Happy Holidays! I know, I know, we didn’t make a blog post last week. It’s the holiday season, and just like you, we’ve been spending time with with friends and family, which takes much greater precedence over this game. We do, however, have plenty to update you on. 

Bug Fixes since last week:

• Reverted bitmaps that cause freezing crashes from mipmap errors. (These were the main crashes mentioned last week)
  
• Base map variant files have been updated (Weapon placements, spawn zones, ect)
• Fixed Beam Rifle spread. (We accidentally had made it extremely innacurate. Oops.)
  
• Cached infoserver response data every 5 seconds. (Increases performance)
• Added push-to-talk noise toggle to settings
  
• Fixed some server variables not being written to preferences file.
• Removed headshot sounds and effects.
  
• Enabled always ragdoll on death 

The AMD Freeze

As you may have seen from my Reddit post this week, we needed a bit of help from the community in getting testers with AMD cards to help us figure out the issue that causes the game to freeze; It’s easily the most complex issue we have come across in a long time. 

The process: Much of the rendering engine was stripped out. There was No lighting, no shadows, no effects, no water, no shield impact, no glass, no effect particles, no contrails, and the list goes on and on. With these features stripped out, unsurprisingly, the freeze did not occur anymore. Over the course of three days, these render features were slowly re-enabled one by one and tested in isolation. After many many hours, finally, the problem revealed itself in contrails.

What are contrails? Contrails are mostly used for trails on bullet projectiles e.g. sniper tracers. Many people have said that they believe it happens when they explode something, which actually turns out to be true. They are in-fact used on explosives. Here you can see contrails created from a fusion coil exploding:

The solution: With these contrails disabled, we’ve had zero reports of any freezing. It has been tested extensively by at least 30 people for hours at a time. While disabling these contrails, fixes the issue, it is not ideal. Particularly the sniper tracers as that directly affects gameplay, and could be said to give an advantage to non-AMD users. Fortunately, only the beam rifle seems to have this issue. We will continue to search for the exact cause and try to save these contrails for AMD users, but it’s proving to be very difficult. The exact cause of what makes the device crash has yet to be determined.

However, we would like to thank you, the community, for helping us out with this. Over 50 community members volunteered their time to help us figure this thing out. There are many people we’d like to thank, but we’d especially like to thank a few of our testers, Rex706, Xennma, and JeBobs, who dedicated countless hours working directly with unk_1 trying to narrow down the cause. 

Q: Why haven’t you released yet? What is preventing you from releasing right now?

1. The new updater has made some more progress, but is not finished. We feel very strongly that an intuitive, bug-free, one-click updater is crucial to be included with 0.6. We still need to implement the ability for it to self-update, as well as skin the UI. Our estimate is that 15 development hours remain on it. 
2. As mentioned above, since the AMD freeze cause has been narrowed down to contrails, we need to finish up fixing it. 

And that’s pretty much it. The AMD Freezing issue was never a must-finish for us, but now that contrails have been identified to be the culprit and we are closer now than ever to having it fixed, we will fix it. Worst case scenario is that we have to add a setting to remove the offending contrails for AMD users. But releasing a game that doesn’t run on a GPU that holds 15% of the GPU market share while a fix is nearby would be pretty foolish.

Q. I want to see more cool 0.6 gameplay. Where is it?

A. Right here, of course.

You know that big crater off in the distance on Diamondback? Well I made a griffball map inside of it. Here’s Craterball: 

We did some more experimental gametypes. Here’s gameplay of an 8-team Multi-Team game (2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2) of King of the Hill. It was madness.

Here’s some gameplay of ‘Matador’ on ‘Valor Dome’ - a new forge map made by Rex706 and recorded by Xennma 

Here’s Anvil Royale on Wasteland - a new forge map made by Rex706 and recorded by J. (Ignore the incorrect time remaining on the vote screen, it’s been fixed)

Here’s some CTF on Diamondback (recorded by Rex706)

Rex706 also made a cool Dodgeball map, with both night and day versions. I don’t have much for gameplay, but here are a couple of pictures and a gif of it:

I’ve been messing with the flycam and adding more fine-tuned controls to adjust movement, look, and up/down speed on the go using the triggers. This allows for better cinematic shots for people who like to make videos. (cough trailer cough).

Conclusion

And there you have it. We would have loved to get 0.6 out the door by the end of the year, but unfortunately it just wasn’t in the cards for us. Hopefully, there will only need to be one or two more of these blog posts. Thanks for being patient. We’re just as ready and excited as you are to for this to be released. 

Til next time, 
Rabid