Alterra 0.2.0
Almost everything under the hood got rebuilt for this release. New renderer, new world streaming, new lighting, and a modding system that finally lets you ship actual code.
Visuals
The sky
Sun and moon positions are calculated from your latitude, the date, and the time of day. The sun follows a real arc for wherever you happen to be standing. The moon uses the same maths, so its phase moves along night to night instead of looping.
Exposure adapts to actual daylight instead of the clock, so twilight keeps getting darker while your eyes adjust
Atmospheric scattering with proper distance fog and horizon falloff
Terrain shadows are ray marched, so mountains throw shadows across valleys when the sun is low
Oceans read from terrain elevation now instead of land cover maps. Where depth data exists, open water looks like open water
Performance
Occlusion culling. Anything hidden behind terrain gets thrown out on the GPU before it costs you anything
Trees, rocks and ground cover are placed, culled and drawn entirely on the graphics card
World streaming adapts to how far behind it is. It runs hard while you're waiting for terrain and eases off once you're just walking around
Open water is close to free. A fully submerged tile uses 25 vertices instead of 66,000, and most of the planet is ocean
Mods can run code now
In 0.1 a mod was a skin. A mesh, some textures, and no way to make any of it actually do anything.
Mods can ship a compiled assembly. Components run in game the same way they do in the editor
Whatever you set in the inspector survives packaging. Arrays, lists, animation curves, hidden fields
The packager cleans up after you. Unused textures get shrunk, mesh settings get fixed, and your skin gets checked against the rules before it ships
Multiplayer
Public server browser, with satellite previews of where each world is
Player count, coordinates, local time and uptime, updating while you look
One shared clock, so everyone gets the same sunset
Players look where they're actually looking, with the aim spread across neck and chest
Rendering
Hi-Z depth pyramid drives occlusion culling for terrain, foliage and shadow casting
Terrain shadows render per tile into a shared atlas, ray marched against the height field
Celestial positions from latitude, day of year and hour angle. Moon phase advances with the calendar
Auto exposure floor tracks sun altitude rather than clock time
Atmospheric fog rewritten as a full screen render feature
Modding
Mod assemblies load, resolve and initialise correctly, including in builds
Component state captured at package time and replayed by reflection
Components get rebuilt at load when a build can't bind them from the bundle
Packager shrinks blank, black and unused textures, enables mesh Read/Write, clears stale output
Validation split into errors and warnings, so one optional component can't disqualify a whole model