Solace Crafting News

Grass is back! I'm still fine tuning things a bit, but it's running smooth and beautiful. There are still some improvements to be had to ensure that grass is never a nuisance, for example, leeks are almost impossible to spot in thick grass, so I'm going to make little dirt mounds that poke out with 2-4 leeks per node instead of just one sticking right out of the ground. I've already increased the size of small and medium ore nodes making them much easier to spot, grass or no grass. There is of course a slider to turn grass density and render distance up and down should you need to adjust them.

Terraforming and Farming are also working again, though the grass is not yet immediately updating as intended while terraforming. I should be able to finish fiddling with that tomorrow.

And most importantly, there was a bug with town building spawning that was causing them to mark themselves as belong to areas they don't actually. In turn this caused them to be marked for destruction when said areas would despawn, incorrectly taking the buildings down with them. This patch fixes that as well.

v 0.6.4.18 2020.07.07
- Added grass
- Increased the size of small and medium ores
- Increased breath refill rate
- Fixed terraforming
- Fixed farming
- Fixed a bug causing unrelated areas to destroy town buildings
- Fixed the breath bar colors not showing up properly
- Fixed some instances where right-clicking to move stacks into containers wouldn't be saved properly

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 is a "small" patch addressing a few bugs. I've actually been finishing up a replacement for the old Unity grass system still being used on the live branch with a threaded (very performant) and beautiful new one. I'm also half finished with upgrading terraforming, but wanted to get this patch on to beta as soon as possible as the town buildings not loading properly is pretty serious. So Sunday night patch it is!

v 0.6.4.17 2020.07.05
- Changed melee attack angle checks to ignore height
- Fixed wood roof not lining up properly
- Fixed town buildings not reloading in certain cases
- Fixed the jump after placing a town building

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 caught up with the Steam Summer Sale, a replacement for beautiful grass, and trying to get get caves to work over the past week and didn't post patch notes for the past couple of small patches. Caves and towers and terrain smoothing are now back in beta for testing. I do believe I've found a good solution for grass and will be implementing it tomorrow complete with a density slider for lower and higher end computers to fine tune things with.

v 0.6.4.16 2020.06.30
- Turned towers and procedural towers back on
- Added a terrain smoothing method for large encounters
- Fixed a way in that player generated objects could be replicated
- Fixed structure data saving too fast for picked up facilities to be registered properly
- Fixed an instance where resource scanners could not be saved properly after upgrading
- Fixed drag + right-clicking to drop single items into a facility not saving properly in single player

v 0.6.4.15 2020.06.29
- Fixed an area self-destruct error interrupting world generation

v 0.6.4.14 2020.06.26
- Fixed basic resources in caves erroring
- Fixed ceiling resources in caves duplicating
- Fixed servers tracking players underground also as above ground
- Fixed cave heat lingering even after leaving heat zone
- Fixed temperature zones not applying in multiplayer
- Fixed environmental damage not applying 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!

The Steam Summer Sale event is live!
Steam does not post "minor updates" to the store page for users that do not own the game, so I wanted to post an update on the progress of the current beta branch 0.6.4. I was hoping to get it stable and ready to push live prior to the Summer Sale, but as it turns out, rewriting tens of thousands of lines of code from scratch is a pretty time consuming endeavour! Though the benefits of the time spent are already there and obvious, I just need a bit more time to polish out the bugs.

In short, 0.6.4 is a major overhaul of the world generation code as well as the save file structure. The new world generation code is able to load an area, for example after teleporting 10 kilometers, in just a couple of seconds, whereas the old system (still on the default "live" branch) could take upwards of 45 seconds. Save file count has also been reduced down to under 1%, meaning a fully explored terrain used to generate up to 129 files, but now those are all contained within a single file. Steam cloud saves seem to have a terrible time when there are a lot of smaller files, so I'm hoping this will improve the problems people have been having when using cloud saves prior to 0.6.4.

The new system also uses a new algorithm for file compression/decompression that is much more stable than the one I was using. Data loss is completely unacceptable with any software, and unfortunately the software I was using was, albeit very infrequently, caused data corruption at times for seemingly no rhyme or reason.

Overall there is a lot more code in 0.6.4 that was hand-written by yours truly meaning there is actually going to be a lot more control over game and world settings. For example how far to render trees, buildings, grass, terrains, and distant terrains will all be able to be managed individually, letting players further tune their graphics depending on their computer specs.

Currently I'm fixing bugs related to multiplayer caves which were added into multiplayer for the first time just last week. There are still however a few things left to upgrade before 0.6.4 can be sent to the "live" default branch:
- Terraforming
- Farming
- Procedural Towers
- Floating Islands
- Non-chunk based biomes

Note: I have not marked the game as "multiplayer" nor with "supported languages" on the Steam store page, because they are works in progress, and I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression. Multiplayer is quite functional, and getting better every week, but still needs work. The UI also supports 30 "major" languages, which make the game at least playable if you can't read English, though they are incomplete, and fallback to Google translations unless a community member has been kind enough to correct them via crowdin.com/project/solace-crafting.

I know it isn't a lot of "fun" not having new things like fishing, cooking, new recipes, and more town functions not being added while this upgrade is going on, but I hope everyone will agree that it was a smart decision once the patch goes live and everything is running clean and fast. It's actually quite draining for me as a solo developer because I too have a lot more fun adding in new things, but again, I really feel this has increased the base quality of the game flow a lot and am glad that I decided to make the effort to improve the foundations that everything else runs on top of.

Meanwhile, Pixel Noise, our audio guys, are starting work on new sound effects for all of the animals and monsters. If the Summer Sale goes well, hopefully I can funnel more funds their way to improve the overall audio experience of the game. At some point a major upgrade to player animations will also be necessary, just to remind everyone that the current animations are not intended as a final solution.

All in all, 3D, open world, multiplayer programming is tough business for a solo developer, but progress is steady, and I'm very much looking forward to the various planned feature from here on!

Please join us on Discord at: discord.gg/SolaceCrafting
for discussions on suggested features, and for posting bug reports.

If you'd like to help test 0.6.4 you need only to opt into the beta branch by right-clicking Solace Crafting in your Steam Library and clicking on Properties.

Stay safe, and happy gaming!

Caves have been turned off in multi-player since its first inception. There were a number of challenges to making the cave system work in multi-player that this patch addresses. As expected I had to upgrade quite a few things and had some difficulty with managing multiple players potentially above and below ground.

I have not yet tested this patch in "host" mode, I've been mainly building it to work with the new systems of 0.6.4 in single player and with multi-player dedicated servers, just to throw that out there in the open until I can look closer at host mode.



There is also a problem where terrain is not yet being "smoothed" or "flattened" prior to object placement as it was prior to 0.6.4. This can cause cave entrances to be difficult, or even impossible to reach, in cases where they are buried under the surface or sticking out the edge of a sharp cliff face. I do plan to address this, but 6/7 or so caves should be accessible even as is.

v 0.6.4.13 2020.06.19
- Updated and enabled caves both in single player and in multi-player

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!