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Greetings, Pilots!
We’ve got good news for all pilots out there: Another small update is coming in hot, fixing the pesky Flak Cannon bug, and some rare mission blockers, as well as bringing various performance improvements. Read on for details, or skip to the end for the full update changelog!
Performance Optimizations
EVERSPACE 2 is a beast of a game, and we’re continuing to look for ways to make it easier on players’ hardware. With this patch, the development team has made headway in optimization improvements in a variety of areas! A few examples are:

Solar flares now use a single sample occlusion check instead of a full render target
Ship dealer showroom ships now initialize with ticking disabled
We’ve disabled global clip plane
The mesh emitter spawning for explosion particle systems is deferred
We’ve reduced the number of texture samplers in "structures" base material

Now we plan to continue optimizing EVERSPACE 2 as we continue development—more updates on that to come in further updates.
Flak Bug Squashed



The Flak bug, first reported in our launch build, has been a longtime issue that we’ve been attempting to solve internally for quite some time, as you can tell from the massive thread in our Slack. We’re pleased to report that today’s patch fixes the issue!
For those who’ve never encountered it, we had a very nasty freeze bug in the game that could occur, although rarely, during intense battles.
We quickly found out that this issue only occurred when using a Flak Cannon, but we couldn’t reproduce the bug on our end, not even with save games provided by our community members.
One of our community testers could reproduce the bug quite constantly, though; thanks, Flori!
To isolate the problem, we tried a few code changes and built a new version on our development branch (which almost took us a full day each time), then waited for Flori to test this new build and confirm if it still happened.
As we went through a few iterations of this, we discovered EVERSPACE 2 did not freeze when setting the effects quality in the graphics options from Epic to High, adding yet another layer of complexity to the problem.
Over the course of trying to nail down the source of this issue, we were:

Porting Flak's projectile VFX from Unreal's Cascade to Niagara
Spawning and gunning down thousands of Outlaw Scouts
Excluding that it's not bound to specifically AMD, Nvidia or Intel video cards
Loading countless user save games to find a common denominator
Running a simulation with 100v100 NPC shredding each other with high-fire rate flaks to no avail
Testing with different projectiles, no radial damage, disabled loot drop (that @Erik streamed and wondered why no loot is dropping!) as loot could be physically pushed around by the Flak explosion
Building a shipping build with no radial damage for the Flak
Realigning the build pipeline in order to build a debug build
Over the course of this testing, we discovered:

That it happens outside of High-Risk Areas
We could exclude that it only happens when an Elite dies and regenerates armor at the same time
Noticed that it only happened during the killing blow of an NPC
It was not a framerate issue
As part of this, we dusted off a team member's old low-spec computer from 2015 and tried to reproduce the freeze, and it worked. So, we finally had one machine that we could rely on for chasing the bug. We upgraded its RAM to 32GB and attached two external HDDs to run Visual Studio, did the huge Checkout (~100GB), and started the building process on said old computer to attach a debugger to the local build.
We found out that the underlying issue may have something to do with missile locking because sometimes the game would wait for a response from the code infinitely and freeze.
We added some more checks for when the missile lock jumps to a new target, which seemed to fix the issue. We believe it was probably an already dead and partly deinitialized enemy that was receiving a missile lock, and that somehow led to the freeze because some HUD animation would not play.
We still don’t know why this only happened with the Flak and with effects quality set to Epic. But that’s a mystery to discover another day if, for some reason, this issue pops up again.
Hotfix 1.0.34243
Hotfix 1.0.34243 should now be live on Steam, with GOG to follow later this week. An earlier version of this update 1.0.34068 containing all but the Engine Trail LOD has been submitted through Microsoft for our PC players on that platform.
If you encounter any crashes after installation of this patch, these are very likely due to a download/update problem. If the crash message includes the text "Retry was NOT successful", then this is a clear indication for this. Luckily, this can easily be fixed using the Steam Client's "Verify integrity of game files" functionality. Here's how to: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0C48-FCBD-DA71-93EB
Below, you'll find the complete list of changes included in this hotfix.
Changelog - 1.0.34243
Tweaks

Further performance optimizations
The location "Drake Passage" does not trigger follow-up side missions anymore
Activated ULTs will now continue after a sequence has finished

Bugfixes

Fixed rare freeze that would occur when killing enemies with Flak weapons
Fixed that some conditions would not stack correctly
Fixed the broken state of "Ancient Rune Sockets" caused by saving during the rotation animation of the Ancient Cube
Fixed an issue in side mission "Rips in Space" which prevented its completion
Fixed an issue that denied the players their reward when leaving a job-location
Fixed an issue in main mission "Smoke & Mirrors" which allowed leaving the location despite the ads being played
Fixed that some solved Ancient Runes had a broken collision after re-entering the location or loading a savegame (Also fixes the hit-box problem of the Ancient Rune when fighting the Warden in Forlorn Vale)
Fixed sun lens flares being invisible on "High" or lower effects settings
Fixed NPC engine trail LOD issues
And with that, we wish you a Flak Cannon bug-free journey through the DMZ!
Lee & your dedicated ROCKFISH Games team 🚀💥🙌