Solace Crafting News

We were hoping to get the latest changes currently on beta pushed to the live branch last week but there have been a number of small network bugs that cropped up holding things back. That and I am currently on a train in Southwest Japan. I went AFK on Monday and will be back tomorrow, so I didn't want to push a major patch, knowing that I would be gone for a few days. Once we free up beta there's a whole new wave of performance upgrades we've been working on that will be moved to beta.

Beyond the performance upgrades we have some new UI upgrades under construction, a new player controller, and I am in talks with a modeller for new building textures.

I also wanted to bring up that I've been researching using the Steam Datagram Relay transport as an alternative to the current TCP based transport. This is not a sector of software development that I am skilled in, but Steam offers backend support for P2P gameplay that bypasses the need for router port forwarding that some people have a hard time setting up, and/or are unable to work with. It's not something I'm sure yet that we can work with, but it could be a useful alternative to the current TCP transport.

Again, I will be back tomorrow and looking to push the recent changes as soon as possible.

The latest beta patch notes are as follows:

v 1.0.1.1 2022.11.21
- Fixed facility/other windows staying open/connected when swapping between crafting & inventory causing problems.

v 1.0.1.0 2022.11.15
- Improved crafting and item details for weapons
- Fixed an issue with the multiplayer town building spawning
- Fixed some tilled soil math issues
- Fixed a new issue causing network object to go invisible while standing still

v 1.0.0.18 2022.11.08
- Fixed a bug with cooked food despawning from backpacks and storage chests
- Fixed player models not loading avatar changes properly in multiplayer in some occasions
- Fixed a bug improperly kicking player for SteamID mismatches
- Fixed a bug causing basic melee attacks to miss on multiplayer clients

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

I've rented a new Los Angeles server from PingPerfect.com for the beta branch. I am currently aware of two hosting services that have recently started offering hosting for Solace Crafting:
PingPerfect Nexus Hosting Networks
Setting up port forwarding on whatever random router you might have isn't always the easiest thing in the world. And then there's firewalls and security and Windows getting in the way. I hope we'll be able to make the experience smoother someday, but I know that as is, some people have a tough time getting dedicated servers up and running on their home computers, so it's cool that there are some cheap, quick, and easy alternatives available now.
As far as I know, both sites are offering shared server usage, so it's not necessarily "dedicated" but should run fine, especially for groups of 2-4, and we are actively working on improving runtime world generation to speed up servers.

The new beta server is running the latest patch, 1.0.0.13. Primarily bug fixes, as we are still hammering out a few different things on a separate beta branch.

In other news, we now have a total of 5 people working on the game in some capacity \o/ Only two of us are working full-time, but we have a third developer looking into texture optimization and general rendering performance, a fourth developer working on reworking the character controller and locomotion, and a fifth individual I will be working one on one with tomorrow morning lined up to spend time working on the UI/UX side of things.
Things are slowly gaining speed, and again, I'm hoping to have some wider reaching changes up before the Steam Winter Sale gets started.

This patch is a good candidate to push to the live branch, pending some testing, and maybe a hotfix or two, I hope to push the update live within a day or two.

v 1.0.0.13 2022.10.31
- Added checks to update really old, unedible food to be edible
- Fixed a bug with weather not syncing properly in MP
- Fixed a bug with resource respawning

v 1.0.0.12 2022.10.25
- Fixed a bug causing skill cooldowns to reduce slightly with each level
- Fixed /stuck not working in caves
- Fixed blink cooldown
- Fixed hotkeys retaining unwanted data after using a tabula rasa potion
- Fixed Stoneworkers requiring stone to summon
- Fixed several skill description errors
- Fixed charge attacking with or without Dashing Strike
- Fixed charge going wild sometimes
- Fixed the weapon set swap icon being scaled improperly
- Fixed wardrobe weapons being overriden with swapping, sheathing, and some skills
- Fixed save and exit briefly throwing harmless errors sometimes on multiplayer client
- Fixed a bug with equipping shields in multiplayer
- Fixed a bug with harvested resources in multiplayer still showing up

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

As previously mentioned, there are some biome changes underway that we want to keep out of beta until we can compile together a couple of other changes that will render currently saved worlds in need of updating. Here is a build from a separate branch we are working on with some bug fixes.

Recently I updated the networking solution that I use, Mirror, to its latest version and there were some slight changes to the architecture that has required a few components be updated. Several of these issues are related to that, and there are a couple more multiplayer specific issues that I am still looking into, outside of the general bug reports on the bug tracker which we are trying to whittle away at.

v 1.0.0.11 2022.10.17
- Fixed weapon targeting not working at times
- Fixed an issue with terraforming collision detection
- Fixed a problem with tombstones duplicating
- Fixed a bug with Charge and Jump Back
- Fixed an animation error with passive animals
- Fixed a bug with the new Mirror stopping resources from syncing properly after harvest
- Fixed auto-harvest not working with the new Mirror
- Fixed being able to loot while dead

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

Hey everybody, hope all is well!
I just wanted to give a quick update as it's been a bit since the last update / patch.

As previously stated we're trying to focus on bug fixes and overall game engine improvements at the moment, but, for a fair amount of things, simply patching up whatever the problem isn't always the best approach. Sometimes the reason there are bugs with a system is because the foundations of the system itself were not written very intelligently in the first place.
These kinds of things are 100% my fault, as I've made clear, I never really wanted to be a programmer, but that was 90% of what the game needed to get everything working, so there is some undesirable code and some less than perfectly designed systems in-game. Since we now have a more experienced programmer helping out, he is reworking some of these systems at a more "root" level rather than just putting duct tape over the holes.
The first thing that I actually had him look at had to do with "area" generation, which is what spawns resources, monsters, and so forth. Any changes to these kinds of systems affects saved games to the point that they need to be restarted or "updated" which repositions player built objects. There are some other changes to spawning underway, so rather than having beta players need to wipe or update repeatedly in a short period of time, I'm looking to group a couple of things together into one larger patch.

Beyond that, I've hired on a second developer part-time, primarily to look into performance optimizations for the time being. A third developer is due to join us shortly for reworking the character controller. And a friend of a friend is exploring some ideas for redesigning and redrawing the user interface.

So, nothing has necessarily happened overnight, but there is a lot going on! Hopefully before the Winter sale starts up we can get a few larger waves of patches up. To be honest, personally I've spent quite a bit of time this week getting my life back in order. I got my car fixed, paid off a bunch of lingering bills I had, etc.

More to come soon!

After a diligent search for cost efficient talent, I've hired on a programmer who's now diving into the code headfirst! It will definitely take some time for him to get situated within the over 120,000 lines of code, but having some help is going to make a big difference!

I am still negotiating with a few other developers for other tasks, likely more short term, but this has brought up a lot of important new things for me to work on to make sure that our team can work together efficiently, how every many are working on the game at any given point, now that it's no longer a solo endeavor.

I am very much having us focus on bug fixes and performance for the foreseeable future. We want to make sure this ship is running as smooth as possible before we get back into expanding on both current systems and new.

I've also finished upgrading Mirror, the network solution that Solace Crafting uses, to the latest and greatest version. There were some bumps in a couple of beta patches over the past few days, but I think I've got everything sorted out.

More news to come shortly!

The latest beta patch notes are as follows:

v 1.0.0.9 2022.10.04
- Fixed static network objects not always positioning properly on clients past 8192m

v 1.0.0.8 2022.10.03
- Upgraded Mirror (network solution)

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker