Hi everyone. Since V0.1.1.1, the four versions shipped over the past few days (V0.1.1.2 → V0.1.1.5) have gone almost entirely into one thing: making sure late waves and long Endless runs stop getting choppier the further you go. This announcement is meant to give you a reasonably complete picture of what was done, how it turned out, and what I'm planning next.
The stutter work, and where things stand now
Across these versions, here is the work I did to secure your combat experience at higher waves:
Reworked how wide-area skills resolve when a single hit lands on hundreds of enemies at once — the work is now spread across several adjacent frames (damage values and hit order are completely unchanged). The single worst frame drop in late Endless has been smoothed out.
The per-wave autosave no longer writes large blocks of data that the run report never reads. Save files no longer snowball with wave count, and the freeze at the end of late waves is noticeably reduced.
The "Performance Mode" toggle in Settings has been reworked into Graphics Quality (画面质量) with three tiers: High / Medium / Low. Optimizations you can't see any visual difference from are now always on at every tier, so you no longer have to trade visuals for frames; Medium and Low additionally lighten the glow on skill effects (Medium turns off the outer glow, Low further narrows the effect range). The gain is largest in late waves where the screen is packed with skill effects. High behaves exactly as before.
Crit damage numbers are now merged and accumulated within a short window (the gold text and the bounce are both preserved). The screen no longer gets buried in numbers, and it saves some overhead along the way.
The first-time load for External Arts (外功) now happens during the pre-wave banner. The hitch on the first cast of an art is reduced.
Removed duplicated drop-rate and HUD-refresh calculations during mass kills; silver from a single kill now merges within a small radius.
The latest version adds a coordinate sanity gate to enemy telegraph circles, blade winds and area rings, closing off an error path that could make the game run slower and slower until it froze completely.
On top of that, starting with V0.1.1.3 the game reports fully anonymous aggregated performance data to Steam (only numbers like frame-rate buckets and wave counts — no personal information of any kind). After collecting 158,000 waves across roughly 11,000 runs in a single day, here is where things currently stand:
About 85% of waves run above 45 FPS from start to finish;
About 8% of waves fall between 30–45 FPS;
About 6.6% of waves drop below 30 FPS.
One caveat: this data was collected on V0.1.1.3, so the skill-glow reduction, the damage-number merging and the error-flood protection mentioned above are not reflected in it yet. It's a snapshot of work that is half done, not the finish line. After today's update, stutter should ease further.
There's one more finding in the data that is immediately useful if you have persistent frame drops: resolution affects frame rate far more than you'd expect. Part of the game's rendering cost scales linearly with the number of screen pixels — 2K is roughly 1.8× that of 1080p, and 4K roughly 4×. So if your GPU is already struggling, running at a high resolution amplifies that dramatically.
[p align="start"]This is likely down to the current build's code not being mature enough. But if you're dropping frames constantly, I'd suggest trying the following, in this order:First, set Graphics Quality (画面质量) to Low (低) — it cuts away a chunk of rendering cost, and gameplay and numbers are not affected in any way. In the current data, it has a clear effect on weaker GPUs.
If that isn't enough, lower the game's render resolution. Fullscreen follows your desktop resolution, so you'll need to switch to Windowed mode in Settings and pick a smaller window size (or simply lower your desktop resolution before launching). This step is usually more immediately effective than the quality setting.
There's another kind of problem in the reports: some players whose frame rate is perfectly healthy (even one or two hundred FPS) suddenly find things slowing down and the screen freezing at some moment, leaving a forced shutdown as the only way out. Almost all of these reports come from machines with NVIDIA discrete GPUs. I've already plugged one suspicious path in the latest version (a per-frame error-log flood), but its true root cause still has to be confirmed in a later build.
To everyone still dealing with stutter or crashes like this — I'm truly, truly sorry!!
The good news is that I now have ways to keep watching. The anonymous Steam telemetry above gets read back every day, so I can see how the share of low-frame waves moves after each release. And the latest version adds finer instrumentation on top of that: per-wave GPU frame time and render resolution are now reported separately, which lets me separate GPU-side from CPU-side bottlenecks using real player data.
With that data behind it, the next round of frame-rate work will be far more targeted and purposeful. What this data can't do, at least for now, is tell me exactly what was happening when you hit a crash or an unexpected exit. So if you run into a freeze, a crash, or persistent low frame rates, please do submit the diagnostic report the game generates along with your feedback:
👉 「群侠传：幸存者」Bug Report & Feedback Board
The diagnostic report contains per-wave frame-rate summaries, your hardware and quality settings, and the log right before the crash — things that aggregated data can never give me. Many of the optimization directions above came out of cross-referencing the diagnostic reports players submitted; the protection against that error flood came from the tail end of one player's uploaded log. Every single report submitted really does get read and attributed, one by one.
Other updates beyond optimization
Alongside the performance work, a number of content-side improvements and changes shipped in the same builds:
Added
The Endless Mode random wave pool has grown from 9 to 12. Early-game wave layouts have been folded into the rotation, with density normalization so their enemy counts line up with the other late-game waves.
Lock-in tutorial segments now support "hold Space to skip this segment"; a short press still advances one line.
The "Equipped External Arts" area on the Martial Arts page now has a permanent note, making 【发劲】 easier to discover.
Locked titles in 江湖录 now spell out their unlock condition on hover. (The UI presentation could still use some polish.)
Changed
The three in-run options (Skip Story / Skip Tutorial / Endless Mode) now appear once you've started a run, instead of requiring a full clear.
"Abandon Run" now plays the full death sequence.
In-combat notification text stays on screen a bit longer.
When you have free rerolls after a wave, the reroll button now reads "免费" (Free) and keeps a pulsing highlight.
The in-combat buff bar now makes room for the stats bar; the two no longer overlap.
Sect selection cards at run start now use a uniform four-character description format.
Fixed
Windowed mode being forced back to fullscreen by the system (two different paths were fixed across two versions, one of them being the GPU driver promoting the window to exclusive fullscreen).
The system menu entry on the post-wave prep screen was dead: both ESC and the pause button in the top right work now — previously both entries were broken at the same time.
Resuming a post-wave save made you replay that wave; it now returns you straight to that wave's post-wave prep screen.
Wave numbering going off the rails after resuming an Endless save, producing a "Wave 62" pre-wave scroll past the safety cap.
Two achievements that could never be unlocked: the hidden poison-kill achievement never counted at all, and the distance-travelled achievement stopped counting the moment its corresponding title was unlocked.
Selling items under 薪火行者 was effectively worthless: with that title, sale proceeds went neither into your purse nor into max HP. It now goes through the same conversion path as ground pickups.
Getting stuck in walls or terrain after being grabbed and thrown by an enemy — hardened again.
The opening cinematic freezing halfway through would lock the game up completely. It now hands you back to the main menu when a stall is detected.
The version number on the in-game About page was stuck at 0.1.0; it now follows the actual release version.
The last character of the description on the "Sect Origin" card at run start was being silently cut off.
Improved the readability of the dangerous buttons (Abandon Run / Abandon and Settle).
Banners flickering and disappearing under firelight effects.
Added a cap on 三元贯脉掌's inner-qi accumulation (a safety net for Endless runs over 50 minutes; normal runs are unaffected).
What I might work on next
I want to repeat something I said in the last announcement: when this game first released, it was positioned as a small project with a bit of a "homework assignment" quality to it. It has a complete gameplay loop, but overall it's still very much a half-finished product. I can now see the number of people who've played it and their playtime on the backend, and honestly, both are several orders of magnitude beyond what I originally expected.
There are things I genuinely want to add to this half-finished product. Since I'm writing this announcement anyway, here's a quick rundown:
The 【Hard Mode】 locked on the character select screen is now planned. The reason it wasn't raised for launch was mainly that I didn't see much need to deliberately add challenge before players had worked through the existing systems and content. Looking at things now, there is a bit of a need after all.
Resonance contribution from Internal Arts (内功) is being designed. To be clear: in the first version I only ever planned for External Arts to contribute to resonance, so "Internal Arts don't resonate" was actually part of the design. But after the question kept coming up again and again, I have been seriously thinking about how to make it happen. It will likely involve a whole series of resonance value and tier adjustments, so please do give me a bit more time to balance it properly.
The martial arts pool will likely get an expansion. Your hands-on play has proven a lot of builds viable, so I'll design more new arts on top of that. Right now the only sects that are genuinely fleshed out are the ones you can pick at run start. When a sect gets close to "done", I'll add it to the run-start options — you can use that as your signal for whether it's playable.
(Also, the sects that have appeared in 焚天坛 should all get their own more distinctive martial arts systems in the next major version.)
More Encounter events. Seems like people quite like them, so I'll make some more (〃'▽'〃)
My development pace right now is mainly limited by sheer workload. Even with heavy AI assistance throughout development, designing a set of new enemies, content and mechanics — and producing the matching visual assets — still takes time. I also have a day job to deal with alongside this game, so I really can't promise you a schedule.
What I am fairly certain of, though, is this: making this game, and watching people enjoy it, has been a genuinely delightful process for me. So I'm more than willing to spend more time on it and get the things you're hoping for into the game.
If at this stage you find the challenge too easy, or feel there aren't enough martial arts, items, or enemy attack patterns, or if the frame drops and optimization issues are still bugging you — all of these are things that can realistically be solved in the future. Until then, I'd honestly recommend going off to play other, better, more mature games first, and coming back at some point after a major update to see the new content. So in short —
