Graphics, Records & Major Quality Update!

Hello everyone!

Today’s update brings a highly requested fix for the game, as well as new features and fixes. Read on to learn more and remember to share your thoughts in the comments to make sure we get your feedback for future patches. Some of the technology and insights from this work will also carry forward into the Super Cloudbuilt re-release.

This update’s goal was to fix Cloudbuilt’s final long-standing stability problem, but it became much more than that. With this patch, the game looks better, loads much faster and runs more reliably. Even more, we’ve added a new Records System that makes competing much more interesting and accessible to more players. To achieve these improvements, we tested the game on various devices, integrated graphics, Steam Deck and performed automated stress tests that continuously load levels. Custom levels were particularly useful because they can push the engine far beyond what the regular levels usually require.

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Lighting and Atmosphere

This is one of the biggest visual upgrades Cloudbuilt has received, and it makes the game both better looking and easier to read while playing.

Cloudbuilt now has pencil sketched Ambient Occlusion, similar to Super Cloudbuilt. AO adds shading where surfaces meet, under overhangs, and between nearby structures. This gives environments more natural depth, and makes distances and overlapping geometry easier to judge while moving quickly.

The AO technique itself is more advanced than the one currently used in Super Cloudbuilt, maintaining more stable shadows and details. The SCB's rendering pipeline was designed around AO from the start, so it integrates it a bit better, but the effect on Cloudbuilt is still quite impactful like you can see. We will continue to work on this technology and improve SCB even further in future patches. (Settings lets you select between 3 different quality settings or toggle it off entirely)

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[/carousel]Fog has also received a substantial improvement with more nuances and directionality. Distant structures now fit much more naturally into the sky while conveying far more of their depth and shape. Previously, a lot of that detail could become completely lost in the fog.

Some additional shading also helps distant geometry retain definition without moving too far away from the original style.

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[/carousel]I also made smaller lighting changes to reduce visible banding and other artifacts in subtle light gradients.

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[/carousel]The AO, fog, and lighting work here will also feed into the Super Cloudbuilt re-release, where I plan to push the rendering further again.

Records and Score Distribution

Records now give your times much more context, which makes improving and competing fun for a much wider range of players.

The new score distribution shows where your result sits across the player base instead of only showing you who is at the top, reflecting your progress compared to the other players as a whole.

Existing Steam leaderboards and historical scores remain intact, but this score distribution view has become the new default.

We wanted a system like this for a long time, and we’re thrilled to finally add it to the game. A similar system is also planned for Super Cloudbuilt, so the work and feedback here will help shape that further. Please let us know what you think!

Faster Loading and a Major Memory Rework

This is where most of the under-the-hood work went, and the payoff is substantial: significantly faster loading and dramatically better stability in long sessions and demanding levels.

Across the levels we tested, the time from selecting a level until the scene was ready was almost halved compared with the previous build. Startup to the main menu was also roughly a quarter faster in all the tests.

Textures are now compiled into a game-specific format so the engine can access the data it needs directly, wasting less memory and loading faster. Small texture snapshots can also restore known boot, menu, and gameplay states in bulk, with far fewer individual file accesses. All of this contributes to the faster bootup times.

Two substantial runtime dependencies were removed entirely in the process. The old image-decoding library is no longer needed during gameplay, and the remaining C# scripts for triggers and sound callbacks have been converted to native C++. That means less memory overhead, faster execution, and fewer things that can go wrong.

The original stability problem was memory fragmentation. Cloudbuilt is still a 32-bit application and is thus limited to a very small memory budget. Repeated memory allocations could gradually split its already limited available address space into smaller spread out pieces. Eventually a large allocation could critically fail even though plenty of memory was technically still free. On some systems, this could cause a crash after only around 30 to 50 consecutive level loads.

With the new systems in place, an overnight test on even an Intel integrated-graphics laptop completed more than 700 level loads, still running strong in the morning while remaining below 2 GB of process memory, with no signs of the steady growth seen before.

We had no screenshot of the 700 levels run, but here is an example of the stress test at 61 levels on the integrated graphics laptop.

For you, tech-savvy players, the previous general-purpose allocation used throughout the game has been replaced with a custom allocation system designed around Cloudbuilt's actual workloads. It is faster, reduces fragmentation, and can completely remove per-allocation overhead in many places. Data is also separated based on life time now. For example, temporary data is kept separate from memory that needs to survive for an entire level or session.

Model storage received a large rework too. Data is packed much more efficiently, smaller index and data formats are used where possible, memory layouts have been improved on the CPU, and batching can allocate combined geometry directly and use more compact representations where safe.

Models that only need their geometry on the GPU can now release the CPU copy after upload.

Level blocks also avoid creating large numbers of temporary GPU resources before batching determines what is actually needed. Since almost all normal block faces end up batched, this removes a lot of unnecessary resource creation and driver memory churn.

Detailed allocation tracking and debugging tools were built alongside the new system so its behaviour could be inspected and verified during real play and extended stress tests.

An WIP view of the dedicated PhysX allocators debugging. Purple means small memory blocks that has overflown into the main pool area, which should be fixed. Red means fragmented small free blocks. The isolated section in the middle there is a dedicated overflow buffer, intended for if the dedicated pools spill over, it avoid fragmenting the main pool from small spills. In this image there were a lot. This was sometime late last year. All of these issues has since been resolved.

We have put a lot of effort into this update, and wanted to share some of the details with you!

Performance and the Steam Deck

The nice part is that all the new graphical work did not come at the cost of performance as we’ve been optimizing the engine along the way too. In the scenes we tested, Cloudbuilt is at least as fast as it used to be, but oftentimes, it’s even faster.

Even with the High AO settings enabled, average performance was similar to or better than the older build across the scenes we profiled. With AO disabled, those same scenes were faster still.

Steam Deck saw an especially large practical improvement.

The regular campaign already ran well, but the old memory and driver behaviour would often cause problems after several level loads. Some very large community levels could also push it far enough to consistently fail during even its first loading.

That is now all fixed!

A continuous Deck stress test completed more than 400 consecutive level loads before we stopped it, including all of the largest and most demanding community levels we could find.

Performance also remained comfortably above 60 FPS in every level we checked, with most brief checks above 120 FPS. (Photo above has 60Hz V-Sync on so you don't see it there)

These were not full benchmark playthroughs, but it leaves encouraging headroom for a capped 60 FPS setup and lower power use/longer battery life on the go.

More Consistent Physics, LOD, and Visibility

A number of deeper engine changes also make gameplay more consistent, demanding custom levels faster, and busy scenes easier to read.

Enemies and other important moving objects now use the same fixed 60 Hz update schedule the player was already using instead of catching up independently.

Above 60 FPS, the practical gameplay difference should be extremely small. The larger improvement appears when frames are dropped or the game runs below 60 FPS. Objects now advance through the simulation together one step at a time, making interactions consistent and fair across different hardware and frame rates.

Generalized logic now also keeps their visible movement more reliably smooth at higher rendering frame rates.

This work also removes some very rare cases where gameplay and physics processing could modify the same objects in parallel, which could previously cause incorrect behaviour or crashes.

Model LOD (Level Of Detail) handling also received a structural change. Different groups inside an asset can now select LOD independently and batch separately. This reduces unnecessary batch combinations and memory overhead.

Grass islands are a good example. Their grass can now reduce detail earlier while the island itself keeps the detail it needs. This significantly improves performance, and it avoids duplicating memory.

On the topic of grass, dense grass, ferns, vines, and leaves can also move or fade away in selected cases where they obstruct the camera. Nothing huge, but it can makes aiming and some jumps in foliage areas easier to see without changing collisions.

Smaller Improvements and Editor Updates

Here’s a list of other changes that improve the overall game experience and make the Community Level Editor more accessible:

• You can now bind the Photo Mode Toggle to a button/key. You can find this in the settings menu along with all the other bindings.

• Added an experimental horizontal camera-offset setting, including fully centered framing.

• Added skin selection directly to the Story and level select menus.

• Fixed level select preview bug where two previews showed at the same time and stayed open.

• Simplified all the options and selection needed when starting a new game.

• Corrected a bug where starting a new game could lock some menu options till you had beaten the tutorial again.

• Improved controller menu scrolling, Level Select transitions, results presentation, ultra-wide layouts.

• Improved background streaming of community level thumbnails and smoothness of the menu when scrolling.

• Improved reliability of mouse state changes and window focus handling.

• Rewrote the setting ini file format and parser, to be faster and more robust.

• Improved settings reapplication to do less repeated work.

• Improved the settings menu reset command to cover the full settings list.

• Slightly tweaked and improved VSync frame pacing.

• Improved booster effect feedback, to vary size and strength to reflect energy use and power.

• Fixed a wall-running booster effect starting at the wrong time.

• Improved boost sound continuity when transitioning between horizontal and vertical wall-runs.

• Fixed mini-drone state after deactivation or checkpoint restoration.

• Fixed the potted plant sometimes falling over by itself and unlocking its achievement without player interaction.

• Adjusted spacing of sweeper rails to be more even and split the available space.

• Fixed in consistent audio levels in the story entries.

• Improved sound playback and channel reuse, fixing incorrectly repeated or looping sounds and reducing unnecessary audio processing.

• Improved stability of background thread work, like sound playback and texture streaming.

• Fixed a visual issue with the blue charge-shot particles and black Dawn-cloud artifacts at medium texture quality.

• Corrected normal angles when models are non uniformly scaled so they receive light and shadows better, and improved rendering of dual sided polygons.

• Improved crash reporting so failures caught by the game leave more useful local logs and crash dumps.

• Fixed loading of very large save files to be more robust.

• Added new startup arguments for testing and troubleshooting: MemTest, MemTest2, InstantLogFlush, BatchTrace, GLDebug, NoTextureSnapshots, and ConservativeTextureQueue.

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The Community Level Editor also received a larger usability pass. We added a new icon toolbar and contextual instructions, improved move/rotate/scale gizmos, angle guides, fine adjustment, and configurable edge and corner snapping.

The rotation gizmo is now more precise and intuitive, with a clear visualization of the applied rotation.

The new fog, AO, and hatch controls are exposed in the editor too. It's never to late to go back and tune an old levels mood and feel.

Please report any crashes, unusual behaviour, and hardware-specific issues in the discord or in the Steams Discussions troubleshooting section.

Work on Super Cloudbuilt is also ongoing, and we hope to have more to show from it soon.

Remember that you can stay up to date with the latest development by following us on X at

https://x.com/coilworks and our Discord https://discord.gg/3pRP3acC3S .

**Thank you so much for the support as always and we hope you enjoy the update! **ːdeboostː

EDIT: Turns out we had a regression in the message pump in windows, so I just did a hot fix to address that. Mouse input should be just as smooth as the previous versions of the game now. Sorry about that miss!