August Performance Changelog

This month went entirely into performance. No new modes, no new features — all of it went into memory usage, stutter, frame rate, and AI cost. If you play on a device with limited memory, or you have a lot of mods installed, this is the update you will feel the most.

Much lower memory usage

• Font resources are now pre-baked, dropping their resident cost from around 37 MB to about 10 MB.
• Startup no longer loads every language's text into memory — only the one you are actually using.
• All interface atlases are now compressed, and several screens share a single copy. Previously every category of screen you opened claimed another copy of its own.
• Entering the garage no longer keeps the entire "advanced effects pack" (about 24 MB) in memory for the rest of the session. Effects load when they are needed and are released when you leave the scene.
• Camouflages, decals and mask textures from mods are no longer all unpacked and kept resident at startup (a single 2048 texture alone costs about 21 MB), and map-mod minimaps now load when you enter the map. If you run dozens of mods, this is the single biggest win here.
• We fixed memory leaks during battle: vehicle materials, procedurally generated meshes and ammo-rack data are now released together with the vehicle. Repeated respawns and vehicle swaps used to push memory up with no way back down.
• Ammo-rack data is no longer stored once per ammo slot (tens of MB saved at a 30-vehicle scale). Older models are converted automatically on load, so nothing needs re-making.
• New graded memory pressure: the tighter memory gets, the more aggressively idle vehicle models are cleaned up — and cleanup only happens while you are not driving a vehicle, so there is no more "one cleanup, one hitch".

Less stutter

• Loading yields to combat. Before you are in a vehicle (loading screen, waiting to respawn), resources load at full speed. The moment you take control and start fighting, loading slows itself down and frame rate comes first.
• Vehicles and aircraft now spawn across several frames, spreading out a one-shot burst of work so someone joining the field no longer causes a hitch.
• Effect warmup reworked. It used to get worse the more effect types you had; it is now a single overall budget. We also fixed shader warmup never actually running — "the first shot always stutters" should be noticeably better.
• Faster second launch. Scan results for camouflages, effects and crew voices are cached, so the game no longer unpacks every resource package on every launch.

Steadier frame rate

• Impact calculations (fragments, overpressure against armour) are handled in batches, cutting the cost spike at the moment of a hit.
• Visibility checks for every vehicle on the field are merged into one pass instead of each vehicle testing on its own.
• Track curve rebuilding and turret calculations moved onto worker threads, removing the points where they waited on the main thread.
• The battle interface now redraws only what actually changed, cutting cost heavily while aiming or scrolling lists.
• The combat loop no longer creates temporary memory every frame, which removes a source of periodic frame drops from memory reclaim.
• The x-ray view and top module view refresh on demand, and the kill-cam camera no longer keeps working after playback ends.

Lower AI cost

• The AI's navigation map building and path searching were rewritten and moved onto worker threads in batches, so the main thread never waits on them.
• Frame-rate spikes in large AI battles are noticeably reduced.

Behaviour changes

• In offline modes, random paint on AI vehicles no longer includes camouflages you imported as loose files.
• Now that effects load on demand, the very first time a given effect pack is triggered on a map, one effect may be skipped (at most once per map).
• Following the pathfinding rewrite, AI patrol routes and firing positions are distributed slightly differently than before.

Bug fixes

• Display glitches from an effect occasionally being recycled twice, and tracers and sustained fire ignoring their instance limit.
• Custom vehicles showing invisible parts on their second load.
• The battle interface backing plate blocking touch input, and an oversized damage-indicator atlas.
• Overlapping and undersized shared joystick areas on some devices.

If you run into anything unusual with frame rate, memory or loading in this build — missing effects, invisible parts, or mod resources failing to load in particular — please send us your device along with what you were doing at the time. This update touches a lot of ground, and we will prioritise those reports.