Hotfix for crash after Test Championship series

• Fixed bug where ability bar sometimes doesn't appear in combat. It happens if you do a ship fight, then keep playing without going to the menu until you do a ground fight.
  
• Fixed bug where stun beam still bugged when used by companions: they occasionally perform another action after stunning an enemy.
  
• Russian localization added
  
• Font changed in game to one more readable and one that better supports different language characters
  
• Font size options added
  
• Rotate character on creation screen
  
• Fixed bug with number pad not triggering proper for dialogue option selections (seems to be with larger selections)
  
• Opening journal no longer pauses other UI animations
  
• Opening conversation turns off any highlighted objects from alt key
  
• Number keys play button click sound during dialogue
  
• Fixed bug with radio antenna clearing away Gunts.

• A critical bug since 1.2.9 that could corrupt save files has been fixed. – I hope no one played 1.2.9 today. Your save files may be corrupted.

This month we are deep diving into some performance optimizations, application load times, and other low hanging fruit. Characters were copied from live as of July 8th, 2025 2pm Central.

• Set animators to cull completely when not on screen. This should yield some minor performance benefits - but please let us know if you notice any funny business when animated things (creatures + players) come into view.

• Revamped the entrance to Freehold as a solo area. A wall was added to more clearly separate the solo area from the group area.

• Improved wording on the error shown when you cannot connect to Steam.

• Corrected material category on Mangrove logs.

• Ability UI elements now properly use Alchemy execution and targeting parameters when selected.

• Auctions that have bids can no longer be cancelled.

• We are sprucing up our loading screens by including various renders of our custom creatures & props that correspond to the region you are currently loading.

The last few patches have ballooned our application load times to an unacceptable level. On application start we are pre-loading a lot of data all at once which can cause the client to show as "not responding". To mitigate this issue we have deferred some loading until the first loading screen is shown. This means that your first "zone in" may take slightly longer than it did previously, but subsequent loads will return to normal.

Please let us know if you see a considerable improvement here when compared with Live.

As mentioned in the opener, I have done a deep dive into what can be done to improve performance of the game. One area we identified was how our UI windows interact with Unity's backend UGUI system.

Currently, all hidden windows have an alpha value of 0 and are not raycasted against, which means that they cannot be seen or interacted with. When a window is shown, we transition the alpha from 0->1 for a fade in, and enable racyasting for interactions. As it turns out, even though a UI element is not being rendered or raycasted against we were still paying a performance overhead in UGUI to keep them registered and available.

This patch adjusts how we handle hidden windows within our UI system. Once hidden, a window's game object is now completely disabled which removes them from the UIGUI system entirely. The downside to this, is that there is a slight performance hit for disabling and enabling objects like this (which is why we did not do it previously). However, this performance hit only lasts a single frame on open/close rather than us paying for having it registered with UGUI on every frame.

We have done a fair bit of internal testing and everything appears to work as usual. In theory this change should not even be noticed - outside of the performance boost. On average I was saving upwards of 4ms per frame which isn't a giant leap forward, but it just may be enough to make a difference.

Please let us know how this QA build's performance compares to the current Live build, or if you notice any oddities with UI windows.

To further improve performance we will be looking into moving client builds to IL2CPP. This would allow our code run as "native code" on your device, which in theory should yield even more performance benefits. Once we get these builds going we will need a heavy bit of testing from you all, so please stay tuned!

I'm really bad at writing these so I'll keep it brief!

Progress made so far:

-  Made significant progress on the core level. The main thing left to do is just more testing and adjustments, but the base layout is done. 

- Added one of the bonus gamemodes. 

- Added/reworked UI elements.

- Fixed various bugs with the general gameplay mechanics.

To everyone out there that has supported this project so far, thank you! Your support is greatly appreciated!