0.574.2 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- NPC pilots will now notice damage to their ships in seconds, rather than in microseconds. This dramatically decreases CPU load and performance when multiple other ships are around you at a cost of the reaction time of the NPC. Reaction time should be still in-line with typical human reaction time.
- Fixed a bug that caused mood indicator updates to still not update immediately after a morale-boosting service visit.
- Fixed Steam Leaderboards to update immediately, which prevents timeout errors and your score not being uploaded in some cases.
- The hearing-impaired music change visual cue shader (coloured edges of the screen) will be disabled completely when it shows no cue, improving performance on integrated or low-end GPU cards.
Feedback Focus: Performance and NPC behaviour. The change in damage assessment from once-per-frame to a more sparse one should dramatically improve performance, but it means that AI is not immediately aware of the damage inflicted on the ship. I decided that this compromise is desirable, as it both improves performance and mimics human reaction time, but there can be an unexpected side-effect of such a fundamental change. Please be on the lookout for any ship-damage and NPC-behaviour related quirks. Your own ship readouts should not be affected, as you have your own human-level reaction time that needs not be simulated by the game. If you have an inhuman-level reaction time, please report to the nearest AI safety specialist.