Release Raptor:Pre-Early-Access Release Notes

Pre-EA Demo 7

(This isn't done yet, we're still working on it.)

• There is a new settings option in the main graphics tab called "Ambient Light Boost." This is a much better form of brightness increase, although it's something that can be combined with the other sliders that were already there to get really specific effects for any given monitor.
  • For very high quality monitors with a high brightness range, the defaults give the richest view; for anything with more muted whites, it may seem overly dark, and thus cranking it up by 0.3 or so can get a similar effect to the intended default. Or you can crank it up a huge amount and play in a super bright and colorful game if that's what you want to do.

Lighting, Performance, And Stealth Overhaul

• All of the lights available in the map editor are now MUCH more efficient, and also put off a ton less light. A lot more emphasis is on subtle lighting visuals rather than true illumination of the scene, basically.

• F-stop from 11.89 to 2.57, and then other visual effects have been tuned to make better use of the more sensitive camera lens.

• The first of the stealth mechanics is now in place. It detects when you're in a relatively lit area, and if you are AND you're not currently being seen by a robot that is already aware of you, then a little icon will show that says hidden. While that icon is there, robots that have never been aware of you will not detect you.

• The ambient lighting is now reactive to light, getting less when you are near other light sources, and getting more so that you can see in areas that would otherwise be dim. This is a lot like your eyes adjusting to the light, and it lets us make a lot of the wall and ceiling lights into something that is more a mix of decorative and gameplay-based versus being responsible for all the illumination of the level.
  • The overall ambient lighting has been reduced since things are so much brighter in general now, and it only adjusts up when the players are in dark areas.

• The raptor's claw swipe now reaches higher, making it easier to hit ceiling lights (or enemies) with it. Before the timing was a bit unforgiving.

• The entire lab demo level has had its lighting completely reworked for the new lens style. The framerate has nearly doubled in many cases.

• All of the enemies have been re-lit, as have their bullets, to work with the new lens. It looks a lot cooler and also is yet again easier on the GPU.

• The industrial demo and all of its lights and effects have been reworked to function properly in the new lens.
  • A ton of lights were removed, because now they are not so required for actually being able to see, and they were a big CPU/GPU hog. The original author was using baked lightmaps that remove that inefficiency, but since we're doing procedural generation elsewhere in the game, in our test scenes (the demos) we've also avoided using baked lightmaps. Makes for a better test that way, and since the demo scenes don't fully work properly with our occlusion system (it works, just not as well as it could), that makes it a better "hopefully closer to worst-case" load scenario, which is also useful.
  • Overall the industrial demo looks a fair bit different now and has less than half as many lights, but the lights that are there are more dramatically used. The overall effect is a more varied progression of a level. The total gain from all the many related changes here is that Chris now gets 90-120FPS steadily whereas before it was 40-80.
  • Also note that in the VERY front hall the lights have been taken out so that you start in a hidden state. This helps to show off the new stealth bits, which is good to have out there right in front.

Level Editor Features And Content

• Ctrl+A now does a select-all in the level editor, so that you can quickly move the orientation of your entire level chunk if you need to. This way if your raptor test starting point is in the wrong location, you can move the level around it. Note that this has absolutely no effect on the actual in-game level chunk when it's being hooked up procedurally into a larger level. Which is good!

• The regular windows now cast shadows again, and so don't cut through walls. They also don't burn with the intensity of a small sun, which makes them not tank the framerate. ;)
  • A more efficient version of the superbright versions that Chris wanted for his hallway are also now in place, also use shadows, and are also vastly more performant than before.

• Fixed a bug in the previous version where you could not properly type in the filename box in the save level window in the level editor.

Hotfix

(July 13th, 2016)

• Vastly more efficient window lights and sconce wall lights, but a different effect that those have as well visually. This more than doubles the framerate on the corridor by Chris, and reduces draw calls (cached or otherwise) 10x.

• Found a big bunch of uncompressed textures used in the new apartment scenes that were eating up tons of memory bandwidth. Properly compressed them for no quality loss and a dramatic (100x in some cases) drop in GPU bandwidth usage. Good for about 10fps on a really nice rig, and probably a lot more on lower end ones.

• Actually remembered to include the levels parts from Blue and Chris this time!

Pre-EA Demo 6

(Released July 13th, 2016)

• The level editor now has a little dropdown on the right-hand side of the screen that lets you choose skins for specific selected objects.
  • Objects must share the same type of skin for you to be able to multi-edit them, but the objects don't have to be the same type. Aka you can set wall styles on a bunch of different types of walls, but it's highly unlikely you can select a wall and a light and have them share the same skin. ;)
  • Tip: when choosing a skin, the easiest way to tell what the result looks like without selecting and deselecting objects over and over again is to hit Q to go into look mode, which hides all selection highlights. HUGE timesaver!

• Windows now have proper backgrounds rather than being hollow, and act as a light source.

• The lists in the level editor were often not sorted properly, making things quite hard to find in many cases. Fixed.

• Blue's awesome new ceiling and floor holes are now in place instead of Chris's cruddier ones.

• Two new tiny walls (one unit high), and some tiny stairs that are able to go up to them, have been added. These allow for some multi-level parts in rooms.

• Added a new interior buffet window wall, which is well big enough for the raptor to jump though. :)
  • The test apartment from Chris shows off these various new features.

• Six new edge-oriented columns have been added for the purposes of large spaces like the apartment corridors. These are being used in an example context now in Chris's corridor.

Pre-EA Demo 5

(Released July 13th, 2016)

• Fixed a rather horrendous bug in an interim windows build that went live last night. The spiders were self-colliding with their own guns and jittering up out of the level and so forth. In the process of fixing this, their physics were made more efficient, so it's not all bad at least!

• In the third person, swiping the enemy shots now sends them on a reflected arc again, rather than doing the first-person-style aiming. That was causing a LOT of problems for players in the third person who were zoomed back and playing in certain angles.

• Taking multiple hits within 0.9 seconds no longer counts as more than one hit. This way things like the red spiderbot are more likely to make you take a hit, but don't make you take like 12 hits when they get you at close range.

• Fixed an oversight where the GPU-heavy Cinematic Temporal Antialiasing was not properly being turned all the way off when it was disabled. This should help a bit with lower-performance graphics cards.

• Fixed an issue in some recent version (maybe just the last one?) where in the third person view the raptor being in front of the camera too close was triggering the depth of field effect. Yikes!

• Made a number of substantial performance optimizations in various scripts.

• Improved the accuracy of the occlusion system at long distances (doubles the number of raycasts, but in profiling these were a tiny tiny fraction of the performance of each frame anyhow.

Release Raptor Main Page