This month is a little light on content as we've spent a good chunk of time diagnosing and working on a number of micro optimizations. The hope is that these micro optimizations add up for folks (especially on the lower end of our system requirements). We are working on a few more performance optimizations which we hope to have ready within the coming weeks!
Updates:
Added +Mental Damage to King's Potions.
Increased Stoneclaw Scorpion spawns in Gimstone Canyon.
Increased Stonecoat Extractors, Menders, and Seekers in Grimstone Canyon.
Increased the drop rate of the tablet for the Alchemy quest.
Removed redundant "Cloth" name in some outfitter recipes.
Sentinel Weaken no longer requires combat stance.
Updated to the latest Unity subversion. This includes minor bug fixes and performance updates.
Improved visual stability of a number of props when using any dynamic resolution option. If you continue to notice specific props "shimmering" please send us a /report so I can get them fixed!
Adjusted Halt VFX visuals.
Fixes:
Fixed Hearth VFX not lasting for the full 60 seconds for non-subscribers.
Fixed missing Mandrake and Silk naming for crafted cloth.
Fixed missing "Summit" prefix for some log types.
Fixed spelling error on Revenant's Reaver.
Fixed Copperhead placeholder not being marked correctly.
Fixed color on normal scale vambraces.
Fixed a potential exception in the crafting UI that could stop a craft.
Fixed some exceptions on IKControllers during tear down.
Fixed a long standing motion vectors vegetation shader bug on macOS and Linux.
Performance Improvements
Adjusted compilation flags for macOS and Linux binaries to improve speed and stability.
Updated macOS and Linux to both use instanced indirect for vegetation rendering.
Reduced mesh complexity of grass to reduce gpu strain.
Reduced grass density across the board by 20%.
Unified grass LOD distance for all biomes and all scenes.
Different quality settings now clamp which vegetation LODs are allowed to render shadows. In other words: lower quality settings result in fewer far range vegetation rendering shadows freeing up cpu and gpu time.
Removed a number of obsolete shaders from the build freeing up vram.
Removed vegetation masks on all collectable resources. This should significantly reduce the amount of vegetation flickering seen at dawn and dusk.
All tree imposters (far distance) are now rendered with instanced batching. This can free up a significant chunk of cpu time in tree heavy scenes such as Redshore / Freehold.
We are currently in the midst of implementing gpu occlusion culling for the vegetation system which is looking to claw back another good chunk of cpu/gpu time. Unfortunately, it didn't make it in time for the patch; hopefully it will be ready at some point August. In other words: more perf optimizations to come!