Hey everyone!
I wanted to talk a bit on how development of the game is going now that we're a few months into Early Access!
I'd like to keep this as a running series where on occasion I talk more free form about things instead of as patch notes or announcements, so I hope you enjoy :)
Early Access
First, thank you all for all of your feedback! I've been trying to keep track of it all, and I hope that you've maybe seen some of your own suggestions already making it in!
I definitely would have preferred to spend a bit more time in development before launching, which many people have noted due to the game's shorter runtime. I don't think I could have picked a better time though, as Automation Fest was something I was not willing to miss, and seemingly that worked out.
One of the reasons I went forward with it regardless was that the game's engine was pretty far along in development, namely modding and multiplayer, so I still felt that left the game open enough to still be built on and enjoyed for those more willing to tinker.
I do want to briefly talk on pricing though, as I've heard a few mentions of it.
Pricing
I launched Voxel Eras at $15 USD for a few reasons:
Pricing must be a multiple of $5. It's the law.
Pricing any higher would be asking for far too much for the current state of the game. A lot of the Early Access games I followed growing up started in the $10-$20 price range, so this felt like a good ceiling.
At the same time, charging $10 feels like too little. As this is a somewhat niche genre, sales are going to be lower volume, and any discount at this price feels like I'm completely underselling the game in it's current state.
I'd like to make developing Voxel Eras my full time job :)
Of course though, Voxel Eras has already been available for 15% off before, putting the lowest price at $12.75. For the foreseeable future, you'll find it for that price during most Steam sales as well as a few I setup myself..... idk, at some point.
Once I feel the game has enough content, I'll be increasing the price, at which point I'll announce ahead of time what it is and what the lowest price you'll find it at will be.
I'm keeping it simple. If you'd like the best deal, there you go.
About that content though... I should probably make some... Eventually.
Vulkan
On the Discord I've been sharing a lot of the development of the game, so now you get the months of fun screenshots :)
The big thing of course, is Voxel Eras is now on Vulkan (at least on experimental), and of course it wasn't simple, it's Vulkan.
The game's renderer was a bit scattered throughout the engine, so it was good timing to rewrite it regardless.
I had most of the renderer in the in-game client, so the main menu couldn't really render anything. I'd like to eventually try and do a main menu simulation akin to Factorio's, so of course keeping that in mind would be nice.
After all was said and done, the majority of the actual renderer now resides in a single, 4000 line long Rust file.
I even got a few new goodies!
Dithering
A complaint / complement I got a lot was about the game's transparency dithering. I agree in hindsight that my particular implementation sucked, but I did want to keep dithering.
Vulkan includes a built in feature called "Alpha to Coverage" which provides the same effect that I originally wanted while also not looking like garbage.
MSAA
With the addition of MSAA to the game's renderer, you can clean up edges of objects, as well as increase the quality of the dithered transparency to be pretty good.
1x MSAA, 8x MSAA
(These screenshots are a month after the first example...)
Anisotropic Filtering
While I was at it I also added anisotropic filtering, which makes textures at grazing angles look quite a bit better, while also in some cases increasing FPS?
Anisotropic Off, 16x Anisotropic:
Configuring
Of course some of these come with the catch of turning them on / up roasts your GPU, so you'll be able to configure all of this.
You can now specify which GPU is the correct one as well, in case you've got something exotic.
Nerd
After spending this long working on this renderer, I would like to geek out for a moment.
The new renderer has the ability to be completely restarted, meaning you can change your graphics card, have the change apply, and be right at the settings menu again, all without the game closing. (Still working on making it work everywhere)
It's been very helpful for improving Intel Arc support, as my secondary GPU is an Intel Arc A750.
Sadly for Nvidia users though (the majority of Steam...) my primary GPU is a AMD Radeon RX 6600, so you're relegated to occasional testing on my laptop's Nvidia GTX 1660 TI MaxQ.
To add to it, I also made the renderer "bindless", meaning for a particular object I don't need to attach it's textures explicitly, as they're already available for all objects, which is pretty ergonomic due to how much control I get over it, as well as how simple the setup is.
(What did you expect? A picture of thousands of lines of code?)
Sun
There is a sun now
Post Processing
I've been changing my approach to rendering quite a bit with the Vulkan rewrite, and post processing is part of that.
Voxel Eras uses deferred rendering, meaning I move the majority of answering "What color is this pixel?" to be figured out later, allowing it to avoid doing complex calculations for pixels you'll never see.
It does have the downside of a higher baseline cost, as well as difficulties for transparency support, however in this case it's worth it, and I have the transparency dithering I mentioned above to deal with transparency without much worry.
The client already used deferred rendering, but now it is something supported throughout the entire game, and it'll eventually have full modding support, so you'll be able to mess around with it as well.
It results in quite the interesting GPU profile:
Content
For real though, the game needs content, not just graphics.
It's been slow, Vulkan sucked, but it's starting to happen again!
I'll be a bit rusty for a bit, so I'm focusing on some lower hanging fruit to start, like a trash can!
Trash Can
Ok, I know it's not the most exciting thing in the world, but at least it's useful.
If you want an "end goal", provide a full pipe on each side of it from your carbon steel factory.
Slabs
Getting different shapes into the voxel renderer is something I'm going to need to do more of going forward for water, so starting with slabs felt like the right move.
My mentality with shapes is that they cost the same, regardless of how much of the block they take up, as the extra inventory mess and thinking about costs for building should be simpler.
They currently have a couple of issues, like walking collision, light leaking, and placement difficulties, but I am very happy to have them!
Oh, and, of course, you can have vertical slabs :)
Hammer
Automation? In an automation game?!?
I know, right?
Anyways, yes, I'm actually adding more things to do.
I wanted to make a general "clockwork crafter" utility that could be shared by a bunch of machines I'm going to start adding, which is part of why this took so long. (I didn't want to do it)
By recommendation, I'm going to try reducing the visual noise of the textures going forward to make the game a bit more readable. This was something I included as a pass over my work to add color variation in a much quicker way, and I do still use it for particular parts, but I'm using it far more sparingly.
I'm aiming to add a few more of these before 1.3 releases now that it's mostly art and sound.
We'll see how much I lean into being GregTech.
Wiring (Toggle)
Some of you might not even know the game has some basic wiring, as the mod isn't enabled by default.
I'd like to eventually move the wiring mod into the base game, or at least enable it by default, but I've kept it like this in case I end up completely breaking it. For now though, I want to keep exploring where it could go, so I've added a new component.
It's a simple toggle switch you just interact with to activate, and you can hold it to toggle it repeatedly.
Zoom Key
For those of you who want to take pictures like the one above without turning your FOV all the way down, you now have a button!
I've repeatedly brought my FOV setting all the way down to take screenshots, so having a button to do it without changing your settings is nice.
The Emotional Bit
Thanks for being patient while I slowly chip away at the game.
It's been a bit of a roller coaster for me lately between my full time job, launching the game, my personal life, and the physical and mental stress that revolved around, and resulted from it.
I apologize in advance if you find it hard to get replies from me from time to time (or don't get a response at all).
I do read everything I can find over here on Steam, my Discord, as well as my YouTube channel, and I do my best to still try and address everything through some means such as announcements, patch notes, and my #rustacean channel in the Discord, but I know this system isn't perfect.
Some would call me a bit... unique, which impacts in how I interact, communicate, and process, resulting in me having more difficulties with things than I would care to admit, and they're not fantastic traits to have as a solo developer.
You, the reader, probably have some of the same traits, so I hope you'll forgive me because I'm going to continue to be a hot mess until the end of time, and you can't stop me.
With That Being Said...
Overall, even if progress is slower than I'd like, I'm pretty happy with how things are going.
Vulkan is starting to finally stabilize a bit, I'm pretty happy with the renderer improvements, and I'm glad to finally be back to making content again after so much engine work.
I hope to have another experimental out soon, with somewhere around 1-2 more of them before properly releasing v1.3.
Thank you for your support, I'll be back again soon.
Progress Awaits Your Return
Destiny Hailstorm - Lead Developer