Nearing A Year - Dev Log 2

Hey everyone!

As you probably heard from the last community post I put up about a month and a half ago, I've been working away on v1.5.0, and I wanted to talk more about where things are now that the game's approaching a year into early access!

Quickly getting it out of the way, you can get an early peek at what's coming soon by going to Steam > Voxel Eras > Properties > Betas, and entering the code "bleedingedge" to get the indev branch. At this point it is seemingly at parity with live, although there are many bugs, remaining changes, and missing content from experimental that I'll talk about below, so if you play with this version I highly recommend making a backup of your world!!! (There are only so many tears I can shed, plz, backup)

Shiny!

A few new shinnies will be making it to the game, including directional sunlight, audio dampening through walls, a completely reworked player controller with the ability to auto step up over 1m tall obstacles, particles, more sounds, texture work, you name it I likely worked on it.

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As I've mentioned a bit before, the Steam Era will introduce fluids, Aluminium, Coke Ovens, Blast Furnaces, Boilers, Fluid Pipes, Steam Winders, the Advanced Clockwork Drill, Crusher, Turbo Pipe, Stack Pipe, and more, being quite a proper deep dive into the game that I feel will finally put the game into a state I'm happy enough with to start drawing some attention towards it again.

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One of the reasons v1.5 isn't available (on live) in time for the Steam Summer Sale is that I wanted to be at parity with experimental , which already had at least the functional side of the Era's content, being the vast majority of remaining Rhai code I need to migrate. Yes, having experimental and indev be entirely different branches off 1.4 live annoys me and causes lots of issues, no, I can't fix that until indev is up to parity with experimental XD

To give you something to look forward to, here's Melusine's base she made on experimental:

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Scripting

While the move from Rhai to Hail has been slow, the performance of Hail has not been. I don't have benchmarks to compare, but I can say that it is so much faster that I'm confident enough to move the vast majority of UI elements to be handled in Hail, where with Rhai I was forced to move them to Rust as the Build Menu itself was enough to noticeably drop the frame rate to the point a Steam Deck drops to 45 FPS from it being open.

There's less of but still an uplift for machines, most of which have already had their scripts converted to their final resting place as Rust code in the engine, so the gains are smaller but still there. Entities however, like the player and its local prediction, are a lot of really deep and complex scripts, so the performance gains there might be noticeable to you if you were CPU bound on the client.

I'm not sure if I'll have it done in time, but I'd like to have LSP support for Hail as well as a VSCode extension + snippets to make it easier to work with. At minimum, markdown API docs will be available, with the ability to run scripted unit tests, or just the compile test, so you don't need to launch the game to check your mod.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is getting some love and care, smoothing out some issues in the time sync and prediction logic, which makes initial load and stutter recovery much faster as well as making the game generally feel more responsive. Before it'd only predict your local player, but now it's extended dynamically based on what you're interacting with / near.

Dedicated servers are also arriving, as due to scripting's new testing suite I had to get a non client version of asset loading done, so I've spent a bit of time getting that wired into what was 90% of the work done for dedicated servers done many months ago. A lightweight Linux box with 2gb of RAM, and a few mbps of upload per player, should handle a handful of players building a pretty large and active factory by just running a copy of the game with --server (I'll eventually figure out proper steamcmd distribution).

I wanted to have proximity voice chat in 1.5.0, but that'll have to wait as I need to replace the audio library I'm using (kira) as it doesn't support "radio style" playback (think more like VOD) which would just result in a memory leak.

I do enjoy the idea of "friendslopping" the game a touch as I've actually really enjoyed playing with others on the dedicated server test, so if you have any fun little ideas let me know and I'll see if I can spend like a day on some fun stuff.

Pricing

I've been pretty upfront with my desire to keep the game at $15 USD with a 15% discount, and that will not be changing. However, Valve has recently released an update to their pricing conversions, and I'd like to update Voxel Eras accordingly to keep prices reasonable for all regions.

I still need to finalize the numbers, but in the vast majority of cases, Voxel Eras will be reducing in price by at least a few percentage points in many regions and that updated pricing will be reflected in the update discount I do for 1.5.0.

Cool, but when?

This update has taken far longer than I have wanted it to take, being about 4 months of work, but I do think I'm on the side of the final stretch.

I need to spend some time doing art, rewriting multiblocks (and by extension Steam Era scripts) in Hail, and fixing lots of issues introduced in the migration. These changes number in the tens of thousands of lines of code changed, impacting well over 45k lines of code, so I'd appreciate a bug report if you run into something unexpected while you're messing with the indev branch.

Since I pushed a bit too hard heading into the Summer Sale to try and get 1.5 done in time, I'll be taking a few days to deal with myself before going back at the grindstone (my sleep schedule has effectively inverted, whoops), but my goal is that I've made it onto experimental within the next week, with it being polished to my standards and released within 2-3 weeks.

Going forward I really want to avoid such a long gap between updates again, content has been locked in development hell for months, but this should truly be the last "huge" engine rework that can't be done piecemeal / independently of other work, with terrain generation (complete overhaul) and parts of networking (dynamic bandwidth / Steam P2P) being the big ticket items I can think of in the mid term.

Thanks for your patience, I can't wait for you to get your hands on all the new toys,

Progress Awaits You - Destiny Hailstorm