Changes: Added doors for the new shelf Grass now spawns near the cliffs too
Bugfix: Fixed the water shader Fixed the cooking not working at all
Friday Progress Report 335
This week we have been mostly fixing game breaking bugs in the beta, we apologise for players who had to deal with that mess, the new beta release with the fixes should be up today, a new game will be required because the saves from the previous beta are broken.
While my brother fixed the code I have added a few new pieces of furniture made by Grispinne who sent the models to my brother.
The new furniture require hardwood and are a fancier version of current pieces, the Rustic Stove is the best of the new pieces, it has a built-in oven, as well as the pan and pot.
The fancy Shelf will act as an inventory when we implement containers.
Now that the most gamebreaking issues have been dealt with we will go back to work on wild crops and the new plants (Dandelion, Violet and Cattails).
V0.63.0.9 on beta
Bugfix: Fixed the female character creator
V0.63.0.8 on beta
Bugfix: Fixed the save corruption bug. Old beta saves will still crash
Added 4 new furniture based on models by Grispine
V0.63.0.7 on beta
Bugfix: Fixed issues with the XML reader using stale references.
V0.63.0.6 on BETA
Bugfix: Fixed multiple issues with the XML reader ignoring various types and properties
Changes: Changed the water shader once again. (Work in progress, especially underwater)
Old water vs new water:
Friday Progress Report 334
We are preparing the forage system to accept a variation of player grown crops, but first some optimization is required because the new bamboo are a bit heavier on the memory and GPU than expected.
The wild crops will spawn in large patches and will replace the placeholder berry bushes, blueberries will now be a crop, wild blueberries will only give fruit during autumn.
Wild crops will drop both crops and seeds like cultivated ones do, and we want this to be the main way of getting seeds, so we are nerfing the seed drops from grass by 80%, you no longer get ANY seeds when using he scythe, only with sickle.
About optimization:
From current to first beta: Rewrote the map raycaster into native containers and added spawnables graph changed the city to the new version added grass to the bamboo forest From first beta to current beta: removed unused textures from memory map texture atlas maker code moved to GPU -> removed 10 seconds and 1.8gb ram spike LoadDatabase 6 sec to 3.8 sec
From the current version to our current build
Loading main menu: from 23 to 13 seconds Loading a save: from 44 to 30 seconds GPU memory from 3.6gb to 3.3gb RAM memory from 3.2gb to 2.4gb CPU use reduced by about 30%, but the GPU use was increased by 15% because now the GPU is doing some work that the CPU was doing less efficiently.
We have also added settings options for LOD and shadows for the forage.
V0.63.0.3 on Beta
Performance: Reduced the game memory usage by about 400mb Removed a 8~12 seconds loading that spiked 1.8gb of memory when you open the game
Bugfix: Fixed the normal calculations on the terrain textures
V0.63.0.2 on Beta
Changes: Added more options for aggressive LOD on bamboos and other forageables.
Bugfixes: Fixed the LOD transition for forageables
Friday Progress Report 333
We finally managed to release the beta, it contains the city overhaul (99% done) and the test version of the new forage system applied to bamboo only for now.
Bamboo plants are now destructible awarding the player softwood sticks or planks (placeholder, it will drop bamboo one day, after we make bamboo building pieces), if enough bamboo are destroyed new shoots will grow and slowly turn into adult plants, we keep track of every single bamboo and managed to do so without impacting performance.
We do still need to do some tweaks and change the way the system saves the entities, so this will cause the next version to be save-incompatible with the current beta, so if you start a playthrough now, do so knowing it will not be compatible with the main build update.
Now we are going to add other plants to the system, starting with wild edible weeds, dandelion, violet and cattails, then we will convert our crops to allow them to spawn as wild crops too, these wild crops will drop seeds like a cultivated crop does, because of this we will drastically reduce the random seeds gathered by cutting grass.
This update might look small, but a lot of engine work was required to make it all work, there are still some issues to fix and a lot of polish to make, the full update might take as much as a full month to release.