With the 1.1 update the game recieved a visual overhaul as well as a few graphical enhancements.
Soft-shadows and Ambient Occlusion
The main addition to this update is the shadow and AO system which bakes soft-shadows and approximated world-space ambient occlusion at runtime (during gameplay) on the GPU.
Shadows (Debug view)
Shadows are more or less straightforward, shading areas darker where light from the sun is occluded by geometry. It's noteworthy to mention that shadows get softer with distance mimicking the behaviour of light in real-life.
Ambient Occlusion (Debug view)
(World-space) ambient occlusion attempts to shade areas darker which are occluded from the sky/enviroment light. (The less visible an area is for the skybox, the darker the area gets.)
For example overhangs, corners or holes get darker as less light from the enviroment can reach those areas.
Due to some limitations which are related to the way AO is calculated it's only a rough approximation but the advantage is that this information can be calculated relatively fast on the GPU.
Baking at runtime
The game ships with precalculated lightmaps for shadows and AO for all singleplayer/campaign maps. However, custom maps downloaded from the workshop don't. (The lightmap information is not stored in the mapfiles.)
This means that this lightmap information needs to be baked/generated on your local machine.
However you don't have to wait for the lightmap baking process to finish. You can start playing a map without having to worry about the generation process. The game will generate the shadow and AO information behind the scenes while you actively play the game. Once the baking process finishes, shadows and AO will fade in and be visible on the map-geometry.
You can keep track of the generation process by checking the progression in the top-right corner of the screen:
The game will cache lightmaps on the HDD/SSD to avoid having to rebake them in case you want to replay a map.
All lightmaps are stored in 4K by default (texture size of 4096*4096 px).
Other additions in the 1.1 update:
- Adjusted overall look and tone of all block-colors
- Purple checkpoint block was recolored to red (same as the goal block)
- Added Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion ("SSAO". Can be enabled in the video settings)
- Bugfixes and stability improvements
- Added checkpoint counter to the HUD.