Hello everyone! It's been a while so I should probably explain why this has taken so long, which is mostly me getting caught in a loop of some things taking longer than expected and feeling like I need to have more new things prepared to justify the time. This is somewhat of a normal development pattern for me where towards the start of an update I'll work on internal stuff that is important but not too exciting for players, then near the end I'll add a bunch of content. This time was particularly bad and I probably could have handled the scheduling of it much better.
The upside is that the reworked systems have started paying off. The biggest one that took a while is the map generation rewrite, which I decided was necessary since the old map generation had many game breaking bugs that were taking a lot of time to fix individually and it was cumbersome to add new biomes to. The new system will likely still have a few bugs, but they should be much easier to fix now. The other benefits are that it is now much easier to add new biomes, and it loads faster. My broad goal for a bit will be to add more biomes and flesh out the world with more things to do. Aside from the map rework I've managed to remove a few of the previous engine limitations, and multi-threaded a lot more of the game which should hopefully improve performance.
I think before I said I wanted to do beta updates once a week. That was probably a bit ambitious for me given my working style. Some updates will happen quickly and some will take longer, but I'll try not to let any span multiple months again. I know many early access games get abandoned so a long hiatus can be worrying. I have much more I want to add to the game and I will continue working on it until it is complete. I'll try to put out a roadmap sometime.
- Kyler
NOTE: this update is on the public beta branch which you can enable by right clicking the game in steam, opening Properties, and going to the Game versions & Betas tab
patch notes:
gameplay changes & features:
Map generation has been completely rewritten, biome placement and connections should be more reliable
2 new side biomes
Biomes can now have random biome modifiers
New mutation: BIGGER cells
Most mutations are now stackable
New cell types: Musical cell, Listening cell, Light detector cell, Propagating cell, Painting cell
Reviving a dead creature now requires 55% of its maximum biomass instead of 50%
The walls are lava mutation now makes walls cooler near flowing water
Ability trigger cells now have 3 variants which use different keys, which by default are spacebar, e, and q. Only the first will spawn naturally, but you can right click in the editor to cycle between variants. These are considered distinct for the cost reduction of having multiples
Increased maximum range of lasers
Increased the upper limit on cell radius for muscle and inflating cells, this was previously an engine limitation
The radius of muscle cells and inflating cells now stack multiplicatively instead of additively with mutations that modify cell radius
Increased how much force muscle and inflating cells can take before breaking
The attraction between linking cells now has a limit
Mind control cells now suppress the controlled creature's natural actions, and movement is rotated to match the mind controller's orientation
Jet cells and vacuum cells now work outside of water with 0.1% effectiveness
Traveling through a waypoint portal no longer cures cancer
Creatures with only one cell can now be steered
Overcharge from shock is now limitted to 12 volts (this nerfs the electric jellyfish)
Player position will now be automatically reset to the last valid location if it is NaN or too far out of bounds
bugfixes:
Hopefully fixed icons being cut in half with certain graphics drivers
Fixed game being blurry with high DPI display settings
Fixed some floating point error related weirdness with torque of spinning and electromagnetic cells
The max range of electromagnetic cells was only applied to the force between electromagnetic cells, it now applies to the lightning effect as well
Fixed music not playing after loading a save in certain biomes
Fixed creatures with modified body plans outside of the loaded radius spontaneously dying after reloading the world
Fixed held mouse press being interupted by hovering over a sandbox tool
Fixed combo cells in mutagenic poison not being restored properly after creating a new sandbox
Fixed directional indicators showing up when creating workshop thumbnails
Fixed main menu background creatures being paused after returning to the main menu while paused in sandbox mode
Fixed position of creatures sometimes being (0,0) for 1 frame before dying
Added limit to internal audio sample rate. This should hopefully fix sound crackling on some devices with audio sample rates above 48kHz
Improved stability of hard cells
Fixed get_player_body_id giving incorrect results if there is no player or the player was deleted
Fixed game window sometimes being hidden on first launch
Fixed offscreen creatures reviving after saving & reloading
misc:
Improved performance, especially load times
Improved rendering of big cells
Changed how the framerate adjusts during lag. Previously the game would skip rendering a frame for one gameplay tick when it is lagging. Now this can only happen if you set a framerate cap less than 120. This generally will make the game look smoother when it is lagging, but it will still play in slow motion if it can't compute things quickly enough
Max framerate can now be set down to 30, and editing in lower values through settings.txt should work
Added setting for thread count. By default it will automatically choose based on the number of cpu cores
Added dynamic range audio compression for loud sounds
Added limit to maximum brightness of hot cells