War of Rights - Patch Notes

[Poorlaggedman]

- Prevented the Union team from being able to reach the 2nd stonewall and fire down into the CSA spawn of the Harpers Graveyard skirmish area.

Wow. Why not just move the CSA spawn back? Moving forward was the only respectable means of defense. That entire skirmish area is now confined to a single defensive strategy of defending the same wall. To advance into the graveyard as a defender would be asinine and the only option left is to defend the same wall because the CSA will 100% occupy the opposite wall every time now with no chance for opposition. gaga.gif

[Poorlaggedman]

There seem to be lots of crashes and clients getting dumped since the last patch.

[TrustyJam]

There seem to be lots of crashes and clients getting dumped since the last patch.

Please use the error reporter, thank you.

- Trusty

[LaBelle]

What was the last 1.6gb update?

[EastonAugustus]

Looks Great, keep up the good work.

[Sgt.Nightfire]

I, and more people have noticed that sometimes, the new particle effects are delayed when firing, you only see it in third person on someone else. It ruined some nice footage i shot of volleys.

[Fancy Sweetroll]

What was the last 1.6gb update?

It was some fairly minor things.

- Fixed a tiling issue on the plowed dirtfield ground texture.
- Fixed console spam when the time of day changes.
- Fixed some minor asset errors that caused some warnings when the assets were being loaded.
- Update the shader cache.

Some of these changes unfortunately resulted in the update being bigger than we had intended.

I, and more people have noticed that sometimes, the new particle effects are delayed when firing, you only see it in third person on someone else. It ruined some nice footage i shot of volleys.

Some months ago we changed how the particle effects are triggered. In the past, each gunshot would spawn its own emitter and then that emitter would spawn the gunshot particle effect. The emitter would then kill itself when the particle effect had expired. Our gunshot particle effects live for quite a while though so often there could be at least 500 emitters active at the same time. This caused a huge amount of overhead, significantly reducing the performance. Turning particles on and off in that case could perhaps make you go from 30 fps to 50 fps.

Now all particle effects are queued on what we call the GlobalParticleManager which then stores a particle emitter for each type of particle effect that is being used. This emitter can unfortunately only be in 1 spot each frame. When a particle effect is queued, we first have to move the emitter to the position where it should spawn. And unfortunately with how the entity system works, this first happens on the next frame. So after we have waited a frame for it to move, we can then tell it to trigger the particle effect which now is 1 frame delayed. If then 10 players should fire in exactly the same frame. Then all those 10 particle effects will be queued and the last one will be triggered 20 frames after the initial request. But since a large group of players rarely fire their weapons at exactly the same frame, this is most of the time not an issue as volleys are usually a bit scattered over 0.5 - 2 seconds. This also means that if your framerate is bad, the particle effects will be delayed further and if your framerate is good, the particles will spawn faster. Gunshots are however being put in front of the queue where every other new and minor request is just being put in the back.

This however means that instead of the cost of the particles being 20 fps. It is now in most cases just 2-3 fps which greatly outweighs the negatives.

We could in theory have 2 of those particle emitters flying around and spawning particle effects with nearly no additional performance cost, where they then keep switching between who gets to trigger the requested particle effect. We have however found with the new smoke particles which is no longer entirely based on volumetric fog, but instead normal textured particle planes. There is an increased chance of z fighting (particle flicker, it cant decide which one is in the front or in the back) on the particles when they arent being spawned from the same emitter. So unless this can be solved, multiple emitters is not really an option.

[Fancy Sweetroll]

We just released another update.

- Fixed weapon particles not triggering at long distances.
- Improved the subsurface scattering effect on all skin materials resulting in more realistic looking characters.
- Added more unique class selection images for the Union regiments on the class selection screen.
- Tweaked the settings for the volumetric fog, resulting in slightly improved performance.

[Jagdmann]

You guys are making an old man very happy with the recent updates. Thank you and keep up the good work. Also, some small insights are very welcome by your community.

PS: The Sgt.Maj. of the 52nd still can`t put his sword away by pressing 1 to change to the Enfield. ...maybe someone could have a look into this. Sorry, wrong section, don`t shoot!!

Furthermore I notice the 2ndLt of the 52nd no has a somewhat evil/mad stare in his eyes^^

Anyway thank you for all the recent efforts! The boost in performance is real! Although the majority of "bugs"/desyncs still feature the game. But I know you gents will tackle these too SoonTM

Thank you! o7

[Sgt.Nightfire]

Discovered this after the previous 2 patches, but after the last patch, it happens a lot more. When you press Double Quick, the hud on the bottom right, does not change, it's still on Quick Time, but if i press T, it changes, the same happens when i got the 1842 rifle to change from Round Ball to Buck And Ball. Also going to Shoulder Shift and Shoulder Arms does not show unless i tab T again....