Update Notes: May 18, 2017

KNOWN ISSUE: The screen flickers black briefly during gameplay when new assets need to be loaded. We know what's causing it and we're working on getting the fix out. We'll keep you advised!


Graphics:

• Fixed several crashing bugs.
• Fixed situations where the game could become unresponsive during long loads, causing the OS to think the game had crashed (and display the "Do you want to keep waiting?" dialog).
• Improved the loading screen to show more information. (This is still a temporary loading screen; a "real" one with a progress bar will be added during the GUI overhaul.)
• Disabled Unity's new multi-threaded rendering mode because it was causing spurious crashes. (This may mean your FPS is reduced, especially if you have a many-core machine and a powerful graphics card.) We'll try it again after the next Unity update.
• Some gameplay effects, such as night-vision, could not be seen in Serbule if you were playing on low graphics settings or had manually disabled "Color Correction Curves". Color adjustment is now always on in Serbule and the "Color Correction Curves" override does nothing there. (But it still does something in some other areas, so we're leaving the override in the game for now.)

Mac & Linux Users:

Mac: You no longer need to "turn off your trees" to play in Serbule. However on some Macs, you may still need to shrink the size of the game window in order to get a good frame rate. This is especially true if you have a Retina display on a lower-end MacBook: the video card can't drive all the pixels efficiently. (Sort of like a Cadillac being driven by a motorcycle engine -- it will be slow.)

We'll continue to try to improve game performance, but that wasn't the focus of this update. This update is about making the game not crash!

Known issue for Mac users: The night sky is extremely bright.

Linux: We've identified some issues that were likely causing problems for Linux players. We haven't tested these fixes on Linux because we don't yet have Linux QA machines (and Linux isn't officially supported yet) ... but there's a good chance that things are somewhat better now.


Preferences File:

The filename for the preferences file has changed. Previously, preferences were stored in GorgonPrefs.txt. Now they are stored in GorgonConfig.txt instead.

The first time you log in after this update, the old file will be imported and then saved to the new filename. The old file will not be auto-deleted. We did it this way because the file format has changed and we want to have the option to roll back to an earlier version of the client if necessary.

HOWEVER. Due to the change in the preference-file format:

• The camera turning and zooming speeds have been reset to their defaults. You will need to re-set these from the Configuration panel.
• Similarly, if you overrode Water Quality, you will need to override it again.

Sorry for the hassle!


Brewing:

• If you had cheesemaking barrels aging, they counted against your maximum number of brewing barrels.
• You were able to age a third barrel of hard liquor if your Cheesemaking skill was above 40. It is now fixed so that you need Brewing skill level 40 to age a third barrel.
• If you tried to place more than the maximum number of brewing barrels, the extra barrels would be placed but then immediately disappear.
• Hard liquor casks could be aged anywhere, not just in caves as intended.
• The favor "Mushrooms for Beer" required a different kind of mushroom than listed.
• The favor "Collecting Keg Orders" could not be completed because Durstin Tallow did respond correctly.
• Beer and hard liquor now count as "drinks" in terms of NPC behavior. Vendors that buy drinks will buy beer and hard liquor, and NPCs that like (or hate) drinks will now respond appropriately when gifted with these.
• The recipe "Sift Through Grass For Barley Seeds" now gives less XP.

Other Changes:

• Cows have jump animations, plus a greater variety of dance animations.
• Giant bats and werewolves now have dance animations, although some are placeholders. (Sorry, deer! We'll hack some placeholder dances in for you soon.)
• Daniel Murderdark's skeleton's trade options now require more skulls.

May 18 Update #2

- Fixed an issue where the loading screen flickered (a "black flicker") when new assets were being loaded during gameplay.
- The ambient noises in Serbule are now tied to the ambient volume slider.

This was a client-only update, and the server did not reboot. If you are experiencing the black flicker, you need to re-run the patcher and get this patch!