After many months of wrangling, Wave 5 demo is finally available to play!

Now before we get further, as you might have noticed the game is now called Ashes of Equestria. While this does not change anything else outside of the name and logo, you are welcome to read a more in-depth explanation regarding the topic here on a separate blog post released at the same time with this one. If you don’t care or have already read it, continue below for details about the Wave 5 demo!

By far the biggest complaint we received regarding the previous Wave 4.5 was performance; many of you reported that it wouldn’t even run on your computers. With that in mind, most of our effort has gone into improving framerates, load times and memory requirements. In our internal tests, most experienced double or triple the framerate to that of 4.5. This is even more impressive when you consider Wave 5 has significantly more content in it.

Of course, this isn’t the only area we’ve been working on. Here’s a list of just some of the features and improvements you can expect to see over the previous version:

  • Significant performance improvements, including:
  • Amplify Texture, a virtual texturing solution that largely eliminates GPU memory limitations
  • NodeCanvas AI framework, which runs much faster than the old one, improving CPU usage.
  • Our custom Overworld system, which reduces the objects in-memory and being drawn, improving overall performance and memory requirements
  • A hugely reduced renderer count due to selectively combining meshes together. This eliminates the large CPU overhead which was causing the terrible performance in densely cluttered areas such as Ponyville
  • Grouping script events together to further reduce the API overhead
  • Further development of Ponyville, with new areas, models, clutter and architecture
  • New weapons and spells:
  • Grenades
  • Teleportation, including a sweet custom particle effect
  • An improved character creator, with war paint and an enhanced colour picker
  • Basic experience gain and level up functionality
  • Improved inventory management: a 'transfer' screen with a Fallout 4-inspired preview
  • A very cool magic glow effect for unicorn horns

Known issues:

  • Balancing is non-existant.
  • PipBuck UI occasionally stops receiving input. Closing, moving around and reopening it seems to fix it in most cases.
  • House colliders are still a work in progress
  • AI inflicts friendly damage a bit too often (especially melee enemies such as Timberwolves)
  • Radroaches and Bloatsprites are not included due to running out of time to update them to use the new AI framework

Of course, the game is still pre-alpha stage otherwise as well, and as such we expect there to be a bunch more bugs/issues we missed, which you can report to us on our forums! In addition, once you have played the demo, we would very much appreciate if you could fill up our feedback form!

Due to the rapidly decreasing minority of compatible 32-bit only CPUs, and the increasing likelihood of requiring more than 4GB of RAM as we add more content, we’ve decided to only release 64-bit builds from now on.

Download the Demo below!

If you can forgive us for little promotion, both self- and otherwise, we do also now have itch.io page! Not only that, but our fabulous fans have started up an Overmare community Discord server, which everyone is free to join using this link! While it is not “ours”, a lot of the team members do frequent there.

So, what’s next on the agenda? We hope to have another release in just a few months, with even more improvements, quests and dialogue, male player characters and more!