Happy holidays, everyone! To celebrate and say thanks, we’ve got a special treasure hunt going on through the end of the year. Plus we’ve released optimization fixes to improve performance. Those notes are below.
The Great Holiday Hat Hunt!
Reindeer, Santa, and Elf hats await.
What could be more festive than a Santa-hat-wearing chicatdog? Nothing, of course! So, this holiday we invite you to hunt down or tame some wild creatures that have randomly spawned wearing one of 3 special hats on their beautiful heads. (Or you could cheat and switch to Creative mode but where’s the fun in that?)
The hats are only available for a limited time—until Jan 3rd—so get hunting soon.
And be sure to share screenshots with us on Discord! We’d want to see your lovely (and not so lovely) creatures in their festive new gear.
Good luck!
Play the All-New CHKN!
If you haven’t tried it out yet, make sure you’re on the latest update and give the brand new CHKN a go. Build creatures with the new blocks, survive the new wilderness, send your creatures into battle in Arena mode… there's lots to explore. (See the full recap in this 0.7 update post.) Let us know what you think!
We’ve also got a poll going over on our Discord to see what everyone’s favourite mode is. Are you an Adventurer, an Arena battler, or a Creative builder? Head over there and vote!
Optimization Fixes & Tech Improvements
We’ve just pushed an update with many fixes and tech improvements to optimize performance. With these, you’ll notice:
- Stuttering/hitching as you move through the world has been dramatically reduced.
- Improved loading with better messaging
There’s still a point during the initial loading, before the loading bar shows 0%, where the game is temporarily unresponsive. It seems like the game may have crashed but it hasn’t! Summon the patience of a saint and it will load after some waiting (how long depends on your computer specs). We’re working on this!
And for those of you that want more technical details, here's the full list of improvements:
- New rendering technique to render many instances of an object quickly for modern video cards. Increases render range while improving FPS.
- Implemented compute shaders to cull based off of camera frustum and occlusion. (Requires a modern card.)
- Added fallbacks for the above for low-end devices to maintain current FPS.
- World streaming system overhauled to no longer be gameObject based. Frees up resources for other systems, greatly reduces stutters, and improves LOD responsiveness. (Collisions always register quickly; no delay when traveling through world for things to load in.)
- Foliage system optimized to remove frame stuttering when traveling through the world.
- Improved quality settings. Render distance will now tune all systems to greatly improve FPS on low end devices. High end devices can now render up to 2x as much as previous build.
- Plus various bug fixes (FX no longer always attached to hands, throw animation is fixed, failed to load fixed)
Dog Armor is Here!
Our 5th creature-based armor is now in the game! If you want to keep warm on cold CHKN nights, hunt down some dog creatures and get to crafting.
“Come, Chicky! It’s time to get our revenge on those Lightcats.“
Handy Links
- Join our CHKN discord! Hang out, chat about your game ideas, report bugs, or get help.
- Follow us on Twitter and subscribe to us on YouTube
- Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about CHKN News
Thank you for all your support this year. We love all your feedback and crazy creature creations. Happy holidays!
- Team CHKN
