Shane Rounce: Fuse Quest October update: faster loads, buses that behave, squad…

Fuse Quest October update: faster loads, buses that behave, squad chat, and everything switched on

Hello from Sheffield. It's been a while since the last proper write-up on here, and a lot has landed in the realm since, so this one's in patch-notes style. Short version: the game loads in a fraction of the bytes it used to, the railway and buses are real now, you can chat with your squad from the hub, and as of today every one of these is on by default. No flags, no secret URLs. Just go to /quest and play.

Headline features

• Much faster first load. The game now only waits for what's near your spawn before it lets you play. Trees, far models, animals, cars and buses stream in once you're already walking about. Combined with lighter copies of the heaviest spawn assets, that's 47 MB down to about 12 MB before you can play. In our tests a 4G connection got to playable in 44 seconds instead of 58, and 3G went from several minutes to about two.
• Sheffield Central and the railway. The above-ground station sits north-west of Park Hill, with its own model and lettering. Trains have 1990s carriage interiors, blue moquette and all, with gangways you can walk through between cars. Press E to board, ride, and alight. Villagers use the trains too.
• Buses that behave. The Mainline / Eager Beaver service is live, and today's update teaches buses to steer properly: they brake before bends, go clockwise round roundabouts, give way, and no longer route into closes or dead ends.
• Squad chat in the hub. T or SAY opens the TalkFuse squad chat dock; your mates' lines come back as speech bubbles in the game. Controller and Deck players get a quick-phrase wheel.
• Multiplayer plumbing for members. Relay and room servers are running for logged-in members, with invite links, a presence grid, compact snapshots and smoother interpolation. The shared world now runs traffic and herds off server time so you see the same thing your mates see.

Performance

• Villagers and traffic now run on a fixed simulation tick with interpolated drawing. Crowds move smoothly instead of stuttering with the frame rate.
• A big CPU pass on the main thread: hot flag reads are worked out once per frame, town residency once per chunk, and the walkable-top lookup uses a grid index. Roughly 20% faster frames on my Windows PC, with checks showing the results are identical.
• The terrain height cache was throwing itself away every time a new chunk loaded. It doesn't any more, so walking into fresh ground is a lot cheaper.
• Turned-away ground stays resident for 15 seconds instead of being rebuilt every time you swing the camera (desktop only). On a Mac in Firefox that took turn frames from around 100–130 ms down to 55–65 ms.
• Fewer redundant WebGL calls per frame, ground workers run as a pool, shaders warm up before the first frame, assets fetch straight from the CDN, and rocks and train shadows that you'd never see aren't drawn.
• Audio moved to an AudioWorklet, and the build cache uses OPFS on HTTPS so repeat visits boot faster.

World and transport

• Park Hill's slabs now stand on proper terrain pads with stone-faced banks and footings, and the black flash at the slab end by the Rotherham ramp is fixed.
• The railway's gradients are held to 3% across every line, with cuttings, cover and the perimeter ring all joined up.
• Buses are back to full size with yellow-and-red Eager Beaver livery.
• Ducks and fish now read the exact water surface, so they stop sinking into weirs and banks.

Graphics

• New Graphics > Lighting > Reflections options: on/off, strength 25–150%, quality low/medium/high. Defaults match the old look; drop quality if water is costing you frames.
• Fixed a GPU fault on Apple M-series Macs in Firefox where quick third-person turns killed the GPU process and left the game a flat blue.
• The loading logo is a solid 3D extrusion now, there's one consistent in-game cursor, and the compass defaults to a sensible size with a resize slider.

Fixes

• First-person and close camera underground (Hole in the Road, Blue John) no longer pin to street level.
• Looking up in third person can't push the camera under the terrain any more.
• Feet, rocks and NPCs no longer ride a tiny staircase on banks and verges; heights match the ground mesh.
• Squad chat lines from mates were arriving blank in the game. Fixed.
• Washed-out daylight frames and missing buildings from an over-eager draw-call cache: rolled back and audited.

Safety and accounts

Plain language, because it matters:

• The first time you chat, you tell us your age band. Under-13s don't get chat at all, in the game or in squad threads. Teens get a stricter word filter than adults.
• Chat is plain text only, rate-limited, and you can block or report anyone. Reports go to a moderator queue on TalkFuse.
• Rewards are now checked server-side, so nobody can give themselves coins.
• Crews are in for members. Guests can still play the 15-minute demo without an account.

Known issues

• First load after this update rebuilds your cached terrain once. It'll be slow the first time, then back to normal.
• Some roads are narrower than a bus, so wheels can hang off the tarmac in places, and ambient cars don't yet give way to buses.
• A few very locked-down home or school networks may still struggle to connect squads directly; the room and relay servers cover most of these, and an extra network relay is on its way.
• On very slow (3G) connections the map request can queue behind assets and the boot can fail. We know, it's next.

Coming soon

Shadows in the Blue John caverns, the slow-3G boot fix, wider roads and roundabouts for the buses, trains and wildlife joining the simulation tick, a boot shell that gets the first download under 3 MB of script, and that extra network relay for locked-down connections.

For testers

Every feature can be switched off on its own by adding ?flag=0 to the URL, e.g. ?fqbusdrive=0, ?fqsimtick=0 or ?fqlateassets=0. If something looks wrong, try the flag off, and tell me which one fixed it. Sub-pixel sky motion is opt-in with ?fqsmoothsky=1.

Have a wander, ride the train, catch a bus, and shout in the comments about what you'd like next. Cheers.

— Shane