* The disaster, flower and ice age scenarios are now accessible again * Fixed an important (and hopefully the only) reason for plant and algae multiplication glitches * The alga evolution tree now works * Fixed the 'choose color of existing species' button when there were algae in the world
Small
* Fixed incorrect season UI after (1) saving and loading, (2) coming back from an editor * Fixed incorrect soil colors after (1) saving and loading, (2) coming back from an editor, (3) showing the same season a second time * Fixed having a mouth on both sides of the body; the procedural animation incorrectly moved both mouths to the same side * Putting a bodypart in an impossible place (like a land leg on the back) no longer creates an invisible but blocking bodypart there * When zooming in on algae, they now show the correct age * Organism age is now also stored in the save file * Fixed scenario objectives not being checked after loading a savegame * Fixed various error messages generated after clicking the 'choose color of existing species' button * Using the eraser no longer shows white balls * Fixed stats and accessibility for edge tiles in the beach level * Esc menu now closes all other views * Renamed Esc menu items to 'Quit to menu' and 'Quit to desktop'
Many thanks to the numerous players who submitted bug reports for the first beta build!
'Sea & sandbox' update and price increase in September
Over the last few weeks, a new devlog series was released on the The Sapling Youtube channel, showcasing the upcoming 'Sea & Sandbox' update. It will include, among many other things, a planet editor, a season editor, algae and underwater animals. The first video of the devlog series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3iQw2WYvwE
The last and most popular video of the devlog series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psqkZBXaitk
This new 'Sea & Sandbox' will be available for everybody on September 13. If you don't mind glitches and crashes, you will also be able to play experimental builds from August 16 onwards by opting into the beta in your Steam settings. The end of every devlog video shows you how to do that.
Furthermore, a heads-up: most players indicate the current price of the game is a bit on the cheap side, so September 13 will also see a $2 price increase... so if you already know you want to buy the game, you might want to do it now.
Patch v9.40
* Added arrow keys as an alternative for scrolling in the editors * Fixed an impossible animal: animals with both primitive legs (the first two, without knees) and normal ones made the procedural walking animations glitch * Prevented an impossible animal: with random mutations turned on, an animal could emerge that was longer than the procedural texture system could handle * Fixed an impossible plant: the object smoothing algorithm can now handle really long thin branches * Fixed a crash related to the number of species that sometimes showed up in the ice age scenario
Many thanks to Skully, Dessert, Tim, Kåre and Pizmat, who all sent crash reports and save files to help discover the problems fixed above.
Patch 9.38
* Made the time jump dynamic: the player can now choose how many years to skip! * Polished the walking system, which should drastically decrease the amount of animals floating or sinking in the floor * Revised the memory overload prevention: automatic level reload every 2000 years (and time speed continues after reload) * Fixed another group of 'impossible animals', related to eye positioning, that made the game glitch * Fixed a bug where all animations suddenly stop after a few years of playing * Fixed randomly appearing infrequent crash when animal animations were reset (as preparation for the next animation) * Fixed randomly appearing infrequent crash when a new animal was created * Fixed a lot of warnings that appeared in the log files, so that the errors become easier to spot
Patch 9.37
* Added option to skip the intro, shown once you beat the first level * Fixed cleaning of the 3D model pool, so the RAM no longer fills up so quickly * Added much more aggressive cleaning of the 3D model cache of earlier created models, to save even more RAM * Refactored the code that specializes generic animations to individual models to be ~100x faster, increasing FPS in situations with a lot of animals and random mutations turned on * Fixed an 'impossible animal', discovered by player GeneralLDS, that could be created by putting a mouth at the end and then making the body longer * Moved the cache of earlier created models much further upwards, so it's no longer possible for players to accidentally see it * Fixed incorrect 'will survive' message in the editor with large plants * Fixed bug so you can no longer increase soil values above the maximum value * Fixed crash in the species list view when accidentally clicking the invisible 'next' button on the last page * Added better logs so the plant multiplication bug can hopefully be fixed in the future
