True. Every day means more work gets done.

This should be no surprise, but it will be pushed back at least a few weeks. Features not yet complete, some major bugs and heavy testing needed.

There is nothing weird about our rendering. Everything comes down to draw calls of which there are thousands. Many blocks use a merged mesh, meaning combined with others of the same category in their chunk to be draw in a single draw call. Combining does add overhead of making that mesh each time a block is added or removed. Many other blocks are props, which have their own renders, models, LODs and mats, which makes a draw call and because of instancing many of those of the same type can also be rendered in a single draw call. Those do not have the overhead of combining and get to use LODs to be culled at a customized distance based on their size. Everything is tradeoffs.

Turning off any type of draw calls would of course make FPS higher, but the whole point of the video in video games is to render things otherwise you would be staring at a black screen.

Sorry, no "true" fire zombie in the burnt forest. We already have the burnt zombie, but I believe there is more fire on h...

Yesterday I worked more on weather storms. It is happening in all biomes now, with increasing frequency/duration based on biome difficulty. Split rain and snow into light/heavy so we still have that variety which is separate from storms. Today back to finishing improvements to RWG wilderness road connections.

I don't think so.

Storms are in biomes.xml and per biome like this:

The buff does the damage, so that can be modded too.

April 15 is a Tuesday, so that was an approximate date as we would not initially release a major new experimental on a Tuesday. An actual public release date would be a Monday, so maybe the 21st. I probably need 3 more days of work on it code/xml wise. I also have new zombie work to be finished, so it will be tight. On the other hand, we don't have to get everything perfect to start experimental, so some changes can happen during exp.

My general target is once a day with some days being skipped, but that is just a guess until the team plays it a while. They will not last anywhere near an hour of realtime.
No Man's Sky and Stalker both have similar concepts which I refer to as examples of how it could work.

I was not going to say anything until it was more done, but yes I started prototyping our existing storm weather being more dangerous looking and harmful to the player. That was approved yesterday and our particle artist has started doing better effects as I just did a cranked up version of snow for the snow biome. The timing was global, but is now per biome as harder biomes will probably have more frequent storms. There will be some new UI messaging telling you to take cover or get out of the biome if it is also hazardous to you as the hazard system runs in parallel with the storms, so both could be happening to you.

No DX12 changes other than using a newer version of Unity. No DLSS support, but there is a chance someday.

FSR has been updated to a slightly newer version of 3.1. Based on some of the FSR setting confusion on this forum, I did get one of our programmers to add an upscaling setting to the video options, so is no longer in the AA settings.

At this point getting dedicated released is currently on us as we have been waiting for 2.0 to be in a good working state to do a submission for it, but delays keep happening. In hindsight we could have tried to push it through with a 1.x release, but the "we will be done any week now" mindset held it back. If we had a time machine, we could go back and try to fix all kind of things, but we don't, so we can't.

I really don't care who you blame or what you crusade against as long as you don't clutter up this forum with a bunch of idle chatter. All people and companies make mistakes and we know about our mistakes as we do talk about what we could do better as any business should. That being said, mistakes are often repeated and lessons can be hard to learn. For my part, I am focused on getting things done and not wasting my time dwelling on past mistakes.