Solace Crafting News

At long last! The big performance upgrade is now live!

This was a major undertaking, upgrading not only Unity from 2019.4.40 to 2022.3.14, but also switching from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline. The Unity engine upgrade brought in some mandatory code changes, while the pipeline swap required an upgrade to every single material and shader used in the game. That means every texture on every monster, rock, and tree, fog, sky, water, you name it, everything had to be replaced or reworked.

What for? Performance! The game is now running much faster on my computer, over twice as fast in most cases, and I sincerely hope that everyone else is able to notice a similar increase in performance.

There are still some minor things I'm looking into, particularly the bug reporting system seems to have gone haywire with the engine upgrade, and there are some trees that seem to not be using the same shader across different parts of them causing a mismatch of colors. The biome colors overall have changed a bit as well as the post-processing systems that were previously being used to not work at all in the Universal Render Pipeline, so it was difficult to try and recreate all the same levels of saturation, brightness, and so forth.

Sometimes I would make a change to try and fix a problem with the global fog, or the targeting reticle, which ultimately I had to stop using decals for, and it would require a 3 and a half hour recompile of the entire shader library just to try something out... It was a pretty brutal experience all-in-all, but definitely worth it moving forward.

Speaking about moving forward, I'm expecting to get pretty busy in the coming months. A peer and some colleagues are planning to start putting in hours on the game as we move towards a sort of revamp of the graphics, the story, the world building, and the "feel" of the game overall. The goals of these changes are numerous and we'll get into them as they unfold, but ultimately we're hoping to take Solace Crafting out of the "solo indie developer" status to being a much more professional level quality game worthy of a modern audience. It's going to take time and money, and hopefully a fair bit of community involvement, but the game has always deserved more than my ram-shack set of skills, and I'm very excited to take the leap into working with others.

We already hit 36C (97F) where I live last week! I'm worried this year is going to be a scorcher! Please stay cool and safe wherever you may be, and I wish you all the best!

Happy Gaming!
Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games

Condensed patch notes:
v 1.1.0.0 2024.06.27
- Changed the targeting and target decal projectors to a quad
- Upgrade Unity to 2022.3.14
- Switched to the Universal Render Pipeline
- Replaced shaders for all materials
- Fixed enchants using Nail, Horn, and Claw from requiring them to be of an equal tier to the recipe
- Fixed some enchanting recipes using the wrong materials

Latest beta patch notes:
v 1.1.0.0 2024.06.27
- Changed the targeting and target decal projectors to a quad
- Fixed hotbars being improperly offset
- Fixed several monster AI problems
- Fixed some small fog issues
- Fixed some small grass issues

v 1.0.5.8 2024.06.10
- Fixed single-player mobs standing still/not responding
- Fixed linux builds

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

Join us in Discord!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

Just wanted to shout out real quick that I am visiting family with a newborn over the weekend. There is a pretty significant performance patch on the beta branch right now but I have made the mistake in the past of pushing a major patch before going out of town and so am waiting until I get back in a couple days to make sure I am available to handle any problems as they arise.

There's an open world survival craft sale going on right now so there's bound to be a wave of first time players and I just wanted to make sure anyone put off by the performance knows they can opt in to the beta via your Steam library if you want to check out the improvements before they go live 👍

Be back in a couple days.
Happy Gaming,
Kyle Postlewait

I struggled a lot with this patch! Not gonna lie! I was able to fix the few major problems that were really bothering me though, in particular the water shaders (still don't seem to be building 100% as intended), the fog both above and under water and on both cameras, as well as the targeting reticle shaders.

I'm kind of running out the door here, but there's still a couple of things I need to double check regarding multiplayer functionality, and it seems Linux builds are not working properly with the major upgrade in Unity versions. As such, this patch is again going to the beta branch, which is free for anyone that owns the game to access, if you want to check out the increased performance + help find any new bugs that might have come with all the changes. Hopefully I will get these last couple things sorted today/tomorrow and can push the change live.

Happy gaming!

v 1.0.5.7 2024.05.27
- Fixed fog
- Fixed weather particles not following the player properly
- Fixed a timing bug with animal/monster enabling
- Fixed targeting projectors
- Fixed auto-target working at unintended angles
- Fixed Earth and Stone elementals not dying properly

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 has been updated.
Every shader has been replaced.
Post processing has been reconstructed from the ground up. It's still much darker and less vibrant, I hope to remedy that.
Most in-game video settings have been rewired.
Weather has been reconstructed.
Grass in the grasslands has been reconstructed, other biomes still pending.
Fog on the foreground camera is not working, both above and below water.
ːsteamfacepalmː
FPS on max settings is up for me about 600-800%.
Work to be done, but glad to have a test build up.

This update is entirely visual and engine based. As such, it shouldn't affect save files, but better safe then sorry. I do recommend you make a copy of any characters or worlds you wish to try the beta with, especially if you plan on switching back and forth. Having said that though, other than the bloom settings, save files should be mutually compatible with both the current live version and the beta version.

I crashed hard after trying to crunch finish all of this before the weeklong sale started. My sister-in-law gave birth to the first grandchild of the siblings last week, and my wife is 13 weeks pregnant. So, got a little stressed out there for a minute, kinda had to shut down and recuperate. Sorry for the delay on this first wave, but the performance is looking a lot better, and I hope to be able to get the lighting and general vibrancy back to where it was previously ːsteamthumbsupː

v 1.0.5.5 2024.05.03
- Upgraded Unity from 2019.4.4 to 2022.3.14
- Switched from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline
- Replaced shaders for all materials
- Fixed enchants using Nail, Horn, and Claw from requiring them to be of an equal tier to the recipe
- Fixed some enchanting recipes using the wrong materials

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

Solace Crafting is on sale with a weeklong deal!

Unfortunately I was not able to get the big update I've been working on up in time, but here's hoping today goes well!

I've been working a variety of pretty serious engine upgrades including upgrading from Unity 2019.4 to Unity 2022.3, switching from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline, and a handful of FPS improvements. Last time I checked FPS was up around +75%, but in order to do that I've had to update over 3500 materials, and rewire basically all of the video settings, weather components, all fluids such as waterfalls and lava, and quite a bit more. Sadly the new water shaders in particular are still giving me problems to the point that I was up till 1AM last night trying to get everything sorted out.

So things are not quite ready yet, but should be ready to go here very soon. I just wanted to break the silence and let everyone know what's going on.

Happy gaming!