Addressing performance issues

Hey everyone, quick technical update aimed squarely at the stuttering some of you reported after the last patch. No content or balance changes in this one, just performance and stability work.

Engine rollback

Several of you told us the game started stuttering after the hit reactions update, high FPS on the counter, but the game feeling choppy. While investigating, we traced the most likely culprit to the Unity engine version we'd been shipping on: recent engine patch releases introduced a memory leak and allocator issues that cause exactly this kind of hitching (and were behind some of the crashes and freezes a few of you have sent us dumps for, thank you!). We've rolled the game back to an earlier, stable engine version that predates the problem.
One note for the technically minded: the newer engine versions also carried a security fix, and rolling back doesn't mean losing it, every build now goes through Unity's official patching tool, which applies that same security fix directly to the shipped game. Best of both.

Ship hit reactions performance pass

The new hit reactions were also doing more work than they needed to: after a ship got knocked around, its thrusters kept recalculating their visuals every single frame, long after the motion had settled. That's fixed, thrusters now only update when the throttle visibly changes. The reactions look exactly the same, there's just less churn under the hood.

If you're still seeing stutter

We believe the engine rollback addresses the reports, but if your game still stutters after this update, we want to know. Hop on our Discord and send us your Player.log (found at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Edgeflow\Breachway), the game records performance measurements in there that let us pinpoint exactly where the time goes.

Thanks for the reports and for sticking with us. o7

The Breachway Team