Hey everyone!

Here we are with Update 7, which is lighter on content, but more focused on quality of life improvements.

The reason for that is we are shifting our focus to really polishing the game in preparation for the end of Early Access. While we do not have more to announce at this time, remember that the price of Panoptic will increase once the game is out of Early Access. We will announce details later, and of course give plenty of notice before any change happens, but keep that in mind if you have been waiting on the game!

On to the changes then!

One big item on our collective to-do list is improving performance across the board. VR games are really resource-hungry, and having to display the levels from 2 perspectives at the same time makes Panoptic even more so.

We are happy to announce that, while we are not done improving the way the game runs, we achieved a significant improvement.

On the picture above, you can see the performances reported by Unity in one of our heaviest level (the Foundry). These show the time taken by rendering (green), scripts (blue), physics computations (orange) and animation (light blue). As you can see, we adjusted the picture to line up the vertical scale, and in the same situation (we positioned the Overseer and Challenger the same way), the new update performed much better on our test machine (running a GTX 1080)!

Here is another comparison on median frames for both (blue is Update 6, orange is Update 7):

This is of course not the end of our work on that front, but we hope this will already improve your experience significantly!

Another part where Panoptic got a lot of work this update is its user interface. We updated the in-game menu once again to add more options to it, and pave the way to more game customization. We already implemented some often-requested features like PC field of view adjustment, as well as features that will make the game more comfortable to play such as an optional reticle. Expect more of this kind of changes in the future!

As usual, feel free to share your thoughts with us on Discord, Twitter, the Steam forum, or any other means.

Following is the full list of changes.

New Features:

• Gameplay: "Extra Watchers" now work for the most recent map
• Gameplay: Breaking Orbs now require pressing the Action button
• Graphics: Some windows have new textures in several levels
• Graphics: Some assets have been improved in the latest map and in the Foundry
• Performance: Optimized rendering by adding occlusion culling to all levels for both players
• Audio: Added option to set the levels of various audio cues and music
• UI: Added support for ultra-wide screens (tested up to 32:9, but should work for all screens)
• UI: Added an option to change the PC player Field of View
• UI: Completely remade the options menu, and use the same menu in the title screen and in the in-game menu during gameplay
• UI: Added button names in the options menu (it will be expanded later to incorporate other parts of the game)
• UI: All the UI now use TextMeshPro (the better text rendering engine), making it clearer at more sizes
• UI: Added the option to add a reticle and set its opacity to help with motion sickness in certain people
• UI: Added an option to set the background opacity for the in-game menu
• UI: Added a confirmation popup when resetting options to default

Bugs Fixed:

• Foundry: Challenger cannot glitch through the floor or get stuck in the later part of the level
• Foundry: Fixed the zones where the Overseer gets blinded for coming too close
• All levels: The Challenger cannot move during the first few seconds of each level
• Crystal Mines: Moved the Challenger spawn position so it cannot be killed before moving
• Tutorial: Updated some instructions on the VR side
• UI: Fixed the view still moving sometimes while the in-game menu is opened

We hope that you enjoy this new version, and do let us know what you think! :)

— Team Panoptes