v1.4.020 - the freezes were my fault, and here's what they were

Some of you got a game that froze at the logo, or showed the main menu and then locked up on the loading screen, or ran at one frame every ten seconds. One review called it horrible. That was a fair word for what you got, and this update is mostly about it.

What was actually happening

The game ships its shaders pre-compiled so your graphics card doesn't have to do that work the first time the store draws. Except it didn't. For several builds the export reported that step as on, and it was quietly producing nothing. Every single launch on your machines was compiling every shader in the store, live, while you waited: about fifteen seconds in one frozen frame on my PC, and far longer on cards slower than mine. On some machines it never got past the loading screen at all.

The embarrassing part is why I didn't catch it. On my PC the graphics driver caches the compiled result after the first run, so every launch after that looked normal, even when I ran the exported build instead of the editor. The export tool said baking was on. Nothing anywhere said the count was zero. I found it by going through the built game's file list line by line and seeing no shader cache in it at all. It had been shipping that way since the first Playtest build.

I was also slow to answer the review that flagged it. Ten days. Sorry.

What's fixed

• The shaders are actually baked now, and the build process proves it with a count instead of a checkbox. The first-launch freeze is gone.
• Menu to store on my PC went from about 47 seconds two builds ago to about 15. The loading screen was spending most of its time on a warm-up step that drew one thing per frame while you stared at static; it does that work in batches now, and a texture setting on the street outside that was being rebuilt on every launch is baked into the files instead.
• Walking into the store no longer stalls while the game rebuilds a leftover navigation region from the exterior's visual meshes.
• The launch that froze at the logo on a fresh install is fixed.
• About 200 MB of assets nothing referenced are gone; the demo download is 258 MB smaller.

What's still open

• A few people may hit a hang when quitting the game. I have it logged and it's next.
• If you still get a freeze, please send me the log. It lives at %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\New Game+\logs\newgameplus.log, or run "Collect my log file.bat" next to the exe and paste the newest file into the discussions. I read every one.

If you tried the demo, hit the freeze and uninstalled, I'd honestly like you to try it again. It's a different launch now.

The Playtest build has the same fixes as v1.4.020.