The start of some major performance upgrades, new asteroid generation that includes craters and more noise, multiplayer stability improvements and more!

Posted by [ZanMgt]Aaron on Aug 3rd, 2012

What's New?

The start of some major performance upgrades, new asteroid generation that includes craters and more noise, multiplayer stability improvements and more!

Check out some of the update highlights below or skip to the end for some more info!

Craters for Asteroids

By popular demand, asteroids now include more realistic cratering, as well as some general noise to keep it from looking so smooth. We’ll make the asteroid generation accessible for editing ASAP.

Ore for Asteroids

Generation of both large lumps and veins heavy rock, metal, or ice. Mostly a test of the generation, we’ll be revising the exact ores and their frequency of occurrence as we play the game a bit.

Frustum Culling

Rather simple, yet long neglected in favor of preparing the back engine for future capabilities, Frustum Culling is an early step at optimizing BR’s performance by clearing chunks that aren’t in view

Performance Boost

After some tiding up of the deferred renderer, Nathan managed to nearly double the framerate in some cases! This is kind of a freebie though, serious performance optimizations will be under way.

Multiplayer Digging

WAIT UNTIL EVERONE’S LOADED THE ASTEROID FIRST (otherwise people can end up disconnected), but after that have at it and make a mess of rocks by digging the asteroid up with other players!

Multiplayer Stability

Zack’s going over stability of the multiplayer, with a few more noticeable perks being the ping readout being much more accurate. There’s still a lot of optimization to be made here -keep an eye out for updates!

Purple Screen Fixed(?)

Report this if you find it. It should be toast. Forever.

(Turning off the compass will fix this if it does show up)



Download Blockade Runner 0.70.0 (Or use wyUpdate.exe)

Changelog 0.70.0

- added digging is now possible in multiplayer (wait until all players have loaded atm!)

- added right-click can convert rock to frame

- added frustrum culling (areas of the ships you aren't looking at won't be rendered)

- fixed purple screen when settings.xml is missing and compass is active

- improved rendering code to improve general performance

- improved asteroids now generated with noise, craters, and preliminary ore

- improved multiplayer netcode cleaned and improved (keep an eye out for more!)

- improved latency readout accuracy improved