0.6.0 - Public release

by MaverickMatryoshka

0.6.0 has hit the public branch! This means the game is now on UE5, and we can focus our efforts fully on new playable characters (work on these has already been underway for a while). If you missed the full overview of what 0.6.0 brings, see the previous post here.

Details on what changed since the beta patch and things to watch out for below.

❗ A quick reminder about performance

Foliage rendering performance has been improved, but the amount of foliage has also increased on the map. If you're having performance issues, that's the first thing to check in your graphics settings (Foliage Density) . The game can scale it down for you if you're struggling.

❗ Client crashes

We haven't seen any frequent crashes, but have run into some rare crashes here and there that appeared to happen deep in the engine's bowels and did not seem directly related to gameplay code. We're keeping an eye on this.

❗ Server crashes

Early in the beta patch test, one of the servers exhibited a crash/restart loop. Once we tried to investigate this however, it didn't happen anymore. We're keeping our eyes open for this, but if you're a server owner and this happens to your server see the section below on how to switch back for the time being. Please also do report it to us.

❗ How to switch back to the old version

We've opened a new steam branch dubbed legacy-0.5.0 where the previous patch will remain available and you can switch back to. If you're a regular player and you want to switch back (or you want to play on your legacy server as a server owner), make sure you remove your old settings at C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\IslesOfYore (this will also remove your skin presets, back those up).

❗ Known issues

The following issues are still present. They're planned to be worked on, but weren't immediately game-breaking and have been deprioritised over getting work done on the new playable characters:

  • Interactable foliage might pop in with the wrong scale. A workaround for this is to walk a good distance away from the foliage, wait a few moments, and come back to it. Issue is known, but needs a bit of further development to fix.
  • While the issues with river collision are better than in 0.5.0, it's still not fool-proof and remains an area of active development.
  • There's a couple weather types that don't blend very nicely (foggy -> clearskies for instance), you might see the weather being temporarily too dark or too bright while it transitions.
  • This is not a new issue, but wanted to acknowledge that we've found a couple of scenarios where there's some rubberbanding. We're going to look into improving this in an upcoming patch.

Changelog

These extra changes have been made since the beta patch for 0.6.0:

Features:

  • Added extra sounds for Deinonychus.
  • Added a "what's new" screen on the main menu.

Polish:

  • Another round of big improvements for weather and time-of-day lighting. Further work continues on this.
  • Tweaked rivers in various positions on the map to reduce clipping and collision issues. However, see known limitations section on this.
  • Adjusted roaming area for scanners so they're less likely to get stuck in the rainforest. Though this is not fool-proof, the game is in need of a better navigation solution to properly fix this.
  • Added AI spawn points in the new coastal jungles.
  • Tidied up various rainforest spawn spots where it was overlapping the waterfall and the alpine biome.
  • Tweaked light occlusion of sun and moon as they rise and set, to be better blocked by the geography in front. Not perfect, but a decent step forward.
  • Added a new "far shadows" option.
  • Added a "Full scale" button to make switching to 100% screen resolution easier.

Bugfixes:

  • Further stability improvements to turn in place. Reminder that while it is now enabled by default, it is still optional. We feel it's stable enough for use, but it's not as butter smooth as we want it to, you can still opt-out in the controls menu for the moment.
  • Fixed a desync (resulting in jitter) that happened intermittently while moving. See also earlier note about known issues with rubber banding that we're further looking into.
  • Fixed smelling causing a squared shadow depression on the landscape.
  • Fixed an issue where the sim.time command didn't set the correct time.
  • Fixed various sky rendering instabilities.
  • Fixed various issues with dynamic weather.
  • Fixed various issues with the aurora and re-enabled support for it.
  • Fixed wind intensity behaving incorrectly on some foliage. We're still improving this further on a per-foliage basis.
  • Fixed another cause of foliage wind jitter.
  • Fixed foliage blur that that occured while it moved, with the exception of grass that cannot currently be fixed due to an engine regression in UE5.
  • Fixed black rendering artifacts on certain ferns.
  • Fixed a bug where desired screenscale wouldn't be persisted.