v0.117.0-rc36 Whole Worlds

Everything in rc35, plus fog shafts that cost a fraction of what they did, and a catch-up budget that new projects start with.

Fog shafts from the shadow map

Shafts (the beams volumetric fog shows where something stands between it and the sun) worked out the sun's shadow with a full shadow march at every step of the fog, which was most of what lit fog cost. A new Lighting setting, from the shadow map, reads the sun's shadow map at each step instead. In a test scene of posts against a low sun, the frame went from 13 ms to 1.4 ms, and on ground made of terrain the old march costs more still. The beams come out a little softer and lighter.

The setting needs the scene's sun shadows to come from a shadow map. New scenes start with it on. Scenes made before it keep marching, so they look exactly as they did; turn it on under the fog's shafts, or set fogShaftsMap on the Lighting node's Light component from a script.

A catch-up budget for new projects

When a frame runs long, the game catches up by running the fixed ticks it missed. If the ticks themselves are expensive, catching up makes the next frame long too, and the game can sink to a few frames a second doing nothing but catching up. The catch-up budget stops that: a frame runs ticks for at most so many milliseconds and lets the rest go, so the game runs slower than real time for a moment rather than stuttering.

New projects now start with a 12 ms budget, enough for an ordinary hitch to catch up in a frame or two. Projects made before keep running every tick they miss, as they always have; set the budget in Project Settings to opt in. Frames that let ticks go count them as ticksDropped in perf.frames(), and the Console says so the first time it happens in a Play.

Upgrading

Nothing changes for existing projects or scenes unless you turn these on.