The menu home page has been updated with a couple of discovery moves. First of all we have a social feed on the right. This will show your friends interactions with the game (if you have any, and if their profile is not set to private in Steam). Then we have a spotlight on the top left, where we can highlight one or two games. We plan to use this to highlight new and under-appreciated games.

I struggled with the games tab, because you'd click on it and you'd see the most popular games, which I feel encourages stagnation. What should we default that to? New games? Trending? There's arguments for and against everything and I don't know if people know how to change the order.

So now when you click on Games it'll show a bunch of different categories that we can control from the backend.

We've added a bunch more Rust content to the rust org. This is an ongoing process in terms of getting the import process correct and making everything work, but there are a lot more models and sounds available now.

You're free to use these assets in your games and addons on the platform, you can enable Play Fund too! I'm really interested to see if anyone can use the Rust assets to create something unexpected, or even try to recreate Rust in s&box. Seems like a fun thing to play around with.

Whilst I was importing Rust into s&box I kept hitting the resource compiler falling over and miscompiling. So I fixed all of it.

Publishing thousands of things at once revealed a bunch of validation problems too:

I feel like there's a lot of sound packs that everyone wants to use. So I uploaded them to a new org for everyone to use more easily. The new org is called OpenSound.

Here you'll find a ton of great sounds from multiple sources that have been released under the CC0 license, so are totally good to use in your projects. We also have a ton of free music by Kevin MacLeod, which is all licensed CC-BY.

Additionally, you can preview sounds on the website now, too.

The recently added Cloud Asset Licenses page has been really helpful for letting people know what cloud assets they're still actively using, but it didn't point you towards where those references WERE.

So now you can click into any cloud asset in the list and see all your local files that reference it from one place :)

Auto LOD can now cull or swap materials as it generates LOD levels. Faces using a specific material can be removed entirely, or swapped out for a different one.

This is handy for cutting draw calls at a distance, for example by dropping detail materials that you'll never notice once an object is far enough away.

We've trimmed down per-frame allocations across the engine.

On our benchmark system we now see around 100KB less allocated per frame on average.
In some benchmark scenarios that translates to a 30% frame time improvement. In a regular game expect an improvement around 1-3%.
Lower end hardware could see the bigger wins.

You can now run our benchmarks straight from ingame, via the Developer settings tab.

Once a run finishes, a modal pops up with a quick overview of the results, plus a link to the full breakdown on the website:

You can now set start/end loop points to the Sprite Editor so you can have animations with a lead-in section, loop section, and lead-out.

We've fixed a handful of issues with complex nested prefab structures, making them more stable to work with.

The main culprits were around nested prefab instances losing track of their IDs, when breaking or reparenting an instance, and in an edge case during loading where nested mappings were built too early.

If you've run into nested prefabs behaving unpredictably, this should clear a lot of that up.

The terrains tools needed some love, after spending some time using there was a bunch of features I wanted to add so I did so. These should help speed things up for people.

Videos now have player controls, volume, click-to-pause, and remembered volume, with controls that hide until hovered. 

 

We were experimenting with this in shadows2 but ultimately didn't ship it. Now I've re-added it to reduce shadow acne on cascaded, point and spot lights. 

We've started building tooling to attack shader performance through static analysis of our compiled shaders, pulling together tools like the AMD Radeon Developer Suite. The goal is to be able to sweep across our whole shader pipeline and isolate performance problems faster - register pressure, occupancy limits, spilling - without having to profile every pass by hand on real hardware.

One of the first big wins it surfaced is quite embarrassing, the unused area-light shading path was drastically hammer our forward lighting shaders. Removing it took a bare PBR cluster loop from 120 VGPR at 75% occupancy (spilling) down to 68 VGPR at 100% (no spill), and a 4K lit pass ran 26% faster (245.5ms → 181.7ms on an RX 9070 XT). The full standard shade dropped from 150 to 116 VGPR with spilling eliminated entirely.

The embarrassing thing is we never caught it in a year, a single dead branch was silently taxing every lit shader in the engine, and nothing in our workflow would have flagged it.

That's the gap we're closing next.

So alongside the analysis tooling, we're wiring this into our CI and PR workflows: per-PR GPU benchmarks, rendering regression tests, and static shader analysis that reports VGPR usage and occupancy as part of review. The aim is to catch this class of regression before it lands..