The past week has been mostly about fixing various bugs, optimization, anti-hack, and adding polish. We also fixed some exploits.
Earlier this week, the customizable input system reached a point where it feels as flexible as PC controls should be. The "Controls" menu was also widened to help display all of the key names... goodbye microscopic fonts. We also implemented a small army of touch-ups for the GUI. The most visible change to the GUI will be the text within the item tooltips. These tooltips are being updated to display numerical values straight from the items, so that any changes made by the up-coming server-side modding system will be apparent in-game. Don't get the word "modding" confused, what we mean is that you will be able to change config file values on the server that will change values in-game. We believe this will allow a lot of customization for community servers.
Many bugs were fixed this week. We fixed a bad bug where animals may repeatedly appear to sink into the terrain and then snap back up to the surface. Animals are also less likely to run in one direction while looking in another direction - a bug that was especially noticeable on wolves. We fixed a bug with the hit reaction animation. Previously, while characters were in a hit reaction, some parts of the body would rapidly jitter, especially when viewed at a distance. This is no longer the case.
Crouching has been improved. Characters can crouch much lower than before, allowing them to fit through spaces that are 1 block high. It is also possible to crouch jump into such spaces if the ledge is not too high from the ground. Be sure not to leave holes on the lower level of your base, as players will be able to crouch through them. It would be wise to install bars in your ground level windows.
Various changes have been made to improve the server's performance.
There's been a small performance snafu where our resolution scaling implementation would confuse the game window into displaying a poor framerate even when the game is running much faster, which could be temporarily fixed by running a piece of capture software like FRAPS - effectively allowing the window to display at its intended framerate. We found the problem could be fixed definitively by making the game window run in exclusive fullscreen. For convenience the game will transition to a small manageable window when tabbing away from the game and will go back to fullscreen when the window's contents is clicked again. Consequentially we have reintroduced true vsync, which will remove the game's tearing, even when disabling Windows Aero. For those who don't like input latency, exclusive fullscreen gives the game the most direct access to the display and can help reduce latency with vsync disabled.
We've also spent a large amount of time with the team looking into server performance to reduce the base cost that climbs as a result of having more players in the server. There were some key contributors to performance loss in the game loop which are being optimized to help the server run more smoothly during normal gameplay.
Enjoy your weekend of gaming,
- The Code}{atch Team