Hey everyone! I've been kept busy with everything going on since the Early Access launch, and I am finally ready to share some of the fruits of my labor! Pouring through all the feedback I heard 2 main things: Fix performance, and add content. I wanted to first focus on the foundations, so this experimental is going to be targeting primarily the core engine.
This is definitely experimental, things such as hardware compatibility are pretty unknown, however I expect anyone who gets to the main menu to be able to play with this.
Experimental v1.3.0
Graphics
Moved from OpenGL to Vulkan, which should help with modern GPU compatibility
Transparency dithering has been drastically improved
Multisample Antialiasing (MSAA) options for 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x are now available, which improve both dithering and edges of geometry (this is very expensive on some GPUs at 8x)
Anisotropic Filtering options for Off, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x are now available, which improve texture readability (this should be pretty much free)
All textures are now able to be globally animated, not just voxels, so things like items can be animated now
Soundtracks
KINETIC - Progress
SPARKS - Early Industry
Changes
Leaves are now supported by 2 instead of 3 voxels
Wrench now stacks to 1
When in "placement mode" you no longer can interact with machines
The main menu now runs the full renderer, a character model has been added (eventually your personalized one?)
Fixes
Game clock should be less unstable, as well as having a bit less latency
Coyote time should no longer cause glitching while jumping
Crafters will no longer make a crafting noise when failing an attempt at crafting
Interacting with the Workbench no longer causes a script error
Modding
Voxel textures now reference normal textures, requiring them to be added to your "mod_data" like other textures
Custom shaders and post processing shaders are now hot reloadable (modding post processing will be added soon)
Prior custom shaders will need to be redone due to dramatic changes, reference the standard shader
Animated texture .toml configs have had "frames" renamed to "frame_layout", with a new field "frames" containing the total amount of frames in the animation sheet
"Prediction Debug" is now available which shows any basic prediction errors the game can detect, letting you see how many things I still need to (maybe) predict
You can now mark a TextureBuilder for linear or cubic texture interpolation
Removals
Support for v3 and v4 world saves has been removed, leaving v5 and the new v6 available
The "Terrain Rate" setting has been removed, this is too confusing, so for now chunks are just generated immediately if they're in render distance
Known Issues
The skybox is a solid color, this will soon return to glory as well as be improved
The main menu character's lighting is unstable until you enter and exit a world
HDR displays and / or Linux AMD cards result in the screen being brighter than it should be