I was looking to put up a patch today, but spotted some small bugs with it I want to fix and re-export tomorrow morning, so I thought I'd at least post a little bit of a progress report, as I don't like leaving the news empty for this long.
There are two main categories that I've been working on this week:
1. Colors
The biggest addition to color overall is the new biome based post-processing system. This slowly shifts color correction math used by the camera such as saturation and post-exposure based on the biome that you are in. Overall the game world is much more vibrant than it was before. I also plugged weather into this system, doing away with the old 6-7 types of weather, for a completely random system that also now takes into consideration what biome you're in.
Fog and sky, two complex and important sets of colors within this new color correction system I expect to further increase the diversity between biomes, though I am still in process of tweaking properly for each biome.
2. Clutter
I've removed most of the "flat" rather performance heavy trees in the grasslands, and replaced them with several types of trees that are also now much more colorful, giving more of a late summer feel with purples and red, rather than just green every where. To go with the new trees I've added a variety of trunks, mossy rocks, and general "clutter". I've also recently acquired a variety of new flora and fauna for the desert, the mountains, and the ocean as well, now that we have breathing potions in and working.
I don't want to spend too much time working on the ocean biome just yet, I'm more just looking to improve the general variety and color of each of the biomes as best as I can without changing the actual heightmap noise. Messing with the heightmap generation noise would require a "world update" in which all player placed objects have to be re-positioned, which isn't a huge problem, but improving heightmap noise isn't something I'm looking to prioritize right now in any case. More importantly I want to get back to working on player animations once this pass at the current biomes is finished.
The pollen count is steadily rising here in Japan, but so is the temperature, and that's a welcome change coming out of winter! Thank you to everyone posting here and in Discord, and my apologies if it takes a little extra to get to bug reports while I'm in the middle of some of these larger changes sometimes.
Best wishes,
Malkere