Edengrall News

Bugfix:
Fixed multiple issues with the XML reader ignoring various types and properties

Changes:
Changed the water shader once again. (Work in progress, especially underwater)

Old water vs new water:

We are preparing the forage system to accept a variation of player grown crops, but first some optimization is required because the new bamboo are a bit heavier on the memory and GPU than expected.

The wild crops will spawn in large patches and will replace the placeholder berry bushes, blueberries will now be a crop, wild blueberries will only give fruit during autumn.

Wild crops will drop both crops and seeds like cultivated ones do, and we want this to be the main way of getting seeds, so we are nerfing the seed drops from grass by 80%, you no longer get ANY seeds when using he scythe, only with sickle.



About optimization:

From current to first beta:
Rewrote the map raycaster into native containers and added spawnables graph
changed the city to the new version
added grass to the bamboo forest
From first beta to current beta:
removed unused textures from memory
map texture atlas maker code moved to GPU -> removed 10 seconds and 1.8gb ram spike
LoadDatabase 6 sec to 3.8 sec

From the current version to our current build

Loading main menu: from 23 to 13 seconds
Loading a save: from 44 to 30 seconds
GPU memory from 3.6gb to 3.3gb
RAM memory from 3.2gb to 2.4gb
CPU use reduced by about 30%, but the GPU use was increased by 15% because now the GPU is doing some work that the CPU was doing less efficiently.



We have also added settings options for LOD and shadows for the forage.

Performance:
Reduced the game memory usage by about 400mb
Removed a 8~12 seconds loading that spiked 1.8gb of memory when you open the game

Bugfix:
Fixed the normal calculations on the terrain textures

Changes:
Added more options for aggressive LOD on bamboos and other forageables.


Bugfixes:
Fixed the LOD transition for forageables

We finally managed to release the beta, it contains the city overhaul (99% done) and the test version of the new forage system applied to bamboo only for now.

Bamboo plants are now destructible awarding the player softwood sticks or planks (placeholder, it will drop bamboo one day, after we make bamboo building pieces), if enough bamboo are destroyed new shoots will grow and slowly turn into adult plants, we keep track of every single bamboo and managed to do so without impacting performance.



We do still need to do some tweaks and change the way the system saves the entities, so this will cause the next version to be save-incompatible with the current beta, so if you start a playthrough now, do so knowing it will not be compatible with the main build update.

Now we are going to add other plants to the system, starting with wild edible weeds, dandelion, violet and cattails, then we will convert our crops to allow them to spawn as wild crops too, these wild crops will drop seeds like a cultivated crop does, because of this we will drastically reduce the random seeds gathered by cutting grass.

This update might look small, but a lot of engine work was required to make it all work, there are still some issues to fix and a lot of polish to make, the full update might take as much as a full month to release.