Warlords,
We are coming up on a week since launch, can you believe it? To me it feels like it has been a month. I don't think I have worked this hard since the launch of Britannia.
I was planning on diving into optimizations later, next week when I return from the wedding, but this has been bothering me. The performance of the game just hasn't made sense for a while. When testing the game it ran very smooth, but in actual builds it had stutters and seemed to be overall less performant. I was convinced for the longest time that this was due to the characters. It turns out it was something far more mundane...
After a long day spent profiling and testing various optimizations I figured out the #1 public enemy: the trees! Not the trees themselves actually, they are quite fast, but rather their colliders. It turns out that the engine's built in tree collider system is extremely lacking for this kind of open world game. Disabling them and using my own bespoke tree collider proxy system ended up massively decreasing physics load on the game.
This change should result in a vastly smoother running game, possible FPS gains in certain situations (can be as much as 2X), and a massive decrease in loading time (at least it has for me, so please confirm this).
Along with these enhancements I have made some QOL and balance changes so please read here for that! I am heading out of town on Thursday and will be back on the 22nd!
Until then,
Darkmatter
vR106
Optimized character, settlement, camp, and especially tree physics to increase stabilization and max FPS across the board
Massively decreased apparent load time (please confirm this)
Changed player map icon to be an directional arrow
Changed captured settlement map icons so they hide their inventory, since it can never be used
Fixed downed unit icons not updating their position when fast traveling or returning to camp
Fixed surrendered and wounded enemies being killed accidentally by player’s troops, now post-battle options are more meaningful
Added a helmet to the Iwaya Mansion
Changed distribution of random hokora and graveyard items in all regions, so you have a chance of getting an item from the next region early
Nerfed starter army because it was scaring too many players
Improved army difficulty scaling so now they scale up per region and roughly match the player’s army size and composition. The end game armies are now the same as the ideal player army, so look out!
