Technical Update: Infrastructure, Telemetry, HLODs & a New Drone

This update moves the alpha onto a current engine generation and onto the studio's new infrastructure, with a real performance pass and a new drone on top. It is not a content patch: the world, the systems and the gameplay are the ones you know. Here is what changed under the hood.

One infrastructure

• New backend. Accounts, the NDA, in-game news, patch notes and bug reports all go through the studio's new infrastructure, on new hardware. The old server is retired.
• Crash reports actually arrive. Earlier alpha builds silently dropped them. Crashes now upload a full diagnostic report that points me at the exact line instead of a raw address.

Bug reports

• Moved to the new backend. A report ships your description, a screenshot taken at that moment and the session log, in one upload.
• Linked to your session. Reports land in my tracker already tied to your session data, so I can cross-reference them with performance samples and crashes from the same session. "It broke somewhere" becomes something I can reproduce.

Telemetry

• Histograms, not averages. The update brings the telemetry described in the alpha NDA. Performance is recorded as frame-time distributions, so I can compute exact percentiles per zone of the island instead of a meaningless average.
• A heatmap of the island. Regular position samples show where players actually go, and how the game runs there.
• Light by design. Everything is batched, compressed and stored locally when offline; the footprint is a few kilobytes per hour of play.

The far world (HLODs)

• The world finally has HLODs. Until now, past a few hundred meters only the landscape and foliage existed; buildings simply were not there until you got close. Three tiers of long-distance stand-ins now cover the whole island, from mid-range detail to a horizon tier you can see from anywhere, drone included.
• Tens of thousands of objects reintegrated. A large part of the world had been excluded from HLOD generation and could never get a stand-in. That is fixed at the source, not per point of interest.
• No more magenta at distance. Hundreds of materials could only render as flat magenta in packaged builds; they are fixed.
• Net result. A real skyline, far fewer pop-ins, and no memory wasted on invisible detail.

A new drone

• Built for Rooted. The old drone was a full quadcopter physics simulation, far too expensive for what it does. The new one flies on a lightweight flight model with near-zero performance cost; the tilt and hover you see are pure presentation.
• Readable in flight. New HUD with compass and gauges, a permanent exit prompt that shows your actual key, and a full audio pass.
• For everyone. The drone is now meant to be pilotable by every player, not tied to a specific role. Deploy it, fly it, hand it over.

Anything odd, use the in-game bug reporter: those reports now arrive with everything I need attached.

Mat