[2019] Patch #14 - Hotfix #2

Apologies :( We ended up having to rebuild around 5 gigs worth of data related to lightmaps and hierarchical level of detail on each map. A substantial amount of pre-calculated data goes into making sure the game runs as well as it does, this takes a bunch of computing power to churn through, so it took us a bit. It sounds dumb, but it's a bit like writing down the entire multiplication table instead of just writing down the rules how to multiply numbers (which would take less space). The table is faster to look up for a dumb computer, but takes up a lot of space.

As to why we screwed up in the first place, it was a combination of a software update that did a sneak change and us trying to rush the patch before the sale to ensure people would benefit from the faster loading and optimizations. The issues didn't become apparent unless you had substantially less video memory, so we didn't end up catching it in time.

The increased optimization was applied regardless. The issue might have negatively affected your FPS as a result (leading to a total net loss or zero), but we don't know how it would affect individual setups specifically. Still, there's a lot that goes into the overall FPS, bottlenecks can appear at various places, the patch 14 optimizations addressed the CPU on the game thread. There's 2 separate CPU threads (game and draw) and then there's the GPU. They all work in unison and vary from setup to setup, the slowest one determines the FPS. We've improved the game thread CPU usage, which will help some people with overall FPS and everyone with stutters, but we might need to do more in the future to bring the other two down more to reap benefits on some systems, but it's a major step forward.