I finally figured out and largely fixed the last big performance spike. It was not what I thought it was previously, which explains why my attempts to fix it weren't working. Solace Crafting uses NavMesh for monster pathfinding for a wide variety of reasons, and needs to generate it on the fly as players place new buildings, chop down trees, and just in general move around the infinite open world. Turns out that was the culprit and I was able to get it running 10x faster in this patch.
"Imposter" models are also in now for all flora.
This lets the big rocks render up to a maximum of a whopping 5.1km (3.2mi), with most trees and other big flora rendering up to around 1.5km (0.9mi). This is achieved back taking several pictures of each model at different angles to create a series of quads (two triangles) to render large amounts of assets without the use of billboards. Billboards are a single quad that rotates to face the camera so it looks like there's a tree there, but it always looks the same regardless of the angle, and they cannot be viewed from high nor low angles, only from straight on. Imposters can be viewed from any direction and look like what the object would actually look like.
I've also made a pass at combat. Though it's nothing ground shattering new, there are a lot of small improvements to the way monsters move and react that should improve the feel of combat.
One of my earliest and most unrealized goals with Solace Crafting has always been megaliths, giant structures visible from great distances. Partially realized with floating islands, but never really in the land based forms that I had started even in the original Kickstarter. The past few patches have actually set the foundations to finally start bringing these in, and I'm hoping to get some big changes in that direction before Christmas ːsteamthumbsupː
Best wishes from me to you in the coming Autumn,
and happy gaming!
1.2.3.2
Multiplayer
Big multiplayer stability pass, built on a new automated test setup that runs server, client and host through real gameplay
Players falling through terrain on join or teleport fixed
MP Harvesting fixed
MP Flora respawning fixed
Cave and dungeon arrivals more reliable for clients
Per client world streaming fixed
Improved position syncing far from spawn
Animals no longer disappearing for clients in some instances
Elemental drops no longer falling through the world
Improved server-side validation of player actions
Combat, skills & entities
Combat feel pass — monsters face their target, stuns and stagger/knockback, hit feedback, camera shake
Monsters now have roles and pick abilities by range
Monsters now have damage-type resistances and weaknesses
Elite, Champion and Hero ranks now fight differently, not just harder
Fixed monsters standing still after a long teleport
Reduced hitches from monster pathing updates
Corpse hitboxes now match the body after death
World generation & terrain
Trees and large rocks now visible much farther away
Large rocks popping in less
Megalith system foundations implemented (more to come)
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