Solace Crafting News

This patch adds in 12 new animals, some passive, some aggrresive. They don't have unique drops yet, though that is certainly the plan, alongside future plans for farming and cooking.

I ended up spending a lot of the later half of last week shopping for a relief programmer, but ultimately decided on an outsourcing company that looks to have quite well-rounded experience. For starters I'm going to have them take over some of the programming and see how well we fit. I will still be very specifically directing everything, keeping a close watch on and making a final pass over all new features, but I've been doing nothing but code for the majority of the past 6 months and it's really worn me out. I program out of necessity, and have become pretty proficient at it, but it's really not where my passion lies. So I'm very excited to be able to start focusing more on content, story, and progression. Hopefully this is the start of a long and fruitful relationship!

v 0.6.3.9 2020.03.03
- Added boars, chickens, cows, crocodiles, does, foxes, goat, hippopotami, rabbits, scorpions, snails, and stags (unique drops pending)
- Facilities are now upgradeable in Multiplayer
- Stopped distant special effects from spawning in multiplayer
- Multiplayer clients will now wait for their host to finish loading a terrain before enabling it
- Network objects will now immediately rebuilding their observer list when entering within range of a client
- Fixed special effects from other players not spawning properly past 8km
- Fixed lightning shot throwing errors in multiplayer

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 back to working on some multiplayer fixes and improvements this week. This patch addresses a rare problem that seems to have been stemming from too many dropped items on the ground, and has in general been a requested feature for some time.

Items dropped on the ground will now decay after 24 (game time) hours. This check takes place when the drops are loaded in, so staring at a dropped bag for 24 hours will not cause it to disappear. Also dropped items will now consolidate with other nearby dropped items to create a single bag with multiple items, which works better for multiplayer.

Tombstones will now appear when a players dies and will contain all of their inventory, and only be accessible by them (or server admins) in multiplayer. Tombstones will decay after 7 days (game time) have passed. Both tombstones and dropped items will disappear immediately if their contents are cleared out.

The mouse over display text for dropped items and tombstones is not quite yet working as intended in multiplayer in this patch.

I also fixed some problems with animals and monsters getting stuck in certain situations.

v 0.6.3.8 2020.02.25
- Doubled dropped item bag size
- Items dropped within one meter of other dropped items will now combine into one bag
- Added tombstones that spawn and store the items dropped by player death
- Tombstones can only be accessed by the owner and/or the host if in multiplayer
- Tombstones will decay after 7 days
- Items on the ground will now decay after 24 hours
- Added /itemDecayTime and /tombstoneDecayTime to world settings and console
- Improved misc (items not placed on buildings) save data disk usage and functionality
- Fixed an instance where animals would ignore being attacked by a player
- Fixed an instance where animals could spawn a second incorrect rarity particle system
- Fixed mobs and animals getting stuck walking in place

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've taken a successful break from coding multiplayer for a bit, it's an oddly draining endeavor. I gathered a list of the reported problems currently with multiplayer and will be trying to go through the majority of them tomorrow. Today I fixed a major one brought in with the client side only floating point precision fix that was causing resources past 8km to not disappear once harvested. Besides that there are a few small single player fixes.

v 0.6.3.6 2020.02.20
- Changed the fps counter (F3) position and color and updated it to a proper UI element
- Fixed withdrawing and depositing negative numbers causing problems with storehouses
- Fixed solace and encounter map toggles being ignored when moving the map around
- Fixed being able to destroy towers with the deconstruct tool
- Fixed basic attacks going off while in deconstruct mode
- Fixed resource graphics remaining after being harvested past 8km for multiplayer clients

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 adds a "workshop" tab to the structure load interface, where you should find any structures you have subscribed to via Steam Workshop. I've also added a thumbnail selection tool for specifying a thumbnail for structures you upload, as Steam only allows specifying this at the time of upload, not after. So no more adding a jpg of the same name to a folder or any of that. I built a small hard disk navigator so you can go find custom jpg or png files of less than 1Mb size (Steam limits) to upload as a preview/thumbnail image.

There is one small caveat to the "workshop" tab and downloaded Workshop content in general. The game cannot inherently know where Steam has downloaded the workshop files without talking to Steam at least once. That means that if you download the game, subscribe to some Workshop content, then log out of Steam and start the game up "offline" it won't know where to look for your Workshop files. I set it up to check for this directory, if you've downloaded any files, when the game starts, and save the folder that Steam informs it of, but wanted to make it clear that both Solace Crafting and Steam have to be turned on at the same time at least once for Workshop content to work. And of course you need to be connected to Steam to upload files to Workshop as well.

There was also a not easily reproduced bug reported that turned out to be caused by dying with bags while on a floating island. That and some general upgrades to the code involved are also in this patch.

v 0.6.3.5 2020.02.17
- Added "Workshop" tab to structure loading interface
- Added thumbnail selection to the structure upload interface
- Fixed older "My Structures" structures not displaying in the structure loading interface
- Fixed a bug caused by dropping bags on floating islands
- Fixed the likliness of any bugs causing the game to stall while loading floating islands

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!

Happy Saturday! Being the weekend I didn't get a ton of hours in today, but I did learn about all I need to in order to finish programming Workshop interaction. I got stuck on properly setting up the thumbnail for uploaded items, as it's something you can't do from within Steam, it has to happen from within Solace Crafting, for whatever reason. So I'm definitely going to have to make some changes to the way that files are loaded and handled as well as the current interfaces.

For now, there is an "upload to workshop" button when you click "save" after selecting a structure in the building interface. This lets you assign a title, a description, and set the item to either public or private. If you try and upload a structure with the same title as a structure you have already uploaded, it will update the item to the structure you are uploading. If you updated a structure by mistake, you can reset it to an older version from within Steam.

In order to upload a thumbnail you need to locate your Saved Structures folder which is located at:
C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\LocalLow\Big Kitty Games\Solace Crafting\Saved Structures
Inside this folder if you add a jpg or a png of the same title as the structure you are uploading to the workshop it will upload the image with it as the default preview image. To test it I uploaded "Staircase" with "staircase.jpg" in my Saved Structure folder. I believe the proper aspect ratio for this image is 800x450.

Unfortunately the game is not yet automatically loading in subscribed structures, though Steam will download them to your computer. If you've subscribed to a structure Steam should download it to your Steam folder: steamapps\workshop\content\670260. The number 670260 is the appID for Solace Crafting. Underneath that folder if you have anything you've subscribed to it will be in a folder named after the fileID of the item you subscribed to. If you copy the file inside that folder to your Saved Structures folder, you should be able to use it as normal. I will of course be updating this workflow to not require the manual copying of files.

So still just a start, but I wanted to patch it in along with some small fixes to creative to make sure everything up to this point is working as intended for not just me. I want to add "monster spawn point," "loot spawn point," and traps into creative mode to let players create custom "dungeons" or encounters to be plugged directly into the random world generation. Currently there are procedural towers and the static towers that I made, but there could easily be 1000+ different types of buildings of various difficulty to run into and it would require very little disk space. Mines as well are currently procedural and random, and I do plan to add procedural dungeons, but user made dungeons I am also very interested in making possible. And lots more stuff I shouldn't really talk about until I can get closer to it!

v 0.6.3.4 2020.02.16
- Turned on cloud saving
- Added "Upload to workshop" button to structure save interface
- Updated structure save files to a non-binary format. Old files will automatically update when interacted with.
- Fixed new structures requiring materials in creative mode
- Fixed loading saved structures requiring materials in creative mode

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!