Solace Crafting News

It looks like there are still some bugs to kink out, some of which are fine after pushing things to live, there are definitely a lot of benefits to be had in spite of a few small bugs, but one in particular I would like to look closer at, and am running out the door for the weekend right now. So I will hold off the push until next week, after I can take a better look at some of the new reports.

The beta is of course open to everyone.

v 0.6.4.30 2020.09.04
- Fixed a problem with missing icons multiplying on the map

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

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.

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

Announcing a push to live has brought up some last minute bugs =D
I've fixed a few things, and am eagerly awaiting some data that should help me pinpoint the map icon bug. I have not been able to reproduce it myself yet, so hopefully a save game already with the broken icons on the map should let me fix whatever the problem is.

Also, the last patch had a bit of a blunder with it. I reused some settings variables that were used in pre-0.6.4, though in a different manner than they used to be used. This caused the old saved settings to be re-loaded, inputting numbers that should never be possible which ended up causing problems. The problems were:
1. Render distance could jump up to over 1000km, and cause the game to crash.
2. Biome noises were not yet being used in 0.6.4, but could still be changed in the world creation window. This would cause the numbers to suddenly switch into use, causing already created (0.6.4) worlds with changes to their biome settings to suddenly generate differently.
I renamed all of the variables in question, so they will be forced back to default with this patch.
The good: Any worlds created before 0.6.4.28 will now run in 0.6.4.29 as normal.
The bad: Any worlds created with altered biome settings, specifically with the 0.6.4.28 patch, will be reset all biome settings to 1.0, causing them to be different then they were yesterday.

All in all that means only worlds created in the past 36 hours or so will be affected, but my appologies if that causes problems for anyone, and thank you for the prompt reports!

I am going to be out of town this weekend, so it might end up being better to wait to push live until the start of next week... But i think even with the possibility of some small problems with a specific user or two, the benefits outweight the risk and I will go ahead and push beta live tomorrow.

v 0.6.4.29 2020.09.03
- Renamed to reset biome settings and render distance settings
- Fixed resource scanners not loading their range properly
- Fixed leyline teleporter upgrades
- Fixed placed facility upgrades not saving/loading properly
- Fixed a bug that could cause distant structure duplications when upgrading facilities or transmogrifying

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

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.

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

I'm hoping to push this patch to the live branch tomorrow! It's been a long time in the works! There's still a number of multi-player fixes to be had, and... as I type this I'm remembering a bug in creative mode that I don't think I've fixed yet, I'll double check that tomorrow. But overall it should be a much faster, much more stable version of the game than the current live branch.

This patch updates the world settings that were not yet working with the new world generation system. You can now once again fine tune biome frequency, as well as most things that spawn out in the world. Render distance settings are now working again as well, so players on faster or slower computers can change how far out the different systems will spawn.

There were also some bugs with grass not updating properly during terraforming, as well as a crafting window bug that was applying passive crafting skills twice to the preview item, making things look stronger than the actual item that would be crafted.

If all goes well, I will push this live tomorrow, and can start diving into some of the next steps while finishing up the last bits of multi-player that need updating (most obvious being bags).

v 0.6.4.28 2020.09.01
- Updated world creation biome settings to work with 0.6.4
- Updated world creation spawn frequency settings to work with 0.6.4
- Updated render distance settings to work with 0.6.4
- Fixed the crafting window preview adding crafting skills twice resulting in a stronger looking item than would actually be crafted
- Fixed grass not updating properly while terraforming

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

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.

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

I got a bit hung up on this patch, which brings floating islands into multiplayer for the first time. There are now 8+ different possible entry and exit methods from world encounters like caves and floating islands (teleporting from one to another, teleporting from the surface to one, re-joining a server where you logged out at one, etc), and getting them all to work properly using generic terminology, as opposed to writing a custom solution for every scenario, took a bit of trial, error, and rewriting.

Mostly only a map icon error I'm still trying to track down, and bags/container support for mutliplayer, and then we should be ready to push beta to the live branch. That doesn't mean that the current beta build is flawless and won't need further attention (thank you everyone for the bug posts in Discord and here on the forums) but it is a big step forward.

v 0.6.4.26 2020.08.25
- Added floating islands back to SP and MP
- Floating islands are a bit smaller and easier to navigate now
- Fixed a number of bugs teleporting in and out of world encounters (caves and floating islands), some MP specific
- Fixed teleporters
- Fixed dropped items in caves throwing errors

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

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.

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

This patch heavily reworks the ways in which caves are generated, positioned, traveled through, and more. The main goal of this is to change the entire "cave" system into a "world encounter" system that floating islands, and other "encounters" in the works can all make of use of instead of trying to setup logic for each new system as they come. This way a procedurally spawned encounter can simply be told to Generate, and it will know what to do with itself rather than all of the manager and resource and travel (etc) systems having to change their logic for different types of encounters.

A second big reason for this upgrade is to improve the way that caves are handled in multiplayer. My first attempts at setting things up was just too complicated as caves were originally built to potentially be very long, and so sectioned into "chunks" that were all handled separately. This made converting the system to work with multiplayer very difficult. Instead, I've ditched the chunk method, widened the caves over all making them much easier to navigate (though gems on the ceiling can still be quite high), and reduced the maximum depth by quite a bit.


(A random cave system)

As there are some pretty serious changes to caves with this patch, there may still be some small bugs with it, especially with planters in multiplayer, as I haven't had a chance to check on those yet. If there are any new problems I'll fix 'em up though! Tomorrow I'll be working to reform floating island management into the new World Encounter system and turn them back on, which will be a lot easier now that the system is built and working with caves. After that I'm very interested in working on a lava "portal" or "pocket dimension" encounter, something I've wanted to do for a long time.

I've found it necessary these past few weeks to spend some time working on some of the more fun things as far as game development goes. For me that's easiest explained as new features. I'm very excited to work on a new lava zone. I've been trying to just force my way through finishing up 0.6.4 and upgrading the last few things that are still not working in multi-player, but if I don't spend some time working on the fun stuff here and there I get really burnt out and my productivity nose dives. I ended up pretty much taking all of last week of to just get my life back in shape as I was kind of in a bad spot, the business part of me wanting to do nothing more than finish 0.6.4 as soon as possible, while the real me wanted to do anything but that. Those two mes fought for weeks and it all kind of blew up right as my fridge stopped working in the middle of summer.

Anyway, sorry for the short absence.
More to come!
Stay safe!

v 0.6.4.26 2020.08.19
- Widened caves and reduce their maximum depth
- Changed the way caves are generated, positioned, entered, left, and saved
- Fixed a problem with cave resources being immediately destroyed
- Fixed a problem with client side cave resources destroying nearby resources on death
- Fixed crystal and obsidian golems throwing an animation warning
- Fixed crystal and obsidian golem ragdolls
- Fixed a number of problems with navmesh data persisting after returning to the main menu

v 0.6.4.25 2020.08.07
- Fixed a bug specific to newly created worlds that could cause facilities on the start platform to disappear