Patch for Update 0.1.1.7 (and some news on Casino!)

Announcements
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Hello again, all you sTUnning people out there!

Developer note: The Casino is a massive undertaking and is under heavy, constant development. We hear you and understand your concerns, but we can’t afford to rush it out. We will be announcing a date of the Casino’s release very soon. Thank you for your patience!

Here’s a small update about the Casino developments, while we’re here:

  • We have working slots as shown on our latest Twitch stream
  • We have 3 different types of slot machines shipping with the Casino update (with more coming in future updates)
  • What’s left to do is:
  • Payouts for Casino games (very close to being done)
  • Betting for Casino games (very close to being done)
  • Persistent jackpots (very close to being done)
  • Spin to Win
  • Texas Hold’em
  • Why is the Casino taking so long?
  • We’ve gone to monumental lengths to ensure security of the Casino games. The Casino uses a piece of proprietary backend software we’ve been developing internally. This software took months to develop and was absolutely necessary to complete the Casino. Development was stalled on some Casino games until the necessary framework on the backend was completed.
  • The Plaza needed to be optimized before we put the Casino in. This took up a sizable chunk of development time. If a developer wasn’t working on Casino, they were doing optimization work. Without these optimizations, the Casino would run at unplayable framerates.
  • Casino games are written in two parts. The gameplay part runs in the game, the game-logic part runs securely on a backend server to prevent fraudulent behavior. Because of this, Casino games take longer to create than most other games in Tower.

Don’t forget to follow Casino development on our Trello: https://trello.com/c/3Kd7gd9o/101-casino

Optimizations:

  • Disabled distance field shadows in all maps, not just Plaza

Developer note: This was causing the issues in the Condo and other levels. Players should now see better performance when on the “TURBO” Shadow setting on those levels.

  • Optimized seats a bit, which should help performance in the Plaza more

Linux Dedicated Server Changes:

  • Fixed an issue where Linux dedicated servers wouldn’t stream certain levels

Planet Panic Changes:

  • Pressing T no longer respawns all players in Planet Panic

UI Changes:

  • Updated menu pictures

You can follow our current developments on our Trello:
https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

13 Likes
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EDIT: I mentioned 4570 draw calls but it was actually just 1170

In general I am surprised that it takes 1170 draw calls just to generate these 3 CSMs (taken after the release of this patch):

csm.jpg6093×2048 213 KB

And the final scene looks like this:

final.jpg1920×1080 258 KB

That’s way too much processing compared to GTA V where it takes only about 1000 draw calls to generate 4 CSMs.
It seems like the scene simply has too many individual objects eventhough my condo is quite empty. Imagine how this gets worse with more objects. Some form of dynamic batching is a must as it seems (and no UE4 doesn’t support it) and should be considered for future condo optimisations (whenever these happen).

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This game isn’t GTA V, they’re not comparable to be frank.

The condo has to be in separate pieces because each wall is 2 draw calls in order to have different materials per wall.

Also, distance field shadows were only enabled in 0.1.1.7, they were not enabled in 0.1.1.6 or prior.

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Fair point.

I don’t think that it should it draw every custom model though. I found the mesh of the toaster and some shelves being rendered as well (occlusion culling is doing some weird stuff). And you know the rocks and other static objects would highly benefit from being merged into just a few actors.

Yup these were taken after the hotpatchs release. Before and after it would generate pretty much the same depth maps.

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