World Turtles News

Smoother Terrain Triangulation and Less Restrictive Building Placement

Good day, fellow Meeps!

I've been working on the following very impactful changes:

An alternative terrain triangulation for a much smoother look.
Relaxing restrictions on building placement, making it easier to find suitable locations.

Terrain Triangulation

I have completely reworked the triangulation to make the terrain more flowing, less blocky. This increases the GPU needs, but the original style will still be available for lower graphic settings.

Less Restrictive Building Placement

Previously, Meeps could raise/lower terrain one elevation level for most buildings and 2 for special ones. They can now alter the terrain by up to 3 elevation levels for most buildings, and 4 for special ones. This greatly reduces the restrictions placed on building placement.

Previously, Meeps could only walk, and roads could only go, up and down 2 elevation levels (as indicated by terraces). They can also now traverse a maximum of 4 elevation levels, again lifting restrictions on where Meeps can go and how roads connect.

Finally, this also makes pathfinding quicker, improving stability / performance.

These changes are quite impactful, so I still need to finalize a few loose ends and test that everything still works properly, so the game will not yet be updated to include these changes - stay tuned, it won't be long!

De Chelonian Mobile!
Gideon

Patch 3: QoL and UI Improvements

Good day, fellow Meeps!

Today brings some more UI improvements, and some quality of life additions.

I've made these changes/improvements since he previous update:

Added an "Auto: Balance" option to the Building UI, which will let the building always select the task with the smallest percentage experience, which allows you to have an automated balanced progression through the experiences and allow the building to upgrade as soon as possible. When all tasks' experience has run full, it falls back to the set task priorities.
Fields, Animal Camps and Shoals that have not been set are highlighted in red (on the terrain itself) in addition to the existing target icon on black background. The previous temporary warning message when deselecting a building with some unscheduled foodstuffs also remains in place.
"Game Saved as...." message does not contain full path anymore (privacy reasons).
Save/Load Menu contains a button to open the saved game path.
Border Flags display even when the terrain they're on is unexplored.
Slight tint on building floorplans makes it easier to know which hexes are occupied by buildings.
Added doodad models to some buildings to also make it easier to know which hexes are part of their floorplans.
Objective Target Icons are now created closer to the proposed area of application, rather than randomly around the Founders Hex.
The first time the game is run, the Personalize segment of the Game Options menu is loaded automatically, so that the player is aware of the available languages.
Disabled icons are not quite as dark anymore, to make them easier to distinguish.
More time between Fault Line eruptions, so there's more time to build "dam walls" to protect your realm.
When displaying the cost of buildings or tasks, values for which there aren't enough resources are printed in red.
All Tooltips now update their text every second to make sure these colored amounts reset back to white when enough resources are available, and all other functions displayed in the tooltip also update.
The temporary change in Tooltip that tells you which resource is lacking now remains for 3 seconds rather than just until the cursor is moved (which often caused the message to be missed).
Fixed a bug when loading a leader board without any current entries.
Changed the message when path-finding takes too long to not mention CPU speed (since that isn't technically the issue), but rather mention it's an unexpected path-finding issue. For reference, if none of these crop up, I can run the game at 18x speed for a long time before the CPU gets overloaded.
Added stand-in auto-translated German and Chinese phrases (as well as proper Afrikaans ones) for the few UI elements I've added. These will be updated in the next localization round.

See you soon with another update!
Gideon

World Turtles is a city-builder on the back of a space turtle out now

City-builders come in all shapes and sizes and now you can build on the back of a massive turtle flying through space in World Turtles.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/05/world-turtles-is-a-city-builder-on-the-back-of-a-space-turtle-out-now

Patch 2: UI Improvements and a few small bugs

Good day, fellow Meeps!

I've been working on the UI functionality during the last week, and have made some good progress towards making the UI more intuitive and less clunky to get around to information / functions applicable at specific points. We've not updated the visuals /theme yet, but the upgraded Building UI panel will make it easier and more intuitive to give orders.

The Building UI panel now contains separate tabs, giving the player focused access to the information and actions specific to that building:

Tasks: As before, the player sets task priorities, order roads and upgrades the building on this tab.
Research: The research "wheel" (as currently on the Research Overview panel) is displayed here, but for this building type only, allowing the player to focus on, and change, the research of this building type in isolation.
Annexes: Displays (and links to) all currently existing Annexes commissioned by this building, and also shows how many Annex slots are still available. A list of all Annexes commissioned by this building type is also displayed and the player can order an Annex straight from this panel.
Resources: For Farms and Fishmongers, this panel displays all the workable hexes, as well as what livestock / seafood / crops are currently growing on them. The player can also schedule crops straight from this panel, and a color-coded frame around foodstuff icons now show the suitability of each crop given the climate of the specific building. When scheduling foodstuff on the map, these frames are now also present on the icons there.

I've also fixed a few minor bugs and made some small changes:

Some of the zooming on certain UI elements (especially when they appear) have been removed to make them snappier and feel less laggy.
Farming, Research and Combined Tutorial achievements did not fire.
Builder's Yard Achievements did not fire (this was a fix on the Steam backend, so they would have already started firing without the game update).