We have another patch to share with you for The Artisan of Glimmith. This one focuses on adding new languages, improving the performance of the game, fixing bugs, and providing a couple of small quality-of-life tweaks.

You can now play The Artisan of Glimmith in these four new languages.

Other language changes include:

• Substantial updates to the Spanish translation.

• In the French translation, changing the names for Match and Mismatch to Pareille and Pas Pareille.

• Fixing some mistakes in German and Chinese.

• Adding a Cyrillic font for Russian.

• Adding new translators to the credits.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on the translations.

In our last update, we mentioned how we were observing some crashes among players who were trying to run the game on hardware that was well below our minimum system requirements.

Most of these crashes were due to these systems not having enough video memory to support the game. So we asked ourselves, "Could we try to lower the amount of video memory that the game required, particularly on LOW settings, without affecting its visual appearance?"

If we could, it would not only help improve stability for those players, but it might actually allow us to lower the game's minimum system requirements, allowing more Artisans to access the game.

We never spent much time trying to optimize Glimmith's video memory usage during development, because our goal was to get the game's VRAM usage below 3GB (to support 4GB graphics cards) and we were able to achieve that without much effort, so we never tried to push it further.

As it turned out, there were many more savings to be found! In fact, we've improved things so much that we expect that the game, on LOW settings, should be stable even on 2GB graphics cards. This should be a big win for those with older PCs or with integrated graphics only.

The changes made include:

• Optimizing lightmap and shadowmap densities throughout the whole map. This made a huge difference! We were able to reduce the baked lightmap sizes by around 85% with no quality loss (and quality improvements in some cases!) This has a huge number of benefits, including lowering the download and install size of the game, fixing blotchy shadows, reducing video memory usage by hundreds of megabytes, and even reducing the number of draw calls due to better texture packing, which yields a small FPS boost.

• Lowering distance field atlas sizes on LOW quality settings. This saves a massive amount of video memory, and doesn't affect visual quality very much (because LOW settings mainly rely on contact shadows for shadow detail).

• Removing unneeded data from the project. We were able to remove a few more unused textures, remove unused navigation data, and remove a ton of unnecessary quality used for collision meshes (whose only purpose was to block mouse clicks on the map). We also removed adjacency buffers from every mesh in the entire project (since we don't use tessellation), and we removed reversed index buffers from a number of environment assets that never needed them (they're only used if the mirror image of an asset is placed on the map).

• Optimizing triangle counts. Many of Glimmith's building meshes had very high triangle counts—enough that they would look flawless even when viewed up close in first person! But that extra quality is completely invisible when viewed from a bird's-eye-view camera, so we were able to reduce many mesh triangle counts with no perceptible quality loss. Some scenes in the game are now rendering with 30% fewer triangles!

• Adjusting some foliage LOD transitions and distance fades. This one is 80% aesthetic but should reduce the pop-in effect on grass and trees, particularly on HIGH and EPIC quality. Flickering should also be reduced on some meshes like trees and the Glimmith bridge.

• Adjusting texture resolutions and formats. Some textures were being stored in raw, uncompressed formats because their x and y resolutions were not divisible by 4. We've adjusted their resolutions and converted them to DXT5, BC7, and various other optimized formats, which saves a bunch of video memory.

In total, these changes reduce video memory usage by 30-40% across all quality settings. There should be no noticeable reduction in visuals, and there should be several minor visual improvements and a small FPS boost (5-10% on most systems, but it depends on what you're bottlenecked by).

Here's a comparison. This is from the before the changes. This scene has 17.4M triangles:

After, the scene has 12.3M triangles (~30% less) and uses 35% less video memory. There are some minor improvements to shadows and grass-drawing distance, but you otherwise shouldn't notice a difference:

Please let us know if you notice anything that doesn't look right while playing with the updated build, as we messed around with a lot of assets.

Other changes that have gone live in this patch include:

• Added an option in the Settings menu to hide the Check Progress button while in puzzles (for you people that can't stop yourselves from clicking it!)

• Improved the map navigation when playing with a controller or Steam Deck.

• Remade the difficulty indicator graphics and converted them to fully-baked textures (to fix the off-center numbers in them and improve their appearance).

• Fixed a visual bug where the window progress graphic was squished in an early note from Elias Vidimus.

• Fixed a bug where the map would sometimes snap to a different location after exiting a puzzle.

• Fixed an unintended way to click the hidden puzzle on the floating island beneath the Glimmith Overlook.

• Fixed a castle tower that was accidentally colored red instead of purple (no, this was not a puzzle!)

• Fixed a missing wall in one of the red-roofed cottages in the forest.

• Fixed a rock that was clipping through the floor inside one of the houses.

• Fixed some objects that allowed puzzles and windows to be clicked through them.

• Fixed a bug with water transparency sort ordering that made water visible through the fog.

• Fixed a puzzle in the Compass area that had 2 solutions.

And here are some other fixes that we snuck in earlier this week:

• Fixed a bug where the Community Craftsman achievement would fail to trigger (if you should have gotten this achievement but didn't, you can solve any puzzle from the workshop to trigger it, including a puzzle that you've already solved).

• Fixed a bug where error highlights wouldn't update after changing the Show Errors setting.

• Fixed a bug where the restoration progress pop-up could appear while in a puzzle.

• Fixed a bug where the restoration progress text would appear in the wrong place for a frame.

• Removed a performance hitch on mouse-up in note-taking mode.

• Increased the drawable area for note-taking mode.

Upcoming changes include:

• Controller glyphs (so we can get Steam Deck verified!)

• New features and improvements for the color palette (this is a big change that needs a lot of testing, so thanks for your patience everyone!)

• Adding Polish language support

~ Elyot Grant

CEO and Game Director, Lunarch Studios

So we've pushed a patch this afternoon. The changes are pretty simple:

• Fixed a dumb bug that caused the game to use 200MB more video memory than it should

• Made further optimizations to save another ~100MB of video memory

But the dumb bug has a really funny story.

It started yesterday when, after the patch, we got a few reports of crashes. Usually this means the patch has a programming error that needs to be fixed, but the reports were quite sparse (we only ended up getting around 7 of them in 24 hours). And when we looked further, the crashes were... weird.

Normally if the crash is caused by a bug in our code, it's triggered whenever players do a very specific thing. But in this case, the crashes were happening at seemingly random times. And moreover, they didn't just crash The Artisan of Glimmith... they sometimes crashed players' entire computers!

When we looked at the hardware of the players having problems, we noticed something in common... these players were all running machines with Intel Iris Xe Graphics. This is an integrated GPU that ships with many low-end laptops, and it's not really meant to run high-end Unreal Engine games. In fact, it scores only 2608 on G3D Mark, and our minimum system requirements (a 1050Ti or similar) scores 6360.

However, it's used in about 1% of systems on Steam, which is still a lot:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

To be honest, I was surprised that these systems were able to run Glimmith in the first place with only 40% of the minimum required graphics power, but apparently they had been able to play reasonably comfortably with a good degree of stability... until yesterday's patch!

We peeked at the error messages and callstacks from the crashes, which revealed a whole slew of random crashes deep in Unreal's engine code, often relating to DirectX. Usually this means that the video card is out of memory and refusing to allocate more VRAM.

Sure enough, I checked in the task manager and discovered that the new build was using around 220MB more VRAM, which is about 10% more on LOW settings. We knew it would go up a little bit for all the new features we added (tutorial messages, area counter, progression tracking, etc.), but it didn't make any sense... there's no way those things would add up to 220MB.

So we ran a memreport and compared it to one from the previous build. And what I saw left me scratching my head even more. Starting from the March 27th patch, Glimmith now had a random 196MB 3D sky texture loaded into video memory. And I had never seen it before. It was called 01.01.

For reference, 196MB is absolutely massive for a texture, like this was a gorgeous 3D skybox for a high-end video game that wraps fully around you in all directions. And Glimmith wasn't using 01.01 at all. It was just... there. And it was wasting a ton of video memory (likely acting as the straw that broke the camel's back for machines with GPUs way below our minimum spec).

We checked for all references to the object and found our culprit here:

Buried deep in the UI widgets, there was the tutorial image box—a feature we added to support those new hand-drawn graphics you'll find in some of the game's tutorial boxes. It also happened to be a feature that went live in yesterday's patch!

The image box was set up with 01.01 as its default image. This was totally irrelevant to the game's functionality, because the default image is never used for this image box at all (our code immediately replaces it with the correct image). But Unreal had no way of knowing that, so 01.01 got packaged into the game and loaded into video memory all the time, at full quality, totally needlessly.

Why did 01.01 end up there as the default? Because 01.01 is the first texture alphabetically in the list of all textures in our library (which includes a bunch of asset packs and other files). If you create an image box and don't pick a default image, Unreal might just pick one for you.

After fixing this problem, we also poked around to see if we could find other VRAM optimizations. After all, if there were players with really low-end hardware that was just barely teetering on the verge of playability, a small change in VRAM requirements might create a massive improvement in stability for them.

We managed to find another 100MB of savings without much effort, mostly by compressing textures that were way higher quality than they needed to be. We'd have made these changes much sooner if we knew they would actually make a difference for players! (But our goal was to stay under 3GB of VRAM so we could run on 4GB cards, and we were already way below 3GB).

In any case, you shouldn't notice any visual differences as a result of the changes. If you do, please let us know.

We also got reports from a couple of players who had much more powerful GPUs than the Intel Iris Xe Graphics, but were still suffering from the same instability.

In all such cases, it turned out that they were running laptops with both integrated GPUs (the Iris Xe) and discrete Nvidia GPUs, and their systems were choosing to run Glimmith using the integrated graphics (definitely not a good idea if you want the best possible performance in the game)! This is likely because Nvidia just hasn't yet learned that Glimmith benefits from the more powerful GPU (likely because it's not particularly demanding).

So if anyone out there is not getting the performance out of the game that they think they should, check if this might be the problem!

To fix this issue, you need to override your system's assignment of which GPU is used for which program. For Nvidia users, you can use the NVIDIA Control Panel app to create overrides. Just go to Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings, and add Geri.exe (typically located at C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\The Artisan of Glimmith\\Geri\\) and set it to use the NVidia GPU.
Edit: you may also need to add Geri-Win64-Shipping.exe which is typically located at:

C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\The Artisan of Glimmith\\Geri\\Binaries\\Win64

Thanks again to all the players who shared their crash reports and system specs with us to help us identify the problem. Please try the main build on Steam again and let us know if you have any further issues.

Happy puzzling!

~ Elyot Grant

CEO and Game Director, Lunarch Studios