Numerous Changes (Patreon)

Hello, I'm sorry this post is a whole week late compared to the normal schedule; the reason is literally just because I have been so busy that hardly anything else can pry me away. The past couple weeks have been spent on things other than creatures, so I'm excited to get back to that again soon.

One of the first things I did after the last post was make this new ambient track. it uses a new instrument for the piano, but I tried to make the filters sound as similar as possible; now I can play notes much higher without them sounding distorted. One of the main points of this track was to try to get back to making "simple" tracks that just fit the feeling of serene nature and outdoors, with more repetition to make them easier to enjoy. I know that no one else is really able to listen to Ambient Music 6 (or 5) because it's so busy and always changing before you can get your footing. 5 and 6 were kind of trying to tell stories rather than just vibe. Fun fact: Ambient Music 7 has a particular six notes (two groups of 3) which were plucked straight out of Ambient Music 3, but I think no one will be able to figure it out. hah

The most exciting things I've done in the past two weeks are things that I would really love to keep a secret so that V80 packs more of a punch. A lot of them are just polish, and they have a much better surprise when you notice them organically. I have been bug-fixing (mostly bugs introduced in V80) and constantly getting side-tracked on the way with little things that I have always wanted but never got around to.

Tongue

Yesterday I messed with player-to-player body collision and made it so that when running or crouching or holding big objects, your collision is less "soft"; the purpose is that in rare circumstances, players will actually knock into each other and get in each others' way. It feels a lot better to feel some resistance than to phase through your coworker as if they were a ghost.

I added these cracks which are visible when getting to critical health.

The reason I did this was because I needed to clean up the normal helmet cracks and initially tried just changing them. However the original cracks are just too good, and I think it must have to do with how they add to the overall composition of the screen, in some subliminal way. So now we have these new injury cracks along with a cleaner, subtler version of the normal cracks.

The mineshaft's flow has been reworked so there are extra, smaller pockets of caves in different locations. This makes the map feel less linear and decreases the frustration of looking for the caves and not being able to find them. The mineshaft has also been extra chaotic because of the fact that there is just one transition between caves and tunnels, which means that all creatures and players need to flow through that one chokepoint to get to either side of the map. Overall it's a small change, but it definitely helps.

I've been turning all the dials to see if there's any more performance benefits I can get. Now there is a basic occlusion culling in the interiors, which should help, for example, on Titan. Non-moving lights indoors now have their shadows "cached" so that the game doesn't calculate shadows for the environment every frame, just for players and creatures and scrap. Yesterday I also revamped some base creature code to make creatures less dumb, mainly in large maps or if there are ludicrous amounts of them moving around. Now that I have a beefy computer it's a bit hard to test if any of this has had a noticeable impact though, so I don't know yet.

Today I also finally fixed spiders so they bob up and down when moving as they were supposed to. (That means they might not randomly twerk anymore, but it's worth it.)

I also got one of the most insane and ambitious ideas for a creature that I've ever had--not ambitious because of the complexity of its behaviors (although those could get crazy) but because of the mere concept. Really the idea could be quite simple depending on how I do it. The reason I'm excited is because it's like a new genre of creature. It's just how it will be executed that I don't know yet. It might not happen in this update.

I managed to talk quite a bit without spoiling anything major! Anyways I am going to get back to my long list of playtest notes and hopefully be done with all these weird changes soon so I can get back to the creature feature.