We updated the Steamworks SDK to 1.63 and now also ship the latest steamclient binaries.

Why does that matter?

When you launch a dedicated server without a local Steam install, Steamworks falls back to the Steam client binaries we ship.
But it turns out we hadn't updated those in 2 years 🥴, meaning dedicated servers without a proper Steam or SteamCMD setup were quietly missing 2 years of Steam updates.

We suspect this was a contributing factor to the "pkt lurch" errors some hosts have been seeing.                        
Newer Steam clients contains a lot Steam networking fixes, so hopefully this helps.
From now on, we'll keep the fallback binaries updated, so it doesn't silently drift again.

The audio system got a pretty significant rewrite. The old threading model used locks everywhere and was responsible for a bunch of crashes - the new one is completely lock-free. Each frame we snapshot the audio state and triple buffer it to the mix thread, similar to how render pipelines work. This makes us lock free, which should reduce audio stuttering and help any odd crashes.
 
We also ripped out the Steam Audio DLL (phonon.dll) entirely. We only used a handful of its effects, so we now compile just those directly into the engine. Building it ourselves means we can use AVX SIMD - which roughly doubles the performance of spatial audio. This also makes it easier for us to ship for Linux.
 
None of this changes how audio works from a game developer's perspective, but it's a much better foundation for the audio features we want to build next.

Acts like the clipping tool now and how you'd expect it too. 

A new addition to runtime model building used in mounts is a way to provide data to create morphs.
Morphs are used to displace vertex positions and normals, usually for face posing.

public readonly record struct MorphDelta( int VertexIndex, Vector3 PositionDelta, Vector3 NormalDelta ); 

Mesh.AddMorph( "name", deltas );

Some users kept running into issues where create model from meshes wouldn't create collision by default, leading them to wonder why they had no collision in game. To make this easier, a new dialog opens when creating model from meshes, to let you choose what collision you want on them.

Our custom cursor page needed a revamp, it's now easier to override system cursors and as a bonus you no longer have to add cursor images to resource files list, they get published automatically.

Our in-game performance overlay wasn't cutting it, a lot of information wasn't avaliable and the way it was presented was hardly actionable.

I've added:

Clicking on a model from the asset browser will now show a ton of useful information in the inspector.

Our grass shader had some artifacts that were visible at certain angles. Grass clump models should now look better.

Not a lot of features this week, mainly bug fixes and community contributions - we need some time to catch up. A weekly release cycle is fast, and we have a lot of pending features we didn't want to merge right before the patch. They'll be avaliable first on the staging branch in order to get properly tested.

Lots to come next week. 👻