Greetings, and as always gratitude for playing and following Astral Terra! The big voxel environment update is live! See the patch notes below for more information as well as some known issues we are working through right now. Old worlds are now obsolete. To avoid any confusion, please locate your game install folder, Worlds folder, and delete all of folders in the Worlds folder(your previous worlds). When you create a new room you may want to click the X on the UI box of your old worlds as well to delete the hot links from that list. If you have deleted the content of your Worlds folder, deleting the items from the list is not mandatory as clicking on it will simply generate a new world with the old name and seed.
We didn't want to keep people waiting any longer so we figured it would be best to put out what we have now and work through some of the remaining new bugs through the following weeks. If you find something broken our sincerest apologies. The process of updating Unity to this newest version was grueling this time. We did the update because a few key assets we use needed it, though this in turn caused a landslide effect of bugs and other things needing to be changed or updated (mainly our shader packages). After sorting through so many code changes and broken items and preparing the build, we discovered a few more nasty bugs. :P Today there were a few small updates pushed out to address these - please check the integrity of your game files to make sure you have all the updates pushed out today. :) Next in line will be a couple more rapid updates/hotfixes to address remaining issues or missing items, while also starting work on the big update that has been being developed in tandem with the voxel environment update (what was originally going to be our big March update). In addition, we are bringing on a few new artists to the team to start concepting the next wave of mobs as well as the next player avatar (the Elemental Sentinel). There are some great things on the way, this is an exciting time for Astral Terra! Enjoy the update, and as always we will be listening for your opinions and any bugs you find or suggestions on how to improve certain experiences.
Patch Notes:
v0.3
- Implemented new voxel terrain base code with lots of optimizations on code and world generation processes.
- Unity engine update to 5.3.
- New Terrain LOD for less overhead and longer draw distance (bigger terrains).
- New Voxel scale of 1 from 1.5. Build shapes are now smaller. 2 blocks in height = height of player avatar.
- New Terrain Shader update with support for dirt and Parallax Occlusion shading. Also supports new Glitter feature for Sand and Snow.
- New Winter biome (work in progress). Standard resources available, new resources being developed specifically for Winter biome.
- Removed Sphere and Cube from Terraformer, tweaked Terraformer settings so that these two options became redundant.
- Added support for non standard resolutions(multi-monitor support).
- New terrain algorithm for Canyons biome for larger, more epic looking land formations.
- New Terrain algorithm for Tropical biome for better mountains.
- Lots of Biome tweaks/edits.
- Changed how Trees and Ores are removed. Players will no longer see a large hole form in the ground when trees and ores de-spawn.
- Set the Terraformer Cube to always start closer to the player and above ground. ;)
KNOWN ISSUES
- Water generation is still being tweaked and new water detection with better splash effect and swim activation is also being looked at.
- Cube Terraforming is messy - new per click method being implemented for next patch for better cube formation via Terraformer.
- Quality settings (High, Medium, Ultra, Low) will not change Texture resolution due to a new bug found in the newest version of Unity. Work around has texture reduction disabled for the moment (reducing quality still effects shadows, particles and a couple other back end settings). A fix for this will come in a future patch.
- Bloodfiends and Grottonoids temporarily disabled due to new bug that has impact on performance. Some AI that we wrote In-House was changed due to the Unity update and needs to be worked on. These mobs will be re-enabled very soon in a future patch. All animals are still active in the environments.