Hello everybody!
Castle Story version 0.5 is now ready to go! It is arguably the biggest release, feature-wise, we’ve ever done since the beginning. The work done on version 0.3 and 0.4 have really paid off, and we were able to tackle systems that are much closer to the end-user experience.
Notable feature upgrades is a completely re-done wood system, the X-Ray vision, and a solid multiplayer backend that we can upgrade on. The goal of this update was to clean up the core gameloop to allow an easy barrier of entry for new players, and advanced systems for veteran players.
Major features
The wood
The wood system was initially envisioned as a more flexible alternative to stone blocks. But using 1x2 wood pieces made building with wood a complex affair due to having to deal with even/odd number of spaces.
Additionally, wood pieces used to cost one log for every piece, making building with wood a costly and tedious process. We have introduced a new resource to address that problem: planks. Planks can be converted from a stockpile full of wood and every log will give you 3 planks.
The new wooden system is based on draggable wood pieces of arbitrary length. This results in a system with the flexibility we once envisioned. You may notice these changes:
- Vertical columns and horizontal planks remain identical visually, but can now be dragged in increments of one unit.
- Horizontal beams now cost the same as plank to allow making longer bridges and platforms for a lesser cost.
- Braces have been introduced to allow suspending beams up to 2 units longer that usually.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer is the holy grail of voxel games. We’ve invested a huge amount of energy into preparing our systems to accomodate the delays and de-sync problems inherent with network messages.
Ultimately these changes are invisible to the end user. This is precisely the goal of this endeavour since the game must function identically both in single-player and multiplayer even though the delays are completely different. To implement this we’ve had to:
- Bomb-proof the AI for multiplayer by introducing sync nodes at key points in their decision processes.
- Split ownership of all items in players and factions.
- Ensured all game object states can be compacted and sent through the network.
- Added a very basic lobby to join a server by IP address. Enhancements will come in the coming updates.
It is important to note that the multiplayer is still far from finished . Right now, only sandbox is supported (With both quarry tasks and static survival mines, since the latter is more stable right now), it is not yet possible to save a multiplayer game, and de-syncs still happen every once in a while. We are releasing it now to help us playtest it on a larger scale and to test it with a wider array of hardware and networks, so please report back any bug or issues you encounter with it on the Steam forums or with support tickets.
X-Ray vision
One of the biggest problems plaguing Castle Story is the inability to select or see characters or items that are indoors or underground. This resulted in most players never putting down roofs on their castle, thus limiting the complexity of structures.
X-Ray vision solves that problem by slicing through the terrain geometry, and allowing the player to “see” through the ground, and interact with what’s inside.
The biggest challenges implementing that system was :
- to slice through the terrain without impacting performance. A shader-based solution was used.
- Keeping the colliders intact to allow the world to stay coherent without “falling through” the sliced volume.
- “Plugging” the holes in the sliced geometry to prevent seeing through.
Minor features
Repair Task
In the heat of battle your castle may get damaged. That’s where the repair task comes in handy. Placed near your castle before a battle, it will help the Bricktrons remember the position of your bricks within its radius by creating blueprint wherever a brick falls off. The repair task will also detect any damaged bricks and allow the Bricktrons to repair the bricks on the fly.
Round Bricks
Castle Story is all about creativity. Many of you requested different types of bricks to explore new architectural styles for your castle. We are introducing a selection of round bricks that will allow you to do just that!
Merge Back
The new merge back feature introduces a new system in our voxel engine that allow debris to be absorbed into the terrain. In addition to free up memory used by rubble lying around, this function allows for holes to be filled up or objects to be buried.
Landscape project
The landscape project will let you level a patch of terrain. You can specify bounds and a plane, any voxel that is above the plane will be dug, and any voxel under the plane will be filled. This will enable you, among other things, to prepare the ground before building a castle. You'll never be limited by the topology of the island again, and you'll be able to make better use the environment.
Handles
We’re introducting Handles, a new and much more advanced control scheme for editing the layout of tasks. To change the size of a mine, the position of a task, and the radius of a zone, you can simply interact with the handles directly in Edit mode and tweak the object any way you want. It's that simple.
New animations
We have further polished our animation pipeline and animations now run pretty smoothly. This has allowed us to revisit older animation and give them a new layer of polish. Animations such as run cycles, attacks and flailing animations have been reworked.
Bear traps
This new dynamic object allows to trap any enemy in it for a short time, allowing your warriors or archers to take care of the threat. Beware though that Big Corruptrons are completely unaffected by them, and you need to re-arm them with a worker after use.
Steam does not allow to put more text here. So for a complete listing of the features that are part of update 0.5 please check out our web site.
- Team Sauropod