Hello everyone, we're happy to announce our first full update to Project Borealis: Prologue. This update addresses many items we've seen post-launch and represents our commitment to refining a robust set of core systems for our engine and gameplay platform. It's been valuable to ship this product and share it with all of you. So thank you for your constructive criticism and feedback while we diligently work through it all. We'll be back soon with even more fixes and improvements, which we'll touch on a little at the end of this post, but for now, here are the changes:

PERFORMANCE

• Disabled FSR, as it's currently incompatible with performance features we have enabled. FSR will fall back to TSR for people who have selected it while it is unavailable.
  
• Optimized key areas of the core rendering pipeline to more efficiently use GPU resources
  
• Improved mesh performance by enabling more efficient rendering for distant shapes and introducing new budgeting mechanisms to scale mesh complexity properly
  
• Disabled some intensive graphical effects on the lowest settings, including cinematic bloom and snow deformation
  
• Optimized various specific systems within the level, including lighting, shadowing, landscape, level streaming, VFX, and texture streaming, to scale better on all quality levels
  
• Removed some redundancies incompatible with performance features we have enabled, which also caused unintended memory references
  
• Reworked fog area rendering to have increased quality and improved performance
  
• Reworked Performance Mode
  
  • Now is intended as a performance option for lower-end / outdated graphics card architectures, while still providing close to the intended look of the default renderer, rather than being a low-quality mode in general
    
  • Performance Mode will be automatically applied for appropriate hardware, for example, GTX 10-series, RX 500 series, Steam Deck, and Intel GPUs
    
  • To opt out of Performance Mode, add -DP=Windows to your launch options
    
  • We are still exploring the possibility of a Legacy Mode, which will support even older graphics cards currently failing to launch, at the cost of some visual quality

SETTINGS

• Changed Supersampling mode "Off" to "TAAU", supporting Temporal AA Upscaling as a higher performance, lower quality upscaling option, rather than locking TAA to 100% super sampling
  
  • Removed render scale option as it was confusing, and TAAU gives much better quality for nearly the same performance
    
  • Changed the default screen percentage from 72% to 70% to enter into an efficient mode for TAAU in case it is used
• Added a * for all quality options, to indicate the recommended quality level/mode for your hardware
  
• Changed how default hardware recommended quality options scale, to target 60fps on 1080p for most graphics cards
  
• Fixed VSync setting being ignored
  
• Fixed resolution setting being permanently locked and resetting in some cases
  
• Fixed supersampling settings being set incorrectly in certain cases
  
• Changed the default anisotropic filtering from 16x to 4x, as anisotropic filtering is not relevant for various feedback-driven rendering systems, and can cause bad performance scenarios on specific cards when set to higher levels
  
• Fixed arrow keys being defaulted to keylook
  
• Fixed keyboard settings not handling console key bind correctly
  
• Fixed mute on focus loss setting being inverted and not saving
  
• Fixed various settings not being reset to default when requested

GRAPHICS, ART & ANIMATIONS

• Adjusted viewmodel positioning on Pistol to show more of the arm like HL2
  
• Improved contrast on generic blood splatter effects
  
• Fixed shotgun blood splatter not rendering due to a VFX bug
  
• Fixed shotgun meat chunks and blood splatter not rendering on headshot due to a surface markup bug
  
• Fixed zombie not playing its flinch animation layer upon a flinch-causing hit due to an animation optimization issue
  
• Fixed rotation being misaligned on a few waiting zombies upon them waking up
  
• Fixed shadow rendering on translucent objects
  
• Fixed zombies, icecrabs, and other objects not rendering to fog layers
  
• Fixed shadow artifacts on low settings for the title screen
  
• Fixed a few props, pickups, and zombies receiving decals incorrectly due to incorrect channel markup
  
• Fixed missing surface markup for gantry and ice chunks
  
• Fixed portal VFX writing through to the WF window VFX
  
• Fixed areas where portal VFX was showing out of geo unintentionally

AUDIO

• Improved audibility of icecrab death and icecrab jump noises
  
• Reduced audio of weapon draws
  
• Fixed missing headshot sound for Pistol

GAMEPLAY

• Fixed AI waves spawning incorrectly after required waves were completed, but the player stayed around
  
• Attempted to address player traversal issues in certain areas of the map
  
• Fixed flashlight size being projected incorrectly compared to HL2, causing the base flashlight size to be too small and the close-up flashlight size to be too big. This not only caused the flashlight to cover the incorrect area, but also caused rapid flicker during size changes due to the large discrepancy.
  
• Fixed weapon quickswitch being updated immediately, instead of after a short delay, which caused the quickswitch to be set to an unintended weapon while scrolling through weapons
  
• Removed camera shakes from weapon draws
  
• Fixed camera shake being too intense and incorrectly oriented when getting hit by a zombie
  
• Fixed gravity gun pull logic to be more reliable with targeting
  
• Fixed gravity gun pull functionality not working if the player picked up an object with +USE in certain cases

MOVEMENT

• Fixed a case where movement could not find a floor to stand on and would slide off (such as during a crouch jump or pixel walk), due to discrepancies in how collision bounds were checked in certain cases
  
• Fixed a case where movement would slide on steppable surfaces due to unintended corrections to the collision

MISC

• Added basic support for subtitles
  
• Removed New Game being disabled when saves are blocked. Please note that usage of this option may result in bugs, and we are actively working on fixing this.
  
• Fixed unzoom HUD animation playing when unpausing the game
  
• Fixed cheats not being handled properly (EnableCheats command now works as intended)
  
• Fixed HUD visibility not being handled properly (ShowHUD command now works)
  
• Fixed alt-tab removing a custom user-specified FPS cap upon tabbing back in

Thanks again for your continued support and feedback. Your confidence in our team has been inspiring, and we hope to ship more updates in the near future addressing additional feedback, both old and new. We wanted to go over a few things we're looking at, just so you're aware of what's on our radar over the next few patches:

• Performance We still have some more work to do here. In addition to our investigations into possibly supporting legacy hardware, we are still working on a key performance bug that results in some machines not getting the performance we'd expect.
  
• Weapon switching We obviously missed the mark on this. Our intention with the new style was to reduce the friction with the classic "bucket" style found in HL2, while still retaining the discoverability that's lost when enabling "fast weapon switch". We'll work on bringing back the classic style as the default.
  
• Save/persistence This is a complex system that interacts with many different elements of the game and is thus the root cause of many different issues, like the Gnome achievement not working and some gameplay inconsistencies.

UPDATE 11/18/24: In the latest update, cheats are enabled by default and cause achievements to be disabled. The upcoming hotfix fixes this and should be live in a few hours. If you're interested in earning the achievements, you can access the update early using the Steam betas feature. Just right click on Project Borealis: Prologue in your Steam Library and then click Properties, then Betas. From there, select to participate in the "upcoming" beta test.

Hey all, thanks for playing the Project Borealis Prologue! We've got a quick hotfix for you all here, the first of many!

Changes:

• Fixed a case where the player could be soft-locked in the exit area due to intersecting geometry disallowing headcrabs from acting properly
  
• Fixed sky being black and not rendering clouds or aurora. This also fixes the sky not contributing to lighting, fixing the unintended ambient darkness in the level.

In other news, we are aware of and working on a variety of bugs, crashes, and performance issues. We appreciate your support, feedback, and reports while we investigate and work on these issues. We will be delivering more hotfixes soon and will iterate on your feedback.

For those facing performance issues on even low settings and TSR + 50% super-sampling quality, you can force a performance mode, that will reduce quality even further. Open the launch options by right-clicking on Project Borealis: Prologue in the library and clicking Properties. Under launch options, enter -DP=Windows_Performance. This is an unofficial performance mode that will reduce the quality further than intended but may relieve performance issues for some users.

People who cannot play the prologue due to a crash on launch may find the -vulkan launch option useful. This is an unofficial and unsupported Vulkan 1.3 mode, which we do not recommend for regular use unless you have problems launching it at all in the DX12 mode. It will not have better performance and might have unintended graphical errors, but it may at least help those who wish to play the game in some capacity. However, please note that most Intel graphics cards are not supported, and older graphics cards that do not support DirectX 12 Ultimate are also not officially supported.

Thanks again for your continued support and patience with the project. We hope to deliver more fixes soon.