A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.37.1.0) This upgrades the particle system to support a 2-pass approach to particle rendering. What this means is, most particle effects now share a unified alpha channel, and separate the alpha render pass from the color render pass. This allows most particle effects, such as enemy explosions, to maintain their ‘melding together’ effect of adjacent particles, while also being more prominent from the background. The previous additive-only particles would sometimes get blown out or lost in bright backgrounds, or colors closely matching the color of the particles. This new approach leverages multicore CPUs to neutralize much of the increased workload, resulting in only a minor net increase in particle processing time. The rendering side does have an increased load, but is still low enough overall that virtually all systems won’t see a slowdown.

A few bug fixes and optimizations are included in this update as well. Here are the full release notes for v1.37.1.0:

• Upgraded the particle system to support 3 categories of particles; Additive, Subtractive, and Sorted
  -The new category introduced is Subtractive
  -Mirroring particles in both the Additive and Subtractive categories can be used to improve particle image quality
  --Doing this melds together unified color/alpha channels for groups of adjacent particles, while keeping them prominent from the background
  --This works great for volumetric effects, such as explosions
  --This prevents the particle colors from getting washed out when used with certain backgrounds
  -The particle multithreading system has been extended to run the new Subtractive particle category in parallel with other categories of particles
  --This allows CPUs with 4 or more cores to run the additional load with minimal performance loss
  
• Upgraded several particle effects to take advantage of the upgraded particle system, using the new melded/unified approach to alpha channels
  -Enemy explosions
  -Boss explosions
  -Bullet trails
  -Bullet impacts
  -Bullet firing
  -Attaining charge levels
  -Holding charge levels
  -Item pickups
  -Final player death
  -Enemies impacting the mother ship in Classic modes
  
• Fixed the cloud unlock data getting reset when starting the game from a fresh new install
  
• Fixed the autoplay demo from always using the Homeworld background
  
• Fixed the autoplay demo from erroneously using music from the selected background, now maintains the menu music as intended
  
• Optimized all non-gameplay states of the game by eliminating elements of gameplay rendering that are not needed in these cases
  -Improves performance by up to 5% in these cases
  
• Improved accuracy of render thread time readouts when showing debug frame stats

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.37.1.0” or higher. Enjoy!