Carmageddon Reincarnation gets revamped engine in new update - Team VVV

News Carmageddon Reincarnation gets revamped engine in new update

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Martin Bigg

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Game: Carmageddon Reincarnation

Platform: PC, PS4, XBox One

Publisher: Stainless Games

Release Date: 21/05/2015

Carmageddon Reincarnation has received its second post-launch update which includes a new engine upgrade, resulting in significant performance and visual improvements. Carmageddon Reincarnation received a lot of criticism for its poor performance on release, so this update has certainly been long in coming – Stainless Games say there has been a 20-35% on minimum spec PCs running the game on standard settings at 720p. Perhaps it will finally run on my PC without lagging even on minimum settings?  

In light of the new update, Stainless Games have released an interesting comparison video showcasing some of the work they have been doing under the bonnet to improve the visual fidelity. Notably, the detail on the environments has been increased, the lighting is more natural, car reflections now look more realistic and the gore is even more gratuitous when you plough into pedestrians, if that was possible.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yPnYSPQSJPA%3Frel%3D0

The update was released in response to players and critics complaining about the outdated graphics and poor performance. Speaking on the Stainless Games blog, Lead Programmer Simon Lacey discusses the difficulties encountered with optimising Carmageddon Reincarnation and why it has taken so long to get to this stage: "It can be quite tricky developing on PC. You never know exactly what you are going to be running on," he said. "The best you can do is to run the game on as many different machines as possible, and hope the coverage is broad enough to minimise how many people are left with a crappy experience."

"We chose quite early on to have a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS, and following the optimisation in the final early access update and the subsequent final release, benchmarking was showing that we were typically exceeding this and by a pretty decent margin. Unfortunately this didn't match up with your expectations, and you let us know! It was always our intention to optimise further as part of our continuing development of the game, but the release feedback made it our number one focus." The insightful blog goes into some detail on the setbacks the team experienced during development and is well worth a read. 

Carmageddon Reincarnation is currently on sale with 40% off for Halloween on Steam

You can find a list of all the changes below. Has this new update restored Carmageddon Reincarnation to its former glory for you? Let us know in the comments. 

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

Minimum Spec

15-20% increase across the board on 1080p, standard settings

Recommended Spec

15-25% increase across the board on 1080p, standard settings

Please note that these results are from comparing the new build to the current Steam build (i.e. Update #1).

The latest gains have come (as before) from a lot of general optimisations and bug fixes, but the main boost has been from the first stage of multithreading the game engine – a much-needed engine upgrade that’s been in the pipeline for a long time, and is now under way. The initial stage, “decoupling the renderer” is in this update, and led to significant framerate improvements. Further multithreading work is ongoing and will result in future performance benefits.

GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS
Rendering

Peds

The peds have been given some attention to sort out some of their dodgy behaviour.

Levels

Many of the gaps in the Snow levels have been filled in, this was done to help reduce the frustration of driving around these areas. And in the Rig Wreck level, some snagging issues on ramps have been fixed.

Multiplayer Balancing

Car Crusher Rule Changes

Fox ‘n’ Hounds Rule Changes

Wobble Recover

Save Slots

Action Replay

Steam Controller

Localisation

Game Menus

Kickstarter Rewards

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