Hey gang!
I hope you have all had a wonderful week. I've been working hard on the Tundra and wanted to give you a progress update.
The last two weeks I finished adding the core biome content (excluding fauna). This includes 3 new trees, 3 new plants, all the tuning and data for the seasons and weather, and, lastly, ice!
Much like the snow buildup I've shown in previous dev blogs, ice will appear as you get further into cold seasons. Ice has the added functionality of providing a path above water and can be deconstructed in order to gain access to water/fishing again.
As well, regarding trees, I've now made it so you can build in the canopy of trees and have settlers walk around in there. This lets you make tree forts if you so choose.
Lastly, this week, I worked on improving two systems which were a bit buggy or slow. I didn't plan on working on these this week but they were VERY annoying and needed to be addressed. The first is the item spawning. It should now spawn items faster but also with less chance of failing because an open point isn't found. The second is blueprint item requirement awareness for builders. In live builds, the game can receive some pretty heavy framerate drops because settlers will think they can start building a blueprint when, in fact, the required items are not available. Sure, the item exists in the world, but another settler could be carrying it or has reserved it for use in building meaning it really isn't available to build with. These added checks will ensure settlers won't iterate through every single blueprint trying to find the item requirements that aren't there which is very expensive CPU-wise.
This weekend and next week I'll be tackling the temperature mechanics finally!
That's all for now. Thanks for reading!
Waylon