Officers!
It is with great pleasure and pride that we announce today the release of update 1.0.6 for Highway Police Simulator on all platforms.
We have invested a lot of effort and work into the new update over the past few weeks and today we are proud to announce some of the key improvements along with the complete changelog.
With a total of 131 improvements to the game, this is a large and comprehensive update. The most important improvements for us were in the areas of performance and missions.
There are 38 improvements in the missions section of the update, which will significantly improve daily life in the game. Performance and optimizations also play a major role with 29 individual optimizations and improvements.
In the user interface area, we have 10 major changes in the update. These were primarily performance improvements in the game, but also improvements to visibility and access.
There are significant improvements in many areas of the game. You can find all the details and information about the update in the complete changelog for this update.
Some highlights:
Mission Objectives: Icons now indicate special requirements, such as necessary vehicles
Visual Effects: Added new smoke effect for broken engines, to better show why cars break down
Fast Travel: Resolved issues where vehicles spawned inside or under parked cars at fast travel points
Optimization: Improved performance by updating core systems, especially animations and save game logic
Reduced lag during driving, unlocking Fast Travel Points, Points of Interest, and completing mission objectives
Enhanced baseline performance at the police station
We are still planning and already working on more performance improvements in the next patch to further reduce causes for frame spikes and lags.
To serve and protect
Your HWPS Team at Z-Software
Complete Changelog of Update 1.0.6
[Accidents] Adjusted the radius in which accident missions are activated when being close to them to prevent unintentional mission cancellation
[Accidents] Changed how Accident missions cancel works. It shouldn’t cancel without any notification anymore
[Accidents] Fixed an issue which caused radial menu options to disappear if you took out cones from trunk to secure accidents
[Accidents] Fixed dialog with Nataly where player’s character says they didn’t get a confession although they did
[Accidents] Implemented dialogue flow options which end a dialogue in a natural way if it is repeated multiple times
[Animations] Fixed an issue with the driver exit animation
[Animations] Fixed broken loop for character driving animation
[Animations] Fixed wrong time stamps in some animations
[Animations] Improved shotgun reload animation
[Animations] The coffee mug in the players hand while forwarding the time in the police station is now visible
[Arrests] Fixed female character overlapping arrested person during arrest sequence
[Arrests] Improved the setup that determined when an NPC will resist being arrested by the player and start a shooting instead
[Vehicle] Fixed an issue with DUI tests sometimes not being registered in the evaluation
[Vehicle] Added visual effect for broken engines
[Vehicle] Fixed a bug the prevented dialogue voice lines about broken lights from being played
[Vehicle] Fixed an issue which could lead to overriding data of other NPCs if a broken down car was spawned
[Vehicle] Fixed an issue sometimes causing physics glitches if you opened the radial menu while driving
[Vehicle] Fixed visual issues with some parts of Fire Truck
[Characters] Improved the character setup to prevent brief A-Posing when spawning character
[Characters] Improved the loading times for spawning characters
[Dialogues] The player is now correctly framed for a dialogue cutscene in the mission “At the end of it all”
[Dialogues] Banter talks now pause when any menu is opened
[Dialogues] Fixed a bug that caused dialogue options for the same piece of dialogue to appear more than once
[Dialogues] Fixed a bug that caused the camera to get lost for a moment during a conversation with Leonel Walker
[Dialogues] Fixed a bug where the game would rarely crash during dialogues
[Drone] “Locate drone” now shows drone position
[Drone] Fixed a bug that prevented objects like NPCs or mines to appear in a different color in the thermal vision mode
[Environment] Fixed an issue where items form vending machines could spawn outside of the vending machine
[Environment] Fixed an issue with camera glitches in Merris Hill caused by a malformed collider of a model of a heap of wood
[Environment] Fixed camera clipping in some walls in Merris Hill
[Environment] Fixed Fire Chief’s pickup didn’t have collision
[Environment] Fixed some floating props at a rest stop in the south of the map
[Graphics] Fixed eyebrows drawn on top of car windows
[Graphics] Fixed windshields causing degraded image quality in first person vehicle view
[Mission] Mission “A Glimpse at Terror” Markers and search area for Travis car are now randomized instead of pointing directly to the correct location
[Mission] Mission “A meeting with Terror” Fixed Cole’s car spawning on top of parked vehicles
[Mission] Mission “A meeting with Terror” Fixed comment about Travis car appear in wrong moment of the mission
[Mission] Mission “Ambush on the delivery” Ally policemen should correctly respawn if player dies during shootout
[Mission] Mission “Ambush on the delivery” Dispatch would call you with new misions while timer is up
[Mission] Mission “Ambush on the Delivery” Fixed an issue causing the gangster you need to arrest clipping into the ground and not being interactable
[Mission] Mission “Ambush on the Delivery” Fixed an issue which could lead to the objective for eliminating targets not being completed even if all gangsters were defeated
[Mission] Mission “Ambush on the Delivery” Fixed an issue with gangsters changing appearance every time the mission is restarted
[Mission] Mission “At the End of It All” Fixed an issue preventing the player from reviving companion during the mission
[Mission] Mission “At the End of It All” Fixed an issue which could lead to companions face being rendered incorrectly during the ending cutscene
[Mission] Mission “At the End of It All” Fixed an issue which could prevent the mission from being completed during the chase with Travis
[Mission] Mission “At the End of It All” Fixed an issue with a wrong checkpoint number in the mission flow
[Mission] Mission “At the End of It All” Fixed mission state not properly initialized after reloading the game
[Mission] Mission “Catching the dragon” Adjusted the save system to correctly save progress when quitting/reloading the game at different points during the mission
[Mission] Mission “Catching the dragon Club house”
[Mission] Mission “Catching the dragon” Fixed a bug that blocked progress when the player checked the mission places in a certain order
[Mission] Mission “Confrontation” Fixed some character positions during dialogues on top of the hill
[Mission] Mission “Connections” Fixed a bug which could cause the “Inspect” button in the database to disappear making it impossible to continue the mission
[Mission] Mission “Fish on a hook” Fixed a bug that prevented progress by failing to trigger a dialogue between the player and Nataly
[Mission] Mission “It’s Getting Personal” The reach location marker while going to the Arrest is now split between driving to the parking lot and walking to the actual mission target. This improves the overall navigation in the mission
[Mission] Mission “Live action heist” “Write a report” mission marker doesn’t show on police station roof
[Mission] Mission “Live Action heist” After when reloading the game after completing the shooting but before returning to the station, the game now saves progress correctly
[Mission] Mission “Manhunt” Fixed hunchmen sit near chair during and after inerrogation
[Mission] Mission “Quack” Replaced the icons with a magnifying glass to better reflect the search aspect of the mission
[Mission] Mission “Scavenger Hunt” Fixed mission search drone objective shows 0/0
[Mission] Mission “The plan” Fixed mission markers would not disappear after speaking to officers
[Mission] Mission “The prisoners’ escort” Fixed a bug that caused the upside down vehicles at the accident to move/twitch on their own accord
[Mission] Mission “The prisoners’ Escort” Fixed an issue which could lead to Coman being stuck in the prison bus instead of walking around it
[Mission] Mission “The prisoners’ Escort” The Grand Patron you get after the accident won’t suddenly become uncontrollable anymore
[Mission] Mission “Up Above” Mission doesn’t appear in failed category after completion
[Mission] Mission “Your everyday race track” Crashing during race doesn’t heal your vehicle if vehicle was damaged before race
[Mission] Mission “Your everyday race track” Players don’t need to sidestep from Blair to finish “reach” objective anymore
[Mission] Mission “Your everyday race track” Quitting to menu during race doesn’t block mission progression anymore
[Mission] Added an Icon indicating special requirements to missions, e.g. what vehicle is required
[Mission] Fixed a bug that incorrectly showed multiple mission markers at the players vehicle
[Mission] Improved the setup for mission markers at the police station to make them more accessible
[Mission] Fixed errors with the saving system to remove progress blockers
[Mission] Fixed a bug that would skip part of a mission when reloading after a game crash during the mission “Catching the dragon”
[NPC] Adjusted Nataly’s AI to enable her to follow the player down a set of stairs in the mission “From Russia With Love”
[NPC] Fixed an issue which sometimes caused NPC’s to be initialized with zero weight or height
[Optimization] added caching for some important actors to reduce search time if we need to access them
[Optimization] Added frame time budget management for animations to prevent animations from taking to much time per frame
[Optimization] Adjusted mirror materials in the station to improve the game’s performance
[Optimization] Changed handling of NPC Spawn ranges to decrease the amount of times an NPC needs to be initialized if the player moves around
[Optimization] Changed how general UI elements are accessed to free up some runtime memory, if UI is not shown on screen
[Optimization] Changed how portraits for the police database and document check are loaded to reduce lag during character creation
[Optimization] Changed loading setup for accidents to allow for asynchronously loading. This reduces lags while initializing accident missions
[Optimization] Fixed a possible cause for Game Lags while NPC characters are generated
[Optimization] Generation of random number strings for documents and vehicle registration data is now faster, which improves data generation times for new vehicles or NPCs
[Optimization] Improved calculation speed of some suspension related calculations in vehicles
[Optimization] Improved calculation times for Character Animations to reduce overall frame time animations take for computations
[Optimization] Improved how mission objectives find interactors in the world reducing frame time
[Optimization] Improved memory management of accident securing feature
[Optimization] Improved overall reference management in helper function to reduce dependencies for loading times and memory usage
[Optimization] Improved performance while using the photo mode in accidents
[Optimization] Improved render times for lighting in police station
[Optimization] Improved runtime of actor lookups in NPC related systems
[Optimization] Improved setup speed for characters. animations
[Optimization] Improved speed for generation of NPC characters and vehicle information
[Optimization] Improved speed of saving to reduce gameplay spikes caused by saving the game
[Optimization] Improved update and render time for rank display especially in terms to updating the current date
[Optimization] Improved usage of threads for IK calculations for characters
[Optimization] Reduced memory usage of accident missions during photo mode and document check
[Optimization] Reduced necessary calculations for an active “Check Database” objective. This reduces frame time used by the objective
[Optimization] Removed some unnecessary update calls to vehicle audio for NPC vehicles far away from the player
[Optimization] Removed unnecessary update calculations for TechTree. Now they are only done, if the upgrade is applied or removed
[Optimization] Slightly improved loading times around Police Station
[Optimization] Split up spawn logic for parked vehicles to improve frame time stability. Previously parking lots could cause lags because all work was done in one frame
[Optimization] Updated activation of lights in police station to reduce the number of lights active at the same time
[Partner] Banter with Nataly shouldn’t start during shootout anymore
[Partner] Nataly’s feet doesn’t go through vehicles anymore
[Shootouts] Added bullet impact sounds for shooting at vehicles
[Shootouts] Added bullet impact sounds for shooting at vehicles
[Shootouts] Character’s model doesn’t obscure aiming while crouching
[Shootouts] Fixed a crash which could occur if you tried to return to main menu if at least one enemy was already defeated in a shootout. This could happen in procedural and story missions
[Shootouts] Fixed medics trying to arrest injured bandits
[Shootouts] Fixed mines not damaging the player and hovering above ground
[Shootouts] Improved navigation to some shootout places and added a mission area to better communicate the area where the shootout happens
[Shootouts] Nataly will be auto-revived now if the player dies during shooting while she is already dead
[UI] Fixed an issue with displaying failed objectives
[UI] Fixed delay between radial menu closing and opening again
[UI] Fixed description texts being cut off in tech tree screen
[UI] Fixed some scaling issues on high-dpi screens
[UI] Fixed tech tree showing wrong vehicle when navigating between tabs too quickly
[UI] Fixed UI overlap when using drone during shootout
[UI] Fixed vending machine UI not working correctly on some screen aspect ratios
[UI] Mission markers are now hidden inside the garage
[UI] Moved map path drawing setup to background worker
[UI] Radial menu can now be opened while bantering with Nataly
[World] Fixed a bug that allowed the player to move while picking up purchased items
[World] Increased the consistency for the player reset and solved issues with NPC vehicles creating traffic jams at the border
[World] Added a fence at the worlds border where the player will be reset if the border is crossed
[World] Fixed issues with incorrect terrain generation in multiple places
[World] Reduced chance of landscape not being correctly loaded in at target location
[World] Fixed flashlight not working in conversations and observations
[World] Adjusted the collider of some rock formations to prevent the player from getting stuck
[World] Fixed parked vehicles spawn under player’s car