Hotfix 48

Whew, rough weekend. I really appreciate all of the patience everyone has been showing. I tested things quite a lot before the big update, but clearly missed a lot of things. It's a big game, and some things slipped in right near the end. There's still a few more things for me to fix, but all of the worst items are gone now, I think. Two of these were really doozies that took hours to solve on their own.

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1.102 Hotfix 48 Changelog

Bugfixes

• Invisible Bulks On Equipment Screens: Fixed a regression in update 76 where bulk units were not showing in any of the hardware tabs anymore.
• One Tiny Fence In The Way: Fixed an issue from several months back where one particular kind of fence could not be overbuilt during CCA. Confirmed that was the only kind of fence where this was true. I just missed one xml tag.
• Matrix Relocation: Completely moved the matrix transforms for building/object transforms off of the LOD Calculator thread and back onto the main thread, and am now calculating those only when things change (which is infrequent), rather than every-frame. I think that I was getting some torn cross-thread reads on this, which was causing oversized trees and fences and such, and flickering of buildings temporarily, but only for some players. The new approach should be very stable, and doesn't have any threading race issues, while also making your cpu do less work in general.
• LOD Calculation Scope: Completely reworked some of the logic for the LOD Calculator thread. It now fully calculates everything for every cell, even if it's not in camera view. This prevents issues where you get funky results as you move the camera around, if your background threads are lagging behind your main thread. This was something I saw in a player-submitted video, and now it won't be possible. This pairs with the matrix transforms being moved out of here, so it's still able to run nice and quickly. But it is no longer so critical that it run quickly, since the frustum exclusions no longer cross into here.
• Targeted Busted Keybinds: Fixed a regression where a half-dozen keybinds were no longer working. This was related to how I converted some of the mode-checking logic into the new style, and I just missed it. It didn't have anything to do with the controls binding screen or any changes to the input system.
• Organization For Background Calculations: The game now keeps track of the camera position per game mode, so that it can use those for calculations even when it's in a different game mode.
• Matrix Memory Organization: Rather than pushing matrices around in structs, I'm now pushing around precomputed values of them, including properly precalculating secondary matrices for the few places where that is relevant. This is a bit more efficient in general, but I was thinking also that this would solve some of the pop-past logic that I'm seeing right now and that players have reported. That second bit isn't actually solved by this, so I'm still looking.
• The Actual Bug That Was Leading To Giant Trees And Flickery Ghost Fences: Fixed a one-line bug (repeated in about 10 places) that was an intersection between my old LOD calculator logic sessions a few months back, and the new rendering logic that made one tiny wrong assumption. This was causing a cascade that was making those giant trees and other stale data that was showing up. This was super hard to track down, and I apologize for how disruptive it was to folks. This should all be fixed now, though.
• The Other Giant Bug That Would Break All The Icons: Fixed a very subtle bug in the new render chain logic, where if a camera compositing layer was null in a scene, then in the future after being in that scene, it would no longer be able to draw sprites or certain other kinds of layers in that compositing layer. The VR mode is one example of specifically not having an icon overlay layer, so many kinds of icons would become perma-invisible after going into that screen, making large parts of the game unplayable. Really sorry about this, folks! This one took hours to hunt down.
• More Fluid Camera Rotation Responsiveness: The frustum calculation for which cells are in view has been moved back to the main thread so that it's more responsive now to rapidly-rotating cameras, while the expensive bits about simulation cells and LODs is still on a bg thread.
• The End Of Time Creation And Deletion: Fixed an issue where you could neither create nor delete timelines in the end of time in Update 76. That all works now.
• This Never Worked!?: Fixed the next and previous lens keybinds not working in the end of time. They never worked, apparently, but apparently nobody noticed.
• GOG Achievement Check Regression: Fixed a bug where GOG achievements checking would throw exceptions on game start. This has to do with some of the order of operations being changed around in Update 76, and that store logic not waiting for the right trigger. EGS was already waiting properly, but Steam also was not set up correctly, it turned out; Steam was avoiding the error on a different technicality. Now all three storefronts are properly handled.
• The Actual Bug Blocking People From WW4: Fixed an issue where if a POI had no workers or residents in it, then it would be marked as destroyed. That was some super old logic, and was not useful now. It was causing certain kinds of minor and automated POIs to register themselves as destroyed when they were fine. This is probably what was blocking most players. If it happens to you, wait for at least 5 seconds and then end the turn, and the contemplation should now appear.
• Resurrection: The game now auto-detects "dead but not really dead" pois and brings them back to life.
• POI Membership After Death: Buildings now still consider themselves part of a POI even if the POI is destroyed, as not doing that caused various problems.
• Latent WW4 Edge Case: Made it so that even if you're in a T3 goal, you can now start WW4 so long as the other conditions are met. [/expand]Full notes here.

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https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/670617878982034155 https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/664986477286917109 https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/535507353628312360