Dying Light PC patch 1.2.1 released

Techland has released a first post-launch PC patch for Dying Light (the one said to be “coming” yesterday,) which claims to make improvements to performance optimisation.

Speculation is already rife that some of the ‘optimisation’ is actually just a newly lowered max limit for the View Distance setting. According to people who’ve poked around in the Dying Light config files, the maximum View Distance is now a lower value. So, either Techland has re-calibrated those values, or having the Distance slider set to maximum in the new version of the game may be equivalent to having it at around 55% prior to patching.

If true, that’s a bit of a sneaky way of improving people’s frame-rates.

This isn’t the only change made by the patch, however, and people with multi-core CPUs are reporting a more even load across cores. Prior to the patch, Dying Light liked to put 100% load on one core and rather ignore the rest.

A ‘new’ Shadow setting of “Very High” has been added. But in fact all that’s happened here is a renaming of the five Shadow option tiers. Previously, there was a “Very Low” option – which is now just “Low.” So “Very High” is the old “High” setting.

The patch notes (below) also note a block to cheating via “changing the game’s data files.” Hopefully this will not affect modding efforts. Currently, mods are the only way to remove potentially unwelcome film grain and chromatic aberration effects in the game.

Here are the notes:

• numerous performance optimizations, both general and configuration-specific, that resolve many performance problems
• compatibility fixes – related to language and regional system settings
• fixes a number of crashes in various situations
• blocked cheating by changing game’s data files
• new issue tracking mechanisms (-safemode switch, additional logs, minidumps always, full dumps on request)
• numerous audio compatibility fixes

• Bug fixing:
o resolved disappearing inventory in a save game in specific circumstances
o resolved blocked using of items after breaking reloading of shooting weapon
o removed weapon duplication glitch of throwable weapons
o limited camera field of view on cutscenes when in-game FOV set to other than default
o lowered frequency of docket availability information

KNOWN ISSUES WE ARE WORKING ON:
• performance issues of systems based on the AMD processor
• freezes when using Nvidia DoF
• unsatisfactory performance on multi-GPU systems