A destruction model, a new rendering mode without ray tracing, a fully rewritten aerodynamics model and improved physics: this update changes how your crafts fly, take damage and crash.
Destruction
Your builds can now be damaged by impacts, heat, explosions and pressure. A high-speed crash, a nearby explosion or an over-pressurized tank now have real consequences on the integrity of your craft. This first iteration lays the foundations of the destruction system, such as ship crashes, industrial accidents or depressurization.
New Aerodynamics
We rewrote the aerodynamics model from scratch, with better performance and correctness. It now fully takes into account the final shape of your craft as built: the actual final geometry of your wings and fuselage determines flight behavior. You no longer need to worry about using large flat blocks or hide aileron components inside the wings.
Rasterizer (you can now play with your GTX)
A new rasterization degraded rendering mode, without ray tracing, is now available. Non-RTX GPUs will automatically switch to it by default, and everyone can choose their rendering mode in the launcher. Graphics quality and performance presets have also been reworked: everyone is reset to Medium by default. Rasterization mode is only intended for non-RTX GPUs. If you have an RTX GPU, switching to rasterization will usually **not improve performance**. It will reduce visual quality and may even run slower.
You might see an FPS improvement in 4K when the world is empty, but as you actually start adding things to your world, ray tracing becomes faster.
Archean is designed around ray tracing and takes full advantage of its ability to efficiently render very complex, high-poly scenes.
Improved Physics
We improved friction and collisions. Rovers placed or driven on moving platforms now behave correctly, such as a rover parked in the cargo bay of a flying ship.
Full changelog:
Implemented Destruction (damage from impacts, heat, explosions, pressure)
Implemented Rasterizer (for users with non-RTX GPU - AMD/Intel will default to raster because of RT bugs in their drivers)
New aerodynamics model (rewrote from scratch, now fully respects the final shape of how an aircraft is built, and improved performance)
Improved physics (friction, collisions, rovers on platforms...)
Reworked graphics quality/performance presets (now defaults back to Medium for everyone)
Build: Added a Creative-only "Delete subgrid & contents" button to the GetInfo of pivots, hinges and tracks
XenonCode IDE: Double-clicking a $variable or @function now selects the full identifier
Launcher: World and server list sorting is now remembered between sessions
Blueprint: Fixed large blueprints failing to spawn with "Failed to parse blueprint"
Blueprint: Added an explicit 64 MB size limit with a clear in-game error instead of a silent failure
Wheel: Fixed wheels having no rolling resistance (a coasting rover would roll forever)
Tank: Fixed rare crash when filling a tank while fluid is being pulled from it
Components: Fixed components placed with symmetry not behaving like their non-mirrored twin (RCS, thrusters, solar panels, solar sensors, magic cube, modded components)
XenonCode IDE: Fixed function signature tooltip remaining on screen after minimizing the IDE
XenonCode: Fixed unary minus on vectors and matrices, clarified matrix/scalar add error message
Come share your most spectacular crashes on Discord!
Social links:
[dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/2941660/Archean/"]
