The need arose to develop a new system capable of determining rare resource positions without rolling for all of the spawns in that area. The main user of this system would be the map, as it would gain the ability to scan for rare resources anywhere in the world. It's a complicated task though that touches on a variety of different systems, and at the root of most of those system was the biome generation math.
When I stopped using a third party tool for world generation last year due to its increasingly slowing performance, it was up to me to develop my own system for biome creation. I always had it in my mind that there would be some day in the future when there would be either procedural biomes, or dozens of hand-crafted biomes. I developed two very different systems to "force" biomes into certain locations after rolling a random number on a table that could do just that, generate any number of biomes. Unfortunately both systems were chunky, very unnatural, and not very perfomant.
Instead, I've for the first time (personally) written a much more normal noise based system that produces very random biomes:
This also brings back the ability to customize the frequency of each biome during world creation, as well as the size of the starting area, the blend distance to be used between biomes, the general scale, or frequency, of the noise used to determine biomes, as well as a new optional archipelago setting:
The archipelago setting will separate mountains and swamps from grasslands and desert with channels of water (whose width you can customize) make travelling around with boats a very viable system, and honestly just makes a lot of cool land formations. I love building on islands and sheer cliffs for some reason. Because of the extreme difference in height between the mountain biome and the ocean biome it is now possible to have quite steep cliff-sides, so I've upgraded the object spawning systems to be able to understand terrain steepness, and can now assign a maximum or minimum slope to any object:
All-in-all I hope it makes for a much more interesting landscape, but the improved performance and capabilities that it offers me under the hood are very real. I have fixed the funky lines that show up on the map in this patch, but for the most part have yet to switch on the new features that I'm working on with the map.
This patch will require a world "update" which will attempt to reposition buildings to the now changed surface height of the new biomes wherever they may end up. Or of course this would be a great time to start a new world, into which you can bring any already made characters. The map update will reset some of the spawned objects and rare object positions, but it won't mess with the biome noise, which is really the only reason I ever need to force a world update.
Outside of all that, I've fixed a few problems with multi-player, and animations in general. One bug that looks like it has been around for a long time was only affecting clients connecting to servers or hosts that turned up their stone spawn frequency, causing server and client resource positions to not match up. Found today and fixed, thanks to a player report!
Thank you so much to everyone that has put up with my mistakes and adventures in coding as I try to bring Solace Crafting to a solid 1.0 release. I know we were in the middle of working on animations, but there was an increasing number of problems and performance issues cropping up due to the old biome system, and wounded ego aside, I'm quite happy to be rid of it.
Work on map improvements continues!
v 0.7.4.0 2021.04.14
- Replaced circular "forced" biome system with a noise based system
- Reduced maximum ocean depth (meaning less deep)
- Added an "archipelago" setting to world creation
- Updated world setting restrictions and added more descriptions
- Added the ability to check the slope of an area for object spawn rules
- Updated MP nametags to reposition themselves based on the height of the player
- Fixed a number of animal animation running twice
- Fixed a number of animals not playing their attack animations
- Fixed MP animations jerking funkily
- Fixed a bug causing clients to load resoures different in MP worlds than the server if the stone spawn frequency was altered
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
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