Hello Photographers, the last week we have been collecting all the crash logs you sent in and working overtime to fix them all! Again, I need to thank you all very much for that, the help in finding these things will prove to be extremely helpful going forward. So it is my great pleasure to share with you all today a Hotfix Patch that should considerably increase the game's performance and reduce the usage of hardware across the board, with the bonus of making the download size much smaller.
The actual statistics are that VRAM - the RAM dedicated to holding textures and video-related processing on the graphics card - has been reduced by 800-1000mb of used capacity. Previous tests showed that on v022d Sapphire Safari required up to 4800mb of VRAM, and this Hotfix reduced that to about 4000mb instead. That means when you take photographs, explore new elements, or just have a lot of additional programs running on your PC as you are playing, the VRAM left over for unexpected events won’t crash the game. Fuckin’ winning.
There was also the issue of players being unable to find the Poly Acts (threesomes) spawning in the world for their photography completion. We have spent some time correcting this and in turn, created a new system to hold AI in a suspended state so frame lag is reduced when they need to spawn in. We set up a few more tricks to spawn in and fill any waiting Poly Acts Smart Objects with these new spawned-in NPCs. Though if we find any issues with it we will likely have to do another pass.
So the short version, we think we fixed all Red Level crashes, both with Photography and Malous spawns. We think we have corrected all Poly Act spawning issues. However, if you do find any other crashes happening in the game, please send in your reports once more.
Supporters of the $5 tier or higher can grab their downloads here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sapphire-safari-115104786
Changelog v022d.hf1
Corrected all textures to be set to the power of two, helping with reduced capacity on texture memory
Corrected time for releasing photo render target to be faster
Corrected Malous model ear cut not being invisible
Reduced the number of Perv Plants on the island
Fixed unique decals to reduce texture overhead in VRAM
Fixed NPC claims on Sex Smart Objects
Added a holding pool for AI NPC’s to vastly reduce creation spikes
Corrected wait times for Poly Acts by spawning NPC’s inside Poly Smart Objects out of visual range
Increase Poly Acts creation percentage by 50% during the Pink Moon event
Recreated rivers and water elements on the island
Corrected tags cleanup on interrupted Smart Object usage
Removed AI elements from Poly Act participants
Fixed Predator mismatch on Pink Moon event
Fixed Rune icon not displaying on curious photos
Removed the “Edit” button from the submission screen
Corrected the “Saved” button on the submission screen to “Add to Gallery”
Tweaked Spored effect opacity, length, size, and visual falloff
Fixed border color bugs
Tweaked Pink Moon spored NPC target selection
Reduced volume of Sweedee Sex Smart Object usage
Added additional vocals for Jamie and Oscar for negative photography rank reactions, seeing sex acts, being close to predators, taking a curious photograph,
Removed running vocals for Jamie that were too intense
Hope you all have fun with this!