Road to Crafting: Furnace, Inventory, Conveyor tubes and belts and collector!
This build introduces several features to prepare the addition of crafting to the game: functional cargo, conveyor tube with auto pull and push logic, collector, conveyor belt and finally furnace and ingot smelting.
This update will be release very soon in the experimental branch. Lets dig into the details!
Functional Cargo:
It is now possible to store items inside cargo containers.
Containers can be renamed from their UI.
Player can do transfer of items from the UI to any cargo connected through conveyor tubes.
They have a maximum storage volume capacity, scaling with the cargo size.
Conveyor Tubes:
Straight, angled and 6-way conveyor tubes were added.
Connect inventory block to do automatic or manual transfer.
An indicator light have been added to help visualize what is happening: - Red: no connection - Green: valid connection - Flashing: item being transferred
There is a maximum limit of 6 connections for cargo and other inventory blocks.
The grid scale impact the rate at which items are being transferred, the larger the faster. For simplicity tube do not have a capacity limit, even small tube can transfer large item.
Note that valid connection are green whilst invalid are red.
Push and Pull Logic:
Some inventory blocks are able to push or pull blocks.
The collector will push blocks when set at collect, and pull block when set at expel.
Custom rules will be added to give a finer control of what item can be pushed / pulled.
Collector:
The collector can pull and collect nearby items or can be set to expel its inventory.
The range at which it will pull object is also configurable.
Collector can pull item without being set to collect them, allowing for some cool possibility.
Fun with collectors!
Furnace and Smelting:
A furnace block has been added.
It will pull ore placed close to its entry.
It can bet set to expel crafted ingots to its output, so you can link it will conveyor belts.
Big up to Womble for the 3D model!
A smaller furnace will be added for progression, with limited capability.
Conveyor Belt:
The conveyor belt will carry items placed on top of it.
It can push player or brick entity too.
It uses real physics, so item can fall!
It can be scaled horizontally.
A sloped and angled belt will be added.
There is still a few things to do, for example items of the same type needs to be merged inside inventory, and ore and ingots needs to be stored by mass, allowing for finer crafting rules.
That's it! Stay tune for the full crafting update, and thanks for playing! Francois
[New build - DEFAULT] 22w25b: Hotfixes
This build introduce some physics performance improvements and add collision for the mined ore. A leak has been detected in the latest physics improvement, this can impact FPS in some world. I reverting the change for the time being.
Hotfixes:
#4746 Light issues when deleting a lot of bricks with box delete.
#4729 Fuel capacity wrong after deleting reactor or engine.
Quit to title fixed
Thanks for playing!
Mining and new terrain tech devlog
Check out the latest devlog on mining and the new terrain tech!
Various improvements have been made to the terrain technology.
The mesh creation algorithm has been changed from Marching Cube to Dual Contouring. This allows better and smoother contour, minimizing some artifacts. Furthermore it will allows to create better hard surface sculpting or terrain shape in the future.
Border gaps between LODs have been fixed.
Terrain modification is now saved! Beware though before starting a big project: the save format is likely to be update it the future, so it is highly probable you will loose any mining done.
Mining has been improved to give smoother and wider results.
Some large rocks are now spawned on the terrain.
Shadow flickering is fixed.
Please report any issues, I would now like to push that branch to Default!
Thanks for playing!
[New build - EXPERIMENTAL] 22w21b: Mining
Mining makes its debut! It is still very much work in progress, this update focused mainly on ore spawned while mining.
This update is released is experimental branch for now, as a few people reported some trouble on the previous terrain/asteroid refactor update. You can switch from/to experimental without corrupting blueprint format, but please be aware that the system was reduced in size in the terrain update so your build will appear further from the sun.
Features:
Iron, Gold, Silver and Cobalt ore veins are present on asteroids.
Mining beam added (model, vfx and texture are placeholder). Mining beam will deal less hull DPS but are more efficient to mine terrain.
Ore vein and rock will spawn an ore / rock. Sand wont spawn anything.
Spawned rock/ore will be "sucked" toward the player ship. They will disappear once close to the ship.
Spawned rock/ore are integrated to the rendering and physics tech.
There is still quite some things left to do:
More mining tool
mined terrain will reset when higher LOD are loaded
mined terrain is not yet saved
rate of drop to be tweaked
Still a few issues like hole in terrain to be fixed.
Collector brick will be necessary to collect ore.
item management (container and conveyor) to pick up ore
and of course do stuff with the mined ore!
more optimization will be needed on the physics side to deal will big quantity of floating ore mined.
Finally a question for you: what mining tool you would like to see in the game? I think having beam is necessary as it is the most seamless to use but I open to add drill or else as people might like them too.
A follow-up on the terrain build. Both performance and look have been greatly improved.
New Features:
Terrain computation is much faster (from 30ms jobs to 3-4 ms)
Job scheduling is also smarter. It will be noticeable when flying near terrain.
Terrain loading is also optimized, for reduced FPS impact when moving near terrain.
New textures added for rock, ground and ore.
The new shader uses separate color gradient to prepare for a wider range of asteroids look / biome (for upcoming planet)
Terrain will tesselate up close: the terrain will loom much higher resolution. It helps massively especially for rocks.
Iron ore vein are being spawned.
Terrain shadow added
Known issues:
A lot of shadow artifact when new LOD are being loaded.
A few issues with the border between different LOD. The current tech is not working well with tesselation, so it will be changed.
Thanks for playing!
[New build - EXPERIMENTAL] 22w19a: New Terrain and Asteroids
The asteroid technology has been completely overhauled thanks a brand new planetary terrain technology. This terrain tech will be extended to Space Habitat and planets in upcoming updates.
It is a massive update as so many tech behind the scene has to be implemented or improved to deal with the amount of asteroids drawn. Beside the new features the new terrain/asteroids use a different approach: it is way more generic and also leverage fully on other tech instead of being completely bespoke. It was quite tricky to pull off as it stresses and push to the limit so many area of the game technology which had to be improved. In the end it is a great thing as this will benefit other sections of the game beside terrain!
=> Please note that the system size has been reduced, so any player entities will unfortunately have to be repositioned if necessary.
New Terrain Technology:
Feature LOD: as you move closer finer detailed terrain patches will fade-in.
Terrain deformation: You can deform the terrain with weapons (for now, a proper mining feature will be introduced later)
Fully integrated with the existing brick entity rendering technology, which means GPU culling and minimum CPU impact.
Fully integrated with the existing physics technology, can be multi-thread for minimum CPU impact.
Texture and terrain shape are very much wip and will be improved in a later update.
Still a bit laggy if you zoom in fast onto terrain. It was already heavily optimized but still needs more work.
Asteroid Technology:
Asteroids are now visible from much further away, the transition between sprite and actual geometry being much smoother and believable.
Flying close the asteroid impact FPS much less compared to before (computations are multi-threaded)
A few much larger asteroid are being spawned (several km wide)
Generic asteroids (the smaller one, which are from a set of precomputed) also have a two levels LOD (on top of the builtin terrain LODs)
Current asteroid are gray rock but will be more varied in the future, and the icy ones will also come back.
Other Improvements:
Culling data was optimized, resulting in less memory allocated on the GPU (saving 100mb ++) and less hiccup
Culling data transfer to GPU improved, resulting in less hiccup during ship loading or warping.
Transform data transfer to GPU was optimized, with expensive TRS matrix computations done on a Compute Shader, which reduce CPU load
World physics query was also improved, which reduce CPU load when many entity are scattered through the world.
Particle Data CPU cost improved.
Next up, proper mining!
Mining and new Planetary Technology preview
Let's dig into the work done of the upcoming terrain technology!
The new terrain will:
unify asteroids, space habitat and planets under the same tech
be fully deformable, which means mining and terrain sculpting to make ground bases.
be integrated into the brick entity rendering system for better performance (GPU culling and batching for the tech savvy)
be integrated to the collision system too, for better performance.
At first this new tech will replace the current asteroids, introducing mining. Then a bit later it will replace the current space habitats terrain, while planets will take a bit longer to be introduced as they require more work to generate good looking and varied terrain.
New Asteroids: The new asteroids will be more varied and will features several ore to be mined. Some larger big asteroids are also spawn on top of the usual field of asteroids.
Here is a preview of mining (just terrain deforming for now, I will add vfx and better mining experience). I havent spent much time on the look for things for now and have instead focused on the technology, so no worry it will look much better! .
The technology uses an octree: an asteroid (and later a planet or habitat) first render a single chunk of geometry at a low resolution. Once the player gets closer that chunks gets subdivided into 8 smaller chunks of half the size. This continue as the player gets closer up until the minimum size of 1m per voxel has been reached. Several challenges arise, like how to stich the gap between the geometry of two chunks at a different resolutions. You also needs to deal with the transition and blend between the geometry of the two resolutions when a node gets subdivided.
You can see the whole thing in action here. Please not how the geometry gets subdivided as you get closer:
Tech wise it has been very challenging as several systems are now dealing with tens of thousands entities rather than a few thousands like before. It is a good news for the long term as it will also improve performance overall and allow ships with many many children entities / doors to run better.
Stay tuned, and thanks for supporting the game! Francois
