Welcome to your *New & Shiny RAYZE*. The first post-release update takes the aim racer concept so many people fell in love with, and turns the dial to 11 to make sure the game is even more bombastic. We're grateful for your feedback, that helped us greatly in giving the game a new layer of fine polish. With nearly all reviews on Steam being positive, we know we've got something special here. If you have RAYZE sitting idly on your wishlist, here's your cue to find out what's it all about - the game is 25% off this week!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1689190/RAYZE


If you've already spent some time playing RAYZE, chances are you'll feel like you're playing a whole new game. The changes to the look and feel are so substantial, we were tempted to dub this release RAYZE 2.0, but we decided to keep that one for later and settle for 1.9 instead. So what's changed? You'll notice instantly - why not see for yourself?



Let us know what you think of the changes! Or - of you're a new player - come and say hi, and tell us how are you enjoying RAYZE. The official Discord server would be the best place to do it! Want to know more? See the full changelog below:

• anti cheat for speed hacks implemented
  
• added different fullscreen mode variants in settings
  
• updated crosshair look, animation and functionality
  
• added crosshair scale settings
  
• mouse input should be noticeably even more raw
  
• updated mouse sensitivity settings with 3 floating points
  
• added panel warp particle effect for
  
• added energy tunnel particle effect to indicate trajectory
  
• baked occlusion culling in all the levels
  
• jukebox doesn't appear when music is disabled
  
• some SFX were updated
  
• redesigned 3_5 (map is now static without moving elements with more warp possibilities)
  
• cars on 4_3 (don't drive on players route anymore)
  
• visual changes for improved visibility on levels 5_4, 6_1, and 6_2

RAYZERS! Today's update brings RAYZE much closer to what we'd consider aim racer perfection, but we know there's more you folks expect of us. Namely - more levels. The second season is underway, and it will bring a slew of new levels to explore, overcome, and master. We just need to make sure we have enough players to keep things interesting, so by all means - make some noise! Got a friend who might enjoy our bite-size speedruns? Tell them today!

The next update, worthy of the RAYZE 2.0 name, will coincide with the Nintendo Switch release, so expect to see controller support in RAYZE at that point (and probably a separate set of leaderboards). For now, please enjoy the new look of your all-time favorite aim racer (we can say that, we're the first one of the genre, after all!).

Ready? 3... 2... 1...

Hi everyone,

We thank you for your patience and can excitedly now announce our localization patch is now out. If you were waiting until now to buy the game, luck is on your side! Sable is part of the Steam Midweek Madness, with 33% off!

Sable's localization has expanded to now include French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. Traverse the world with Sable, now with more localization options!

We also hear you in regards to your calls to rebind your keys. For now, we've enabled the arrow keys as an alternate input method. Full key rebinding is something we're actively working on, and as soon as we can give an update on when we can implement it, we will!

The full patch notes are as follows:

• Added the following language options: French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese
  
• Fixed a quest blocking issue that caused the map to disappear from Cartographer Jourdan’s inventory in the tutorial.
  
• Added arrow keys as an alternative input method for movement.

Please note: Although Sable now supports the above languages, if you wish to contact support, we can only reply to those queries in English.

Thank you again, and have a great holiday season,

/Raw Fury & Shedworks

The Caribbean, in the turbulent 17th Century. The mighty kingdoms of Spain, England, France and the Netherlands fight over the colonies. And there you are, a young sea captain whose only goal is to become the most powerful man in the New World. To achieve that goal, you may choose one of the two available campaigns: will you become an Adventurer or a Trader?

For the first time in the acclaimed Port Royale series, you are not alone in the beautiful and seemingly so peaceful seas of the Caribbean. The Multiplayer mode allows up to 4 players to play through LAN or over the Internet. Develop a successful trading company, lead your ships in beautiful 3D naval battles and force your opponents to their knees!



Port Royale 4 - Standard Edition - 40% off
Port Royale 4 - Extended Edition - 40% off
Port Royale 4 - Original Soundtrack - 40% off
Port Royale 4 - Buccaneers - 25% off
Port Royale 3 - 60% off
Port Royale 3 Gold - 60% off
Port Royale 3: Dawn of Pirates - 60% off
Port Royale 3: Harbour Master - 60% off
Port Royale 3: New Adventures - 60% off

Set sail and join the colonial powers of Spain, England, France and the Netherlands in their fight for supremacy of the Caribbean in the 17th century.

In Port Royale you will take control of a colony as a young and ambitious governor who is eager to learn what it takes to manage and grow his small settlement into a bustling trader city.



Port Royale 4 - Standard Edition - 40% off
Port Royale 4 - Extended Edition - 40% off
Port Royale 4 - Original Soundtrack - 40% off
Port Royale 4 - Buccaneers - 25% off
Port Royale 3 - 60% off
Port Royale 3 Gold - 60% off
Port Royale 3: Dawn of Pirates - 60% off
Port Royale 3: Harbour Master - 60% off
Port Royale 3: New Adventures - 60% off

What's your preference: PvE or PvP?

Tell us in the comments.

Despot's Note: You're puny either way.

Jupiter Hell 1.2 "Varia" brings a variety of changes, and changes that bring variety (see what we did there? :P). We have the player requested Mouse support (although it should be considered experimental still), a ton of new Callisto exotics, plasma SMGs (and unique SMGs!), new weapon perks, a big variety improvement of the traits (including master traits), a rework of damage type resistances (and affinities and vulnerabilities) and minor Callisto and Europa reward improvements.

It's a lot to go over so lets split our changelog into sections - raw changelog is at the end as usual!

Be sure to drop by the Jupiter Hell Discord (https://discord.gg/jupiterhell) if you have any questions - it's the best place to find help, discuss strategies, share mortems or videos of Jupiter Hell. The devs are very active there too!


While we still believe that Jupiter Hell is best played with a keyboard or gamepad only, we agree that an option for mouse control is great as an accessability feature, and probably also will be the prefered way to play by some people.

JH 1.2 introduces experimental Mouse support. It's experimental in the sense that we didn't have enough time testing it, so there still might be bugs, and it isn't fully integrated into the game (no mouse tooltips, no tutorial support and the only source of help is in the help menu). That said, ALL the functionality (apart from name entry) is in the game, so it can be fully played without touching the gamepad or the keyboard :P.

Enable mouse support in Settings/Input Settings by switching Mouse Support to "Active", and definitely read the Mouse and Mouse UI section in Help to get started!

Feedback on mouse control needed and very welcome!

• NEW #1174 - Mouse support (experimental)

As a part of our long standing goal of early game improvement we noticed that the variety of exotic loot in Callisto is very lacking (I mean, who gets excited at the 121st 9mm calibrated to drop?). This update introduces 13 (!!) new exotic weapons that can drop in Callisto, each with a unique perk, many designed to be strong in the earlier part of the game helping to transition into mid and late game gear. 2 armors, 2 visors, and 9 weapons have been added to the loot pool, each of them dropping from at latest depth 3!

• NEW #1591 - 13 new early game exotics!

SMG builds didn't have a late game version of their favored weapon, so we fixed that. At the same time we fixed the horrible oversight of SMGs not having Unique's to be found! Plasma SMGs come with ADV variants, and 3 new Uniques in the loot pool.

• NEW #1591 - plasma SMG added (and ADV variants)
  
• NEW #1584 - 3 unique SMGs added! (early, mid and late)

We took a critical look at the weapon ADV perk pool, decided to remove the unpopular and usually worthless Finisher perk, and instead introduced 6 new perks to spice up the variety of ADV weapons found.

I'll use this section to also mention that CRI rail rifles got scopes that they were missing due to an oversight, and we buffed 7.62 snipers by a bit too!

• NEW #1652 - 5 new perks for ADV weapons added
  
• CHANGE #1625 - removed Finisher weapon perk, added Ambush perk
  
• CHANGE #1603 - CRI rail rifle comes with a scope
  
• CHANGE #1603 - 7.62 sniper damage 24 -> 25
  

Following further with the goal of improving early game, we also decided that it will be more beneficial for the game if picking early traits doesn't railroad characters into specific builds. We started those changes in 1.1, but only now can these changes truly shine.

We took a deep look at every class in the game, with the goal of improving build variety, making traits have more character and opening up interesting new builds!


With Marine we wanted to have more gameplay around the Fury mechanic, and wanted to decouple the melee only traits into something that might be useful in non-melee builds in some edge cases.

Vampyre now has a weaker effect if using non-melee weapons opening up for hybrid builds, Rip and Tear grants fury for non-melee kills and Furious grants a straight damage bonus on Adrenaline use.

Army of Darkness was in a relatively good spot, but we wanted to give it some flavor. It now gives bonus to chainsaw damage and grants zero-time melee weapon swap to open up some proper hybrid gameplay options. If you know why a chainsaw specifically, then you had a groovy childhood like we did!

Tough as Nails needed some love and gets a pain penalty removal functionality - without removing the pain status, so Adrenaline still works fully! Field Medic additionally grants faster medkit/stim use.

• CHANGE #1602 - Vampyre works with non-melee weapons (but weaker)
  
• CHANGE #1627 - Rip and Tear grants Fury for non-melee kills also
  
• CHANGE #1627 - Furious loses fury generation on gibbing
  
• CHANGE #1627 - Furious grants damage bonus when using Adrenaline
  
• CHANGE #1627 - Marine Skilled increases Tenacity heal by 10%/lvl
  
• CHANGE #1602 - Army of Darkness gains zero melee weapon swap time
  
• CHANGE #1602 - Army of Darkness gains chainsaw damage bonus
  
• CHANGE #1603 - TaN L2 provides -50% pain penalty, L3 removes it
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Field Medic L2+ adds small medkit/stim use time bonus
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Field Medic requires only one level of Ironman

Scout needed mostly a specific buff to the Assassinate master, and especially the hybrid Swashbuckler/Assassinate build. The former, while owning easier difficulties was definitely too dangerous for higher challenges, so we rebuild it with a charge mechanic that prevents it from going off the rails on Easy, but added crit chance bonuses and auto-hit so it can shine even in higher difficulties.

Swashbuckler has been straight up buffed with the damage bonus now slowly degrading instead of being removed after using the other weapon group. Fairly casual gameplay with swapping between guns and melee will now fairly steadily maintain a +50% damage bonus.

Speaking of melee, Gunrunner now works with melee, adding a third pure melee master option after Assassinate and Ghost builds, and even more opening up Scout to hybrid gameplay!

Skilled has been buffed to provide an additional benefit of increasing energy, while Eagle Eye at level 3 now halves enemy cover. Speaking of Eagle Eye, Whizkid, Ghost and Gunrunner no longer require it, not to penalize pure melee builds.

• CHANGE #1603 - Assassinate uses charges mechanic
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Assassinate always hits, +50/100 crit chance at L1/L2
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Swashbuckler bonus now degrades instead of removed
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Gunrunner works with melee
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Scout Skilled L1 and L3 increase Energy by 10
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Eagle Eye L3 halves enemy cover
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Whizkid and Ghost require Hacking L1 instead of EE L1
  
• CHANGE #1603 - Gunrunner requires Son of a Gun L1 instead of EE L1

With Tech we really wanted to make him more unique by digging into status effects (which got big changes, see below) and grenades.

Fireangel has it's namesake effect kick in from Level 1, and gives a bonus to ALL burning damage that you deal. Find a suitable relic or a nice Molten weapon? You'll be much more effective with it than a regular marine ;).

Similarly Toxicologist got a blanket toxin damage buff at L1, and does smoke nade conversion at L2. This ties directly to the next buff, Grenadier L1 and L2 give a grenade damage boost (and they now crit if you have skills or items that increase general crit chance!).

• CHANGE #1603 - Fireangel sets things on fire since L1
  
• CHANGE #1587 - Fireangel L2/L3 grants +50%/+100% to ALL Burning
  
• CHANGE #1587 - Toxicologist L2 - smoke nades, L3 +50% ALL toxin procs
  
• CHANGE #1637 - Grenadier L1/L2 - +25%/+50% nade damage, no gib bonus
  
• FIX #1636 - grenades can now crit and use other character buffs
  
• FIX #1602 - Sharpshooter didn't increase auto/semi max range

We cleaned up the trait descriptions to a pleasing universal format, and did two changes to the more general traits.

While Ironman health bonus has been nerfed from +20% to +10% (giving an option for the health stations to shine more) this is because it also grants the important bleed resistance, giving it a wider desirability.

Son of a Gun got a buff back to it's roots - while it stays weapon agnostic (did you know it works with melee and 'nades?), ADDITIONALLY it adds pistol/revolver range bonuses, to strengthen the early game of those pistol builds that we love. Gun Kata is once again, a bloodbath without incident :P

• CHANGE #1603 - Ironman adds only +10% HP, but also bleed resistance
  
• CHANGE #1628 - Son of a Gun adds pistol only range bonuses
  
• CHANGE #1627 - trait descriptions cleanup

In spirit of enabling more fun synergies and combinations we decided to do a deeper dive into damage types and status effects. Apart from resistances now the game has negative resistances (vulnerability) and affinities (bonus to all damage done with a damage type/status).

We added vulnerabilities to many relics (instead of the boring damage debuff) for more interesting gameplay and also status affinities to several ones too (and some traits as you might have read already above).

There are also more interesting interactions between damage types - for example burning damage now cauterizes bleeding effect.

More useful though is that bleeding prevents regeneration effects. This is only a slight problem for the player (if using a regeneration relic, Heart buff or Survivor), but is very useful against some enemies - regenerating exalted or enemies under the warlock aura! Speaking of which we removed the bleed resistance from Warlocks and enemies under their aura to emphasize and encourage this counterplay. Oh, and frag grenades now cause bleeding - finally having a use late-game and providing a cheap source of bleed at the same time!

EMP had only limited (but powerful) use - now however it will also affect semi-mechanical enemies (think which demons have grafted metal/armor) damaging them partially and slowing them down (but never disabling). To make things interesting, the boss stages 1 and 2 are now considered semi-mechanical too.

Having access to the vulnerability mechanic, we could not resist making some enemies vulnerable, and hence fire fiends have cold vulnerability, while ice fiends, cyroberi and cryoreavers - fire vulnerability.

• CHANGE #1631 - several minor relics grant status effect buffs
  
• CHANGE #1631 - minor fire/ice relics -100% resist instead of -damage
  
• CHANGE #1633 - bleeding now prevents regeneration
  
• CHANGE #1633 - Burning damage cauterizes Bleeding
  
• CHANGE #1633 - frag grenades cause bleeding
  
• CHANGE #1633 - Warlock aura no longer grants +50% bleed resistance
  
• CHANGE #1633 - Warlocks no longer have bleed resistance (Archs 50%)
  
• CHANGE #1587 - resistances are displayed uncapped
  
• CHANGE #1587 - fire fiends have cold vulnerability
  
• CHANGE #1587 - ice fiends, cryoberi and cryoreavers- fire vulnerab.
  
• CHANGE #1587 - bots now have only 50% fire resistance
  
• CHANGE #1630 - semi-mechanicals can be harmed with emp damage (50%)
  
• CHANGE #1630 - boss stage 1 and 2 is semi-mechanical
  
• CHANGE #1587 - emp and toxin resistances displayed on bots and bio
  
• CHANGE #1587 - slash/impact/pierce resistances (with display)
  
• FIX #1611 - Acid status shows damage amount
  
• FIX #1587 - fixed some edge cases with wrong damage value display

Preparing for the big Callisto changes coming in the next update (1.3) we decided to make the current special levels a bit more visit-worthy - Anomaly, Rift and Barracks rewards have been improved.

We also noticed that Europa Ruins and Shadow Halls duo had a way lower amount of chests than intended - this has been significantlt improved. Frozen Temple is easier to open on Nightmare+, while Cathedral has a small added secret interaction - no hints are provided :P

• CHANGE #1642 - improved Anomaly, Rift and Military Barracks rewards
  
• CHANGE #1643 - Europa Ruins/Shadow Halls have a guaranteed box count
  
• CHANGE #1643 - on N!+ Frozen Temple also opens after 125% kills
  
• CHANGE #1578 - new small Cathedral secret added
  
• FIX #1617 - CalSec shutdown will properly disable Rift enemies

And finally there' the usual splatter of bugfixes!

• FIX #1636 - fixed chainfire weapons that didn't stop when dead
  
• FIX #1587 - Firecrown properly awards experience on kills
  
• FIX #1618 - Journal entries will not archive entering minilevels
  
• FIX #1625 - TAINTED properly shows up in enemy view
  
• FIX #1639 - zero-time action will always be queued next
  
• FIX #1638 - fixed status update on zero-time weapon swaps
  
• FIX #1611 - stage 1 of the boss properly has size 1 melee-wise
  
• FIX #1611 - boss conversion will not misplace player visually
  
• FIX #1654 - fixed manufacture hint about perks for stock items
  
• FIX #1641 - weapons with 100+ mag will display correctly

• FIX #1644 - proper stretch of low-health overlay on widescreen
  
• FIX #1644 - fixed low-health overlay on some systems
  
• FIX #1619 - opt outline will no longer disappear on fullbody FX
  
• FIX #1653 - fixed Discord activity always showing "MED" diff

That's all the details you need - now let's sum this all up in the usual...




Jupier Hell 1.3, currently codenamed "Valhalla", will be out between February/March, and will feature an overhaul to the Callisto zone, including several additions that will make the first half hour of a run more interesting and prettier! It will be either accompanied or preceded by a language update, bringing German, Russian, and Polish translations to Jupiter Hell.

As this is the last mainline release of 2021 we wanted to wish you Happy Holidays and an excellent New Year! We're sure to do our part so that Jupiter Hell can still deliver new experiences and joy throughout 2022 :D

Yours,

Everwake Games is proud to announce that Pipeline VR has been released!


Pipeline VR is a hectic virtual reality puzzle game, that pits you against a rising tide of torrential water.
Connect the pipes to stem the flow before the room fills up with you inside.

With a focus on panic, human error and speed, will you be able to keep your cool as the water inches higher?




Pipeline VR contains:

• Satisfying pipe snapping
  
• *Faux physical water
  
• Advanced VR physics interactions
  
• Infinite replay-ability
  
• Five unique settings each with their own environmental challenges
  
• Four modes
  
• Unique art style

What good is rising water without the urgency? Well, we at Everwake Games have worked tirelessly to ensure that the water "feels" as real as we could.
By tying shaders, filters, collisions, haptics, sounds and underwater physics together to create what we call "*faux physical water", you can feel immersed while you are being immersed.
So much in fact, you may find yourself holding your breath.


So grab your tools and your Handy-o-Matic Pipe dispenser and plunge in to help the residents of Pipesville with their plumbing disasters!

This update replaces Markets with Shops and adds significant rendering optimizations. And I might as well call this "Rendering Update", because I spent most of the time working on optimizing sprite drawing.


Shops are new buildings that are set to replace Markets and Market Stalls.



They essentially do the same thing that Stalls do, except each shop can store and distribute several item types. For example, a Produce shop would sell Tomatoes, Carrots and Potatoes at the same time:



Shops allow me to add more items without adding a lot of micromanagement to Markets and Stalls. I can instead focus on logical item "groups", such as foods, supplies, clothing, well-being, luxuries, etc. The gameplay would then not be so much about having exact items, but a decent variety of items and an overall satisfaction for that item group. It's also much easier for me to design for and players to work with fewer categories.

For now, Markets and Stalls will still work, but they are tagged as obsolete and will be removed (probably) in the next update. Basically, I'm leaving them working so anyone who wants to update their world can do so. Unfortunately, I cannot maintain two versions of item distribution, so I will have to completely remove Stalls later. I also cannot automatically replace them in-game with shops, because shops are 7-tile buildings.


There are now 2 more larger world size options. Thanks to the optimizations, I am finally able to create bigger islands without lagging everything. These won't have better terrain generation yet and the camp still spawns in the middle, but at least they are an option now.

Animal habitats now have to be selected to see their information:



This is mostly because I could not easily re-implement in-world tooltips following the rendering changes. But I also had this planned regardless, so I just went with it. There isn't any new information yet (notably, about quality factors).


So the problem is: MicroTown's rendering is fairly slow because there are a lot of things to draw. I should note that MicroTown being "just" pixel art is rather deceptive. The game needs to render more geometry than many 3D games and, for various reasons related to how GPUs work, it's not much cheaper to send "just" sprites to render than it is to send 3D models.


Optimization should generally be done based on profiling, i.e. evidence. So, most importantly, I need to count the number of sprites that are required to draw everything in the game world. For my test case, I am "looking" at a 1440p resolution zoomed-out 160-size world with 2000 villagers. These are the numbers of in-world entities that exist in the world:



This is a rough indicator of how much "stuff" needs to be drawn, but it's inaccurate because each entity does not correspond to a single sprite. There could be zero to a dozen of sprites needed for an entity, depending on many factors. This also does not account for many extra things, like effects, tile overlays and outlines, markers, building icons, etc.

So here are the numbers of individual sprites:



These can be further broken down into broader categories:



The numbers I am most interested in are the 25k/54k renderers. This is how many sprites need to actually be drawn out of the total sprites that exist. Importantly, there are 5k updates per frame, which means that that many sprites were changed, added or removed.

Which means there are two main focuses for entity processing optimization - knowing what to render and processing changes quickly. Subsequently, the main rendering optimization focus is to render the visible sprites as fast as possible. And these two sentences are so much easier said than done.


The main bottleneck is the CPU time it takes to render the game world. Unity works with "game objects" to do things, broadly speaking. For the game world, I only use game objects exclusively for sprite rendering (no data or logic there). Each sprite renderer requires a separate game object. So every sprite I mentioned above requires a game object, which is easily 50k objects. Meanwhile, for Unity, general consensus is that 10k objects is too many.

I basically have these long long lists of objects:



Unfortunately, there is only so much I can do before Unity itself bottlenecks like this. I've squeezed out as much performance as I could with this setup. Without going into too much detail, there are too many engine-dependent things happening that I cannot change in any way like sorting, culling and communication with the GPU. Unity simply isn't built to support so many objects via its "conventional" game object means. It doesn't matter that the GPU renders everything in 0.5 ms when it takes 25 ms for Unity to prepare and send the data. It still has the overhead of all those universal game objects regardless how many are visible and how cleverly they are optimized for rendering.

So here comes the technical and difficult part...


After lots of research and experiments, I decided that I would need to bypass almost all of Unity's "standard" rendering overhead and send sprites to the GPU more-or-less directly. This is essentially how most GPU-based 2D games have always done this. Simply put, "draw sprite S at X, Y" for every sprite. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done nor does it capture the many complexities. Unity isn't a 2D game engine and all its features have many layers of expensive abstraction. But thankfully Unity does provide rough access to lowish-level graphics logic.

In short, I can send a mesh to render directly to the GPU. A mesh is just a bunch of triangles connected at their vertices. In my case, to show a sprite, I only need a quad -- a rectangular mesh that is 4 vertices and 2 triangles.(This is also what Unity uses by default for sprite renderers, except with a lot more stuff.)



I can not only send a mesh once, but "send" the same mesh again and again, which is called GPU instancing and which saves the day. Technically, I am not even sending multiple meshes - just the one quad, but I am telling the GPU where to draw copies of it. So each quad mesh would correspond to one sprite and I would send a batch of such sprite data to the GPU to get them all rendered at once really, really fast. This lets me render any arbitrary layout:



Fortunately, I have built the game in a way that allows me to fairly easily "collect" all the sprites I need to render (which still massively downplays the difficulty of this conversion). As I described, I have game objects that correspond somewhat to game world entities. I know where they are located and roughly in what order. So I "just" need to pass these to the GPU myself. It would look something like this (with a colorful test texture):



Except, there are no "sprites" on a GPU, there are definitely no sprite atlases. All the "sprites" here look the same. Because a "sprite" is a high-level engine abstraction done through custom assets, custom shaders and lots of engine code. All I get at low-level is a texture and raw vertices and pixels. What I really need to do it specify locations on the final atlas texture, so I can draw specific sprites that would be arranged there (these are 16x16 "squares" from the same 2048x2048 test texture):



The next step is to somehow combine individual meshes and send things to the GPU in batches. The problem is communicating what data I need to send per mesh, that is, per sprite. Naively, I can only set one property per communication, which basically results in every sprite in a batch being the same:



The solution is that modernish GPU shaders can be compute shaders, which can receive and process large chunks of arbitrary data and run (parallel) processing on the GPU. This means I can actually pass all the sprite information to the shader in one big batch very efficiently. This data can then be sampled to select the correct region from the atlas texture from the sprite's location data for each mesh/quad.

And this provides the starting basic functionality of rendering sprites directly to the GPU almost the same as game object sprite renderers, but for a tiny fraction of the cost. Here is the pipeline itself working correctly if not the logic of drawing everything:



This does unfortunately come with a bunch of significant drawbacks that can be summarized as "additional complexity" and whatever is the opposite of "ease of use". But I can live with these considering the speed benefits.

The new problem is that now everything that Unity did -- sort, cull, toggle, offset, scale, etc. -- is gone. I now need to make it all myself.


Most importantly, I can't just "render all sprites" in whatever order they are (unintentionally) stored. I can technically do that for tiles, roads, and tile overlays, because they never overlap and are exactly spaced. But every other entity must obey visual depth sorting. Simply put, a unit can walk in front and behind a building while still being in the same tile. But sending sprites to the GPU is fast precisely because it ignores such pre-processing details and just draws things sequentially. Just rendering naively would result in this:



Thankfully, my job is simpler than it could have been trying to sort 50k entities -- I already have a game tile hex grid. Every entity has a whole tile coordinate and I can hugely optimize sorting by looping through the tile coordinates in "visual order".

Entities also have in-tile fractional coordinates. So I have to loop through the entities in a tile back to front. For optimization purposes, I have to keep the entity list pre-sorted and add and update entities as their coordinates change. And this basically correctly sorts 90% of sprites.

The final consideration is that for entities at the same coordinate (like parts of the same building), I need an extra hard-coded depth-sorting value so they appear in the right order even though they are technically at the same location.

Sorting is probably the most time-consuming part to implement because I have to change and adjust so much code. Every one of these "considerations" is another layer of complexity and difficulty. And with all that, I am only now approaching the same visual results as I had at the beginning:




Another important consideration is to cull anything that is not visible, that is, literally not render sprites that are not on screen. It's a simple problem to explain, but deceptively difficult to implement efficiently. I cannot just check 50k items every frame. So I keep a list of entities per-coordinate, update the lists when entity coordinates change, and loop only through visible coordinates when rendering:



The biggest consideration is that whatever code logic I do, I will be CPU bottle-necked and I cannot offload this work to GPU in any reasonable way.


All the small effects in the game were provided by Unity's particle system -- smoke, dirt, chips, sawdust, etc. It was all relatively easy to set up. And none of this works anymore with the custom rendering pipeline. Unity's particle system wasn't compatible with how I rendered regular sprites. So I had to recreate the effects myself -- all the logic, animation, sprites, visuals, previews, etc.

There are now some new optimization considerations. For example, various effects like digging dirt used the same basic logic where a 1-pixel particle would fly out. There would be some 12 particles, which equates to 12 sprites. This is actually quite a lot when you consider they have to follow all the new rendering/sorting logic I implemented. I now have to design effects paying attention to the number of sprites they produce and optimize when I can. For example, I can use only 4 sprites if I make an "animation" of the particles splitting up as they spread over time:



My favorite effect -- smoke, which I painstakingly recreated -- takes up 8 sprites:



Here, there's nothing I can do to reduce the number of sprites, and it will be slower than Unity's particles were originally. Of course, I am considering the big picture performance and presentation, and nice effects are definitely a worthy "expense".


There is so much to talk about, because I am now revisiting 3 years worth of various visual features. But one of the cool easy-to-add changes was adding shadows for units:



These are very subtle and usually get lost in the "noise". But they subconsciously feel good. I couldn't add these before because they would get incorrectly rendered on top of other things - buildings, other units, etc. - because units would run all over the place and cause depth-sorting issues. However, now that I am "sending" sprites into layers for rendering, I converted all shadows into a "shadow layer", so they get drawn on the ground before any sortable objects, thus they are always on the bottom. This fixes a lot of shadow glitches I had, as well as lets me add shadows without worrying about problems like this.

In fact, I have a lot of new debug tools I had to make to visualize and find all the different parts. For example, a shadows-only preview:




All this fancy shader stuff is great and all... except many older systems don't actually support it. The whole GPU-based compute shader processing is a relatively new concept. In fact, systems older than 3 years are increasingly unlikely to support it. Whereas even 15-year old machines could run the game before. Virtual machines also don't support advanced 3D accelerated graphics, which means I cannot test the game on macOS and Linux with the new rendering logic. This is also not something I can afford.

I did not enable analytics in the game, so I have no idea what systems MicroTown's players have. But the game has a strong retro vibe and I would not be surprised nor could I fault any players for trying it on an older system. So I have to support them. Which means implementing a fallback method for rendering everything.

(Un)fortunately, I cannot just fall back to my original Unity-based rendering, as I have essentially changed and rewritten everything. Thankfully, I have about 90% of actual logic reusable, because it's only the communication with the GPU that cannot utilize fancy data transfer logic. I have my list of sprites, their location, atlas information, etc. So "all" I need to do is replace the fancy shader stuff with a dumber, slower version.

Naively, I would basically have to send a mesh per sprite to the GPU one at a time. This is too slow (even with native batching), but I can also combine these meshes together. Which is also too slow with Unity's tools (but comparable to how fast the game ran before). So in the end, I am manually re-constructing meshes vertex-by-vertex to match the expected "sprite layout". It still makes things very CPU-bound, but it's still better than before. The biggest problem is just the human time it takes to get everything implemented and running smoothly.


Most of the time I was looking either at a complete mess like this:



or this:



Or trying to fix one of the 100 different things that were glitchy:



I even discovered 2D MicroTown:



As a final thought, I only summarized the "correct" path to implement this. I spent a lot of time experimenting, agonizing why something doesn't work and getting exhausted by debugging. And this is besides Unity crashing every time it doesn't like something. The power of working directly with shaders is great and the results below speak for themselves, but it's also equally mind-numbingly tedious and disproportionately time-consuming. As a one-man team, I can't detour through such rabbit holes unless it's absolutely necessary.

So I'll end this with some benchmark comparisons. (I am not comparing FPS, because this isn't an accurate measure for games like MicroTown. The game doesn't have a fixed time step and fewer updates just means it has to process more changes.) These benchmarks are done on a 1440p resolution zoomed-out 160-size world with 2000 villagers drawing 25k entities (same as in the section on entities above) on 4-year old high-end hardware:


A full frame now takes 34 ms instead of 63 ms, which is almost twice as fast. Notably, specifically rendering now takes 6 ms instead of 35 ms before, which is more than 5x times faster! Even the fallback method takes "only" 25 ms. It's still only 30 FPS, but this is also an extreme case. I think I have squeezed out as much performance as I will be able to from rendering. But I could also easily add more entities and sprites without a significant performance hit. (In fact, I imagine most of the future optimization will be to the world update logic. In these examples, world update takes around 20 ms.) Of course, this will vary system by system, but there should be a significant improvement for all systems because the game is CPU-bound.


I originally planned for "Shops and Houses" to be the next update (i.e. this update). This would have allowed Houses to use more items so that Shops can sell more items and then I could add more production chains and variety. But I only managed to get the Shops working, so the next main goal is getting Houses working. This will likely be a smaller update, but with bigger breaking changes. The Houses will likely also become 7-tile buildings.


Changes

• Market Square, Food Stall and Supply Stall are scheduled to be deprecated; they will remain functional for the current version, but will need to be replaced by Shops
• Optimized rendering requires compute shader support: at least DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.3, OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan or Metal
• Older system will fall back to a slower rendering method
• Add shop buildings: Grocery Shop, Produce Shop, Meat Shop, Clothes Shop, Supplies Shop, Medicine Shop with corresponding sold items
• Shop building HUD inspection to show full item "progress" (unlike market stalls)
• Add Shop concept
• Tooltips to show sold items at shops (similar to storage building tooltip)
• Export Station and large storage buildings will distribute items directly to nearby shops
• Market Square, Food Stall and Supply Stall are no longer constructible but will remain functioning as before in the world
• Rename "Fish Steaks" to Raw Fish
• Rename new game world size options from "small", "medium" and "large" to "tiny", "small" and "medium"
• Add "large" and "huge" new game world size options
• Fish Animal Habitats will no longer spawn far away from coast
• Remove tutorial steps for Market Square and Food Stall construction and replace with Produce Shop construction
• Adjust tooltips and explanations mentioning Market Square logic to instead describe Shops
• Animal Habitats no longer show tooltips on mouseover; instead Habitats can be selected in-world and show an inspection panel with the same information and changed display
• Add in-world markers for Animal Habitats animals
• Shadows now appear on the "tile layer" and don't overlap other objects
• Tile outlines, selection indicators and other tile overlays appear above roads
• Markers and various indicators now appear above in-world objects
• Mine, Sand Pit and Clay Pit prepared ground sprite now appears on the tile "layer"; adjust worker position and mining effect offset
• Villagers and animals now have shadows
• Add water splash effect to fisher casting and reeling animation
• Micropedia now has "Tutorials" section/list
• Item tooltips and Micropedia descriptions now combine storage entries to multiple buildings
• Add tooltip and description for Beer and Mead usage at Brewery
• Add amount label to (de)construction item progress for building and road inspection
• Add warning in main menu if compute shaders are not supported and the game will run a slower fallback rendering method
• Path-finding will discourage walking between buildings as much
• Units will no longer stick to exact hex tile centers when path-finding and choose straighter paths
• Workers with carts entering and exiting Export Station and Import Station will now move at a non-slowed down speed
• Hunting goal now counts skinned (but not shot/hunted) animals as part of the completion number
• Add internal "animals skinned" stat
• Roads to have separate sprites for vertically-mirrored bits and new dedicated sprites for the straight segments
• Add a more-expensive Boardwalk type of Roads that can built on otherwise unbuildable land tiles (Sand, Rocks, Clay)
• Add Boardwalks tech
• Add Boardwalk construction Goal
• Roads to have a new dedicated sprites for the three-way segments
• Animals now walk instead of running (internally, since visually these are the same speed and animation currently)
• Fish move faster to bait/hook
• Idle villagers will walk more instead of running, especially for short distance
• Adjust Import Stations item positioning so all stacks fit on the same tile
• Import Stations will also distribute their items to Food Stalls and Supply Stalls
• Large Warehouses and Large Granaries will also distribute their items to Food Stalls and Supply Stalls
• Add issue warning for large storage buildings that have dedicated workers but no compatible item sources or targets
• Large storage buildings to mention how workers operate in the description and change range explanation label for construction

Fixes

• Micropedia search bar results would disappear when clicked before the click is processed and would not navigate to the clicked entry
• Raw Fish item distribution proportion unintentionally defaulting to weight of 1 instead of 3
• Oven operation progress not showing correctly when the worker is activating the cooking process
• Export Station and Import Station not showing all item delivery marker icons
• Florist missing tooltip/Micropedia information line about Flower "production" from Seedlings
• Brewing Vat not showing cooking sprite and smoke
• Building workers still accepting tasks from far away blocking other workers from and choosing them until they arrive
• Building worker with no task going to the building from far away even when the slot is disabled
• Building construction and deconstruction markers now appear on the tile "layer" and don't overlap other objects
• Mouseover tile would occasionally be momentarily incorrectly calculated
• Various sprite fixes
• Path-finding will avoid leading units through single-tile buildings
• Fix path-finding not considering "exiting" a building tile in a proper direction
• Path-finding will prioritize "front" tiles for multi-tile buildings and avoid going through "occupied" building tiles
• Path-finding will again avoid leading units through fields/plots/pens, but take corners instead
• Animals will properly ignore pathing restrictions and walk in pens as desired
• Fix path-finding choosing sub-optimal shortcuts
• Fix villager slowdowns when running between certain road tiles, most noticeable with carts
• Animal Habitats not spawning
• Graph window not working when loading previous version saves
• Acquiring items not present in loaded saves causing an exception in internal graph logic
• Export Stations sometimes not delivering items when one of its target Import Stations has a full stack of that item
• Technology panel buttons having mouseover detection region larger than the button itself
• Skinned animal stat not being recorded in saves
• Animal Habitats not despawning when reaching a low score
• Fix large storage building worker incorrect waiting locations
• Import Stations and large storage buildings would not fill up compatible building items fully
• Fix exception when loaded saves would fail to assign unit idle locations
• Remaining items not appearing in the world when extracted from stacks
• Internal ID conflicts between units (namely Pigs that are led to Butcher) and items would cause one or the other to be excluded from future deliveries for the ongoing session
• Import Station issue verification causing internal exceptions while it's constructing
• Large storage building issue verification incorrectly triggering when there are compatible item source buildings in range
• Building issue verification for required auxiliaries would incorrectly show double-issue for buildings with multiple auxiliaries
• Building issue verification for issues that have a building of item list to report would not update the tooltip if these lists changed

Balancing

• Garden Plots, Crop Fields, Tree Nurseries and Animal Pens now cost 2 Planks instead of 3 (and 1 Stone Slab)
• Import Stations can now distribute up to 6 items to nearby targets
• Large storage buildings can now distribute up to 6 items to nearby targets
• Double Large Barn and Large Granary capacity
• Increase Forester operation range from 3 to 4 to match Lumberjack operation range

Optimizations

• Redo rendering pipeline and significantly reduce CPU usage and overhead
• Most visual-related logic has different performance cost, usually reduced
• Small, emptier worlds run slightly slower, but large worlds run significantly faster
• Increased memory usage
• All particle effects are redone and slightly different due to using a new system
• World entering is slightly faster
• Reduce redundant unit internal animation processing
• Speed up villager idling location lookup
• Entering (generating, loading) and exiting a world is slightly slower due to the pooled objects now having inefficient hierarchy for mass changes
• Processing (pathfinding and delivery processing) threads sleep longer and more frequently when idle freeing CPU usage
• Internal game logic is now capped at 90 FPS, so faster machines do not do needless processing
• Slightly fewer HUD rendering batches
• Building issue periodic checking is faster
• Many minor optimizations

Rudy
Snowy Ash Games

“Once Scar AB decided to make himself a rocket launcher. His workers spent a lot of time trying to make something, and they came up with a slow but very powerful thing”

Right answer was Snowfall/Буран.

And the first who correctly guessed what kind of rocket launcher we are talking about were:

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• mr_KOT48186

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Hello there, VR Flippers and Pets lovers!

We are proud to announce our brand-new VR game – House Flipper – Pets VR. Together with Petard Games we will do our best, so you can have fun not only by playing with your animal companions, but also by spending some time with your friends in virtual reality, thanks to online co-op mode. We hope that you will embark on the wonderful journey, and will enjoy the game as much as we do.



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Frozen Way & Petard Games teams