Hey everyone! Time for a monthly update. A little early, because today is Monday and it's supposed to be March 1st, which would be the first Monday of the next month, anyway...
So many changes have been made in the past month for the game.
Item Management
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I rewrote a lot of the item management system, to encryption, and item stack size and item pickup. Starting with encryption: I completely removed the encryption system and added in a bank system, which costs 15k to own forever, and can be used to store items in, and can be accessed at any merchant. Next I recently rewrote the item stack size manager so it's not stack size per item in the Item Database, but stack size per slot in the inventory. I also fixed a long time bug with item pickup where certain items wouldn't disappear and would delete some other item nearby of the same type.
Rendering
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This was done yesterday, but I finally figured out how to get very distant objects to be rendered without increased draw distance for the player camera and with no performance hit! I added a second camera that starts at 8000 for the near clip plane (which is the max render distance for the player camera) and it renders only things within 8000-200000, which is only one planet right now, so the performance impact is barely noticeable.
Networking
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I rewrote networking again to make it as clean as possible. I did away with the in-game server creation and added in a .bat file to host a server from to offload the server processing to say, a VPS. This allows for dedicated servers to be ran with ease as long as your VPS is running Windows. We have one dedicated server up currently: Ember's Tyranny.
Bug Fixes
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I fixed so many bugs in this month, that I didn't expect to fix. I also changed a lot of things for improvement.
Bug fix/change count (Since Feb 12): 53
Steam Release
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I released the game on Steam this month! It was a giant accomplishment for the game, with a slightly shaky launch with player spawning issues, which were fixed immediately, I'd say it's pretty great despite the Mixed rating because some people don't meet minimum requirements so they gave it a Not Recommended rating. :(
I'd say this month was fantastic. :)
Thanks,
Mark