Demo Update 0.9
Apologies for the lengthy silence -- my time has been occupied with the beta testers, and making many changes and adjustments as EA release nears.
Today I'm rolling in many changes from the beta. Far from all, but those that are stable and involve the demo assets.
Changes:
Significant Overhaul to rope behavior.
Ropes should now jitter less in most cases, particularly when fully reefed.
Rope behavior should be more predictable overall, with less spastic or oscillating behavior.
Adjusting rope length should be more stable, with less 'sproing'.
Reefed or partially reefed sails now update to match position of moving yard more predictably.
Made a significant overhaul to rope behavior on Tanja and Lateen rigs. This is the main change for this update. It should now be much more difficult to create physics issues by over-tightening the ropes. Essentially any rope connected to a rigid point such as the yard will now take the tautness of the connection, and other connections to the same object, into consideration. If the desired length of the rope is less than the smallest possible distance from end to end of the given rope, the applied forces will be vastly reduced.
Environment:
Disabled the rapid TOD changes on the main menu, as it outruns the GI op leading to weirdly bright appearance once the sun goes down.
Expanded available weather types
Added collision to some of the ground clutter on some islands
Significant update to the starting island, including new areas and updated assets.
Reintroduction of shoreline foam/waves
Significantly updated xebec wreck to increase model quality
Changed to a more complex shader for rocks on Nameless Isle and Watcher, reducing visible tiling and adding directional variation.
Made numerous changes to possible weather types, avoiding rare cases where extreme seas (to the point where sailing is impossible and it just looked goofy) could occur.
Added more consistent support for varied sea types. (Not just differing wave intensity, but now varied types of chop/rolling swells/etc.)
Increased the chances of 'very rare' weather types by around 5x. This includes ashen fog and severe storms
Ships:
Moved the wind indicator on the caravel to a more visible location.
Made several small changes to caravel ropes to try to minimize visible gaps at various rope lengths.
Steering should feel more precise and controllable.
Slightly reduced quality of cloth sim. Visual impact should be low relative to performance gain, though gradual collision pass through may occur earlier.
Changed to a variable model for the Kedging system, rather than the fixed-strength system held previously.
UI:
Added a inverse zoom movement modifier to the map, allowing much faster movement when you zoom further out.
Numerous small changes to prevent UI lockup when flipping between various menu types.
Added visible type and destination labels to loaded cargo objects to make dealing with mixed loads/multiple tasks easier.
General:
Updated some input scripts to utilize the new input system more consistently.
New interactable object types, with a generalized interaction interface.
Simplified the scripting behind interaction points, to allow various types to utilize the same base class rather than fully individualized components. i.e. winches/levers/etc can now use a single tag/class rather than multiple.
Significantly overhauled scripting behavior on interactable island objects -- this should result in substantial performance gain on some islands, particularly the Watcher.
Lowered overall memory consumption by textures and models, and improved resource release operations.
Fixes:
Fixed a bug in the last build that led to excessive loading of meshes and textures into memory.
Fixed some text alignment issues in some menus
Fixed certain cargo types causing the cargo manifest to become un-interactable.
Fixed broken text positioning on pre-existing tasks when opening the task table interface
Fixed superfluous line breaks being added to some saved data
Fixed event types and one time notifications being duplicated in saves, leading to oversized save files.
Fixed excessive and drastic weather changes near Bathis.
Fixed some poor UV unwraps
Fixed several environment holes in several places.
Fixed wonky textures on some store barrels
Speculative fix for rare cases where a weird green glowing light would appear when placing cargo -- which would not disappear until reload.
Fixed numerous superfluous nullpointer exceptions in the main menu.
Major update to world recentering -- that should vastly reduce system load when performing, which lead to lockup or crashing on some systems -- or the increased likelihood of physics explosions on the rigging.
Fixed a memory leak that could occur on some systems during weather changes.
Fixed rare rollover on load that could affect some ships.
Fixed an issue that could cause cargo to become impossible to unload when stacked 2 or more crates high.