Space Clouds

Beta client 290.1144

** update 1144 ** (all known beta issue fixed)
* fix for the graphic corruption causing random crash (and bluescreen on some cases) as well as missing particles

** update 509 **
* Fix for the biggest issues that were added with the beta clients. All ships should now render properly / where they are expected to be
* Your ship should no longer shake seemingly randomly when you move around.
* A few various crashes and corruptions were also fixed.

– As with all beta client, there are likely more issues to be found and fixed. This is why it is beta after all.

Its been a long time coming. I started this client optimisation pass with the goal of supporting large scale bvb action (which currently result in more or less locked up client).

* In the process I ended up having to write new optimized container for our nodes childrens list (before we used a list, now its using an hybrid between a vector and a map for fastest possible iteration and somewhat fast element removal).
* I also ended up rewriting the way our particle system use d3d hardware buffer (before it was constantly rewriting it, now it only flag and rewrite the bits that changed)
* I rewrote how our scenenodes (the objects containing everything that end up on the screen including their rotation / resize etc) are created to remove useless parents set and overwrite (some nodes ended up moved around from parent to parent 3-4 times everytime they were made).
* Changed our billboard nodes to use a single hardware buffer containing the actual billboard index (which are used for most projectiles). While this is in practice slower when theres only a small amount of projectiles to use the hardware buffer over just sending the data directly to the gpu, the time it represent in a frame is extremely small. On the other hand, when sending the data directly to the gpu vs using a buffer, if you have 200+ of said billboards to do in the frame, it become a whole lot slower and represent nearly 20% of the gpu/cpu time in those situation (since the gpu will wait for the cpu to upload the data), this change resulted in a large improvement in the amount of billboards (projectiles) that could be on screen at once.
* This beta should also fix the few crash dumps i received over the past weeks.
* The ship preview on connection has been fixed.
* The account creation now include a password and email validation field with dynamic coloring if they match / dont match.
* Multiple other smaller performance improvements.

All in all, you should see a small generic improvement to the fps, between 5-20% depending on the scenario. On the other hand, during what was previously borderline on the client load or completely above client capacity, you should see an increase in the 20-25times the performance.

Keep in mind that while I did test and fix hundreds of problems during those optimisation there are likely a lot remaining. If you do find any new bug in this beta, please mention it in forum pm or in this blog forum post.

I wanted to do a side by side comparison of the previous beta with this one in my test scenario (20 stations firing mags at 10k range with max rof) but sadly current beta just froze / gave a frame every 15-20sec so it didnt make much of an animated gif heh.

Heres one of the new version, with lagkiller disabled and very high graphic settings (altho in a mostly empty galaxy except for the 13000 projectiles floating around at all time).

Those on the current beta client will automatically get an update at that time. If you do not have the beta client and want to try it, use http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. It is independent from the live client and you can use both on liberty.

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