This update is now available for testing. To grab it, right click Reflex in Steam, go to the "Betas" tab and select "test" from the dropdown box.
For players, this update is primarily the first performance focused update. A huge part of this was our system for increasing scalability -- we now have very fine control over the quality of textures, effects, shaders, lighting, etc. From our profiling, players should see significant FPS gains compared to previous versions (even with higher detail visuals).
Under the hood, hundreds of hours of development has gone into our art pipeline. While we're not doing much with it at the moment, we're very excited about
the power it gives us -- it makes cusomizing players and map textures extremely simple but extremely powerful. We're going to be doing some really cool stuff with this tech and we can't wait to show it off.
This update is compatible with existing 0.30.x servers so if you encounter any problems, simply revert back to the "main" version until we squash the bugs. Server admins should ideally update anyway but there's no need to run both main and test servers.
Changelog
Server
Re-wrote server front-end to use windows forms instead of raw console. This should actually reduce CPU loads.
Fixed a bug where the servers Steam information was being updated far more often than it needed to be. This fix should also reduce CPU loads.
When using "callvote map", the returned map list is broken into multiple lines so you can actually read it.
Cleaned up failed to connect messages on both server & client
Fixed bug where clients could get stuck in lag state indefinitely on map change. (always connecting)
Added sv_startmode command
Added server commands "mode", "kick", "remove". This can be used from the server console instead of requiring a vote.
Added callvote "kick", "remove"
Client
Reduced required DirectX version to 10.0
Input is now sent to the server at 75fps (down from 125fps). This should lower the CPU load for dedicated servers with no noticable impact for players (the server only ticks at 75fps anyway so the extra data was largely wasted).
Lightmap format has changed. We now store an extra colour for low end machines, instead of the expensive per-pixel lightmap information. Sorry mappers, this means you need to rebuild.
Ridiculous amounts of graphics optimisations (shadows, zprime, decals, gbuffer format, shader optimisation, normal blending). Players should see significant FPS increases across all video configs.
Created micro/macro texture architecture, giving us more detail, more customization and using less GPU.
Added Image-Based Lighting and removed previous broken reflection pipeline
Added offline DXT1/DXT5/BC6/BC7 texture packer & compressor
Added configs for different video modes. Until we've done our options menu, the easiest way to change video settings is to bring down the console, type "loadconfig vid_X" and then "saveconfig" to store the changes. Graphics presets are:
vid_high
vid_medium
vid_low
vid_hi_vis
Added lots of cvars to scale graphics for different hardware. Generally, 2 is highest quality, 0 is lowest quality.
r_shader_quality <0-2>
r_texture_quality <0-2>
r_effect_quality <0-2>
r_shadow_quality <0-2>
r_texture_resolution <0-2>
r_texture_microdetails <0-1>
r_high_vis <0-1>
Re-did every single material for the new macro/micro material system. Fun times.
Reduced the amount of maps we ship with (rebuilding and reuploading all the lightmaps is tedious and our internet sucks)
Updated lava shader to something prettier
Loading bar is now orange for no reason
Known issues:
Player colors are broken (color0 seems to be multiplying through all colours)
Reports of video driver crashes and occasional freezing of client/server. Consider this a general stability warning -- huge amounts of the engine have been rewritten and we're expecting some bugs.