Here we are with the first major update that I'm working on.

The demo that, hopefully, everyone has played contained the bare firefighting mechanics; I didn't really work on optimization at that stage, and probably it runs like crap on most of your PCs; mine struggled when things got hot with a lot of particles involved.

---

But first things first, I almost lost all the work for "who knows why" reasons when Unreal decided to crash every time I tried to open it. Luckily, I was able to make a new level and salvage from the original in a "play in editor" view, but I still had to refurnish everything and repaint all the foliage, so you'll probably notice the bigger difference with much less grass and plants in general, but at least I didn't have to remake everything from scratch.

---

Then, about the update:

I remade the fire sprite material from scratch; instead of a translucent one, I used a masked one, which is much lighter overall and doesn't burn the eyes anymore, not that much at least.

I simplified and instanced almost all the materials, made one master with the shader logic instead of a material for every object, and saved a lot of memory and frame time.

I partially updated the fire and redone the damage system—no more overlap checks and a simple radial damage instead.

I modified all the props, building modules, and furniture into destructible actors, so they disappear, break, or simply change into burned material when the flames touch them. Pretty sick, though!

Due to those changes, I had to slightly modify the map to have more spaces between the houses, or else they would catch fire from the neighbors, and partially remodel the buildings too.

I still can't upload the updated demo because I'm facing a strange crash in the dx11 build, something about failing to create a shader resources view for buffer. If anyone knows what that even means, it might be of great help.

It crashes after a while when the fire starts spreading, but the DX12 build isn't affected and works fine.

I'm trying to narrow down what can cause the crash, but I still haven't found it, and sincerely, I don't have a clue.

I don't want to drop the DX11 build; it seems to be the most downloaded from the insight, but if I can't solve it, I probably have to.

---

I hope to see you soon. Bye!