Chao Garden: Evolved 1.5.0

Sand Ocean

The ninth course, and it unlocks after Aquatic Mine. Cargo Run and the rest of the space courses now sit above it.

• Drop the pyramid tier by tier. Each descent is a ramp running down the outside of a riser, with the drop open on one side. Five of them, then a stone causeway out into the desert.
• Then the dune sea, and it goes uphill. Every windward climb bleeds the speed the slip face just gave you, so the course is about carrying speed over the crests rather than holding a clean line.
• The ground throws you. This is the first course where air comes from the terrain instead of a ramp — a terrace lip or a dune crest launches you if you are moving fast enough when it curves away. Commit and you fly; coast and you scrape over it.
• Rail transfers. Press jump while steering on a rail and you kick off sideways. Land on another rail within a moment and it reads as a transfer, worth a bonus. Every white rail on the course is grindable.
• Quicksand on the slip faces. Five pools, and they are placed where a rider taking the lazy line comes down. Commit to the crest above one and you are still in the air when you pass over it.
• You ride it on a snowboard, and it finishes at an oasis.

Aquatic Mine’s par has been re-timed to 92.8 seconds. The rail kick is a global change and Aquatic Mine is the one existing course whose reference line uses it, so its par moved with the mechanic rather than being grandfathered.

The garden runs at 60

On Windows the garden was managing 20–25 frames a second in a full garden. It now holds 60, and the work behind each frame is inside its budget with room to spare.

• The long freezes are gone. Opening the menu, scrolling the market, or just playing could produce a stall of several seconds. Almost all of those were the graphics driver building shaders in the middle of a frame; the game now builds them ahead of time and never waits on one mid-frame.
• Startup is much faster. A cold launch could take over thirty seconds. It is now single digits — the compiled shaders are kept between sessions instead of being thrown away and rebuilt every launch.
• Grass and flowers sway on the graphics card rather than being moved one plant at a time by the processor, which is most of where the old frame went.
• Press F8 for an on-screen performance readout if you ever want to report a slowdown — the numbers on it are exactly what we would ask for.

The Android garden keeps its 30 frame target, but it gets the same reductions underneath: far fewer draw calls per prop, and lighter grass.

Board gear that fits

• Helmets and goggles are sized and seated on the head they are actually on. They used to be measured from the eyes, and the eyes do not move with the skull — so gear sat wrong on some chao and drifted further as they grew up.
• A helmet is now measured against the skull it caps, with horns and crests kept out of the measurement so a horned head does not get an oversized helmet.
• Goggles still go on the eyes, which is what they are for.
• The dark chao have hand-authored corrections, one per type and age, for the heads whose shape no general rule fits.

Under the hood

• Sand Ocean’s pyramid is generated from the road rather than modelled: the course planner derives the tiers, and the renderer builds the stone buttress under every ramp from the road above it. Nothing on the course can be placed where there is no ground under it — the generator refuses to write the course if anything would float.
• Terrain air is its own flight, computed in world-vertical terms, so a rider leaving a lip actually watches the ground fall away instead of following it down.
• Two new headless tests cover terrain air and the buttresses; the board’s regression suite is up to seventeen.
• Generated props are now merged when they load, so a market stall or a festival lantern costs one drawing operation per colour instead of one per piece.