Busy busy busy! I hope you all have been enjoying Voxel Eras!
You may or may not have known, but I've started up a new beta branch called "experimental", focused on me throwing ideas out and getting them in people's hands to test. I've been working on getting the game feeling smooth, and trying to get things like multiplayer working well.
In the future I don't expect this same rate of updates to come out, I wanted to primarily address everyone's biggest issues before jumping back into content mode and expanding the game again and doing the bigger feedback items I've gotten over the last week.
Anyways, here's the notes!
New
New soundtrack "SPARKS - Early Industry"
Changes
The furnace now no longer has an exception for it's top slot regarding burnable smeltables. This isn't used, and so the furnace now accepts fuel and smeltables from all sides.
Max render distance increased from 10 -> 24, compared to Minecraft, this is 19 -> 47 chunks render distance. This is still limited to ~768mb of VRAM, but in my own testing 64 chunks (127 Minecraft) worked within this, so I expect no issues.
"Galactic" lighting setting added (this is a "goals" setting, enjoy baking your PC)
Flowers now are tagged Growable, meaning the Planter can now plant them
Right click on the Crate slot restriction controls now does 5x
Fixes
Naturally spawned trees will now work with the Chopper, however this fix does not correct trees that were already generated (Sorry!)
Internal game clock is now much more stable, this should result in far less jitter, "input stick", "head stick", "movement stick", "inability to move in multiplayer", and other related bugs.
Client prediction no longer has a memory leak due to accumulating inputs until the world is reloaded.
High render distance should no longer cause game instability
Chunks changing should no longer cause large lag spikes
Rendering more than 4096 chunks will no longer crash the game (wasn't possible with restricted render distance, however was a possible issue on launch day)
Joining a multiplayer game where your mods are synced should no longer keep both your initial mod config and the newly loaded mod config loaded at the same time
You can no longer place into your feet (you can still place into your head, but we're getting there)
Windows should now generate a log.txt, like Linux
Dropped items should now move smoothly with framerate instead of tick rate
Pipes should no longer cause game crashes, and instead may misbehave in the event they enter a bad state
Planter no longer eats it's plants on break, deciding instead to drop the items
Performance
Chunk meshing should no longer cause large freezes on upload
Large worlds should no longer slow down due to simulating grass growth
General event performance improvements
Removed geometry shader from voxel shader pipelines
The game generally should have more stable frame pacing, room for growth of your factory, as well as letting you explore your worlds more and see with higher render distances.
Modding
Added new API, on_grass_random, an accelerator function for grass behavior
BREAKING CHANGE: Many event APIs have had their return types changed from EventResponse to (), this was done for performance and should be quick to fix, however your mods will be broken unless you correct it
New entity prefab tag "BuildBlocking:VoxelEras" for marking entities as able to block constructs, currently used by the player
Known Issues
Some graphics cards may have severely limited render distance, primarily seeming to effect Windows Nvidia GPUs, working on a longer term fix for this
The game clock may still have issues, please reduce your lighting distance or other settings in order to get your game to a stable framerate, working on a longer term fix for this