Dear Squaddies,

Today we are releasing Squad Hotfix v2.13, which specifically aims to address some of the performance drops that players have reported following the v2.12 Update. 

Shortly after the release of last week’s Update (Link URL) we began seeing reports of players experiencing a decrease in performance and frames-per-second. Seeing these reports appearing across various community channels, we began an investigation of which you can learn more here (LINK URL).

Thanks in large part to help from players who worked with us and shared their experiences with us, we were able to get a number of potential fixes into a test branch of Squad and provide that to select members of our community who had volunteered to assist. Testers saw improvements in performance, and we continued work over the weekend.

At this point we believe that we have a Hotfix that should improve performance for some of the players experiencing problems. We want to issue a heart-felt thank you to those that were willing to provide us with detailed technical feedback surrounding their experiences with 2.12. We realize that it can be very frustrating when a release degrades your playing experience, and this kind of detailed feedback helps us to investigate issues and resolve them at a faster or more successful rate. Again, thank you! 

We will continue to monitor and investigate player reports, and have set up a new Google Form (LINK URL) for players to share with us their performance after playing a few matches on v2.13, either good or bad. The team will continue to look into ways to improve Squad’s overall performance, and based on player feedback and the results of our investigation we will look at potential further fixes.

We realize that this has been a frustrating experience for many of our players, particularly those that have found Squad unplayable since Wednesday’s Update. We appreciate your continued support, and your patience shown as we worked to solve these issues.

• Offworld Industries

 

Release Notes

Changelog

• Improved performance by optimizing the Shadows System, especially on Low and Medium settings. Adjusted low and medium shadow scalability to lean more heavily on cheaper contact shadows to increase performance
• Fixed an issue on Fallujah which caused poor performance due to shadow render distance being in excess of what was intended.
• Fixed an issue with specific foliage assets on Gorodok, Mestia & Yehorivka causing excessive performance loss, especially in sunset/sunrise lighting.
• Fixed an issue with Ambient Occlusion not working properly, this fix will be most apparent in interior spaces.

Known Issues / Troubleshooting

• If you are still experiencing performance issues after updating to v2.13, be sure to go to Settings -> “CLEAR CACHE”.
• If after the v2.13 Hotfix you still have performance issues, try experimenting with the Graphics settings menu. Settings which have the biggest performance impact will be Shadow Quality and Tessellation. We believe that the Medium preset is the best compromise between visual quality and performance for most players. 
• If you are playing on Low Preset and are bothered by excessive flickering/dithering on shadows, foliage, and road shoulders, try setting Anti-Aliasing quality to Medium or above, and increase sample size to 8 or more. This can decrease the issue with minimal performance impact compared to the Low preset. 
• On Anvil, Chora, and Mutaha a specific tree type will show a line into the sky at certain ranges.
• After playing a few games on v2.13 we would appreciate it if you reported your performance via our Google Form to let us know what your  experience has been with this Hotfix (LINK URL).

Offworld out.