Solace Crafting
Beta v 1.0.0.11
Recently I updated the networking solution that I use, Mirror, to its latest version and there were some slight changes to the architecture that has required a few components be updated. Several of these issues are related to that, and there are a couple more multiplayer specific issues that I am still looking into, outside of the general bug reports on the bug tracker which we are trying to whittle away at.
v 1.0.0.11 2022.10.17
- Fixed weapon targeting not working at times
- Fixed an issue with terraforming collision detection
- Fixed a problem with tombstones duplicating
- Fixed a bug with Charge and Jump Back
- Fixed an animation error with passive animals
- Fixed a bug with the new Mirror stopping resources from syncing properly after harvest
- Fixed auto-harvest not working with the new Mirror
- Fixed being able to loot while dead
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Join us in Discord!
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
Quick development update
I just wanted to give a quick update as it's been a bit since the last update / patch.
As previously stated we're trying to focus on bug fixes and overall game engine improvements at the moment, but, for a fair amount of things, simply patching up whatever the problem isn't always the best approach. Sometimes the reason there are bugs with a system is because the foundations of the system itself were not written very intelligently in the first place.
These kinds of things are 100% my fault, as I've made clear, I never really wanted to be a programmer, but that was 90% of what the game needed to get everything working, so there is some undesirable code and some less than perfectly designed systems in-game. Since we now have a more experienced programmer helping out, he is reworking some of these systems at a more "root" level rather than just putting duct tape over the holes.
The first thing that I actually had him look at had to do with "area" generation, which is what spawns resources, monsters, and so forth. Any changes to these kinds of systems affects saved games to the point that they need to be restarted or "updated" which repositions player built objects. There are some other changes to spawning underway, so rather than having beta players need to wipe or update repeatedly in a short period of time, I'm looking to group a couple of things together into one larger patch.
Beyond that, I've hired on a second developer part-time, primarily to look into performance optimizations for the time being. A third developer is due to join us shortly for reworking the character controller. And a friend of a friend is exploring some ideas for redesigning and redrawing the user interface.
So, nothing has necessarily happened overnight, but there is a lot going on! Hopefully before the Winter sale starts up we can get a few larger waves of patches up. To be honest, personally I've spent quite a bit of time this week getting my life back in order. I got my car fixed, paid off a bunch of lingering bills I had, etc.
More to come soon!
New hire & new beta
I am still negotiating with a few other developers for other tasks, likely more short term, but this has brought up a lot of important new things for me to work on to make sure that our team can work together efficiently, how every many are working on the game at any given point, now that it's no longer a solo endeavor.
I am very much having us focus on bug fixes and performance for the foreseeable future. We want to make sure this ship is running as smooth as possible before we get back into expanding on both current systems and new.
I've also finished upgrading Mirror, the network solution that Solace Crafting uses, to the latest and greatest version. There were some bumps in a couple of beta patches over the past few days, but I think I've got everything sorted out.
More news to come shortly!
The latest beta patch notes are as follows:
v 1.0.0.9 2022.10.04
- Fixed static network objects not always positioning properly on clients past 8192m
v 1.0.0.8 2022.10.03
- Upgraded Mirror (network solution)
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Join us in Discord!
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
Beta v 1.0.0.7
Until then. the following fixes will be upped to beta first for safe testing before being pushed to the live build depots:
v 1.0.0.7 2022.09.21
- Added guardian gauntlets recipe
- Fixed guardian leggings not rendering properly
- Fixed being able to save a solace placed using free placement mode into a structure save
- Fixed weather turning on in caves sometimes
- Fixed character creation assigned skill points not properly increasing skill tree spent point count
- Fixed character creation assigned attributes not properly assigning
- Fixed harmless render texture error spam on dedicated servers and a couple other harmless start up errors
- Fixed bought attributes not always applying properly until reconnecting
- Fixed some types of weapon speed improvements reducing their "base speed," upsetting damage math
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Join us in Discord!
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
Developer update + survey results
1. What's been going on
2. The money situation
3. Talking about hiring on freelancers
4. The survey results
5. My long term vision of Solace Crafting
1.
To summarize, I've been swamped with all of the contacts coming in, alongside working on getting the project more ready to welcome onboard other developers. It's a 50+GB project folder full of thousands of assets that I know how to navigate because I've been working with them every day for the past 5 years, but I want to get things better organized to ease the onboarding process I'm planning to get into at the start of next month.
2.
As previously talked about the initial sales boost is in large generated by a "visibility round" wherein Steam boosts the games exposure so that a lot more people than would normally are recommended to look at the game. That ended on something like Sept 1st, so there was the possibility that sales would go back to pre-1.0, which case I would need to be more careful in my spending. Thankfully these past two weeks of post-1.0 sales have not reverted to pre-1.0 numbers, so I'm more confident in planning how to spend my earnings to improve the game.
3.
There are four different developers I am looking to pay in some capacity once the August sales make it to me at the end of the month. One is a girl I've paid in the past to do building pieces for me, and another is our audio team. These both are not necessarily hourly or "part-time" positions, but more milestone payments where I ask for a package of things like a package of desert theme building skins, or harpy combat sounds, for example. The other two are more part-time positions focused on revamping the in-game user interface, and converting the current targeting/combat system to a click to target system similar to games like Everquest or World of Warcraft. This will both better allow for grouping and being able to click on other players to heal, buff, or interact with them, as well as remove the need to aim fireballs and arrows, while adding in things like channeling abilities and spell cast times.
4.
There were somewhere around 350 response to public survey, with a fair amount of text based comments and remarks, but here are the number based responses:
This graph shows that for the most part everyone voted towards "this does not bother me". The higher the number the more "bothered" people were, with combat AI, animations, and the UI being the least liked.
I was a little surprised that audio was voted as not bothering people, and that achievements weren't better received. There are some bugs with the current achievements systems, one big one showing a ton of achievements as just all giving "wisdom 0.2" when they actually give a wide variety of stat bonuses, that I have fixed, though not patched in yet. But all in all I personally agree with the bulk of the answers.
5.
In the video I go into some depth as to how I want the game to evolve to better support some of the survey results, and how some of the systems already in-game have been designed from day one specifically to support exploration, area based quests, NPC villages, and to add more practical uses to the long range viewing distance we have rather than just looking neat. Tough to summarize twenty minutes of me talking into a few paragraphs, but I'll try.
Currently the world of Solace Crafting generates in 8km squared "chunks," which are divided into 64 "sections" or terrains, each 1km squared themselves. Each chunk, for example, can contain only 1 floating island, then each remaining 63 sections that do not have a floating island then roll to determine what type of a "large encounter" they have. So there is only ever one cave or dungeons per square kilometer. This is a flow of logic that the generation engine goes through to make sure that encounters are properly placed throughout the world.
In the future I would like to further expand on those systems to generate an NPC town per chunk, and to have that town aware of the other encounters within the same chunk, and build stories and offer quests and rewards for engaging in those encounters.
One of The main thing I am interested in exploring further is a quest system that in large does away with the:
- get a quest from a quest hub (city)
- walk to some distant location to kill 8 monsters
- walk back to the quest hub
- rinse repeat
This is still a widely used system, especially in RPGs and MMORPGs, and is in my opinion just terrible, and really ends up making otherwise great games a chore to play. I think for example, NPC villages that offer quests should have a public solace within them that players can teleport back to, maybe even with a spell specifically for NPC villages only.
The quest hub, story building system has a lot of good that can come out of it as long as it doesn't turn into a walkathon, but a superior and generally more fun system of questing that I want to implement is an area based quest generation system. In the video I use the example of walking into a swamp and having a quest notification popup that "you hear a scream to the northwest." You don't need to "pickup" the quest, and you don't need to engage in it if you don't want to, it just exists in that area, and can be engaged with if you choose to. Maybe killing a skeleton in a graveyard drops a ring that starts a quest, or you come across a broken shrine that starts a quest, etc. Things that don't ask you to walk somewhere else to engage with them, but start and finish relatively where you are.
I think it will be entirely possible to support these types of area based quests with an area specific section of the journal, and by allowing players to interact with map "sections" by clicking on them to show if there are quests that they encountered and either finished or are maybe still available to them.
I think there are a lot of unexplored possibilities for making "questing" more fluid and exploration based than the plain old "go get this for me" stuff, and I think can open up a lot of opportunities for modders to get involved in designing more fun content in the future.
I also think having crafting and harvesting quests, class specific quests, and a lot of other "unlock" content can really add to giving players more options of what to do with some minimum level of guidance, without railroading players down a main story quest or predetermined path.
Anyway, check out the video if you'd like to hear more about me rambling about that kind of stuff. I'm sorry I haven't actually been engaging a ton in "game development" these past two weeks. I'm trying to dedicate the majority of this week to bug fixes, and probably half and half next week between bug fixes and again getting ready for onboarding more help.
It still feels like mid-summer over here, but the nights are starting to cool down, hopefully I can get out and repair my once accessible yard from it's current jungle status.
Happy gaming!
Back home + survey closing
I also wanted to remind everyone that I will be closing the short survey that has been live throughout August via this link:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HVRZBLP
I will leave it up for another 24 hours then take it down and gather the data into a spreadsheet to share with everyone.
Thank you again to everyone that has joined us this past month, and I will have more to report again soon!
Summer Break
I'm so appreciative for all the friendly messages people are sending me in Discord and on YouTube, etc. It seems that the majority of gamers are well aware of the fact that games don't get made overnight, and really we all just want to play fun games. I've been very anxious about bringing my game out into the open from day one, so it's very invigorating to see all of the positive reactions.
As I stated recently, I don't actually get to see any of the revenue that is coming in right now until the end of September, and from there it will take a bit to onboard some assistance, but it's looking very probable that I will be able to safely go down that route! Next month will be interesting as the current visibility boost going on on Steam will wear off and sales will revert back to normal organic visibility. If September sales are enough to cover my basic needs I can likely consider the bulk of earnings from August as fuel to improve the game to the next stage.
In other news, I am leaving in 30 minutes to get on a train towards Narita Airport to visit my family in Seattle. I do this every August, and was lucky enough to get support from my family to help pay for tickets this year, because I was broke! Because of this I have held off from patching anything in this past weekend, as change is always dangerous and I am not going to be able to make any corrections while I'm not at home. I hope the recent multiplayer improvements have smoothed some of the larger problems out, but am aware there is still a lot to be done.
I've got about 25 hours of travel ahead of me, and notebooks to plan out the next few months with. I will likely not be able to keep up with all the e-mails, messages, and chat that is going on right now while I am gone, but will be back shortly and ready to program!
Best wishes to everyone in the ongoing heat!
The most recent patch also went down silently through discord discussions and brought in the following changes:
v 1.0.0.6 2022.08.12
- Added to the console for listing admin commands
- Added /kick, /kickall, and /reloadworld admin commands
- Added console command report backs to admins issuing commands to the server
- Added the command line argument: -uselocalfolder to change all file and folder access to the application folder
- Defeating monsters, monoliths, and animals will now give light and experience to all players within 50m
- Further improved world generation speeds on dedicated servers
- Added a method to check the current status of world generation on a dedicated server
Join us in Discord!
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
Hotfix v1.0.0.5
I do plan to have another patch later today (later today for me is the middle of the night for most people, still mid-morning atm) with more multiplayer server speed upgrades as that seems to still be a problem for people playing on servers with more than 4-5 people. Was trying to focus on multi-lingual stuff, but I'm sure this is annoying for people that are running into it.
I'm also going to be adding in some "devops" to try and gather better data on if the official server (7 people on it right now) is indeed getting it's terrain generation queue backed up.
v 1.0.0.5 2022.08.11
- Fixed some spelling errors
- Fixed the two newest shields facing backwards
- Fixed the offhand weapon positioning being rotated improperly
- Fixed the brutal sword being rotated improperly
- Fixed a number of hair types not responding to color changes
- Fixed the world terrain preview being too dark
- Fixed stuns slowing down damage over time spells
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
Join us in Discord!
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
v1.0.0.4 now live
1.0.0.3 brings in improvements to server world generation speeds, so hopefully we will see a drop in what people are labeling as "desync" where again when you run around on a multiplayer server with several other people and monsters seems to not spawn or resources don't seem to interact properly.
I've also fixed a number of more annoying multiplayer bugs that people were running into. More to come tomorrow o/
v 1.0.0.4 2022.08.09
- Fixed skill points spent not always updating properly in multiplayer
- Fixed some multiplayer achievement errors
- Fixed familiar not spawning nor firing in multiplayer
- Fixed chain lightning lingering for multiplayer clients
- Fixed backstab criticals multiplying way too much
v 1.0.0.3 2022.08.08
- Improved multi-player dedicated server world generation speeds
- Enabled password protection for servers
- Upgraded quest system to work in multiplayer
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
Beta v1.0.0.3
One major problem I've seen a few people run into so far is a lack of enemies in multiplayer. This is caused by the server not keeping up with the connected players. If, for example, there are 6 players all running in different areas of the world, the server has to be constantly generating all of those areas in order for the player to be able to engage with anything as everything is server authorative. There is still a lot of room for improvement on this front, but I've tweaked a few server specific methods that should speed things up.
The starter quests/tutorials not working in multiplayer has also been a problem for families and friends that start their very first character in multiplayer. This patch upgrades the system to work properly in multiplayer.
As there are some bigger than small changes in this patch I will push it to beta for a bit of testing before I push it to the default live branch, but expect to push it over tomorrow assuming there aren't any serious problems.
v 1.0.0.3 2022.08.08
- Improved multi-player dedicated server world generation speeds
- Enabled password protection for servers
- Upgraded quest system to work in multiplayer
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Join us in Discord!
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Check out the bug / suggestion tracker