Solace Crafting News

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!

There have been a few players having trouble with multi-player. This is causing the client to server connection to hang while the server to client connection remains active, resulting in the client not being able to do anything. I do not yet have a definite solution as to the cause, though there are a couple of different courses of action I've planned out not only in order to fix the problem, but to improve connection performance and stability in general.

There are a number of differences with 0.6.4, which I've been working on, that will also improve multi-player performance. I may look into fixing farming and containers on multi-player, but want to try and finish up 0.6.4 as soon as possible as it heavily improves the single player experience as well.

I've not yet returned to full-time develop after injuring my left arm, though it's nearly fully healed now.

No serious problems reported with the new UI. I will most likely push this patch live.

v 0.6.3.19 2020.04.30
- Updated Unity to 2018.4.22
- Non-dedicated multiplayer hosts will now also output server logs
- 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

v 0.6.3.18 2020.04.22
- Fixed swamp animals spawning in the snow (and not in the swamp)
- Fixed a server client sync bug affecting some players in 0.6.3.17

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 brings in the new user interface skin. It's still a work in progress and I'm very much open to feedback and suggestions. There are parts of it I like, parts of it I've already changed, and parts of it I'm planning on changing yet. Some of the buttons feel a bit overactive in my opinion, and some of the backgrounds a little too "cartoonish". All in all a lot better than the default grey we were rolling with I think. Please let me know what you think.

v 0.6.3.17 2020.04.21
- Reskinned UI

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 in the driver's seat! My left index finger is still half numb on one side, but my back and shoulder are much better. I'm still going in for therapy every day, but it's only 30 minutes or so. My apologies again for the lost time in development.

There has been an increasingly common problem with some people crashing while trying to enter caves, that I've added some things to try and better track down in this patch. I've got a helpful player in Discord right now trying some things out for me, as unfortunately most people do not encounter the problem, myself included. If I can reproduce a problem I can go straight to the cause and fix it, but some things aren't quite that easy. (Update: It seems to be shadows causing the crashes. I will continue to dive further into fixing that. It might be only certain graphics cards or drivers)

There is also an upgrade to the multiplayer method that sends town data from the server to clients, which was previously going over the single packet limit for fully populated towns. This patch fixes that so they will now compartmentalize the data when necessary.

I've also updated Unity from 2018.4.16 to 2018.4.21 though it has a known bug that spams the player log with an unnecessary warning... I've blocked it from printing "an error has occurred" in-game, but until they patch it, logs might be a little messy. I didn't notice any actual performance or visual changes caused by the bug thankfully.

The UI reskin has also been largely completed and I hope to push it to beta tomorrow to get some input before moving on to finishing up 0.6.4.

I'm also behind on the Steam forum posts and plan to set aside time tomorrow to go through them all.

Thank you everyone for your understanding with my injury and need to take a few weeks off to heal up.
Stay safe, and wash your hands!

v 0.6.3.16 2020.04.20
- Updated Unity to 2018.4.21
- Fixed multiplayer town data not compartmentalizing itself across networks
- Fixed the chat window minimize button going too far down
- Added video setting options for anisotropic filtering and shadows

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!