Holiday greetings and update preview

Hello everyone!

The year is coming to a close, and it’s time for our final release of 2024. This year’s Winter Update will focus almost exclusively on fixes, improvements and optimizations, as we wanted to take some time to address long-standing issues and improve performance before adding more content. Let’s take a look.

Networking improvements

The fixes in this department address issues such as shots often missing in multiplayer despite seemingly hitting the enemy on your screen (and the enemy’s health jumping back up right after). This is mostly due to the lack of proper lag compensation in the game: there’s always some latency in communication between the client and the server, and by the time the server finds out you fired your gun, the target may have moved enough to make the shot miss. Now the server properly compensates for the lag, calculating if the shot hit at the point in the past when you fired the gun, which makes the hit detection a lot more reliable.

We’re also introducing new fixes to multiple networking errors, such as the “level equality check failed” and “entity event data exceeds the size of the buffer” errors, the server lobby sometimes appearing empty, and other similar issues.

There are various other networking fixes and improvements coming as well, and they should reduce glitchy behavior such as dead bodies getting stuck hanging from platforms, or characters getting stuck behind doors. The changes improve character syncing overall, also reducing issues like rubberbanding, movement lag and teleportation.

Optimizations

While optimizing the game is an ongoing task, in recent months we’ve redoubled our efforts, and this update should result in a considerable performance improvement across the board.

Notably, we’ve made several physics optimizations. In technical terms, the game now disregards potential collisions between things that can never collide (such as two characters and most items) much earlier in the collision detection logic. This should reduce the amount of redundant physics calculations that could have a negative impact on performance. 

We’ve also optimized rendering in a way that should give a major performance boost to situations in which there’s lots of structures visible. In addition, memory usage has been significantly optimized, which should reduce loading times and CPU overhead in most systems. There’s a long list of other optimizations coming in the update as well; you can get a closer look at those in the changelog on release day.

We hope these changes will make playing much more enjoyable!

More fixes

Besides these more techy changes, we’ve addressed a number of bugs and made small improvements throughout. Here are a few highlights.

Submarine improvements:

• Reworked Berilia (kudos to WJohnston): layout improvements, added a bottom docking port, more windows, replaced cameras with searchlights, simplified battery setup and increased reactor output, minor visual improvements and a lot of miscellaneous tweaks.
• Reworked the Kastrull drone (less ugly, a little sturdier, the ballast can be accessed through a hatch).
• Waypoint fixes in the Camel; fixed bots being unable to enter through the Camel’s bottom hatch.

Experience gain improvements:

• Mission XP is no longer only tied to mission rewards, but adjusted based on the difficulty of the mission.
  • The more hazardous and lengthy missions, such as nest and ruin missions, will now be more worthwhile because of the increased XP gain.
  • XP gains are faster overall, particularly towards the later stages of a campaign when missions become more dangerous.
  • Losing a character in Permadeath mode is now slightly less punishing, as you will re-gain XP faster.
  • Modders now also have an additional way of adjusting mission XP.
• Campaign setting for adjusting the XP gain rates.
• Higher XP gains in later biomes.

QoL additions and fixes:

• Added a “toggle run” input (so you no longer have to keep holding shift to run). Not bound to anything by default, but can be set in the settings menu.
• Ruin scan missions show a progress bar indicating the status of the scans.
• Option to change the sound of the alarm sirens to a claxon horn sound (the “traditional” AWOOGA-AWOOGA submarine alarm sound).

Miscellaneous goodies:

• Improvements to environment visuals: made texture tiling in level walls less obvious when zoomed far out and improved the shapes of level walls (more natural shapes, less long and straight wall segments).
• Made dry or partially dry rooms more common in wrecks.

Barotrauma OST now on streaming services

As a final note, you can now listen to the Barotrauma soundtrack on most popular streaming services. This excludes the newest remixes; those will be released at some later point, when we hopefully have a few more of them. Enjoy!

Happy holidays!

The Winter Update 2024 will be coming next week, and a short while after that we’re going to close up shop for a couple of weeks. While we enjoy time with family, friends, and traditional food, we hope you do the same and have a wonderful holiday season. See you next year!