Tuesday April 5th Development Update

[luthier]

We’ve finalized the patch tonight. We’ll be testing it all day ourselves, and hopefully release a beta version by the end of the day. The main reason for this is that we don’t want to make it live for everyone in case anything else was accidentally broken, and if we do a public test of the patch we can figure out whether we broke anything or not much sooner if we just test it ourselves. Anyone will be able to try it, see how much their performance has improved. If nothing major is found, we’ll make the patch live for everyone at the end of the day this Friday.
What we’ve done today:

1. Started figuring out SLI and Crossfire.
2. Finalized trees improvements. The overall framerate gain was actually smaller than we thought, but it can still be optimized further, just not in the time we have. The microfreezes are gone.
3. Got to the bottom of the server search issue. It will get fixed with the Friday night live release.
4. We have made some improvements to the engine sounds – exact description will be released with the patch.
5. Cleaned out the memory a lot. Whereas flying over an online map in the live version today takes up 700 megs of memory, in the developer version we have today it only takes 380. This does not affect FPS but it does affect the overall stability, loading times, etc. This is especially important for DX9 users.
6. We are also aggressively continuing to expand multicore support.

No screenshots today because visually nothing in the game changed.