadows globally.

[Known Issues]

• It sounds strange but improvements to the Online Stats and Leaderboards have caused an issue where they may take some time to load, or not load at all. Return to the Main Menu and Log Back in if you experience this bug. That usually fixes the issue.
• Online Matches can still end with a Sync Error despite many strides to combat the Sync Demon(s) that could be causing them. Each player involved in a Sync error is given a free point for the trouble as I continue to gather data and find the weak links in the deterministic chain. In this networking pass we squashed 2 Demon Spawn, furthering the crusade of eradication.
• Though rendering performance should be greatly improved with this patch, be sure to try disabling the Shadows and Real-time Lighting options if you have any performance issues, as many lower end PCs are still more render-bound than limited by their CPU. Aside from that, you may still experience slowdowns on weaker hardware as there is a lot going on in each simulation step, especially in Survival Matches or Matches with a high number of spawned Characters (32+).