Neck & Neck

• GAMMA TEAM
• RUN IT AGAIN
• Catz VS Ratz
• Keg Quest

You can now add your own profiling scopes inside command lists. They will be visible from in-game GPU profiler (overlay_gpu 1) and external tools. This should be useful for measuring performance cost of specific sections of your rendering code.

This is how you can add a profiling scope:

static readonly ProfilingSampler MyProfilingScope = new( "My Profiling Scope" );

// inside the command list execution code:
using ( _commandList.ProfileScope( MyProfilingScope ) )
{
    // do something here...
}

using ( _commandList.ProfileScope( ParentScope ) )
{
	using ( _commandList.ProfileScope( NestedScopeA ) )
	{
		// something here...
	}

	using ( _commandList.ProfileScope( NestedScopeB ) )
	{
		// something here....
	}
}

Downloads

• On average hardware with a 200 Mbit/s connection, a game with lots of small files downloads about 50% faster
• Games with lots of other package dependencies benefit the most, one went from 19.4s to 6.6s
• The faster your connection the bigger the gain, slow connections were already mostly network bound

Loading

• Files were mounted one at a time
• Package dlls were downloaded again on every load
• Backend calls waited on each other instead of running in parallel

• Cold load (first load after starting s&box): ~20s to ~9s
• Warm load (loading it again in the same session): ~7s to ~5.5s

We have fixed several causes of GPU crashes, including depth-normal work on some AMD cards, cubemap filtering, render input layouts, and cleanup when maps unload or the renderer shuts down.

There are also fixes for replacing DLSS upscalers and initializing or sharing FSR3 upscalers. When VRAM is over budget, the texture pool now shrinks by the amount it is over, including in tools. GPU crash reports include more information about the failing call, shader and memory budget to help track down remaining problems.

var messages = Database.GetTable( "player-messages" );

// The message and its world position.
var data = Json.Serialize( new
{
    Text = "That chest has teeth.",
    Position = new Vector3( 120, 450, 32 )
} );

await messages.Create( Guid.NewGuid().ToString(), data, "dungeon-01", true );

var records = await messages.List( "dungeon-01" );

• How long players stay during their first session
• How many come back the next day, a week later and a month later
• Whether that's getting better or worse over time

• Where the menu showed your game and how players got in
• Whether the thumbnail, description and video convince them to press play
• Whether the first 5 minutes keep them engaged

Terrain holes and outer edges are now clipped before pixel shading. This restores early depth rejection and lets MSAA smooth the cut edges, while avoiding shader work on terrain that will be discarded.

We also fixed the terrain depth prepass writing incorrect surface data. It now outputs the proper normals and roughness, restoring ambient occlusion on terrain.