v0.118.2 Full Speed

A big step for frame rates. Forests, fog, shadows and upscaling cost a fraction of what they did, so a dense planet at High settings fits in 60 frames a second on a mid-range card. Terrain gets real materials: every texture slot can carry its own Material, normal, ORM and height maps, and borders between materials that can be soft, sharp, pixel-stepped or decided by height. Plus glass, wheels that grip, scroll views and much more.

Faster frames

• Leaves, grass and other cut-out cards are drawn once per pixel. Cards hidden behind other cards cost nothing to shade, even on a planet. A forest that took 18 ms of GPU time now takes about 14.
• Volumetric fog can be built in a grid at a fraction of the cost of marching it per pixel, with the same look. Choose it under Project Settings ▸ Volumetric fog.
• FSR 1 upscaling. Render the 3D scene below full resolution and bring it back up sharp, in well under half a millisecond at 1440p. Choose it under Project Settings ▸ Upscale, with app.setRenderScale for the scale.
• Shadows cost what they show. The sun's shadow map draws only what lies inside it. A scattered field can cast no shadow, or none past a distance, with castShadow and shadowDistance on scatter.create.
• Lamps out of reach cost nothing per pixel, and ambient occlusion switched off costs nothing at all.
• A single star lights the world for what the sun costs.
• See where the time goes. The GPU profiler times every post effect and offscreen view on its own line, and perf.counts() reports triangles, shadow-map draws and terrain meshes still to come.
• Settings a game can offer its players: app.setTextureQuality, app.setAntialias (FXAA), terrain.setDetail for terrain view distance, and a camera's own near and far planes.

Terrain materials

• Each terrain slot can carry a Material of its own: roughness, metalness, glow, tint, or unlit. Scripts read and set it with terrain.slotMaterial and terrain.setSlotMaterial.
• Slots take normal, ORM and height maps, and pixel-art slots keep them crisp.
• Borders between materials have a width in metres and a style: soft, sharp, wobbled, pixel-stepped, or decided by the height maps so stones stand out of sand. Borders run cleanly where three materials meet.
• Textures stay steady into the distance, can hide their repeat from far off, and can be larger.
• Terrain shows its own colours from the very first frame, instead of white while its pictures load.
• Digs can be round. Project Settings ▸ Terrain shape draws dug and sculpted ground smooth (Natural) or in crisp voxel facets (Faceted), and terrain.setShape changes it while a game runs.
• Paint and digs take a brush, soft or hard, for crisp seams and road edges: terrain.paintTexture takes a soft brush too.
• Ravine walls are painted and solid. No more untextured patches on steep walls or holes along their rims, and raycasts stop at the walls.
• Terrain gives back the GPU memory of ground you have left behind.

Glass, light and effects

• Glass reads its own shape. A thin pane shows what is behind it straight through; a ball is a lens.
• Lit particles take a spotlight's cone and choose how strongly they answer lamps. Particles can draw into a render target, and particles.setMax sets one budget across every effect.
• Effects fired from moving things slow down and swirl the right way.
• Reflections, motion blur and contact shadows hold steady: reflections that miss turn to fine grain rather than a woven pattern, motion blur leaves what rides with the camera sharp, and contact shadows stay still while the camera barely moves.
• Tiled materials can hide their repeat.
• Render-target and stacked cameras can skip shadows, sky, terrain and fog, and lay themselves over after depth of field.

Vehicles and physics

• Wheels grip and turn the way they should: suspension in real units with bump stops, the same grip forwards and backwards, held to the ground over crests at speed, and a project setting for wheel friction.
• Surfaces can be slippery with node:setSurfaceFriction.
• node.contactForce tells how hard the ground pushes back, and assembly.impacts says what each part of a craft hit.
• A fast craft pays only for what it can reach, in open air and near colliders alike.
• Queries can skip a node's whole subtree with ignoreChildren, and an ignore list skips static colliders too.

Scripting and UI

• Scroll views fade the edges that hide content and can scroll to a row with view:scrollTo.
• ui.wantsPointer says when the pointer is over UI, so a click on a button does not also fire the game's.
• Screen drawing stacks in the order a script makes it.
• What scripts hold: perf.scriptMemory and perf.resources name the script behind each mesh and texture, and a script's mesh or texture can live as long as its node or scene.
• Scatter keeps the nearest props when over budget, fades props in and out, and answers big scatter.near queries flat or a page at a time.
• Compute buffers can be atomic, with a new tutorial: a pond the GPU simulates.
• Files can be written off the frame, so switching save slots never waits.
• A game's Quit closes it, and its resolution setting takes effect.

Upgrading

Projects from before keep their look: they stay on marched fog, a plain upscale and faceted digs until you choose otherwise in Project Settings. New projects start with grid fog, FSR 1 and Natural digs. Planets in an upgraded project are generated exactly as before; a new project generates with the improved ravine walls.