Greetings friends and thanks for your support on Astral Terra. Things have been a bit slow as of late as the team is down to 2 right now and working on multiple projects in order to keep this one afloat. :P There were many systems that have been tweaked and reworked over the last couple months and the result is a much smoother, optimized play experience. We have also fixed some bugs as well and added some stuff. Due to some of the optimizations and changes we have made we are seeing large FPS gains. 100+fps on a mid range game rig and GTX 1070 video card (up from 70+ fps). This should be the last major technical update to our voxel engine and we are focused on content, AI, bugs and tightening controls from here on out. As always thanks so much for your interest in the game and support, enjoy the update, patch notes below.
Patch Notes - 0.9.2
- Rewrote cave system. Minerals/ores spawn much more consistently now and this opens us up for specific creatures in different biome caves. This new cave system is also much larger with expanded underground networks and detail. Caves are fairly barren now but we will continue to add content that is appropriate to dress them up and give players more reason to explore.
- Fixed a bug related to old caves where player would be placed on the incorrect geometry below a cave.
- Fixed item placement bug.
- Tightened up block placement (still not perfect - looking to replace this system soon with a new solution that uses pieces instead of blocks).
- Reduced memory usage through terrain LOD update, grass, details and trees update and new cave creation system.
- New Tree system! Our new tree system uses GPU instancing to reduce the overhead, therefore creating much denser coverage than was possible before. River biome going into Forest is noticeably more dense.
- Increased draw distance on terrain with reduced overhead.
- New water system. This new water system has reduced terrain generation time and memory usage. However, it is not flowing water and therefore water creation has been removed from the terraformer. Water is throughout the world at a certain level - simply dig deep enough to find it. If you want a pond outside of a house simply build lower down on the terrain and dig a pond out where you like. Water is still interactive of course.
- New water shader. No more ugly default unity water. Reflections have been disabled to keep performance until we can custom roll our own solution.
- Biome algorithm changed to have smoother transitions from each biome and to reduce generation time and overhead.
- New Grass system.
- Added ambient occlusion.
- Various bug fixes and optimizations for big FPS gains.
October and November development roadmap:
- New AI system with increased mob coverage and improved performance.
- Multiplayer world data share at start of game.
- Halloween content update.
- New Mobs and animals.
- New building system.
- Bug fixes/tweaks.