Save your game properly, and hold the late-game sieges at full speed. This release adds real save slots with periodic autosave, fixes the two long-standing ground rendering bugs (invisible/untextured terrain after a rebuild, faintly see-through ground), and takes a deep pass over endgame performance when the island is crawling with orks.
New — save slots & autosave
- Five manual save slots. Save from the pause menu into any slot; each row shows the night, your hero level and total playtime, so you know exactly what you're overwriting.
- Load from anywhere. A new LOAD GAME picker on the title screen, in the pause menu, and after a game over. CONTINUE resumes the newest save across all slots.
- Autosave every 10 minutes of play (on top of the existing dawn autosave), into its own dedicated autosave slot. An autosave that comes due mid-siege politely waits for the dawn — no save can ever resume you past a night you didn't fight.
- New Game no longer touches your manual saves. Starting over only clears the autosave slot; your named slots survive.
- Your existing single save file is migrated automatically into the autosave slot — nothing is lost on update.
Fixed — ground rendering
- Ground textures failing to load. After an in-process world rebuild (new game, map switch), whole terrain sheets could stop rendering — the ground masks were uploaded GPU-only, and rebuilt materials pointed at data that no longer existed. All ground masks now survive rebuilds.
- Faintly see-through ground. Two real causes, both fixed: the terrain shader never forced its output opaque (dry ground wrote alpha ≈ 0 into the frame, which alpha-aware post passes and upscaling could wash out), and the two terrain LOD meshes measured their crossfade distance against different bounding boxes, so their dither patterns could mis-align into actual see-through checkerboard holes at ~150 m. The LOD pair now shares one bounding box and the shader pins ground alpha to 1.
- Visual polish from the interim builds: corrected depth-of-field distance scaling, stronger atmospheric haze, backlit foliage.
Performance — endgame sieges
Late nights with a full wave, militia, villagers and wildlife on the field now cost dramatically less CPU and GPU:
- The terrain sampler every moving creature stands on is ~6.6× faster (measured on a 400k-sample sweep, bit-identical results) — no more global lock on the hottest path in the game, and dry land skips the river/bog water checks entirely.
- Invader pathfinding reads a pre-baked height grid instead of re-deriving the island's terrain on every replan.
- NPCs farther than ~90 m from the hero steer with a cheap direct step instead of the full 9-way escape probe (wildlife already did this; now orks, guards, villagers, workers and the rival do too). Gate-threading and courtyard fighting always keep full steering.
- Skeletal rig animation stops posing joints beyond 70 m from the camera (same rule the legacy rigs always had).
- Orks no longer get a personal copy of their material at spawn — the horde batches again; a hurt-flash clones a material only for its few white frames, then returns it.
- Health bars, hit effects and floating damage stopped re-uploading GPU data on frames where nothing changed, and impact flash lights are capped so a cleave can't spawn a pile of them.
- Changing graphics settings no longer forces every terrain material to rebuild.
Under the hood
- Experimental photographic tree pipeline behind the
FOREST_PHOTOTREESflag (off by default). - New full-map regression tests prove the terrain fast paths return bit-identical results to the old code, plus headless test hooks for the save pipeline and menus.
Windows note: the installer is self-signed, so SmartScreen may show an "Unknown Publisher" warning — click More info → Run anyway. A commercially signed build needs a paid certificate; it's on the wishlist.