Developer Rocketwerkz made some major changes to the weather systems in ICARUS Week 61 Update following community feedback.
In the previous update, the company introduced a new weather forecasting system, as well as various types of storms, to make things more challenging for ICARUS players. While these things are welcome additions, the community has provided Rocketwerkz with suggestions to improve them.
One of the things that ICARUS players will notice in the Week 61 Update is that the weather now generates one event per weather block. A “weather block” is an icon that players can find on the forecast system which is roughly equal to 60 minutes of real-world time. That said, a single event that lasts anywhere between five to nine minutes may occur within a weather block. Players will know the severity of the weather event by looking at the block’s icon.
Another major change is that the frequency of weather events has been reduced to a more reasonable degree. The intervals between these weather disturbances may now provide some relief for those who previously faced storms every two minutes.
Changelog
- Weather Blocks are now longer (often twice as long or more)
- Weather events are now picked again via the "weighted list" system, rather than a rolling queue
- The Weather Forecast has been extended to three days
- Reduced and rebalanced the severity of weather in various prospects
- Fixed the loading of certain assets during gameplay that could cause hitches. These were being loaded, used, and then released for garbage collection every few seconds
- Optimized the atmosphere controller to rely more on cached data
- Optimized building pieces to cache several “commonly-accessed” data table values
- Weather events now use cached building data, reducing hitches when the system is calculating which building pieces to damage in storms
- Building pieces no longer “tick.” Any ticking logic that they previously had (such as updating stability), is now controlled by their “owning grid” and has their calculations spread across multiple frames. When loading prospects with large amounts of building pieces these operations would previously sync up and cause noticeable hitches multiple times per second
- Nativized (converting Unreal Engine Blueprint code into C++ to improve efficiency) several building grid background tasks, which are now managed by an “owning system” that evenly spreads these tasks between all building grids. This evens out performance with large numbers of different building grids present in the world
- Optimized the spline system used by electrical/water pipe systems
- Optimized deployable objects and benches. Deployables now have a custom ticking system that groups all of the deployables together to reduce CPU overhead
- Removed the tick process from almost all “trait components” that were present on items in the game
The full patch notes can be found on Steam.
So, what can you say about the weather improvements made in ICARUS Week 61 Update?
