It's been a long time between updates, but there has been a lot going on behind the scenes. I'm nearing completion on the next update which will, amongst other things, add animals to the game to give some more excitement to exploring the different biomes.
When I released the initial version of Terra Firma it was the most minimal, hacked together version of my vision for the game that I thought people could get any fun out of. The feedback has been amazing, far beyond my expectations for essentially a tech demo that I assumed only family and friends would play. The first release had a lot of shortcomings technically that have required a decent amount of rework to progress the game. Let's dive into what has been improved and what's coming for the next release.
The most important change is to the camera system. The current camera uses an orthographic projection, which makes everything the same size no matter how far away from the camera it is. The camera scale is changed as you zoom in and out, but there is no perspective- if you look downhill the trees at the bottom will be the same size as those far away. You can actually crash or vastly slow the game by looking downhill at the wrong angle and overloading the level of detail that is rendered. An orthographic camera makes a bunch of things about moving and zooming the camera easier but adding animals required a lot more care for how the game looks at close zoom levels, so it had to go. We now have a proper perspective camera with varying levels of detail depending on how far away things are, and smooth transitions in between. There is a lot of complexity behind this and it's been the majority of the work since the first release.
Looking downhill like this was not previously possible
The visuals have been given an overhaul- while not the focus of this update, the tree models have been replaced, all textures replaced with new textures for the river areas and shore areas too, making everything a bit nicer. It wouldn't do looking at that hideous grass model that we had before when you're watching animals running around.
A lot of work has been put into changing how the world updates. Whereas previously everything was running on a single thread, a whole new system to update the world using multiple parallel threads is now implemented. This will allow the game to smoothly generate and update loads of animals, befitting the scale of the game where you can zoom from kilometers in to individual trees. There are alternate debug views in game to monitor what the threads are doing, how they are communicating and how quickly the game is rendering to get as close to smooth 60fps as we can.
Everything running smoothly at 60fps
Debugging a dropped frame
Finally what all this has been working towards: being able to see creatures running around! This has been the focus since the first update as it really adds an extra dimension to playing around with the simulation. Already there are effectively different biomes such as forests, plains, swamps, rivers, lakes, the shore and ocean but there is very little to distinguish them. The different biomes will be inhabited by different animals 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.
I'm hoping to release the update before the end of the year. Thank you all for your feedback, testing and patient support so far. Rest assured that despite the occasional lack of communication this is being continually worked on- however with this major work soon to be completed I'll be able to release more regular, smaller updates.