Corona is still going on and so is our work. Performance improvements in Elemental War, demo for Tri6: Infinite coming soon, a Spine update and progress on Red Skies: Ascension – this and more now in the progress report!
This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.
Read the full progress report on our homepage: https://clockwork-origins.com/progress-report-may-2020/
We hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your opinions on it either here or better on our Discord.
Progress Report April 2020
First quarter of 2020 is over and despite the whole COVID-19 crisis we made good progress with a clear roadmap for the Elemental War performance improvements and Tri6: Infinite beta start!
This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.
Read the full progress report on our homepage: https://clockwork-origins.com/progress-report-april-2020/
We hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your opinions on it either here or better on our Discord.
This month's maintenance update Elemental War 1.6.0 improves performance a little, fixes a bug and added a feature request.
After a small delay of a week we now have the regular update for you. On the performance side we have some first optimizations, but the big boost will come in the next weeks. We will set up a beta branch probably in two or three weeks. As the whole upgrade process will require a lot of testing we hope some of you will join the beta branch and help us to ensure everything is still working as expected.
While working on these optimizations we also got a feature request and a bug report. The bug was the Money tower resetting its orientation on upgrade if it has been rotated by the player. The feature request was to show the remaining active item cooldown also in the tooltip in the inventory. Both things have been done for 1.6.0.
Full changelog
Enhancements:
added remaining cooldown for active items in tooltip
Fixes:
improved audio performance
improved level performance
Money tower now keeps its orientation on upgrade
If you have any balancing concerns or bugs, please let us know, either as comment, in the discussions, via the Feedback functionality ingame or on Discord.
Elemental War 1.6.0 delayed
Just a small heads-up! This week’s Elemental War update is delayed by one or two weeks.
It has nothing to do with COVID-19. It’s just that it took longer than expected to figure out a solid plan for the performance optimizations. The whole optimization process will be split up in a few different steps.
We already did some performance optimizations for the whole audio processing for 1.6.0. But we want to improve the levels for 1.6.0 now as well. This will already give a small performance boost. Depending on how long it will take we will delay 1.6.0 by one or two weeks. It won’t be more.
The next step is already bigger. We will upgrade to a newer Unity version. That alone won’t bring any performance benefits, but allows us to use some new techniques that will help. There are two things: The Universal Render Pipeline and DOTS.
The Universal Render Pipeline is a new and a lot improved rendering pipeline Unity developed in the last years. We already use it in Tri6: Infinite and it’s pretty cool. A first try with Elemental War gave us around 50% better performance on Xbox One in the benchmark scene, that’s already a lot.
DOTS stands for Data Oriented Technologies Stack and is also a new thing in Unity we also use for Tri6: Infinite. It makes it easier to write more CPU friendly code and use multithreading in Unity. This will mean we have to rewrite some of the functionality of Elemental War, but therefore it will be way more performant afterwards.
So the plan is to release 1.6.0 with the optimizations we can already do now, then we will upgrade Unity and convert to URP which will end up on a new beta branch we will set up for that purpose. While that’s being tested, we will upgrade our code base to DOTS where it makes sense and push these changes to the beta branch as well.
If you have any balancing concerns or bugs, please let us know, either as comment, in the discussions, via the Feedback functionality ingame or on Discord.
Progress Report March 2020
Last month of the first quarter of 2020 already reached and our projects and the team as well made very good progress!
This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.
Read the full progress report on our homepage: https://clockwork-origins.com/progress-report-march-2020/
We hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your opinions on it either here or better on our Discord.
Elemental War 1.5.0
This month's maintenance update Elemental War 1.5.0 improves controller support and adds some bugfixes.
As you might know we're currently porting Elemental War also to Xbox and PS4. These platforms of course require proper controller support. Even though Elemental War supports controllers since release and in some beta state even since Early Access, we found some things to improve again. A big problem was for example the speed of the simulated mouse cursor, especially on screens with a different resolution than 1920x1080. Also the menu navigation felt not perfect as it wasn't possible to use the digipad and when navigating to the top bottom and try one up it was stuck and didn't switch to the bottom most button. The latter two things were more or less just things we personally prefer, there are games that support it and others that don't. But in our opinion it feels better now and as the code for that was already prepared by our next game Tri6: Infinite it wasn't a big deal anyway.
Another big topic is again performance. Even though we spent a lot of time to improve the performance, we found out that the CPU performance on consoles is pretty bad at the moment. For us that means a lot of additional work to optimize the game further. For the PC version that means that you will get better performance as well. Some small improvements are already part of 1.5, but we have to figure out how to solve the big problems now.
Full changelog
Enhancements:
improved mouse simulation with controller
improved controller navigation in main menu
added digipad navigation to main menu
performance improvements
Fixes:
cursor now is hidden while game is started
fixed Steam rich presence
fixed progress display of monster hunter achievement
disabled tutorials in benchmark
adjusted buttons in profile menu (text length)
Pegasus doesn't decrease speed anymore if it's already higher than its effects
fixed opening of leaderboard using controller
If you have any balancing concerns or bugs, please let us know, either as comment, in the discussions, via the Feedback functionality ingame or on Discord.
Progress Report February 2020
Almost missed that it’s already February again. So time for the second progress report this year!
This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.
Read the full progress report on our homepage: https://clockwork-origins.com/progress-report-february-2020/
We hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your opinions on it either here or better on our Discord.
Elemental War 1.4.0
This month's maintenance update Elemental War 1.4.0 has been released with some new bugfixes and a feature request to always show at least one entrance portal in the top area of the default camera.
With this update when starting a map, the default rotation of the camera will ensure that at least one of the start portals is in the top area of the screen. Of course you're still able to rotate the camera as you like, but it should be a little easier now to find the entrance point.
Besides that we fixed several small bugs we found while playing or got reported. Mostly cosmetic stuff, nothing crucial.
Another good news: Elemental War got approved for PlayStation 4! That means besides the Xbox One port we're also working on a PS4 port soon.
Full changelog
Enhancements:
at least one start portal now is always on top of the map
Fixes:
fixed error when activating controller for the first time in a submenu
damage type change is only shown now by Joker when the tower is selected
when logged in only via linked Steam account alliance score is now displayed properly
Root Nexus effect is removed now when last Root Nexus is sold
inventory can be closed again using the close button
slightly improved CPU performance
removing item from slot 3 now updates the tower overlay properly
game restart now clears tower and monster info screen
optimized login button for login hint
dragging an item from one tower directly to another one now drops the items always on the correct tower
If you have any balancing concerns or bugs, please let us know, either as comment, in the discussions, via the Feedback functionality ingame or on Discord.
Past and future 2020
It’s 2020 already for a few weeks now and so we want to look back on what we achieved in 2019 and what we have planned for 2020.
This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.
Read the full news on our homepage: https://clockwork-origins.com/past-and-future-2020/
We hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your opinions on it either here or better on our Discord.
Progress Report January 2020
The new progress report is now live and contains many updates for all our projects and future plans!
This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.
Read the full progress report on our homepage: https://clockwork-origins.com/progress-report-january-2020
We hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your opinions on it either here or better on our Discord.
