Terra Firma v0.2 is here! Animals, revamped visuals and camera system, a host of bugfixes (welcome those with recent Radeon cards) and minor improvements are all part of it. Thank you all for your support, testing and feedback that has helped development tremendously.
Animals
Various animals now appear on the game, including deer, ibex, bears, rabbits, crabs and crocodiles- you'll have to zoom in quite far on the map to see them. Different animals will appear depending on the different biomes that are present, whether it's plains, forest, coastal, swampy or ocean. The number and variety of animals will be continue to increase giving you more reason to experiment with the landscape and will make coming features such as variable rainfall, variable temperature, snow and ice a lot more impactful.
Visuals
Visuals have gotten a big overhaul. All models for trees have been redone, as well as new textures for ground and grass areas, new textures for river areas as well as sand in coast areas. The terrain rendering has been improved with occlusion shading added to give highlight variation in terrain relief. V-sync has also been added as an option in the settings menu.
Camera
The camera has been changed from an orthographic projection to a perspective based camera. The old camera displayed everything on screen at the same scale, which changed as you zoomed in. This led to crashes and poor performance when looking down hills at certain angles. The new perspective camera has varying levels of detail depending on how far away things are, and smooth transitions in between the various levels of detail. The terrain detail loading system has been completely rewritten to happen asynchronously in parallel, avoiding lag that could happen when the camera was zoomed in.
Minor Changes
- q/e keyboard shortcuts to rotate the camera
- Fixed crash affecting recent AMD cards with certain driver versions (Radeon 500 Series, Radeon 600 Series, Radeon Vega, others)
- Fixed rare crash when graphics card could not be determined
- Fixed bug where trees could float above the terrain
- Fixed bug with trees flickering or disappearing on some AMD cards and integrated graphics devices
- Innumerable other small changes and fixes
Debugging
Verification and performance tests have been added to the startup of the game. This both helps with debugging issues when users report crashes, as well as enabling performance settings to be customised depending on how powerful the computer is. A new debugging interface which collates all the different debug options has been added, as well as a custom profiling interface with tracing aimed at ensuring constant 60fps performance.
What's next
This update contains a lot of foundational work that was required to progress the game from what was essentially just a tech demo. Future updates building on this will be smaller and more frequent. Most likely upcoming releases will focus on new biomes as well as systems need to support them like temperature, varying rainfall, ice and snow.