Croteam has announced a new patch for the PC version of Serious Sam 3: BFE. The patch chiefly deals with online multiplayer optimization, such as giving network priority to projectiles where the player’s personal connection gives priority to projectiles fired by and at him. The game also optimizes memory usage with some shortcuts, such as reusing same texture for red and blue in team modes.
The patch will be automatically applied through Steam. The complete changelog includes the following fixes and tweaks:
- Network priority for projectiles is now boosted dynamically for each player’s connection so that he gets those projectiles that are more important to him first (those fired by him, or at him).
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Optimized render target switching to improve performance on multi-GPU setups.
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Optimized screen clearing for SLI setups. Can be tuned by new cvar ‘gfx_iClearBeforeRendering’.
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Fixed problem with too much shadow buffer clears when using muti-threaded rendering on multi-GPU setups.
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Fixed problems and crashes with several renderables in multithreaded rendering. (Note that this still an experimental feature!)
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Optimized memory usage for several multiplayer characters in team modes, by reusing same texture for red and blue, with dynamic colorizing in shader.
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View bobbing option now also affects weapon bobbing and weapon swaying.
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Fixed auto aiming (used by gamepads) on Warship enemy, so it aims for the right spot, not the center of the ship.
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Added yet another controller preset.
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Added some new swim and dive animations for the player (so user-made maps can use deep water).
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Controller crouch command no longer displays player list.
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Fixed controller being unable to skip intro cutscene.
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Errors related to microphone settings are now classified as “log”, as they are not actually a problem.
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Optimized lightning particle effect implementation. On average, memory consumption is reduced by 50%, and performance is increased by 30%.
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Limited maximum subdivisions on lightning particles to ensure the do not exceed reasonable time and memory boundaries.
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Fixed potential crash after canceling a server list query.
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Added Russian localization for Santa Sammy.
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Fixed game freezing on entering menus via right arrow keyboard key.
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Updated in-game and in-editor console line editor to support unicode strings.
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Updated slider to fade out its value when widget is not on the active menu.
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Fixed graphics options defaults not resetting FOV value to default.
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Aiming hint for Devastator will not be shown if the user doesn’t own the Devastator scope DLC.
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Fixed a possible crash occurring in a rare situation of player picking up a scaffolding pole while some client is connecting.
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Fixed an issue with wrong weapon shooting placement on hands weapons if they are used after “getting up from the floor” player animation.
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Fixed an issue causing Mutilator to sometimes fail to work on client if it’s not rendered on server.
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Console font is now an OpenType font (DejaVu Mono), instead of a fixed bitmap, thus it supports a wide range of non-ascii characters and different scaling.
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Added console font scale cvar.
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Disabled cheat menu access during level loading.
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Fixed Khnum sliding after melee.
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Fixed endless loop at game start under OpenGL; waiting for all shaders to be pretouched (which never happens in OpenGL).
