Legends of Dawn v1.30, v1.40, and v1.50 Patches
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After a long hiatus, the team at Dreamatrix has been busy cranking out a handful of new patches for their crowd-funded RPG Legends of Dawn, with the game's Steam feed alerting us to the availability of v1.30, v1.40, and v1.50 patches that optimize the game's performance, fix a number of bugs, and introduce some community-requested features. A bit of what's been added lately:
- 64-bit OS Support. Game and engine are now 64-bit too. You can choose between 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems, but good news is that memory problems (64-bit) are thing of the past now. Game can now utilize all the RAM you have, well over 2GB per process that is the limit of 32-bit processes.
- Upgraded Physics. NVidia PhysX is not dependent on external system software anymore. No more separate installation of physics software is required. External physics installation was cause of many problems in the past - from configurations where physics software was not recognized, even though it was installed, to problems with non-steam installations where users simply forgot to install physics software. This is now solved, physics is part of the game itself and should work without any intervention from the user or external software.
- Streaming is upgraded.
- Smoothed Animations. Animation for all dynamic entities are now smoothed over time when transiting between animation states. This is most noticeable on monsters and player characters.
- Numerous small optimization's and fixes.
- Slight tweaks and changes to monster AI.
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Some of you have requested moving camera higher up. In this update we have changed maximum camera height so you can see bigger area around the player. There are some technical limitations that we'd like to explain so that you understand how camera position affects world rendering.
LoD world is divided in sectors. Each sector is 48x48 meters square. Number of entities in sector is not limited, but it affects rendering and streaming speed. For example wilderness sectors have mostly trees and rocks and few other objects in them. But towns are another story. You have houses, furniture, NPCs, their equipment and who knows what else. Each of these entities must be streamed in memory to be rendered. Number of visible entities directly affects framerate.
Moving camera higher up is absolutely no problem. It's just number that limits max camera height. Problem that arises with higher camera is that more entities will be visible. If you can see 100 entities while camera is 20 meters in the air, it may be 150 visible entities if you move camera 3 meters higher. That's 50% increase in number of visible entities for just 15% higher camera.
We have slightly modified max camera height. Now you can move it to ~23-24 meters. Note however that this will affect performance. This performance is mostly visible in town. While moving through the wilderness, this will have little or no impact on rendering speed.
Regarding viewing distances such as those in FPS games - LoD was from the start designed to have look similar to games such as Baldur's Gate or Diablo 2. This means camera at fixed distance from ground, with single viewing direction. Over time that changed to freely rotatable camera that can now be zoomed.
