Performance Update

Greetings, Guardians!

Jacob from Infuse Studio here, I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer! Over the last few months I have been working diligently on completely overhauling certain aspects of how our content is rendered in Spirit of the North 2. I will go into more depth on this in a press release in the coming weeks but for now, here are the patch notes!

*Example of new visual quality on all high settings hitting 60fps at 4k 80% render quality! Previously this was completely unattainable and I could only get about 37fps on the launch version of the game, meaning a 75.8621% fps increase on my PC with a RTX 4090. I will go into other hardware scenario's I have tested in my press release.

On Medium tier hardware can expect around a 30-40% increase over the launch version of the game on medium settings and a 13.33% over the previous version.

Lower end hardware gets huge wins with this update as I have added multiple new quality options that can be set for the game run better than ever before. Low end hardware loves the new GI OFF setting *FoxTribe.

Note: these are all approximations based on my own testing with the limited amount of hardware that I have on hand. Results may vary especially depending on what settings you are trying to use.

We are now Steam Deck Verified!

Spirit of the North 2 on Steam Deck was pretty unplayable before, now players can expect a pretty solid 30fps!

Patch Notes

Quality of Life

• Minimum Spec Pop up, added a popup that will warn the user if their system specs doesn't meet the minimum requirements on PC.

• Improved legibility of button icons at lower resolutions

• Changed Post Processing so game looks less "washed out"

Optimizations

• Full Opaque Nanite Overhaul

• New "Off" option for Global Illumination

• New "Very Low" options for Post Processing and Reflections

• Added Ocean Quality Levels

• Lumen scalability optimizations

• Hair/Fur rendering optimizations

• Better FPS in game menus from Fox Preview optimizations, this now includes consoles

• Disabled Various plugins to save on runtime costs

• Volumetric Cloud Fog is no longer active on Medium Sky Quality saving rendering cost

• Rain Drop VFX improved

• Steam Deck Device Profile added, now sets correct settings when first launching on steam deck targeting 30fps.

• Removed Custom Depth Pass and reworked the effects that relied on it to save performance

• Changed MaxScreenPercentage on Performance Quality Mode on consoles from 100% to 80%, this helps minimize memory footprint fluctuations

• Changed max roughness to trace for lumen reflections to 0.2 to reduce raytracing overhead when materials are wet

• Various VFX scalability added

Content Fixes

• Hats no longer receive decals

• Cleansed Stag VFX no longer use the geode color the player is using

• Vsync option no longer visible when not in fullscreen (it doesn't work in windowed or borderless)

• Water VFX no longer emissive (for real this time)

• Material values overhauled on foliage like roughness and specular

• Basic foliage interaction displacement added

• Raven Boss (Memory) Level of detail fixes so he no longer looks like an N64 character at View Distance Quality Low

• Shaman Materials reworked, not as washed out now

I wanted to give a huge shoutout to our dedicated community member Amber for helping test and verify all the changes that went into this update. I couldn't have done it without your help!

As always thank you from - **Infuse Studio & Silver Lining Interactive **

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