Hello Creators.
It’s that time of the month again, everyone! There’s a patch in the waiting room and it’s ready to be downloaded from your client at the earliest convenience. It’s been a productive month for us, and we’ve accomplished a lot. We’re constantly working on new content and performance optimizations (as well as those pesky bugs), and we always aim to deliver our best at all times. Your support makes it all possible, so thank you again to everyone who has joined the ranks of the early adopters, both new and old. We’ll ensure that you always receive special treatment in both The Universim and all future projects to come. Please continue to leave us your feedback on the forums, it’s always super useful. Now, go download Carter (that’s the name of the patch), you wonderful people.
BUG FIXES
- Fixed an issue with birds not behaving as intended.
- UI confirmation dialogs now prevent any other interaction with the game (no more awkwardness with confirmation pop-ups).
- Clicking on a UI panel behind another panel will now bring the selected panel to the front.
- Better Nugget clothing mechanics. Nuggets will now wear their unique outfits. Fixed an issue with snow textures near to water edges.
NEW CONTENT
- Gatherer’s Huts/Distribution Centres for keeping all your piles and piles of stuff sorted.
- Mating panel is enhanced. The automatic mating toggle is now ON by default.
- Added more immersion to the building process. The construction site is now marked by nice fence and the ground is cleared from grass. When Nuggets begin building, Stone Age scaffolds are constructed and the building process starts.
- Building process updated with new animations. Now, with each hit of the hammer, you’ll see how the construction is progressing, step by step, stone by stone. When the building is completed, the scaffolds will be disassembled and Nuggets will celebrate. Don’t forget to repair! Your buildings will collapse as soon as they hit 0 HP.
- Distribution Center implemented.
- Wood Stash implemented.
- Food Stash implemented.
- Stone Stash implemented.
- New Courier class for the Gatherer’s Hut/Distribution Centres: When a Nugget wants resources from storage areas, they will go to the Distribution Centre and request resources from a Courier. The Courier will collect the requested items and bring them back to the waiting Nugget.
- When they have some time to spare, Couriers will go out in search of resources that have been left around and bring them back to the stashes.
- Couriers move faster (+0.3) than normal Nuggets, and can carry a lot more as well. (+15)
UI/UX DESIGN
- Main UI: added animations to buttons.
- Priorities panel tooltips added.
- Mating Panel: auto mating button upgraded.
- New warnings when attempting to place buildings without a Constructor’s Hut.
- Added Gatherer's Hut and Distribution Center UI panels.
- Added water consumption to main UI (coming soon!).
- The Priorities Panel has new button animations.
- Construction menu and building construction cloud visuals upgraded.
- Main UI LED color change.
- Linked the “Years” display in the Seasons Panel to the rate at which Nuggets age, so that each year shown in the worker ID card relates to one year in the main UI.
BALANCE CHANGES
Builders will no longer help constructors. They will only focus on building Constructor’s Huts and stone huts.
Stockpiling, Agriculture, and Clothing research are now completed up front.
Research Panel has been disabled temporarily.
- Nugget Changes
- Hunger Recovery Per Tick: 0.02 to 0.01
- Child Growing Time Min: from 180 to 120
- Child Growing Time Max: from 320 to 240 Min
- Reproduction time in hut, from: 25 to 15 Max
- Reproduction time in hut, from: 35 to 20
- Nuggets Carry Capacity: from 3 to 5
- Idle Stamina Decrease when Idle: from -0.1 to -0.05
- Added Variation to when Nuggets go rest: +-15%
- Added Variation to when Nuggets go eat: +- 5%
- Max Gatherers Per Resource: from 1 to 2
- Building Damage Per Tick: 0.05
- Building Repair Level Condition: 0.5
- Resource Changes
- Tree Pine Wood Points: from 5 to 10 with Health 60
- Tree Broadleaf Wood Points: from 5 to 10 with Health 60
- Tree Broadleaf Wood Points: from 5 to 10 with Health 60
- Tree Dead Tree Health: 10
- Tree Palm Wood Points: from 5 to 3 with Health 40
- Tree Tall Cactus Wood Points: from 0 to 10 with Health 80
- Tree Medium Cactus Wood Points: from 0 to 5 with Health 60
- Tree Small Cactus Wood Points: from 0 to 3 with Health 40
- Rock Small: Health 30
- Rock Medium Stone Points: from 7 to 10 with Health 40
- Rock Large Stone Points: from 7 to 15 with Health 80
- Buildings Statistics
- Stone Hut Max Health: 250. Requirements: Wood 5, Stone 10
- Farm Max Health: 100. Requirements: Wood 15, Stone 20
- Distribution Center requirements: Wood 10 Stone 15
- Construction Hut requirements: Wood 10 Stone 15
- Stash Stone Resource requirements: Wood 10, Stone 10
- Stash Food requirements: Wood 10, Stone 10
- Stash Wood requirements: Wood 10, Stone 10
PERFOMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- Significant rewrite of AI for both game and developer performance.
- Significant rewrite of Resource Storage systems for both game and developer performance.
- Significant performance improvements due to a custom object culling system. The terrain is split into chunks, and the objects are combined per chunk, so that only the visible chunks are rendered. This leads to just under half the planet being hidden at any point, saving a bunch of unnecessary computing.
MISCELLANEOUS
- Fixed Nugget Thumbnails: previously, only Adahy and Elu had correct thumbnails, with the rest being cut off. Also made their lighting much more consistent.
ART ASSETS
- New Pine Trees
- New Water shader
- Now Water covered with ice if temperature below -3c
- Increased snowflake quantity
- Tweaked Nugget hair colors and clothing colors
- Ambient lighting tweaked
- Daylight tweaks Night light tweaks (nights are now darker).
- Grass texture color tweaked
AUDIO
- Building Construction Fixes
- New Buildings construction & repair sounds
- Music tracks now fade in and out rather than abruptly cutting from one to the next.
Mini Blog from the Art Department
New Water Update
Hello my name is Bradley McNinch,
I have been working for Crytivo Games for a little over a year now and am currently filling the role as the technical art director. Lucas Norr is one of the main wizards when it comes to performing technically-daunting tasks that I can’t figure out or perform myself, so I would like to show recognition for his main role in taking time from the dev dept to come over and help the art team.
In this mini blog, I will go over the update to the water shader we have implemented in this patch. The very first version of the water was pretty generic water shader that was snagged from the Unity Asset store. That shader was modified to triplanarprojection onto a sphere primitive that lays below the surface of the planet to give the false depiction of oceans and small bodies of water. For those who don't know what triplanar projection is, it is something we do inside the shader to sample a texture or series of textures 3 times or more and project them from 3 or more directions usually on the x,y,z axis and lerping between the three to give a gradual blend between all directions. This is commonly used in terrain shaders to prevent distortions of the textures due to steep slopes or any other deformation that would cause unwanted UV stretching. I would like to go into detail on many various ways of triplanar mapping, but I don't have much time or space in this blog to get into the details of it all.
The new water is a rebuilt shader that contains a noise generator that helps break up patterns and make minor runtime procedural changes within the visual representation of the water. The goal with this shader was not to spend months building a photorealistic water simulation with subsurface scattering, but to remove the static generic feel of what the old shader provided. The noise generation within the shader changes the intensity of the normal map between 2 lerped samples and also provides displacement information to the mesh to give the water a little bit of movement. Along with setting up new lighting conditions and visual changes of how the shader samples depth, we have removed the need for triplanar projection by allowing the bodies of water to be generated and each body’s UVs mapped 0-1. This allows for culling of oceans that are not seen and a vertex reduction.
The next patch will have further optimizations to the water shader since there are a few redundant components that are unneeded. Another feature to expect by next patch is an update to the planet shader itself. I have been holding off on pushing the update currently in development for the planet shader. I am hoping to have the update put in by next patch so you can have more detail and eye candy to look at when navigating around the planet
