A small update:

• Fixed a rare bug that caused damage to save-game

Happy New Year. Stay alive!

Whoops! I had to revert to the old version for a few hours, but now we are back up again!

• Optimized the heck out of Wolfvale - runs twice as fast now, from 16-18 ms frame times (even with the 0.4.1.8 improvements!) to 6-8 ms.
  
• Fixed a bug where getting pelted in the face by enemy projectiles could permanently blind you.
  
• Fixed an objective from Ch.4 not clearing properly.
  
• Fixed dead enemy blood pools from glowing insanely bright sometimes.

The original 0.4.1.8 notes are below:

Performance is important for VR games, and while Dement was playable, it could have been better. This update took a while to come out because I've been working on not just the performance boosts, but polishing some side areas a bit, making new ones, working on long side quest chains, and some enemies. Thank you for the patience and I hope you enjoy the new performance boosts to Dement! New areas and quests are getting close, but they're not quite ready yet.

Due to the nature of this update, it is possible some visual issues may arise. Text not appearing on signs, things rendering on top of fog, a particular square of ground not having consistent lighting - these are all things encountered during the beta process. Some of them may persist yet - please report them! :D

• Changed rendering from deferred multi pass to forward single pass
  
• Added 2x MSAA
  
• Upgraded post processing stack
  
• New gamma correction effect - more robust, less intrusive. It is actually adjusting the gamma now, not messing with color spaces and post exposure values to try to cover up the gamma issue.
  
• Dynamic Resolution option added and enabled by default. You can adjust the lower-limit value, or disable entirely if you wish.
  
• Removed old quality options, they didn't do much but make the game look worse.
  
• Heavily optimized forest walk scene, removed the ugly bush and put in some new pretty ones.
  
• Fixed the puzzle in Ch.4 that involves the posing mannequins
  
• Fixed the park gate key not unlocking the park gate
  
• Other minor bug fixes

Now that we have the tl;dr list out of the way, I thought maybe some of you might enjoy a peak behind the curtain. ;)

Previously, Dement was using two cameras - one that rendered most of the game, and one that rendered the hands / weapons, UI, and applied the post processing effects. The game was set to deferred rendering for some of the effects, and multi pass was necessary for the post processing to not force each eye to render that double-circle-both-eyes image... you know the one I'm talking about. In other words, single pass would break everything.

So, in order to increase performance, I upgraded the post processing stack to allow single pass (this will usually half the CPU requirements for rendering) and since deferred wasn't necessary any more, switched to forward rendering as well (which in some instances decreased draw calls by over 60%).

At this point, Dement's image quality was very nice, very clear. Supersampling to 150% produced a very crisp image that was running much faster than the previous build at 100% supersampling. Switching to forward rendering unlocked the use of MSAA, and at the lowest setting removed jaggies without introducing any blur, and only increased performance cost by something like half of a millisecond.

So at this point we're at a pretty good place, yeah? Well, some scenes are heavier than others. The forest walk scene in the prologue should come to mind...

As an aside, I went back and switched out that stringy awful looking bush for some new ones. I think the old bush had some rendering issues that increased draw calls a lot as well. New bushes are more efficient and look much nicer. I switched the trees from the desktop versions to the mobile versions. Overall, they look a bit more straight but you don't really get close enough to them to notice any change in quality. I made the LOD scaling on pieces of the terrain much more aggressive, but it isn't terribly noticeable. I changed the shadows a bit and they seem to be better now.

Back to the original point - some scenes are heavier than others. With such a taxing scene so early in the game with these optimizations still not necessarily cutting it, the last obvious option is to force lower resolution. So, an option for dynamic resolution was added that takes the average framerate of the last tenth of a second, compares it to your headset's refresh rate, and if the framerate isn't high enough will decrease resolution by 1%. I used a technique that doesn't blur the image, just makes it more pixelly... pixlier... (red squiggly line says these aren't words). ANYWAY, when your framerate gets better, it will do the opposite - increase resolution by 1%. Note that these values stack with your SteamVR supersampling value so I actually recommend turning that up to at least 120%. However, setting a dynamic resolution lower-limit-value of 80% will result in your lowest target resolution to still be 96%, so play with those numbers until you're satisfied with perfomance to visual quality.

Back to the aside, I actually had GPU frame timings of 8-11 ms in the forest walking scene with dynamic resolution set to 80% lower limit with 100% SteamVR supersample setting. Pretty good!

However, things were not all sunshine and rainbows. The previous ambient occlusion method did not play well with the dynamic resolution, and it rendered on top of fog now. After tinkering with it, the distance fade property fixed the fog issue, and it eventually rendered close to where it was supposed to be. Key word being close... it was jumping around a lot. It was also producing very noticeable full screen artifacts and would look pretty bad at lower resolution scales. Sad day.

With the new post processing stack upgrade, I added a new ambient occlusion method that still looks pretty good. Maybe not as good as the previous one did in some instances, but better in others - especially with dynamic resolution in play. The old ambient occlusion method would cost about 2-2.5 ms to render, the new one costs 1-1.5. It isn't effected by the dynamic resolution either. The choice was clear.

Remember when I said Dement was using two cameras to render things? Now, there was no need. The old ambient occlusion technique looked awful on hands and weapons, which meant it needed the second camera to render them to avoid having the effect applied on them. No longer the case, so the cameras were consolidated into one. I don't have the specifics for the performance increase on this, but it was noticeable.

Finally, after some testing, I found that lowering the texture resolutions was not doing much to increase performance - just potatoed the game. I removed the option to change those in game and have reset everyone's default to max.

Another fun fact - some headsets have higher gamma values than others, so that pesky ol' gamma correction option exists. Previously, I didn't have any control over the gamma. The gamma correction profile was just a mix of effects that darkened the game enough to make it look less washed out. Well, the new post processing stack has an actual gamma adjuster. Previously, I thought Dement looked noticeably worse in the Oculus Rift CV1 compared to the Vive. With the new gamma correction option though... I would probably rather play Dement in a Rift over the Vive these days. It looks fantastic.

Anyhow, thanks for the read, and thanks for supporting Dement. I hope everyone had a good holiday and is looking forward to new upcoming content in Dement!

Hello Everyone,

this is really good timing – on December 31st of 2019, we reached the magic milestone of having sold a 1000 copies of Rainbow Reactor! While this is a nice, round number, it's not really THAT much, but as a small team without a publisher, we're still quite happy about this achievement ːlunar2019smilingpigː

If I'd be really nit-picky, I could also mention that 77 players refunded the game and that most units were sold during sales. But still, the bottom line is that we have now made back about two thirds of the money we had to invest to get the game out, so there's a small chance we'll break even next year – especially since the general interest in VR has risen lately with the arrival of the Oculus Quest and the announcement of Half-Life:Alyx ːvegaː

The development of Rainbow Reactor is also 95% complete now, we'll soon add some more unlockables for the Museum Tour, and once that's done we'll work on porting the game to other platforms and bring it to the Oculus and Vive stores. A Quest port is also very high on our list, but first, Oculus have to give us a permission for that. Of course versions for PSVR and WMR would also be great, but this would be complicated and also costly, so we'll have to see about it. Still, if we get the game to a couple more stores, we can hopefully make it known to some more people and sell a couple more units, so we can hopefully start developing another game soon ːlunar2019coolpigː

Also, we'll be releasing the Original Sound Track of Rainbow Reactor as Steam DLC soon, so if you really like the game, you could support us even further that way ːquidː

In any case, we're now approaching the finish line for 2019 fast, and the whole team of Rainbow Reactor wants to thank each and every one of our supporters and all VR enthusiasts in general – we hope, 2020 will become THE year for VR and we wish everyone a fantastic new year full of fun gaming experiences ːlunar2019grinningpigː

ːsummer2019vehiclecockatielːːsummer2019vehiclehareːːsummer2019vehiclecorgiːːsummer2019flagː

Best wishes from sir Lootalot. Happy New Year!

Hello, Friends!❄️
Santa is flying to you with his deers and CyberLight Game Studio already wishes you a Happy New Year!

The New Year always opens up new opportunities, so we wish you to always believe in yourself and take advantage of the possibilities that 2020 will bring to you!

This passing 2019 year we worked a lot on the game BIGFOOT and will also soon release a new update! You can already see the first screenshots in our Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/CyberLightGS/

We have made a Discord server to make our game community stronger. Join to know the latest info and to communicate with us and players: https://discord.gg/5485TNX
Hope, you will enjoy it!

Also, we made a 30% discount on the game BIGFOOT in Steam in this truly fairytale time!

We wish your dreams come true, and our game will please you in 2020!

We wish you a Happy New Year!

2020 is going to be very exciting for us and we are eager to share some big announcements soon. Of course we won't start into the new year without a special treat. Our team has been working on the second iteration of our dynamic campaign for Call to Arms and implemented a new strategic map for you to choose your next objectives and targets. Needless to say, it's turning up quite nicely already and we will have it ready for you early 2020!



Follow our developer website to stay updated on future sales, new games and updates. You may also want to join our official Discord to stay in touch with us more closely!




https://store.steampowered.com/app/302670/Call_to_Arms/?curator_clanid=1560170

https://store.steampowered.com/app/244450/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad_2/?curator_clanid=1560170

https://store.steampowered.com/app/920840/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad_2__Ostfront_Veteranen/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274440/Assault_Squad_2_Men_of_War_Origins/?curator_clanid=1560170

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1135240/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad_2__Cold_War/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/64000/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad/?curator_clanid=1560170

We wish you a Happy New Year!

2020 is going to be very exciting for us and we are eager to share some big announcements soon. Of course we won't start into the new year without a special treat. Our team has been working on the second iteration of our dynamic campaign for Call to Arms and implemented a new strategic map for you to choose your next objectives and targets. Needless to say, it's turning up quite nicely already and we will have it ready for you early 2020!



Follow our developer website to stay updated on future sales, new games and updates. You may also want to join our official Discord to stay in touch with us more closely!




https://store.steampowered.com/app/302670/Call_to_Arms/?curator_clanid=1560170

https://store.steampowered.com/app/244450/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad_2/?curator_clanid=1560170

https://store.steampowered.com/app/920840/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad_2__Ostfront_Veteranen/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274440/Assault_Squad_2_Men_of_War_Origins/?curator_clanid=1560170

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1135240/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad_2__Cold_War/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/64000/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad/?curator_clanid=1560170

Eye of the Temple is still in development. Here at the end of the year, let's have a look back at what features and areas were added to the game in 2019.

Back at the beginning of 2019, the most recent addition was two new areas - Fiery Pass and Black Sanctum - as well as a whole new and rather cool-looking ability in the game which I won't reveal here.



Okay, now let's look at 2019!

2019 started with an update in January that added a new area called The Wall as well as changes to the existing areas The Atrium, Monument Square, and The Cauldron. The temple got more "tied together".





January is also when the game got Steam Achievements implemented.



And last but not least, a new dynamic music track was added, composed by Claudio Martinez who's also behind the other music in the game. I implemented the track into the game such that it changes dynamically to match different moods in different areas of the game.

In February the combat in the game was revamped to feel more satisfying. This was done based on lots of helpful feedback from the playtesters and various people on Twitter.


And water splashes were added to the areas with water for fun and immersion, though they have no effect on the gameplay as such.



A big update hit in May, where minecart rides were added to the game! To get access to it, you'll have to first get through a new added area called Creepstone Mine. A small new area was also added that's only accessible by minecart.


This update also added a secret room in the game. To this day, none of the playtesters have found it yet.

An area Watergrave Arena was added in August, featuring more combat, and in October an area called Dark Ruins was added which culminates in a new kind of challenge with some tense moments. Afterwards you'll get to pick up an all new gadget.





This update also added a new element to the game which is story. Bits of story can now be uncovered at a number of shrines throughout the temple. The overall story was developed in collaboration with Lex Wilson. In the final game the story bits will be voice acted, but for now it's text only.

I released a reveal trailer for the game in November, which you can see here:


This was covered by UploadVR as well as by a few other outlets.

2020 is the year Eye of the Temple is released, unless things go terribly differently than I anticipate. (That said, I once thought it would come out in 2017.)

There's one final area in the game left to do, apart from various fixes and improvements. That sounds manageable, but then, it's probably the most challenging area to design and get right, being the culmination of the game and all. I can't wait to get started with that.

Thanks for reading! If you want to follow the development even closer in 2020, why not join our Discord server?

Happy new year!

Main:
1. add quick tool bar (user configurable)
2. add unit: metal extractor
Bugs fix:
1. fix enemy life bar display
2. display available unit count
3. fix trees location
Art:
1. Terrain

Thank you for all-year support and tracking the development of Train Station Renovation.
We hope that next year we will show you new progress over the game again.




Happy New Year,
Car Trader Simulator team