Golfing In Aether received an update focused on quality-of-life improvements, such as material based ambient occlusion, better LOD island quality, and water enhancements. Many existing bugs have been squashed as well.
Material Based Ambient Occlusion
The developer improved the existing material based ambient occlusion on some wall pieces to make the wall definition more prominent. Items such as fences, bamboo, and pipes have been updated to feature better shading. Also, now players can see some material based ambient occlusion while running regular graphics mode.
Better LOD Island Quality
The developer has reworked all meshes for walls and LOD islands to hold form better and feature material based ambient occlusion. Previously, there was no sky lighting and the meshes had emissive values to imitate it, which resulted in far islands having poor quality. So, minor tweaks have been made to shade the distant islands to make them look more natural.
Water Improvements
The latest update introduces new water visuals to address the lack of screen space reflections where water appeared underwhelming. Basically, the improvement is an overhaul of water quality that should now maximize the benefits from higher graphics settings.
Golfing In Aether Update 1.3.4
- Added improved material based ambient occlusion for most wall meshes. This will improve the all-graphics quality levels but stand out more at lower settings where weaker simpler is used.
- Fixed various small wall gaps.
- Fixed some wall alignment on "see you on the other side."
- Fixed a ground alignment on "center path."
- Added material ambient occlusion to fences.
- Added improvements to distant islands in ES3.1 mode so they get better shading.
- Added slightly improved water appearance when not using planar reflection.
- Fixed ball shadows not rendering in ES3.1 mode.
- Fixed Shadow bias causing shadows to sometimes end abruptly in lower end settings.
- Added improved lods for all wall meshes.
- Added improvements to mouse/gamepad control switching, by mouse cursor being invisible and unable to interact with UI elements while in gamepad mode.
- Added improvements to glyph mode switching by having a mouse threshold return to keyboard mode rather than have to click or press a specific button.
- Added new thumbnail for level hop and jump.
You can read more about the patch notes here.
