As the year draws to a close, it has been two months since the release of the Logistic Update and a few weeks of subsequent adjustments. We’ve been gathering suggestions and feedback from all directions. By combining these insights with ongoing research and development for our next title, we’ve achieved breakthroughs on multiple fronts—some of which we’re excited to apply to Kingdoms Adrift.
Starting with this update, we will share more announcements and updates about our upcoming title’s progress alongside the improvements we’re making to Kingdoms Adrift. We’re also focusing on enhancing the game’s content and balancing to not only refine the experience for Kingdoms Adrift but also to serve as valuable lessons for our new project. Our goal is to make Kingdoms Adrift the best it can possibly be while laying the groundwork for what’s to come.
As mentioned previously, we always push the recent build into Beta for testing before the release and we could always use extra hands. Check out this community post on How to Access Beta: LINK
Let’s dive into the first improvement we’ve managed to accomplish in this update!
Update Note for 1.6.1.2
Status:
LIVE NOW: 24th December 2024
Older Saves: Safe to continue
Improvements:
Improvement #1 Offloading GPU with a new skybox renderer
We’ve brought a new rendering pipeline from our "New Project" into Kingdoms Adrift. Initially, we thought it wouldn’t be compatible—but we were pleasantly surprised to find out otherwise. So, we thought, why not give it a go? The result was very satisfying with our test machine running constantly below 60°C (Default GPU fans threshold)
Previously, with our legacy skybox renderer (The temperature isn’t relevant here):
After implementing the new skybox renderer, we managed to shave off approximately 45% of the GPU load—quite the improvement!:
With this update, graphics cards equivalent to or above the game’s recommended specs should no longer require constant cooling in most cases. This means you can enjoy Kingdoms Adrift for longer sessions without worrying!
We’ve also been investigating other factors affecting late-game performance. While there’s limited optimization we can do with Unity Physics, we identified and addressed several script-related inefficiencies.
For example, The AI officers’ listener was repeatedly looping and recalculating ship part performance whenever a ship part was destroyed. This caused frame freezes, especially when multiple parts were destroyed simultaneously. Similar inefficiencies were found in the algorithms for target scanning and bullet spawning.
These discoveries wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our community—especially @ItsJustLuck on our official Discord server, who provided save files and insights into the core of these issues. Thanks again for your support!
Improvement #2: In-Game Difficulty Menu
The title says it all! If you find the game too challenging or certain aspects aren’t to your liking, you can now adjust the difficulty. Simply access the settings menu and scroll to the bottom of the list to find the new difficulty options.
Once you open the menu, you’ll see a familiar difficulty settings interface, similar to the one available at the start of the game. Here, you can adjust the difficulty or switch to a custom difficulty mode. Please note that if you lower the difficulty, achievements will be disabled—even if you later increase the difficulty again.
Balancing and Bug Fixes:
- Made freight quests a more viable source of income by increasing overall rewards by 50%.
- Fixed multiple crashes identified through automatic crash reports.
That’s it for this update! As mentioned earlier in this article, we’re now taking a closer look at Kingdoms Adrift’s balancing to see how we can shuffle things around and potentially add new elements. Feel free to drop by our Discord server and share your recommendations: LINK
On a completely unrelated note, a recent game trailer release has sparked quite the conversation, with some viewers commenting on how poorly the main protagonist seemed to have aged. Interestingly, we’ve had some similar discussions behind the scenes here at Revolution Industry! Let us know what you think :D
Cheers,
Jay
