Owlbear Rodeo 2.3 is here with many great changes. By far the biggest change is our new rendering engine we’re calling Warp Core. With Warp Core you can expect great performance increases, better cross-platform compatibility and beautiful visuals.

Larger Map Support

Warp Core uses a new tiled renderer for large maps and images. This approach allows quicker loading and better performance for larger images.

To showcase what’s possible with this new approach below is the Ancora Bay map by Borough Bound which is a gigantic 137 megapixel map being rendered on a phone.

In version 2.2 this map would fail to load but now we can not only load it but also zoom in without a hiccup.

All our users get the performance benefits of the new tiling system but for our Bestling users we will also be increasing both the image file size limit to 50MB and the resolution limit to 144 megapixels to take advantage of this new system.

For a further breakdown of this feature see the blog post below:

144 Megapixel Map Support - 2.3 Launch Week - Day 1

In day 1 of Owlbear Rodeo 2.3 launch week we explore how we’ve majorly improved our rendering for large maps and images.

Owlbear RodeoMitch McCaffrey

Larger Scene Support

Warp Core makes use of a new spatial index to allow larger Scenes to be rendered without slowing down. We also make heavy use of instancing to keep memory usage low.

Below is a Scene with over 100 animated dragons but still only using 130MB of CPU memory and 64MB of GPU memory.

In our preliminary benchmarks Warp Core is from 50-80% faster to render Scenes with large numbers of drawings.

For a further breakdown of this feature see the blog post below:

Optimising Large Scenes - 2.3 Launch Week - Day 2

In day 2 of Owlbear Rodeo 2.3 launch week we explore how we can now support much larger Scenes.

Owlbear RodeoMitch McCaffrey

Realtime Dynamic Fog

Warp Core has built in dynamic fog primitives that allow rendering dynamic fog on the GPU. These allow developers to build dynamic fog extensions that are blazing fast.

Below is a demo of the new dynamic fog rendering with soft shadows and feathered edges so the fog can blend beautifully into the world.

To showcase this new feature we built a new first party extension called Dynamic Fog that offers a super simple interface to create walls and lights.

As with all our extensions the Dynamic Fog extension is available as open source and is free to all our users.

Alongside this we’ve also worked with the developers of the Smoke & Spectre! extension to add support for the new dynamic fog engine in their extension.

For a further breakdown of this feature and a demo of the new extension see the blog post below:

Realtime Dynamic Fog - 2.3 Launch Week - Day 3

In day 3 of Owlbear Rodeo 2.3 launch week we explore the new dynamic fog options.

Owlbear RodeoMitch McCaffrey

GPU Effects

To compliment our support for animated maps Warp Core offers developers options for beautiful realtime effects.

With an Effect an extension can program directly into the Warp Core pipeline using a GPU shader.

To show off this new feature we’ve built another first party extension called Weather.

With the Weather extension you can choose from six different weather conditions. Since these are all being procedurally generated we offer a range of customisation for you to match exactly the feel of your encounter.

Below we modify the wind speed and cover to dramatically change how the encounter feels.

With these settings the Weather extension has upwards of 600 different visual options which would be impossible to support if we were simply overlaying a transparent video over the canvas.

For a further breakdown of this feature and a demo of the new extension see the blog post below:

GPU Effects - 2.3 Launch Week - Day 4

In day 4 of Owlbear Rodeo 2.3 launch week we explore the new GPU effect options.

Owlbear RodeoMitch McCaffrey

Reworked Drawing Editors

With Warp Core we have taken the time to rebuild all the editors for Shapes and Paths.

For Shapes we have a new bounding box editor that allows resizing from corners as well as edges. You can also now use the Alt/Shift modifiers to control how the bound resize works.

For Paths we now support the full assortment of edit/delete options for all points.

This includes adding new points by clicking on the outline of the Path and deleting points with a double click. We now also support adding curved sections by holding down the Alt key while dragging on a line. You can even split the quadratic curves created to get full control over the Bézier control points.

Below is a demo of this new Path editor.

Other Changes

Image Alignment Menu Improvements

The image alignment toolbar has a new visual and lock button that allows you to control whether you can control each axis independently.

Text Rendering Improvements

Warp Core has a completely new rich text engine so we’ve gone back and added support for some things that were broken in the previous text engine. This includes new support for underlined text and support for text alignment controls for developers. We’ve also changed some fonts and renamed them in the UI to better match their intention.

Faster Image Loading

We now store images closer to each user so that images that aren’t cached will take less time to load.

Better Ruler Visuals

The text on the Ruler item will now scale with the viewport so it will be more visible when zoomed out.

Viewport Inertia

Navigating the viewport should be more fun as there is now inertia when you let go of the mouse.

New Default Fog Color

To better show off the new dynamic fog rendering the default fog color has been changed to a darker midnight color. You can now also change the fog color before creating a new Scene.

What’s Next

Warp Core marks one of the largest efforts we’ve undertaken here and we believe we’re finally able to deliver on our vision to offer the most performant web based VTT. But we still have so many things planned for the near and distant future. For the immediate future we have some updates to our networking to make everything more stable. We also have some small quality of life improvements planned that didn’t make it into this release. This should take us until the end of the year but we have many things planned for 2025 and beyond so stay tuned!