Greetings everybody! Today we are proud to announce that Northern Lights is part of the Steam Winter Sale Event at a 50% off discount! And to celebrate this, the Christmas in-game decorations are making a return!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1090800/Northern_Lights/
Along with this event, we are also releasing update 0.12 which focuses on improving stability and performance of the game. This is the first stage of our optimization effort, and a first base on which we will continue to add improvements with the coming updates.
Better asset streaming
Northern Lights uses asset streaming in order to load and unload regions of the game without a loading screen. That means that the game loads and unloads assets from disk as it goes. This sounds great in theory, but some of you were having lots of trouble with scenery not loading, missing terrains, falling through map, lag spikes and so on. This was an issue of a middleware tool that we use and is no longer supported, so we decided that in order to get rid of these issues for good, we had to take the step to replace it altogether. And because of this, in the past month we worked hard at developing our own system for streaming scenery. It is not perfect and definitely not final, still a lot of things to solve about it in terms of performance improvements, but a good start in our journey towards a fully smooth experience.
Better memory utilization
We've taken a deeper look into what takes so much system memory in Northern Lights, and we manage to shave off up to 2GB of memory used in certain cases. There are still things that we want to address regarding this, but unfortunately we didn’t manage to do it for this update. There will probably be another patch with further improvements regarding memory usage in the near future.
Better frame rate in certain locations
We have optimized some of the assets we use in the residential locations. This is still an ongoing process, but for this update expect better performance in most residential locations. As with the previously discussed point, there will be another patch addressing the issue in more locations in the near future.
Improved terrain settings
Some of you might have noticed that the terrain quality setting of the game does not do much. This was a big issue that was on our radar for a while, but something we've never got around until now. Setting terrain quality to low should now have a great benefit impact on frame rate, at the cost of texture and effect quality. With this fix in place, we have noticed up to a 30% performance gain on low-end hardware. If your machine is around the minimum specs in terms of graphics performance, expect a good performance boost from this update.
And more! Changelog below
- New asset streaming system
- Improved memory utilization
- Improved performance in locations
- Improved terrain quality settings
- Doors now save their open/close state when saving game
- Fixed an issue causing in-location loot to sometimes respawn when loading certain saves
- Fixed an issue causing pelt-beds from certain locations to disappear when loading any save
- Minor tweaks to some texture resolutions
What is next?
In the coming months, along with the aforementioned performance patches, we aim to add new mechanics elements and improve the existing ones. This will include hunting, animal AI remade from the ground up, improving and fixing the issues with story mode, as well as new side quests, and more. We will come with a full roadmap for 2023 in the weeks to come!
And as always, thanks to everyone for taking time to read this blog post, for supporting us through feedback and purchasing the game, and for being part of our small, yet growing community!