Hi everyone,
We have just completed another round of performance improvements and bug fixes before shifting our main focus back to Endless Mode and upcoming content. Work on the URP transition is also continuing alongside development.
This patch is primarily focused on improving stability, reducing unnecessary performance overhead, and resolving several edge case bugs reported by players.
One of the larger areas we looked at was the Gunslinger and Golden Gun. We found a few unusual situations where weapon swapping or firing the final shot could cause incorrect weapon behaviour. These cases have now been addressed, and we have also improved how Golden Gun projectiles, lighting, explosions, and effects are handled to reduce potential frame spikes during combat.
We have also made several smaller performance improvements across enemy AI, effects, shadows, colliders, and background logging. Individually these changes are small, but together they should help provide a smoother experience, particularly during heavier encounters.
The Forest remains one of the more demanding environments for lower-spec systems due to its vegetation and scene complexity. We have reworked part of the grass rendering setup, which improved grass rendering performance by roughly 30% in our internal testing. There is still room for improvement, and we expect the ongoing URP work to give us additional opportunities to optimize this further.
Mage players also received an important fix. Staff attacks are now correctly recognized as ranged attacks, allowing ranged God abilities and related effects to trigger as intended. Special thanks to C… from Discord for helping us track this one down.
We also corrected the visual appearance of the Iron Abomination elite after discovering that part of its material setup was not displaying correctly.
This update took us slightly away from new content for a short period, but we felt it was important to improve the foundation before pushing further into Endless Mode. With these fixes in place, our main development focus is moving back toward new gameplay content.
Thanks again for all the reports, testing, and support. If you encounter anything unusual, feel free to post in the Steam Community or Discord. We check both regularly and your reports have been extremely useful.
If you are enjoying Dark Light: Survivor, leaving a Steam review is also one of the best ways to support the project. It makes a meaningful difference for a small team like ours.
Performance & Optimization
Improved the enemy indicator system to prevent indicators from accumulating between runs.
Removed unnecessary enemy side logging operations that could generate additional garbage collection during combat.
Reduced repeated AI calculations by moving behaviour and weighting setup out of per-frame updates.
Reduced the maximum shadow rendering distance from 60 to 30 for improved performance.
Reworked Forest grass materials for better rendering efficiency.
Removed unnecessary mesh readability errors associated with environmental walls.
Cleaned up an invalid material setup and unused script associated with the Western Revolver.
Removed redundant freeze related processing from enemies that do not support freezing.
Improved several explosion effect configurations.
Added preloading for Golden Gun projectiles, impact effects, and explosions.
Adjusted Golden Gun projectile lighting so it no longer generates dynamic shadows.
Golden Gun
Fixed a rare issue that could cause continuous dodge rolling after firing the final Golden Gun shot.
Fixed weapon state issues that could occur when replacing another weapon in the inventory while Golden Gun was active.
Fixed another edge case where removing the previous weapon while Golden Gun was active could prevent the next weapon from dealing damage correctly.
Improved Golden Gun effect loading and runtime performance.
Combat & Weapons
Staff attacks are now correctly recognized by ranged attack effects and abilities.
Ranged God abilities can now activate properly when using Mage staffs.
Fixed a rare animation lock when activating skills during Two-Handed Sword attacks.
Corrected Mage one handed weapon animations within the inventory.
Cleaned up several unnecessary player animation warnings.
Achievements
Corrected progression tracking for the achievement requiring 200 enemies to be ignited during a single run.
Mage burning effects now contribute correctly toward relevant achievement progress.
Corrected the displayed requirements for Guns Up and Sharpshooter.
Bossbreaker now correctly recognizes one-handed weapons.
General Fixes
Corrected several coroutine cleanup issues.
Fixed a controller related error when selling an equipped Artifact.
Restored a missing loading step for certain insect enemies.
Removed several warning messages triggered after Shooter enemies were defeated.
Visual Improvements
Corrected the material and skin appearance of the Iron Abomination elite.
Again, thanks for your support, and stay tuned for more updates coming soon.
Best,
Mirari