World Turtles News

New triangulation and textures, Improved Placement and Optimization is Live!

Good day, fellow Meeps!

I'm happy to report that the smoother terrain triangulation, less restrictive building placement, new terrain textures and improved optimization is now live! More detail in the links below.

Improved Optimization:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1512050/view/3674421166715540061?l=english

Smoother Terrain Triangulation and Less Restrictive Building Placement:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1512050/view/3696938531596732980?l=english

I'm aware of a few small visual glitches that do not affect gameplay (mostly where rivers and roads are concerned). If you encounter anything strange with the new triangulation, please mention it here or on the Discord server.

Next up: Improving the UI/UX. I'm working with a professional UI team on this one...

De Chelonian Mobile
Gideon

Improved Optimization

Good day, fellow Meeps!

I've been spending a lot of time on optimization recently, and wanted to mention a few improvements that will be included in the next update:

I'm now emitting all "dust" and "water spray" visuals from a single pair of particle systems, changing its parameters before emitting specific particles, where previously I placed a copy of the system at each point where dust / spray needed to be visualized, and then destroyed the system to get rid of the visuals. The central particle systems now emits particles for all locations specified in a dynamic list. Rain, clouds and snow emission have been working like this for a while.
Finding locations for Fracture Springs when Fault Lines erupt now runs on one of the parallel threads, getting rid of the most notable (and very noticeable) temporary stuttering in frame rate when Fault Lines erupt.
Some "take small steps over time until all is done" changes are now made instantaneously if the Fault Line isn't explored by the player (and thus not visible), further reducing frame rate stuttering.
I've improved memory management by implementing list pools across all threads to reduce the strain put on garbage collection, reducing temporary frame rate drops.
I've reduced "Set Pass Calls" and "Batches" to reduce the amount of communication required between CPU and GPU.
I've reduced excessive triangles in the Food Ball and Snow Comet models.

Along with the improved triangulation (see previous post), the next update will also include huge improvements in the terrain texture, which I have completely revisited (with only a few left to go). Here's an example of what the game currently looks like. Although the new triangulation requires more GPU resources (I've always been CPU bound on my side anyway), the texture improvement is achieved with no additional strain on the CPU or GPU.

I'm very excited to release this update, but there are a few loose ends to tie up before we can go live. Please stay tuned!

De Chelonian Mobile
Gideon

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