After multiple weeks of behind-the-scenes work resulting mostly in ugly brown hills, we're finally starting to render more interesting worlds! Every place in the world is assigned a temperature and a level of rainfall. With this information, the appropriate biome is selected. This ensure a realistic distribution of biomes, and a gradual transition.
We needed more shades of grass to make this gradual transition possible. We've got a system for giving blocks different colors without adding new textures, but we couldn't get it to work with grass in the past. Yesterday, we succeeded in doing that! So today we've been experimenting with many shades of grass.
Zun has also created a way for me and modders to easily generate new trees. The old world generator required hand-crafted trees that were saved as 'structures'. With the new system, a tree is defined by it's height and the shape of its leaves. This makes it a lot easier to generate a wide variety of trees, and to ensure a smooth transition between them.
Here is a summary of the work that still needs to be done on the new world generator:
- More diverse trees and shrubbery
- Random flowers
- Rocky outcrops and cliffs
- Clear consequences for going north/south/west/east, continents and oceans
- Appropriate ores in each biome
We've made a very rough timeline for the 0.7.0 release. It'll most certainly change!
September: New world generator, see list above.
October: Features like trading, multiple players in one colony, happiness
Closed beta starts here, we'll release a form where you can apply to become a tester
November: New crops, jobs and items + airships or boats
December: Finishing things up, patching issues found by testers, polishing, achievements
Hopefully, you'll be able to start testing at the end of October and to play the full release during the Christmas Holiday! But as always, development is unpredictable and Valve Time applies.
New renders and fatal crashes
I've hated the icons for wheat and wheat seeds for a long time. We've worked on new icons this week, and I'm pretty happy with them. NACH0 made a mod that adds the new icons to 0.6.3, and I feel it makes the game look a lot more professional:
The rendered icons make the hand-drawn icons for the command and banner tool stand out like a sore thumb. Time to upgrade them as well!
Something that also needed upgrading, was Zun's PC. While testing the new world renderer, his graphics card died resulting in a pretty dramatic image.
The next morning, Zun's dead graphics card was replaced with a brand new GTX 1080, and we were able to continue working without problems!
While we're talking about new hardware, my new vertical mouse arrived. Thanks for the concern about my wrist pain, I received lots of advice! It's already feeling quite a lot better. The new mouse is a Logitech MX Vertical, and it looks like this:
In a lot of ways it feels better than holding a normal mouse, and I got used to it pretty quickly. But the mouse is pretty big, which can also become uncomfortable.
We're pretty sure we can post an extensive video featuring the new world generation next week, and we're looking forward to it!
Bedankt voor het lezen :)
Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord
P.S. This blog isn't sponsored by Nvidia, Logitech or LG, but it probably should have been ;)