These notes are for 0.975 beta, for which you can opt-in on Steam by editing the game properties for Aquila. They will apply to the live version once I can test on motion controllers. Mine are 90 miles away! :( Also I’ve not yet tested non-vr play with this beta.
Notes are as follows:
- New music added, and credited on the title screen.
- New in-game wind sound effects, and neater transitions to the flying wind sound.
- Scotland terrain is now a bit bigger to add a couple of nice looking ridges that you couldn't reach before. The terrain mesh is still the same resolution, and I do plan to improve it, but I dropped the satellite photography one level on Bing. While flying at any decent height you can't really tell, with the added bonus that the memory footprint has dropped with a performance benefit. This is a stop-gap until I can work further on terrains and their detail level.
- All terrains have been adjusted so that thermals and their clouds are accessible from near ground level and reach above their highest peaks. Columbia, for example, has huge peaks that the old system couldn't cope with resulting in clouds entering the hills!
- On the subject of terrain, previously you could adjust your view distance betwen Very Near and Far. These options now adjust the fog distance, and terrain tiles beyond that distance are switched off to increase performance and reduce memory usage. Note when increasing the view distance, any tiles previously switched off take a few seconds to reload and may pop into view. Likewise they take a few seconds to unload when reducing view distance.
- Thermals now age rapidly and decay after dusk, and won't form again until the sun rises, as they should do with a normal average everyday thermal.
- The grid of points used to create ridge lift and sink (the downdrafts) has had its resolution trippled.
- There was a small band around the Canada landscape where you could potentially fall off the edge of the world before hitting where the world edge was set. This has been fixed.
- Unistorm weather system updated to latest version, and main camera adjusted to correctly produce God rays.
That’s it for now. Thank you for reading. :). Please let me know if I can help with any issues.
Graeme