With this patch we were fixing some issues that were causing huge annoyance, and optimisation.
Changes
- Actor Animation: Actors in zones have started to take their toll with cpu usage, we managed to decrease the demands to render actors by re-coding the way their animations work. When the actors are in view of the player's camera the animations play normally but when the camera is not facing these actors, the enter a sort of "freeze state" where although they still follow their waypoint paths (movement paths) the animations are not being played reducing the stress on the client. With this change the fps rate of each zone has increase a dramatical amount.
- Re-Optimised Shadows: Shadow casters and receivers are defined by the client running checks for each model during loading screens and then renders the shadows once the player is playing. We have reduced the amount of checks being performed which not only reduces loading screen time but also reducing the stress on the client when rendering the shadows. This only gave a small boost in performance but as a result shadows became a lot sharper and zones don't look as tacky.
Bug Fixes
- Actor LOD: Although the actor LOD was working as it should, actors were just appearing and disappearing instantly. They are now fading in and out as they should to give a much smooth transition between rendering and not rendering the actors.
- Night Lighting: At night time although the sky texture was updating correctly the ambient lighting was not, resulting in the scenery being extremely bright instead of dark ruining the atmosphere. This has now been fixed and this was the result...
- Bloom: The code behind the bloom effect was tweaked so that it didn't make white surfaces such as snow become blinding bright.
