Greetings friends and happy Friday!
We have a big update we just pushed out that's been in the works for a few weeks. Apologies to those that were experiencing crashing issues and problems with terrain generation. We have worked on a number of things that came up after the big framework update that caused some issues. There will be 1 more huge water rewrite that will take some time - in the meantime water has been optimized some more and we will continue to tweak how it flows until the new system is in place. We have done some major changes and improvements with this update, see patch notes below.
Patch Notes:
0.8
- Due to last big update on voxel framework, biome layout and generation has changed.
- Roads have been removed and the Town biome has been combined with the Canyon biome. Small clusters of houses will appear on low land flat areas or even higher up on plateaus.
- Winter biome removed and combined with Forest biome at upper heights.
- Rivers and lakes added. Rivers flow through the center of the Forest biome and will overlap into the Tropical biome and form lakes, as well as appear in small areas on the Canyon biome when blending between Forest and Tropical biomes.
- Optimizations to water generation and flow to improve terrain generation time.
- New Caves system with smooth caves and connected networks. Many of the Ores now spawn directly in caves and at higher altitudes.
- New optimized grass system with LOD and longer draw distance.
- Replaced biome materials with new high detail terrain textures that support PBR and POM effects.
- Replaced post effects with newer, higher quality and better optimized Amplify suite.
- Added Color/Tone mapping to camera.
- Adjusted Terrain Alignment functionality when falling through terrain or being aligned the first time. This should remedy some terrain alignment issues.
- Improved terrain generation time.
- Removed Floating Islands. This system is being rewritten to reflect the optimizations to the core framework.
- New basic grass on all biomes, flowers, weeds and other plants remain the same.
- Sand and a few other Terrain materials used in the terraformer have been tweaked or changed.
- Removed random presents from the environment.
- Fixed bug with playing in window mode and mouse being confined to the incorrect area.
KNOWN ISSUES
- With the new Cave system comes a new bug. Sometimes if the character is spawned underground they will be incorrectly aligned to the bottom polygons of the cave system. To realign correctly, enter Terraform mode with the terraform button, select FREE mode, navigate the camera up to the terrain, hit FETCH PLAYER button to move your character to the new position and then exit terraform mode.