Starlight: Eye of the Storm update for 13 March 2021

Patch 0.74

First of all, sorry for the delay as the patch has some serious testing to be done in order to test the efficacy of the performance fixes.

To begin, we're genuinely concerned about how some systems, especially laptops that is within specifications can't run the game smoothly.

We've therefore identified a few heavy duty areas and done thorough investigations on why they were slowing down the game and the potential bottlenecks and so on.

This patch will solely be focused on optimizations, bug fixes and some minor changes to gameplay.

New Features

• Added new Graphic Options > Dynamic Lights. Turn it off to improve game performance. Dynamic Lights are also automatically turned off should LOD be set to LOW.

Changes

• The game will now require slightly more VRAM due to 3D textures being transferred over from 2D textures. We believe one of the original issues was due to texture hogging.

• Ship editor will now allow a complete replacement of the fighter's source picture. This will no longer cause a reset of the ship's statistics, turrets or engines.

• HARD and EXPERT (Bullet Hell) modes will now have a wider spread of bullets and higher bullet count for 360 degrees, arc of fire, aimed arc etc. This is adjusted to allow the players to feel challenging rather than punishing. Expert difficulty is definitely playable albeit much harder to survive.

• Improved the target system for drift mode. If you've upgraded the targeting system, when you are attack an enemy and you drift, the drift AI will not pivot away from your current target but instead, will pick that as the target since you might be attacking it based on your own intentions.

• Optimized 3D meshes rendered in the game, including meshes that are shadowed.

• Optimized secondary particles such as missile trails to never be emitted if the missile goes off-screen

• Optimized the pacing for the following:

  • Stage 3 where there's a huge delay between the bonus ships and the wave that came after
  • Stage 9 where the final boss doesn't come until much later
  • Stage 10 where there's long break between the bonus ships and the enemy ships that came after

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with ship editor where workshop description will be overwritten with default description.
• Fixed a bug where the custom ship list wasn't refreshed when exiting the ship editor
• Fixed a bug where going into the steam overlay, then the workshop, then subscribing to a custom fighter and it doesn't reflect when you return to the game. This is now changed to reload the custom fighter manifest again.
• Fixed a bug with custom fighters set with distortion engines appearing in the editor but not in-game
• Fixed a scenario where returning from the steam overlay doesn't unpause the game, causing the game to go into a limbo.
• Fixed a bug in the weapon shop where if you upgrade the power stock in stage 2, since power stock level 3 isn't available, the whole inventory darkens. This is incorrect; only power stock lvl 2 should be darkened.
• Fixed a bug in stage 1 / arcade tutorial where if you skip the tutorial very quickly, the game begins with the fighter(s) forever invulnerable for the rest of the stage and doesn't accumulate any power in the power gauge.
• Fixed a potential memory leak with per-pixel lightning. This error was available in 0.73 where the light stays on with the mesh and isn't removed. Also a possible reason why the game was slowing down.
• Fixed a small problem where power stocks in the in-game UI will appear above the options menu black layer.
• Fixed a bug where a segment of stage 8 boss doesn't fire at you at all.

Conclusion

As always, we've been collecting feedback, asking for machine specifications and gathering information on how we can improve the game in terms of gameplay and performance.

We'll continue to optimize the game. However the next patch will be focused more on quality of life issues reported by you guys! Of course, by then, work on the full release would have started in full swing already!

We thank you for your continued support and look forward to hearing from you soon in our discussions. Your input will help shape the game towards the full release!

Thanks,
Jeremy