It has been a long time coming. In fact, this update has been the longest update to create by far. Most of the blame can be aimed at my job hunting situation, which has not really improved in the last few months. That being said, I wanted to finish this update and the next by the end of the year, so I’ve powered through to get this update out. If you have been following the last few devlogs, then you probably already know what is being added in this update. However, just to get everyone up to speed, here is what Version 0.1.121 adds.

Improved Visuals

The game has been updated from Unity 2021 to Unity 2022 and from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the High Definition Render Pipeline. That means the lighting has taken a noticeable change. You can expect better shadows, fog, more realistic colors, bloom and reflections, a realistic-looking skybox, and vastly improved water rendering and physics. While the original game leaned on heavy usage of post-processing that gave a washed-out appearance for the game, the new visuals keep things looking more natural and clean.

In addition, the game now uses new vegetation and nature assets from Unity’s HDRP Terrain Demo and from the “Book of the Dead” short film. These assets provide foliage that not only has significantly more detail than before, but also uses animations to simulate wind. This makes the maps feel more believable and lively when the action is quiet.

There is also the new particle system for blood and bullet impact effects. And lastly, the new graphics menu allows you to tweak the visuals of the game to maximize performance (more on that a little later).

Redone Maps

I was hoping when I started working on this update that it would be merely an asset switch from the old to the new. However, I was given a rude awakening when I found out how out of place some of the new assets looked and how some elements of the game were completely broken.

For instance, the entire San Juan map needed to be retextured, replanted with new trees and vegetation, have its map boundaries re-outlined, and have some of its height map data altered. This on top of the new additions, such as a fully modeled background environment (no more floating maps in the middle of a void, unless you are counting the museum which will likely get modified in the future as well), made development of the map take ages. However, it was all completely worth it given the results. You can expect that, while the maps might play similarly before, you will need to readjust your bearings of where you are given all the changes.

Important Info Regarding Performance

This is going to be a quick PSA on the game’s performance. Obviously, the game is much more performance demanding now. The game is now twice the file size (this is the first time I will be using Itch.io’s Butler plugin, because the base importer limits file sizes to 1 GB) with the compressed file being a little over 1 GB and the full game being around 2 and a half.

If you struggled running the game before, you definitely won’t see performance improvements here (though they will be coming soon). My recommendation, especially for the San Juan map, is to play the game using the Medium graphics setting preset (bear in mind, you can also tweak custom settings). This lowers the draw distance of grass and lowers texture quality, but buys you a whole lot in frames. You should also turn off motion blur unless your PC can actually handle it or you want a “cinematic” appearance (motion blur is disabled by default).

Now What?

You may be surprised to hear this, but this is the second to last “major content update.” Version 0.1.122 will be the last major update for the game and will add more improvements and debugging tools for the AI (since they are still quite unintelligent and they need much more work), updated menu UI, controller support and key bindings, and localization support.

As mentioned previously, some performance optimizations are incoming. This will come in the form of retexturing the recently added nature assets, specifically the ones from the “Book of the Dead.” Currently, these assets are affected by wind from any distance (even far from the player) and they are not designed with low “batching” in mind (batching is the process of the CPU telling the GPU what to render per frame). To fix this, I’ll be making a separate LOD texture for these assets and adding them to the lower LOD models, which should hopefully alleviate some of the performance hiccups (especially on the San Juan map which stutters quite a lot).

Version 0.1.122 is not the final update though. There will still be a series of hotfixes to fix any serious bugs still found in the game. While that is all happening, work will begin on Alpha 2 and the Steam Early Access launch. You can expect an updated roadmap (along with probably an updated Itch.io store page) alongside the release of the next update.

Finally, support for Mac and Linux devices is still planned. Whether it will be in the next update or as part of the rapid series of hotfixes is still to be determined.

Thank You

I can not stress this enough; thank you all for waiting. I know it has been a while and I wouldn’t even be surprised if some thought I quit the project entirely. I have not, and I am determined to finish the project even if my personal life problems cause a bit of havoc. So again, thank you for your patience. Let’s hope the next update won’t take so long.

As a reminder, feel free to send bug reports and suggestions to our community Discord server (https://discord.com/invite/p8CA9qXgCN) and feel free to check out this post on the Venomic Games website: https://venomicgames.com/?p=784