The Sapling News

Added a 'cinematic camera' menu in the sandbox, which allows you to:
* Hide the UI
* Hide the weather
* Set the time of the day without influencing the simulation
* Change the camera speed
* Set fixed camera positions and rotations, and have the camera animation between tem

Other camera changes:
* Added SHIFT as a camera speed boost button; if you fly the camera in one direction for 2 seconds, a hint will show to teach players about this
* Shortended the delay noticeable when dragging the camera with the mouse; the camera feels more responsive now
* Highlighting organisms is now disabled if you move the camera
* The camera position in the organism detail view is now always as close to the current camera position as possible (no weird camera flips anymore)
* The camera no longer moves slower on smaller maps
* The camera position in the organism detail view no longer is very close to the ground on smaller maps

Main menu changes:
* Added an extra 'game mode' selection view, with a warning the the sandbox will be unlocked after one scenario (lots of new players were confused by this)
* Added icons to the filter buttons in the load view
* Added a button to go to the save file location in your OS
* Also made 'x' to skip the disclaimer work with Caps Lock turned on
* Increased the the text size saying you can use x to skip
* The green background when showing the title during the intro now fills the whole screen
* Made title font during the intro the same as above the main menu
* Put a warning below the ice age level (will be overhauled in the future)

Fixed flowers and the flower level:
* Plants can be pollinated by animals again, and thus the main objective of the flower level triggers again
* All nectar mouths can create wax nests now
* Also unlocked the crab mouth by default, so you can go the 'insect route' if you want
* Changed the ground softness so you don't need mangrove roots everywhere
* Fixed the progress bar not responding for two of the objectives

Misc:
* Made animal color mutations more likely
* Made it possible for animals to also mutate to become brighter or darker
* Made gasfruit animations smoother, so it really looks like they are floating
* Removed high white clouds from the sandbox
* If you click 'redesign' after mutating, you now continue to have access to unlocked bark and roots

[h3]Following a series of 7 weekly devlogs, and a period of weeding out the most annoying bugs, the Food & Fire update is now available to everyone. As of today, the beta branch no longer exists and the price has seen a slight increase, as indicated earlier.[/h3]

• For a 1 minute summary of the update, see this Youtube short.
• For a 'normal' patch log, explaining all changes since last week, see below.
  

[h3]Old save files[/h3]

The Food & Fire update uses a new save file format. Although I have tried to also support the previous save file format, several users indicate that this was not 100% successful, and they cannot load save files created with the previous update. In case you really want to continue with your old world, you can still access older versions of the game by using the 'previousupdate' branch here on Steam.

[h3]New since the previous small patch[/h3]

Added 2 new aquatic seed types that sink to the bottom and germinate there; there's an extra explanation text to explain the difference to floating seeds. This fixes two problems:
* Aquatic plants so far usually did not survive, because normal seeds die when touching water
* ALL grass species just continues growing under water (now they need special seeds)

Fixes for disasters:
* Fixed the strange, mostly black, colors seen temporarily when increasing or decreasing the ocean level
* Tweaked the bloom effect: during the night, made the bioluminescence brighter but fire less bright
* Wild fires no longer spread to plants submerged in water
* Changes to the soil made by meteorites are undone after some time
* Grass now also dies from the fog caused by meteorites
* Removed the confusing global temperature drop during the fog caused by meteorites
* Made the y position (height) of the volcano model the same everywhere, independent of terrain, so it no longer sticks out sometimes
* Fixed global temperature changes causing temperatures above the maximum temperature (which caused perpetually dormant plants)

Fixes for the planet editor:
* Added sound effects when placing volcanoes
* Made the animation to switch from the spherical to the flat planet faster
* The toggle button to switch between the flat and spherical planet is now locked during the animation
* The terrain overlay button now have a sound effect
* The terrain overlay buttons now pulsate 2 times when touching a slider selects them automatically
* Fixed various smaller reasons that could cause the volcano position on the spherical planet to glitch out

Fixes for the plant editor:
* During the mountain level, don't show the root handle below the fibrous root (because you can't use it anyway)
* Realized (and fixed) that I never configured the 'provides energy' stat for many seeds
* Made the rotation with mouse movement faster

Misc fixes:
* The list of common death causes in the species detail view now also mentions 'old age'
* Fixed the missing texture for the blue iris eye (black in the previous build)
* Fixed a glitch with floating plants caused by their ancestors having stilt roots

Refactor (changes under the hood):
* Gave body parts persistent identifiers, so when new body parts were added and you load an old save file, they are not all mixed up.

I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].

Reactivated the terrain shadows created by organims, and for the rest a lot of UI improvements:

Polished the organism detail view UI (when you zoom in to an organism):
* Added a button so you can go the relevant species detail view in one step
* Fixed the species status label being updated too late (you saw the status of a previous species for some time)
* If an animal dies, the organism detail now stops automatically
* Made the animations faster

Editor UI fixes:
* Changed the fruit editor so buttons and handles now dissapear when using them would create an impossible fruit
* In the animal editor, fixed the animal poison traits button getting more and more transparent each time it was clicked
* Gave the 'ready' button in all editors a higher resolution
* Fixed clipped 'max ocean current' label in the animal editor

Polished the species detail view UI:
* Clicking on related species in the family view now also changes the focus species in the rest of the detail view
* Made temperature limitations easier to interpret, using infinity signs and red/blue colors

Improved the wildfire sliders:
* Added an exact percentage to all wilderfire sliders
* Redesigned the disaster panel to create more room for future sliders
* Fixed the fire chance slider button having the wrong color after using it

Polished the cladogram view UI:
* Also save and show grass species relations
* Removed arrow buttons to other starting points if not applicable

Generic UI fixes:
* The extinct message is now aware of dormant eggs (like the dormant seeds in the previous patch)
* Using the 'reintroduce species' option for algae now triggers the correct filters in the species list

Scenario related fixes:
* Carrion is visible again
* The introduction of roots now has a moving circle to draw attention to it

Fixed impossible animals:
* Animals with both developed and primitive feet no longer create a problem for the walking animation controller
* When random mutations make an animal longer, things like tails are now moved to the last animal segment (instead of the game crashing)

I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].

The Q and E buttons can now be used for vertical camera movement, like CTRL and SHIFT

Fixes related to seasons:
* You will no longer get an extinction message if there still are dormant seeds (like for a seasonal plant)
* Plants that are dormant (shed leaves) now have a 'dormant' status labels when you zoom in on them
* You are no longer in 'add alga' mode after editing seasons
* There now is an absolute max age, to prevent immortal 'always dormant' plants
* Dormant plants now take damage from fire

Balancing body parts:
* The first vertibrate carnivore mouth is now better with meat and less generalist
* The first generalist arthropod mouth can now survive longer out of the water
* Small changes to eye color ranges so the progression makes more sense
* The game now also recognizes obliglate blood feeder mouths (like the bat mouth) as full mouths

Finally implemented postponed fruit shape features:
* The fruit shape now also mutates
* The fruit shape is taken into account when two plants 'merge' as a result of sexual interaction

Visual fixes and improvements:
* The meteorite model no longer hangs in the air after impact
* Filter feeders now sim closer to the surface, where the plankton is
* Removed shadows by mountains, because they were always glitchy anyway
* Fixed problem where clouds of various wheather types were sometimes rendered as if under water
* Fixed problem where snow was sometimes rendered as if on top of the snow cloud

Misc:
* Removed various glitches related to animals that just escaped being eaten
* Fixed the textual representation of 'if you see food'-type instincts (was 'if you see SOMETHING' before)

Code hygiene:
* Fully removed the old instinct view from the game
* Fully removed the old 'ovule' system from the game

I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].

The beta is now finally on Linux too! So far, I couldn't get the grass shader to work there (that is, in OpenGL), which I've solved for now by turning OFF tesselation. This means that on Linux, grass will be less pretty with fewer strands of grass.

Plankton fixes:
* Fixed plankton species classification (used to be based on body parts they didn't have)
* Fixed plankton ocean depth requirements (used to be based on the alga height, but plankton doesn't have a height)

Animal editor UI fixes:
* Overhauled the statistics panels for eyes and mouths, to better represent the new situation
* Increased the size of the food type icons in the animal editor 'food' tab

Instinct list view UI improvements:
* Removed the white outline of the color and brightness sliders
* The audio slider handle position now match the cursor position more closely
* Improved the position of the dark 'range' background of the sliders
* The 'ready' button now responds to being hovered
* The audio slider handles now indicate being hovered by becoming darker instead of brighter

Epoch UI fixes:
* Fixed the glitch you got when pressing ESC in the epoch and species detail views
* Finally got the 'maximum number of organisms' statistic to work

Species detail view fixes:
* Most common meals and death causes are now in the correct order
* Fixed that you could no longer zoom to organisms after using the species detail view and the cladogram view

Scenario and understandability improvements:
* Added more food types for the first carnivore mouth
* The arrow buttons in the plant and animal editors, to see more body parts, now pulsate to attract attention
* There is now a tooltip for the 'hanging baby' toggle you get when you add hands to a creature
* The wildfire risk now also has (correct) legend labels
* The attention getter circle on the alga handle, to teach new players they can grow and shrink algae, now only goes away after you used it correctly
* The attention getter circle for the camera preset buttons in the mountain level is now on the correct location

Audio improvements:
* Added instinct list and diet view sound effects
* Removed perpetual 'rain' music from the scenarios
* Tweaked baleen mouth cry pitch
* The water splashing sound effect is now less loud
* The water splashing sound effect is now linked to the 'sound effects' setting
* The wildfire sound effect is now linked to the 'sound effects' setting
* All weather sound effects are now linked to the 'sound effects' setting