PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
The Black Pool patch 1.3 brings many performance improvements. Following the last big content patch, we devoted substantial time to evaluate and tune both CPU and GPU performance. A large focus of this effort was to ensure that biomes which were less performant were brought into parity with the rest of the game. Most notably, the forest environment has been optimized and greatly improved, and now has a low-end tree replacement system for players on low foliage settings.
QUICK WIND REVAMPED
Wind Blast has been reworked to be more fun and useful from the start. The wind projectile now moves at a constant blistering speed, a 225% increase. The projectile speed upgrade has been replaced with an upgrade to increase the blast splash radius—a more rewarding option. Some additional adjustments were made to reduce accidental self knockbacks when hitting targets in close proximity. The attack rate upgrade and other attack rate modifiers now also reduce the time to maximum charge for the Gale Force augment.
NEW LOOK FOR THE DEVICE
The Device has been updated to help visually differentiate each of the device powers.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES AND IMPROVEMENTS
- Player movement speed is now 20% faster, improving agility and feel while reducing run time in large levels.
- Reworked the light overcharge upgrade mechanic to now increase the charged damage and light effect without increasing overall charge time. Rebalanced the quick and strong attacks that make use of this upgrade.
- Updated fire and ice clones to not collide with players. No more deflecting off your friend’s clone when they cast it after hitting a jump pad!
- Some of the longer levels have been tightened up to reduce excessive running.
- Added first-time shader compiling notification to the main menu to inform players when additional resources are being spent on compiling shaders.
- Additional refinement of movement animations.
BALANCE UPDATES
- Magnus Underlord bosses: Replaced the penetrating laser with a bolt attack. Now all Underlord attacks can be blocked by the side pillars, fixing the issue of being hit through walls.
- Phantom Leap: Updated to have slightly more upward momentum and 20% more base height. Reduced decay jump height upgrade by 20%. Reduced invulnerability time upgrade by 50%.
- Decreased the move speed drop bonus from 50% to 40% to account for the new increased player movement speed.
- Adjustments to the Time Trial challenge mode timings.
- Boulder Toss: Increased base damage by 20%.
BUG FIXES
- Event Bars: Fixed the boss name listing twice in event bars while playing The Journey Home.
- Rallies: Fixed issues that could delay applying the effects of rallies, most impactful with Holy Light where it could be possible to cast and die without getting revived.
- Time Trial: Fixed display bug that could cause the time trial bar to erroneously show an extra minute in the countdown, giving the appearance of skipping time when it self-corrected.
- Stomper Boss: Fixed lag spike that could occur upon boss death.
Note: Recent NVIDIA drivers introduced a bug with DLSS which causes severe graphical glitching. If you experience this issue, updating your drivers or switching to TSR resolution scaling should fix the issue.
A huge shout out to BeardedInk and itsAlexxGaming for their extensive testing and feedback on performance for their setups! If you would like to be part of the community and share your opinion on what should be developed next, join The Black Pool Discord!
