Hello! I'm Mr. Slate and here you can find the patch notes for version v.0.3.52 of the MoonWard Demo! This is the latest and as of today current MoonWard version. We've got a short one this time. As I said in my MGF (MoonWard Going Forward) update I've been a very busy with life and work... paid work for a change. But enough reality - let's do this!
Before I continue, you can download MoonWard here!
1. New Locations and Bounties.
I added the Quarry location in county 1 and the Factory location to county 1 and 2! Those are of corse accompanied by new bounties. You can also find them in multiple biomes. I was hoping to add a couple more but time and energy weren't on my side this last month.
2. New and updated locations art.
I wanted to focus on assets and content for this MoonWard patch. To an extent I did, but I didn't manage to do nearly as much as I wanted. Don't get me wrong, I think what I managed to do is quite good. In lore the majority of county 1 is on a raised, forested, snow and rock covered plateau. No tall mountains. I touched up the town and mountain backgrounds to reflect this a bit better. The big new add here is the completely new town art for county 2, as well as county 2 specific versions of the House and Factory locations. Had quite a lot of fun with those since the architecture had to be completely different from anything I'v done for MoonWard.
3. Major frame-rate optimisations.
I finally got back briefly to frame rate optimisations. I noticed ages ago that there was major slowdown when the background blur shader was active. Since then I've looked into optimising its code, completely different aproaches and of corse trying to buy one from the asset store. Some looked promising, some didn't but the bottom line is I didn't find anything that gave me any significant improvements. Finally I realised this effect is just too hefty to run continuously on low end devices. So I got creative.
In simple terms, my solution is the following:
Turn on shader
Wait 1 frame
Take screenshot
Turn off shader
Place screenshot behind the popup
Done.
In retrospective, I'm pretty sure this is industry standard for low end devices and I've seen this effect before so I probably subconsciously knew the sollution the whole time. Oh well, at least I learned a bunch getting there on my own.
4. Improved UI, fixed typos and bugs.
Plenty of those. Trust me. I'm Mr. Slate.
Thank you all for your time! I work hard on these patches so please give the MoonWard Demo a try! I hope to see you again soon!
Have a great week!