RELEASE 21 LANDS JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS!
FEATURES
- New starting location at the border of random generated and handmade content:
- Forest spawner system part I: It spawns forests, flowers, wheat fields and sunflower fields around roads. (House, healing altar and camp lights can be seen from far away to aid the navigation at night)
- Enemy spawners in landmarks and along roads.
- Improved landmark placement using distance fields. (the actual distance field) (how it looks from landmark's point of view)
- Lots of other procedural generator improvements.
- Road generation has received much more attention: - Roads can spawn houses along itself. - Each landmark decides what kind of road connects to it. For example you have a higher chance of encountering elves if you're traveling to Elven Citadel. Road leading to Goblin Forest spawns lots of goblins etc. - The road keeps itself horizontally level so it's easier for the player to walk on it: (In theory NPC's should be able to walk pretty much any road, though the AI navigation might still get stuck sometimes)
- Big random generator optimizations to get this new more advanced system to run fast enough.
- Very long distance terrain shadows. (Regular objects can't cast these type of shadows but they can be shadowed by these)
- Multiple save game slots.
- New ranged weapon aiming mechanics. Holding the left trigger (right-click on a mouse) moves the camera to the over the shoulder aiming view. (See this earlier announcement post for GIFs)
- Blunderbusses, Pistols and Crossbows have their own unique carrying and aiming animations:
- Several body armors which can be switched:
- Falling from heights can kill.
- Melee hit detection improved.
- Boss variants of wolves and wild dogs:
- Several unique armor variants for NPC's.
- Several new tree objects.
- New merchant guard.
- Handmade landmarks have received more polish.
- More characters moved to random generators.
- Ground spawning animations for several characters.
- Several new world generator nodes: Dilate, Shrink etc.
- Distance based generation of terrain tiles. (faster)
- New Temporal AA adapted from Playdead's wonderful game Inside.
- New better quality and faster bloom effect.
- Screen-space reflection quality improved.
- Additional distance culling system.
- More seamless day and night cycle.
- Generation seed is displayed.
- Tons of small improvements and bug fixes.
This update went through a pretty long testing period, thanks everyone who helped!
What's coming next: In Release 22 forest spawner will get another big feature. It gains the ability to spawn forests anywhere on the map and also bring much more advanced blue noise based hierarchical object spawning to replace the grid jitter algorithm.
This image explains how part of it works:
Each small image depicts the same forest. Spawning stars from the first row and advances left to right. White dot's represent succesfull spawning and gray dots were rejected due to lack of space or proximity to other existing objects. I won't go it into specifics of all the little details but the end result is much more natural forests. In several places the procedurally generated content is starting to produce more beautiful results than the handmade landmarks.
This is how the end result looks like:
Merry Christmas Adventurers!