Solace Crafting News

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!

Just wanted to chime in. I've got Steam Workshop support enabled and uploading properly for structures and item templates, though I still need to get subscribing and downloading working, so I'm not quite ready to patch it in.

I've got a lot planned for community content implementation over the next couple weeks!

I've also enabled Steam Cloud saves for people that use it. The Solace Crafting save data file structure uses a lot of small files, so my personal save data which has a lot of worlds I've received from players over the years for debugging and multiplayer this and that, actually goes over the file limit which is 10,000. This of course shouldn't be a problem for most people, but I wanted to point it out openly. I will definitely be reconsidering how files are handled and separated with some of the bigger changes I'm working on.

This fixes up some major problems with the item template editor. You can now select icons for custom item templates, though the available selections are limited to the icons I'm currently using for other in-game items. I plan to add an external sprite importer, though I could also add in a variety of icons that I own though am not yet using if our community is interested in creating new items for adding to town buildings for unlocking, etc.

This patch also adds a second background track with a third track now in the works!

v 0.6.3.3 2020.02.12
- Added a new BGM track
- Folders in the item template editor can now be slow-clicked to be renamed
- Fixed item template icon selection
- Fixed item template numeric values not saving 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!

Introducing the first iteration of the Item Template Editor.



The purpose of this tool is to allow players to create and test new items for use in-game. I'm very much interested in adding player made content into the base game, and would very much like to run something like monthly contests in the future when things are more refined. A little bit of community effort from a big number of people, can end up being way more useful than 20-30 hours put in by myself.



Currently the Item Template Editor is only accessible in Creative mode, via tha I key. Icon selection is not yet working, I haven't fully tested the loot settings yet, there is no way yet to rename a new folder created via the interface, and some small things, but I will continue to fix those and other features. The base ItemTemplates folder can be located under Users/you/AppData/LocalLow/Big Kitty Games/Solace Crafting to rename folders in the mean time, and I definitely want to make folders and files more obviously different from one another.

For a bit more explanation about the long term goal here, this system once refined will allow the creation of items both to be used as ingredients and/or as final products. We will also need an Enchanting Recipe Interface, though enchanting has some changes planned, that I will probably wait to finish before implementing an interface for that, and an upgrade to the building import/export interface. And finally to have a Biome Creation Interface complete with heightmap noise tuning and texture importing. The complete rework of biome creation and management that I am working on will support this well, and allow players (and me) to create and fine tune new biomes, what monsters can spawn there, what encounters can spawn, etc.

Once then connected to Steam Workshop, we will have the first wave of tools to really help make a lot of new content possible. Further tools can be made to create and add new encounters, new clothing textures, and new models as well.

v 0.6.3.1 2020.02.06
- Added Item Template Editor interface to 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!

Creative mode is now an option beneath single player, in which building, enchanting, and crafting are all free. You can also take no damage. The primary reason for creative mode being to play around with building tools and item creation, which is in the works, though this is definitely just the first step. There is no "item menu" as is common in some other games. You start out knowing all recipes, and everything ignores the requested ingredients so you can simply craft and build whatever you like. And you can go ahead and level up and adventure as normal like that if you prefer.

I was able to build a new computer last Friday. My old PC had some parts that were ten years old. I didn't get anything fancy, but it's definitely an upgrade and is compiling and exporting patches noticeably faster! That also means reinstalling everything, which can take quite a while, and I took it as an opportunity to upgrade Unity from 2018.4.12 to 2018.4.16.

As is common when upgrading Unity, after preparing this latest patch I immediately ran into a bug that was causing headless servers to not work at all. It took the greater part of a day from me and a fellow developer to narrow it down and submit a reproduction project to Unity for fixing. Luckily it was something that I can bypass, and it should not be affecting headless servers.

What I've been working on yesterday and today, an item template creation interface, needs a few more hours, and should be ready for testing tomorrow.

v 0.6.3.0 2020.02.05
- Upgraded Unity to 2018.4.16 LTS
- Added 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!