Icarus Dev Tracker

Originally posted by WarNerve: Please don't see my post as a complaint.

Did not come across like that at all, and many have this issue - occasionally even myself. So discussing it is good. While some might get a bit annoyed as it has been discussed before, it can be very hard to know if information is current. So discussing it and continuing to look at options to deal with it are well worth it.

Originally posted by WarNerve: I really appreciate you taking the time to give us all such ...

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Originally posted by Grand Forks: love that response @Rocket "highly optimized binarized data" I had to giggle a bit.

Sorry I don't quite understand what you mean?

Perhaps you misunderstood me; but the phrase "highly optimized binarized data" is just a descriptive way of saying "packing" something. It's just a factual statement describing how the files are packed.

Take for example if you took your whole computer hard drive and "zipped" it up. By saying its binarized and highly optimized, I wouldn't be necessarily saying its the best way to work on those files, but it is the most efficient way of storing it. Additionally, if when zipping it, the packing process looked at what files reference what others, and ... Read more

It is a very frustrating issue for us. Note that we have zero control over how patches are applied on steam. The way delta patching occurs on steam causes this issue, especially on highly optimized binarized data. This means steam reserves a whole bunch of new sectors, copies the data across, and cross references.

We get many complaints about this, but the only thing we could realistically do would be uncompress the data completely, which is what games like Ark do. They don't pack the data and leave it all unpacked, and uncompressed.

If we tried to do this with Icarus, it would very dramatically increase both the load times and RAM used by assets during loading, as well as filesize very dramatically.

Unfortunately it seems following the best practice guidelines for packing data for Unreal, which we did, triggers big problems for steam downloads. I raised the issue with valve who told me to get customers to raise tickets, which I passed on. However, valv... Read more

Originally posted by Diedel: And i personally am very happy for this, being able to mod games is a HUGE extensions to the lifetime of many games for me.

It's a shame we aren't, currently anyway, better able to support mod integration as well. There are some truly outstanding mods, but because it is not quite as easy as visiting the workshop it means many miss out on seeing some amazing creations. When you look at what life games like KSP and RimWorld have gotten from mods, it really shows what they do for a game.

Currently we have our hands so full with the current roadmap it can be difficult for us to look for time to rework what would be needed for more streamlined mod support.

This person is creating multiple accounts after being banned. Their behavior has escalated to other concerning behavior that is being taken further.

I will leave this post here so people are aware of their username, until the matter can be dealt with properly by steam and authorities.

We specifically changed the game to better support people to get into the game files and mod/adapt the game to what they might want to do with it. Defining the difference between a cheat and a mod is pretty much impossible.

Again, I cant stress enough how important it is to update your drivers for both Nvidia and AMD. Each update Nvidia has been releasing specific changes that will help with ICARUS, not having the latest drivers can also cause crashes especially if advanced rendering settings are turned on.

Note, many of the users having issues (many of the ones above, for example) are AMD GPUs.

Some recommendations for AMD users, do one - test - and keep going down until you have performance improvements:

• Update your AMD drivers
  
• Turn on "Simple Building Shadows"
  
• Make sure "Contact Shadows" is on
  
• Turn down "Shadows" setting from High, to something lower
  
• Turn down "Shadow Cascades"

If you still have issues, please raise a support request at AMD, as we would very much like them to spend some time on the game with their hardware diagnostics and get them to put some hardware optimizations in their drivers. Nvidia have been regularly doing this, testing, and including specific changes for ICARUS in their drivers.

Do note that with ICARUS we aimed the bar very high for scale. So *every* tree on the map can be cut down, etc. This means that, depending on actions in the world, a lot of memory can be used. Given it is a PC only game, we also wanted to make something that could grow with improvements to PC's over the years, hence depending on settings and usage, the game could end up using a lot of RAM.