Devblog #14

I have created an ammo management system. Guns will have a set amount of ammo they are able to hold at a given time, when you reload it checks for if you have ammo in your inventory and reloads according to how much you have spare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NwwoOWbs-k


Animal hitboxes and ragdoll constrains have been improved and now properly wrap around their bodies.




The Moon phases now render correctly.




There were some pretty major performance issues with the weather. The main issue is that when the tornado would contact a tree, it would tell it to change its mesh to a stump. This is normal and supposed to happen, the issue is that it would telling the tree to do this every frame, regardless if the tree was already a stump. This resulted in major CPU overhead trying to change the mesh constantly. This has been fixed and the performance is much better. Improvements to storm cloud rendering have also been made.


I have made a change to how player saves are loaded. The game will now always try to match the host save. What this means is that, if I have a world, and I have lots of items in my inventory that are vital to playing the world, and I give my friend the world file, he will load in with all the same items that I had.


I have made many changes to how actors are saved and loaded. Previously if I were to do so much as move a file around, it would risk breaking save files. Now I have created a system that allows for greater compatibility over the long term. It uses lookup tables with identifiers to find the class it needs, rather than pointers to classes, which could change from build to build. Along with this I have created a versioning system for save files, which is able to detect what version the save was last loaded on, and perform any compatibility updates if needed, preventing the save from becoming corrupt. I have already put it into action by changing the location of the sea level, and landscape height. The system was able to correctly reposition all objects to the new ground location. There has also been simular compatibility code added for things like inventories, to detect if the amount of slots has changed since last load, and properly resize the amount of slots without corrupting items. BLAH BLAH BLAH BORING TECHNICAL SPEAK BLAH BLAH BLAH.

• Animations have been optimized.
  
• Equipable Items now use skeletal mesh.
  
• Graphics Quality settings are now auto detected on first time launch.
  
• Grass rendering has been improved for better performance.
  
• Fog can no longer be completely opaque.
  
• Lights will stop rendering at a distance of 30 meters.