Starlight: Eye of the Storm update for 13 January 2022

V1.04 Patch

This patch is a maintenance patch with a new weapon being added. The biggest change is underneath where the game's rendering is properly redesigned at the engine level. The amount of stuttering will be reduced.

New Contents

• Added new weapon: Disruptor
• The disruptor is an offensive weapon that has 3 levels. It's a low level weapon open to players right from start (after arcade stage 1) to provide more options. Its unique ability is the chance to inflict double damage. When in effect, it'll further by doubled if there's a double damage bonus.

Changes

• Improvements were made to the engine which indirectly improved the overall performance of Starlight. The key improvement is that stuttering occurs almost every other second.
• Improved Mission 5/Stage 6 boss where the need to take down the shield generators is prompted and counted. While it's not a primary objective, it's there to help players identify what to shoot before taking on the platforms.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where players without targeting computer will not be able to preview Micron Laser in the weapon shop.
• Fixed a specific bug where if V-sync is ON and refresh rate is higher than 60Hz, and the game is run in Windowed mode, the game will suddenly go into permanent bullet-time mode. It runs slow, but not laggy. This is now fixed.

Performance Issues

There might have been some misconception with recommended and minimum hardware.

1. All recommendations are based on well-maintained, well-powered VRMs and isn't thermally compromised hardware.
2. A GTX 1080 TI on a laptop may be more than enough to run this game. This is correct but if the laptop's thermals had been compromised, it'll throttle so much that it'll slow down the game.
3. Starlight uses ~40% of GPU in a GTX 1650 SUPER and is still pretty much CPU bound ~70% of 1 core.
4. Starlight isn't an emulated modification; this is a full-fledged game using 3D hardware acceleration and rendering pipelines. It's not a sprite-only game!
5. Do not run Starlight under power-saver option. You'll most likely get a much below par performance.
6. Do not run Starlight when you've opened a lot of applications in the background.
7. Do not run Starlight in windowed mode under 144Hz where you've set the resolution to 60Hz. 144Hz meant that the game has to render 144 frames per second interpolated across 1 second. This means the game has to work more than twice as hard to deliver.
8. All recommendations are based on 60Hz performance in FHD (1920x1080). Not 144Hz!!
9. Always go full-screen mode, ie, Windowed Mode: OFF to enjoy full acceleration.

Conclusion

We'll be implementing the Survival Mode soon which will roughly contain about 50 waves with just 1 weapon shop visit at the beginning. No bosses.

After that, Boss Rush Mode will be implemented. All the bosses will be presented 1 by 1.

Meanwhile, we might still implement 1-2 more weapons.

Have fun!!!

Regards,
Jeremy