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Solace Crafting News

Beta v 1.0.2.0

At long last, we have our first patch of upgraded logic and math on a variety of our core systems including world generation queues, biome noise math, and object spawning. These three are the major systems running the background at pretty much all times while players are moving around in the game trying to determine what needs to be spawned, where, who needs to be spawned first, and so forth.

You all as gamers are probably aware of these concepts, but Solace Crafting operates on a near 100% runtime spawning system, meaning that there are no "levels" or predetermined areas already designed that are getting copied and pasted into your game world. Yet at the same time, each world is not at all "random" but actually completely math based, derived entirely from the seed generated whenever you create a new world. Right down to the placement of a flower, everything can be derived from the world seed and so nothing actually gets saved to disk either, until you make a change.

I personally very much enjoy the replayability and randomness this brings to game, but it does also come with a variety of challenges as all of this has be handled in runtime, whether the player is looking at a menu or in the middle of a decisive fight for their life. This patch makes some pretty deep changes to these core systems for an overall faster and smoother game engine.

As these changes are in some place quite "foundational", it's not unlikely that there will be some new bugs we'll have to look into, but our new programmer has been doing a stellar job, and let me be the first to say I'm super thankful to finally have someone that knows what they are doing! haha... >_>

The new player controller is very close as well, 95%, didn't quite make it into this patch, but it is indeed, so much better than the current controller, it's hard for me to switch back to the current. I have also opened a contract with a new 3D artist for some new buildings pieces and skins, as my old contact has proven inapplicable for our current needs. We've also seemingly lost one of our initial hires for some reason, he never logged any hours, but I have not heard from him in over three weeks now, so I've unfortunately frozen the contract, but things are moving steadily forward. I've also gotten a first glimpse of some of the UI changes we've got in the pipe, and they too are much more intelligently planned out, and I hope we can get some early iterations of them in as soon as possible! I'm also working on some new items, but nobody wants to hear about that!

Best wishes and holidays to everyone in the merry month of December!
We should have some more updates very soon.

v 1.0.2.0 2022.12.03
- Improved world generation queue logic
- Improved object spawning logic
- Improved biome noise math
- Implemented multi-threading to save functions
- Redesigned player teleportation handling in and out of caves/dungeons/floating islands
- Added noise to tree spawning
- Increased most tree resource maximum rewards

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

Now live v 1.0.1.1

Now pushing v 1.0.1.1 to the live default branch. I have been really hesitant to push this patch as there is a lot of changes to the core networking code that could have had generated some yet unforseen problems, and I knew I had a small trip coming up before Thanksgiving, and then well it was Thanksgiving. I'm headed to bed now though and tomorrow is Monday morning for me here, so if there is anything problematic that crops up I'll be on top of it!

As I've mentioned before once this patch is moved off of the beta branch I will start pushing the procedural generation and engine optimization changes that we have been working on to beta. This patch will primarily only affect multi-player, outside of the various bug fixes, but this next wave of patches will be more foundational improvements affecting all play modes. Hopefully we will be able to get targeting and the new player controller up for testing and input in the next week or two as well.

I usually summarize patch notes moving from beta to live by removing smaller fix notations, but that was the majority of what was being worked on outside of the networking upgrade, so I went ahead and left all of the changes below.

v 1.0.0.6 -> 1.0.1.1 2022.11.27
- Upgraded Mirror (network codebase)
- Added guardian gauntlets recipe
- Improved crafting and item details for weapons
- Added checks to update really old, unedible food to be edible
- Fixed facility/other windows staying open/connected when swapping between crafting & inventory causing problems.
- 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
- 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
- Fixed a bug with weather not syncing properly in MP
- Fixed a bug with resource respawning
- 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
- 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
- Fixed static network objects not always positioning properly on clients past 8192m
- Fixed guardian leggings not rendering properly
- Fixed being able to save a solace placed using free placement mode into a structure save
- Fixed weather turning on in caves sometimes
- Fixed character creation assigned skill points not properly increasing skill tree spent point count
- Fixed character creation assigned attributes not properly assigning
- Fixed harmless render texture error spam on dedicated servers and a couple other harmless start up errors
- Fixed bought attributes not always applying properly until reconnecting
- Fixed some types of weapon speed improvements reducing their "base speed," upsetting damage math

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

Development update

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

News + Beta v1.0.0.13

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

Beta v 1.0.0.11

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