Posted April 13, 2022
War for the Overworld - Patch 2.1 released (part1)
Dynamic Shadows, Visual Tone Update, Performance Improvements
Type: Major Update
Posted: Tue, April 12, 2022 @ 7:05 PM CEST
Darkest Greetings Underlord,
As promised a mere 11 days ago we have returned to this realm, dragging a surprise War for the Overworld patch kicking
and screaming from the depths. This patch is a special one as it celebrates, somewhat belatedly, the 7th Anniversary of
WFTO’s release and contains a few new features we, and you, might never have expected to see in WFTO.
But first an introduction. I’m Lee, one of the designers and the community manager at Brightrock. I’m better known
in the community as Noontide. I’d like to take a moment to talk about the patch and why it’s a bit larger than our
intended scope for maintenance.
A large part of this is a result of several months of on and off tinkering that I’ve been doing with the WFTO project.
With input from my colleagues and assistance from the code team we’ve managed to wrap these changes up into this patch
alongside the originally scheduled work and maintenance we had planned.
All of this is to say that this patch is meatier than first anticipated but also a little experimental and I would
invite your opinions on changes that are being made here.
I expect this isn’t the last tinkering I will do with WFTO, but to set some reasonable expectations. I’m not a coder,
I wasn’t involved in WFTO’s production directly and I’m still getting to grips with the project and its intricacies.
A fair chunk of the work here involved a lot of help from others on the team who similarly supported me out of love and
passion for the game.
So please understand that the inclusion of some unexpected features doesn’t change our intended plans for
WFTO’s maintenance cycle. Which remains primarily an exercise in keeping a wary eye out for serious issues,
triaging and addressing them with short bursts of activity between our work on Project: Aftercare.
With all that said I hope that you will enjoy the changes included in Patch 2.1 and you’ll keep an eye out for
further news on Project: Aftercare this year :)
Now onto the patch notes!
Patch Highlights
Real-Time Shadow Support
One of my deepest desires for many years has been to see the game with real-time shadows, the light from torches
casting long shadows of workers passing through, structures casting equally imposing presence on the environment.
Ideal for dark, gritty dungeons.
There’s very real reasons why we never touched this. Frankly it’s super expensive performance wise, WFTO has a lot of
dynamic lights already and each light is an expense, doubly so if they cast shadows. Then as time went on and performance
generally improved, working backwards to introduce this was a non-starter because so much of the game had been done
without it intended, as an example many objects that should have cast shadows, simply didn’t because they weren’t set up to.
Anyway a lot of that work has been a focus of my efforts, and now this is now a supported graphical feature.
Largely I focussed on structures: Dungeon Cores, Shrines or significant light sources like the hand of evil.
If you enable shadows this is the bare minimum you get.
Some other shadow sources can also be optionally enabled, mostly this means corridor torches right now but may be expanded
in the future to include room props and more if there’s enough performance headroom.
Speaking of performance, it should be expected that this is a net-loss in performance if you enable this.
I’ve provided options to help offset this and the recommended finds a nice middleground.
But you can totally kill your FPS if you want to get the best looking picture, I just wouldn’t recommend it
for moment to moment gameplay.
Visual Tone Overhaul
Part of my goals with my tinkering was to try and give the game a “deeper” atmosphere with an emphasis on feeling
the effects of the terrain that surrounds you. First and foremost I wanted to communicate the sense that the player
was underground with more oppressive shadows and lighting, whilst still allowing the player to see what they’re doing.
It’s hard to communicate these changes so here’s a few comparison screenshots.
Power Hand of Evil
Just over a year ago now we asked our Discord community whether they wanted to see the Power Hand of Evil,
which was that year’s April Fools, make its way to the game. To say that the response was a resounding yes
would be an understatement. So we finally got around to doing that.
The new hand can be selected via the gameplay options menu.
UI Performance Optimisations
Thanks to feedback from the community we managed to isolate a few significant performance monsters in the UI.
This should greatly improve the performance of the Main Menu but also parts of the in-game UI that are known
to cause problems such as the units panel and veins of evil.
In some brief logging I confirmed a significant 41.8% reduction in UI overhead on the main menu in a steam thread:
Gains for the In-Game UI are more circumstantial but the unit panel in particular is much, much faster taking only 0.1ms
to render down from 5ms when fully populated and in advanced mode. That’s a massive 5000% gain in performance!
Dynamic Shadows, Visual Tone Update, Performance Improvements
Type: Major Update
Posted: Tue, April 12, 2022 @ 7:05 PM CEST
Darkest Greetings Underlord,
As promised a mere 11 days ago we have returned to this realm, dragging a surprise War for the Overworld patch kicking
and screaming from the depths. This patch is a special one as it celebrates, somewhat belatedly, the 7th Anniversary of
WFTO’s release and contains a few new features we, and you, might never have expected to see in WFTO.
But first an introduction. I’m Lee, one of the designers and the community manager at Brightrock. I’m better known
in the community as Noontide. I’d like to take a moment to talk about the patch and why it’s a bit larger than our
intended scope for maintenance.
A large part of this is a result of several months of on and off tinkering that I’ve been doing with the WFTO project.
With input from my colleagues and assistance from the code team we’ve managed to wrap these changes up into this patch
alongside the originally scheduled work and maintenance we had planned.
All of this is to say that this patch is meatier than first anticipated but also a little experimental and I would
invite your opinions on changes that are being made here.
I expect this isn’t the last tinkering I will do with WFTO, but to set some reasonable expectations. I’m not a coder,
I wasn’t involved in WFTO’s production directly and I’m still getting to grips with the project and its intricacies.
A fair chunk of the work here involved a lot of help from others on the team who similarly supported me out of love and
passion for the game.
So please understand that the inclusion of some unexpected features doesn’t change our intended plans for
WFTO’s maintenance cycle. Which remains primarily an exercise in keeping a wary eye out for serious issues,
triaging and addressing them with short bursts of activity between our work on Project: Aftercare.
With all that said I hope that you will enjoy the changes included in Patch 2.1 and you’ll keep an eye out for
further news on Project: Aftercare this year :)
Now onto the patch notes!
Patch Highlights
Real-Time Shadow Support
One of my deepest desires for many years has been to see the game with real-time shadows, the light from torches
casting long shadows of workers passing through, structures casting equally imposing presence on the environment.
Ideal for dark, gritty dungeons.
There’s very real reasons why we never touched this. Frankly it’s super expensive performance wise, WFTO has a lot of
dynamic lights already and each light is an expense, doubly so if they cast shadows. Then as time went on and performance
generally improved, working backwards to introduce this was a non-starter because so much of the game had been done
without it intended, as an example many objects that should have cast shadows, simply didn’t because they weren’t set up to.
Anyway a lot of that work has been a focus of my efforts, and now this is now a supported graphical feature.
Largely I focussed on structures: Dungeon Cores, Shrines or significant light sources like the hand of evil.
If you enable shadows this is the bare minimum you get.
Some other shadow sources can also be optionally enabled, mostly this means corridor torches right now but may be expanded
in the future to include room props and more if there’s enough performance headroom.
Speaking of performance, it should be expected that this is a net-loss in performance if you enable this.
I’ve provided options to help offset this and the recommended finds a nice middleground.
But you can totally kill your FPS if you want to get the best looking picture, I just wouldn’t recommend it
for moment to moment gameplay.
Visual Tone Overhaul
Part of my goals with my tinkering was to try and give the game a “deeper” atmosphere with an emphasis on feeling
the effects of the terrain that surrounds you. First and foremost I wanted to communicate the sense that the player
was underground with more oppressive shadows and lighting, whilst still allowing the player to see what they’re doing.
It’s hard to communicate these changes so here’s a few comparison screenshots.
Power Hand of Evil
Just over a year ago now we asked our Discord community whether they wanted to see the Power Hand of Evil,
which was that year’s April Fools, make its way to the game. To say that the response was a resounding yes
would be an understatement. So we finally got around to doing that.
The new hand can be selected via the gameplay options menu.
UI Performance Optimisations
Thanks to feedback from the community we managed to isolate a few significant performance monsters in the UI.
This should greatly improve the performance of the Main Menu but also parts of the in-game UI that are known
to cause problems such as the units panel and veins of evil.
In some brief logging I confirmed a significant 41.8% reduction in UI overhead on the main menu in a steam thread:
Gains for the In-Game UI are more circumstantial but the unit panel in particular is much, much faster taking only 0.1ms
to render down from 5ms when fully populated and in advanced mode. That’s a massive 5000% gain in performance!
Post edited April 13, 2022 by JMB9
