v1.38.1.0 - Improved player weapon firing rate consistency across all framerates

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v.1.38.1.0)  This update improves player weapon firing rates across all frame rates.  Previously, low frame rates would have slow or irregular player weapon firing rates.  The issue was most noticeable around 20-30 fps, but also had a subtle effect for the 30-59fps range.  Now, all frame rates have precisely the same, consistent player weapon firing rate.

Here are the full release notes for v1.38.1.0:

• Greatly improved player weapon firing rate consistency across all frame rates

  • Previously, running at a low frame rate (20-30fps) would fire player weapons at a slower, irregular rate

    • This would make some weapons less effective, unintentionally increasing the game difficulty

  • Now, all frame rates (20-240+ fps) fire player weapons at the exact same rate, and at an even rate without irregularity

  • This improvement is most noticeable for high firing rate weapons, such as Flurry Shot and Forcefield

  • This improvement is the result of multiple combined factors:

    • Eliminates a single frame of delay after each weapon fire before the framerate-independent timer takes over, which would scale differently based on the frame rate

    • Simulates bullet fire event timing at much higher precision, allowing them to occur between frames or simulation steps

      • This ensures all time tracking is preserved down to a fraction of a millisecond

      • These events would previously only occur at render time or simulation step time

    • When new bullets are spawned, a micro simulation is performed at a sub-frame level to ensure the new bullet is placed precisely where it should be since the inter-frame firing event occurred

• Increased the Burst Shot range for 2 of the outer bullets by 33%, increasing effectiveness at moderate range

• Slightly optimized collision detection for players, enemies, bosses, and all projectiles

• Added support for single channel textures as a form of lossless texture compression for applicable grayscale textures

  • Converted specular maps and emission maps for all player and enemy ships to use this texture format

  • Reduces vram usage by ~1.1mb without any loss in image quality

  • Reduces game filesize by ~97kb

  • Slightly reduces memory bandwidth usage for rendering player ships and enemy ships, slightly improving performance

• Improved specular highlight accuracy and quality for all player ship and enemy ship rendering

• Several optimizations for the matrix calculation system

• Slightly optimized water shader rendering for the home world environment

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.38.1.0” or higher.  Enjoy!