Update 0.117/0.120
Last Friday I released an update that changed a couple of things. Firstly it added a Telescope to the game allowing you to zoom in and identify your foes and friendlies at a distance. It's also pretty useful for spotting ore.
One of the core issues people have been having is the fact that trees don't grow back. So areas around spawns on server's were speedily becoming giant treeless wastelands. No longer! Trees, grass and 'cut grass' will now grow back. I'm still trying to balance the speed so you may see speed ups/slow downs in the future for the growth. In addition to that I've also added the swaying leaves back to trees after some re-implementation.
Steering has been completely revised for ships and now works a bit differently. A lot of people had a lot of suggestions about how to improve it, so I took a lot of them on board and the new system is much better all round because of it. Pressing Forward(default:w) and Backward(default:s) will now steadily increase and decrease your speed. This allows you to match speeds with ships where as before it was essentially full speed only. You can now brake, by pressing left shift(default). This will be bring you to a stop whether you are going forward or backward. You can no longer travel full speed backwards, it is limited to 25% of your max speed. Turning has been limited based on the overall mass of your ship. This means that larger ships will turn much slower than smaller ships. Giving smaller ships an advantage in maneuverability. Travelling vertically has also been reworked to be 10% of your max speed, this be raised significantly based on the reaction of players.
The rest of the changes were mainly performance and small visual changes and you can check them out below at the very bottom of this post.
For those experiencing the chunk corruption problem on their servers. Rejoice! I've fixed it for next Friday's update. We've been testing the patch for it, for a couple of days now on the Official server and it's not occurred at all. This marks the last show stopping bug to be fixed that I know about!
Livestream
Tommorrow(Wednesday 10th July) I'll be on Prescription Pixel's livestream talking about my game and answering questions. They'll be a bunch of YouTuber's and other developers on there so come check it out. She's doing a livestream every day this week with new developers talking about their games and some pretty big YouTuber's you may know. If that sounds like something you'd like, be sure to check out all the streams this week. They'll be lots of cool game developers and games! You'll be able to find the stream here. I'll be on around 10-11pm GMT.
Change Log
Client Changelog 0.117
Features/Gameplay
- Disconnecting from the server now takes you back to the server lobby.
- Skins are now downloaded asynchronously and do not cause stutters for slower connections.
- Added plank steps.
- Added Copper Telescope.
- Energy well core now rotates faster when travelling at higher speeds.
- Grass now grows back if it has surrounding blocks of grass. No more wasteland islands!
- Tall grass also has a chance to grow on newly grown grass blocks which is higher than normal generation.
- You can now grow trees by placing a Log block on either grass or dirt.
- Grass will also now die if it has a block on top of it and turn to dirt.
- Trees and grass will only grow during the day.
- Ship speed is now only shown to 1 decimal place.
- Steering has been revised for ships. Using forward and backward keys(W, S default) will increase speed up and down, it will stay at the speed while you are driving. Pressing Left Shift(default) will cause the ship to brake. You can now only reverse at 25% of your max speed. Turning speed is now based on the overall mass of the ship, this may be altered in the future when blocks are weighted. Vertical speed is now 10% of Max Speed.
- Tree sway has been re-enabled and fixed.
- Low level cloud layer is now thicker.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed the top of blocks having the wrong way round textures and emissive in some cases(such as the Reset Block).
- Fixed a bug where it was possible to disable options menu.
- Fixed disconnection not taking you out of game state.
- Fixed the ‘3 block high' requirement bug for Control Panels. They can now be mounted in 2 block spaces.
- Fixed being able to open options with chat open.
- Fixed Edge Mode sometimes not working on certain rotations with ships.
- Fixed a bug where exiting options would not accept movement key presses.
Server Changelog 0.120
Features/Changes
- Added experimental virtual file system for island chunks. With this enabled island chunks are loaded into memory at startup in their compressed forms and then accessed from it rather than the harddrive which is a major bottleneck on busy servers. The downside to this is the server startup time, loading a large map can take about 60 seconds. Storing all these files in memory is also an issue. However the memory use is pretty low. For a 8k map it is roughly 80mb+tiny overhead.
- Changed ship updates to 20 times a second, previously 30.
- Chunk cache has been disabled to prevent bugs it was causing. The new virtual file system takes its place for most functionality anyway.
- Much of the servers objects have been changed to update at 24 frames per second. To reduce wasted CPU time for no noticeable difference.
- Server no longer pushes you upwards while in a unloaded area.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed ship spawns getting their ID's reset.
- Fixed spawns not always being loaded correctly.
- Fixed an issue where items and cannon balls could sometimes go through walls. Specifically happened a lot on Machine Sphere.
- Fixed an issue where cannon balls did a smaller area of damage than intended.
- Fixed an issue where special blocks placed on the edge of a chunk, which would create a new chunk would receive their special data.
