Solace Crafting News

There were problems with the new system duplicating things and sometimes erasing things. They turned out to be one and the same problem as structures could duplicate, and then both be trying to update the same save data causing one structure to overwrite it's copy where facilities like storage chests may have been placed. This also explains duplicating building pieces as was being reported. A similar part of the same problematic system was also causing monoliths and animals to duplicate creating sometimes a dozen guards for a single area instead of the usual 2-3, or "ghost" animals that seemed unresponsive.

This patch fixes all of that, and should be a much more stable experience.

There are still some small problems with fruit trees and towns aren't fully upgraded yet. I'll be working on those today, and hopefully moving on to caves and other "world encounters" tomorrow before upgrading the current biome generation system which is still running in "chunks" for simplicity.

There has also been a couple reports of crashes from Radeon card users. I am also a Radeon card user along with many other players, so it's not necessarily all Radeon cards, but there are definitely some crashes going on. It looks to be a Unity engine GPU communication error, so not likely something I can actively "fix". I've reached out to Unity for support, though should anyone run into this I would definitely recommend trying to upgrade your graphics card drivers for starters, and please let me know if it happens.

v 0.6.4.7 2020.06.09
- Lowered default start menu target FPS from 90 to 60
- Reinstated "world shift" solution to correct floating point precision errors in single-player and for clients
- Improved world generation queue ordering and management
- Fixed trees not being removed properly making doubles possible to appear
- Fixed structures and certain miscellanous objects not being removed properly making doubles possible to appear

v 0.6.4.6 2020.06.06
- Increased the spawn rate of earth elementals
- Fixed multiple objects spawning on single locations
- Fixed dedicated server spawning unnecessary terrains
- Fixed a number of map saving and loading problem
- Fixed a maps not drawing properly immediately after teleporting or entering a new game

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 should bring multiplayer back to near where it was prior to the first 0.6.4 patch. There are still some minor improvements to be coded for saving speed, and server-side world generation queue priority management, but most things are back to working as they were before. Towns still have some problems, and there are some other minor reports, but I should be able to clear those up tomorrow.

I'm always inclined to talk up "what's next!" but honestly it works better if I talk about things after I patch them in as the hours and the days don't always end up going in a straight line, if you know what I mean.

As always, thank you to everyone participating in early access, and especially to everyone posting bugs and helping me track stuff down in Discord!

v 0.6.4.5 2020.06.01
- Fixed Enchanted Stones spawning in swamps, Spider Nests spawning in Mountains, and Coal Mines not spawning
- Fixed a type of tree not spawning a collider
- Fixed some trees not properly removing from terrains after harvested
- Fixed projectile skills not working
- Fixed held equipment not showing properly
- Fixed furniture reloading after being picked up
- Fixed storage chest and sign color and labels not updating immediately in multiplayer
- Fixed storage chest and sign color and labels not updating after picking up and repositioning
- Fixed facility upgrades not saving properly
- Fixed transmogrifiers not saving their contents properly

v 0.6.4.4 2020.05.29
- Fixed multiplayer servers not properly resetting the world generation queue when new clients connect

v 0.6.4.3 2020.05.29
- Fixed another world generation queuing issue
- Fixed placed facilities reloading position rounded to the nearest meter
- Fixed facilities not properly saving their contents
- Fixed dropped items not saving properly
- Fixed an eye type causing character creation to lock up
- Fixed free mode placed building reloading even after deconstructing

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!

On Tuesday night I patched in 0.6.4.1 which stabilized the new generation engine, which was having some priority/queuing issues. Finalizing that system brought up a new problem causing certain terrains to not render at all. Unfortunately this took me a long time to figure out, as it's just not something you would run into in almost any other game out there due to the multi-layered terrain system that Solace Crafting uses to "fake" long distance scenery. In short, the distant shader was overriding the near shader causing it to fail and simply not draw the near terrains at all. Two seemingly unrelated systems ended up costing me a lot of effort to fix.

That should be the last of the major problems allowing me to now focus on a variety of "smaller" problems that have been reported with the new code. Most notably there seems to be some saving issues causing stored items to go missing. This is no doubt a result of the new save and load code and should be an easy fix for tomorrow.

v 0.6.4.2 2020.05.28
- Fixed terrain shader instancing problems

v 0.6.4.1 2020.05.26
- Increased Hippopotamus and Crocodile attack range
- Changed horseweed, knapweed, cattails and small swamp mushrooms to allow movement through them
- Fixed a number of world generation queuing errors causing a variety of problems
- Fixed Swamp and Desert biomes

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!

Beta v 0.6.4.0

Last night I pushed 0.6.4.0 to beta. In short it's a complete rewrite of the main foundations of the game for a number of reasons. I've posted about the changes a bit in the past, but first and foremost I want to make it clear that there are some pretty serious bugs, and I don't recommend players trying the current beta branch out without the clear intention of "bug testing". Now, the bugs aren't "difficult," it just needs work, and the best way to narrow down what needs to be worked on is to test it. In other words, Solace Crafting is my baby, and it scares me sometimes to let other people play it, but it's coming along.

Why the big rewrite? In truth a good portion of what I "rewrote" I actually wrote for the first time because up until now I was using third party software. This has the benefit of letting you focus on other things, but over time it can turn out to be a wrench in the gears where you find yourself repeatedly trying to force code into places it was never meant to be. The new world generation system is entirely custom, and built specifically to be the biome based, runtime, infinite possibility spawning game system that Solace Crafting really needs.

So what's wrong with it? There's a lot of math involved, specifically in understanding where players are in the world, and what needs to be prioritized for spawning and despawning things around them. Currently the system is a little out of control, spawning more than it really needs to, and not in the most logical of order. The base functionality is all there and running much faster, teleporting 1000km can take less than 2 seconds, but it needs tweaking.

There's over 10,000 replaced or rewritten lines of code and I spent almost every waking hour working on it on Friday, so despite it being a bit of a mess, I'm going to wait until Monday to jump back into polishing it up, but wanted to at least make it clear what's going on for anyone that is used to trying out the beta builds. The past 10 days or so have also been a constant stream of "just five more minutes" and I have neglected the Steam forums during the bulk of that. My apologies to the questions and suggestions waiting for me on there still.

Wishing you and yours the best!

v 0.6.4.0 2020.05.22
- Complete re-write of world generation, save file management, file compression, and object management
- Grass, caves, towers, and floating islands disabled temporarily

This patch is an accumulation of fixes that have been implemented on the beta branch over the past couple weeks. There are a few concerns I have related to problems Unity has been patching into their engine lately, but hopefully they won't affect many, and nobody very seriously. The problems in question have a patch from Unity scheduled for later in May, but I want to explain them clearly here should anyone run into them, and if they look to be causing more trouble than expected I will put forth the effort to roll Unity backwards to before the problems were occurring. I should also make it clear that I do not develop using "beta" releases of Unity, I only use the LTS (long-term service) releases that are supposed to be stable..

The biggest problem has been with caves locking certain computers up. I was able to narrow down the problem to an engine-side method related to shadows, and have subsequently added the option to disable shadows completely. If you run into caves locking up on you, please try turning shadows off before you enter, and I will update the engine as soon as the patch is released.

The second problem seems only related to certain Radeon graphics cards and has cause a big stir among the Unity community the past couple weeks. This can cause a "d3d11" and/or "vertexBuffer == NULL" error, the former of which can cause a crash. This too is said to be fixed in the patch due for a May 20th release, but again if it's causing frequent crashes for anyone I'll roll the engine back until I can confirm it's fixed.

Besides all that, a lot of the fixes in this patch are related to Multi-player, which I was hoping to let sit for a bit longer while I focused on getting 0.6.4 ready for beta, but there were some debilitating bugs making the game unplayable in certain situation. There's still a lot of small upgrades I now know will become important in time for multi-player performance, but 0.6.4 for improved world generation is also very important not just for single player but for multi-player as well.



This patch also includes the reskinned interface, and adds some small "feedback" sounds to a lot of the interface buttons. Fishing, a new music track, and sound effects for monsters and animals are also underway, some of which will be included in the first 0.6.4 patches.

Big thanks to everyone supporting development via Patreon!

Once again, please be safe, wash your hands, and stay positive!

v 0.6.3.23 2020.05.09
- Updated Unity to 2018.4.22
- Reskinned UI
- Added video setting options for anisotropic filtering and shadows
- Updated inventory, equipment, and wardrobe network synchronization methods
- Non-dedicated multiplayer hosts will now also output server logs

- Fixed large player buildings over 15kb in data not transferring properly across the network
- Fixed torches always turning off when clients connect to multi-player
- Fixed town buildings not placing properly past 8km for clients in multi-player
- Fixed shadow settings not saving between sessions
- Fixed returning to the main menu from in-game causing UI buttons to not respond
- Fixed the crafting interface not including crafting skills into equipment stat previews
- Fixed resource scanners not saving range properly
- Fixed ice spikes spell not working in caves
- Fixed some spells playing audio twice immediately
- Fixed town citizens sometimes not loading properly when loading into a cave beneath them
- Fixed summoning circles causing "unable to spawn" errors on multi-player clients
- Fixed a common server side RightClick on inventory slots bug
- Fixed a multi-player client split bug
- Fixed a multi-player client right-click into facility bug
- Fixed interacting with furniture in multi-player
- Fixed swamp animals spawning in the snow (and not in the swamp)
- Fixed multiplayer town data not compartmentalizing itself across networks
- Fixed the chat window minimize button going too far down
- Fixed ladder popup text and interaction
- Fixed containers dropped into tombstones upon death becoming unusable

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

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