Game updates

• Tweak: Savegames now remember the ambient settings that have been tweaked through the world edit gui
• Tweak: Whole tree chopping no longer drops sticks
• Tweak: Halved spawn rate of all creatures
• Tweak: Replaced torch sound for @InsommniaKitten ;-)
• Tweak: Removed unnecessary 'X' Icons from the Singleplayer world list and MP serverlist
• Tweak: Increased torch light duration from 2 to 3 days.
• Tweak: Increased reed regrowth time from 5 to 7 days.
• Tweak: Improved readbility of slider tooltips
• Tweak: Added warning texts when selecting large world heights
• Fixed: Outdated texts on the playstyle buttons
• Fixed: Select block outline jumping for 1 frame when placing blocks
• Fixed: Exception thrown when typing '/gamemode 2' in the server console
• Fixed: Some unreported exceptions thrown when loading worldedit workspaces. Might be a cause for other issues
• Fixed: Don't crash the server if mono decides to fail us on Console.ReadLine()
• Fixed: Falling tool molds leaving behind ghost blockentities and crashing the server on chunk reload
• Fixed: Input text fields not unfocusing correctly (i.e. on the login screen)
• Fixed: Login error messages not in a human readable form
• Fixed: Missing names for bamboo stakes, knapping surface and several others
• Fixed: Player able to clip into blocks while sneaking along edges
• Fixed: Rendering issues when setting dynamic lights to 0
• Fixed: Bloomery base dropping itself instead of bricks
• Fixed: Entity rendering issues on certain graphics cards
• Fixed: Rare occasion where eating food replenishes several times it's amount of saturation
• Fixed: Game crashing randomly on ingot piles
• Fixed: Eating mushroom animation all wonky
• Fixed: Rare crash when using the ingame video recorder
• Fixed: Missing blocktypes not rendering at all. Now shows as "Unkown block id XXX".
• Fixed: Game crashing on missing files that are non-critical 
• Fixed: Log blocks listed twice in the creative inventory
• Fixed: Godray rays going all curvy. Now there is a high quality setting that prevents that.
• Fixed: Sun/Moon moving in the sky when looking around (i.e. following the player)
• Fixed: Game pause screen not pausing clouds and ingame world time
• Linux fixes
  • Fixed: Missing game icon under linux
  • Fixed: Client not starting under linux
  • Fixed: "/bin bash" typo in server.sh
  • Fixed: Broken install.sh script (by @cynthia)

This is it lads! Over a year has passed by since we reached our first major milestone - the "Creative Mode Release" version of the game. For most of this time we have been tirelessly working on countless survival features. Today we will retire this title and officially announce Vintage Story 1.4.6 as the first version than can rightly bear the mark of a "Survival Mode Release". Let this be the start of something much greater!

Please Note: This update will rotate all your toolracks by 180 degrees and in turn pop of the wall, sorry about that. I made some changes for the sake of consistency.

Website Updates

• New trailer! 

Game Updates

• Feature: The Iron Age
  • Can now construct bloomeries for high temperature smelting (like limonite ore)
  • Requires a base and a chimney, for crafting recipe see below
  • Fill with charcoal or bituminous coal and limonite ore then ignite with a torch. Requires equal amounts of coal/ore in order to smelt properly.
  • Added Iron Variants of all tools, these can be smithed on bronze anvils
  • Tweaked durabilities of all tools for a better metal progression feeling
• Feature: Underground ruins: Ghastly underground experiences and the basis for future Story related features
• Feature: Trap doors
• Feature: Improved Reed harvesting
  • No longer breaks instantly
  • Breaks in 2 stages, the top parts and it's roots. Requires knife in order to not destroy the roots
  • If the roots remain planted, then the tops will slowly regrow
  • The tops are for basket crafting, while the roots are for replanting or eating after being cooked
• Feature: Finally! Replaced 3x3 anvil grid recipe with a more immersive anvil casting counterpart - the anvil mold! Also requires 9 ingots instead of 7. Removed the old grid recipe for anvils.
• Feature: Finally! Quick inventory slot filling with holding down the right mouse button
• Feature: Bamboo now drop bamboo stakes for planks and can also be chopped entirely at once with an axe. See recipe below.
• Feature: New grid crafting recipes for Wooden Bed, Chair, Clay brick chimney, Table and Bamboo planks
• Feature: Added loose quartz stones on the surface, which drop clear quartz at a 20% chance, to be able to create quartz glass early on
• Feature: Entities now push eachother apart instead of overlapping
• Feature: Health and Saturation bar now flash when below 20%
• Feature: Added /playerstats [hunger|saturation] [0..1] command to quickly set health/saturation in creative mode
• Tweak: Berry bushes no longer have a collision box and regrow berries up to 5 times slower, but increased the chance of them spawning already in ripe state during worldgen
• Tweak: Drifters now gradually walk away from the player during daytime
• Tweak: New models for all saplings
• Tweak: Animals now spawn in better randomized groups. Previously they almost exclusively spawned in a group of 1 male + 1 female + 1 infant
• Tweak: Improved Notification message on server crash / bad connection. It is now more understandable to the user.
• Tweak: Can now use mouse wheel to change slider values when hovering over them
• Tweak: Made the engine more robust against corrupt save games, which should make some broken savegames playable again.
• Tweak: Reduced saltpeter deposit occurence and size by about 33%
• Tweak: A wolfs howl and the rooster call can now be heard from further away
• Tweak: Halved the player detection(+chase) range for Wolves and Drifters.
• Tweak: Can now also use the jump button to climb stairs
• Tweak: Can now also chop whole bamboo trees
• Tweak: Holding a stick in hands gives you 1 meter extra attack range, torches an extra of 0.5 meters
• Tweak: Seeweed no longer drops anything
• Tweak: New texture for quartz, sulfur and diamond ore
   
• Fixed: Godrays discoloration issue. Together with the unanounced changes in 1.4.4 we now have quite the pretty godray shader effect. 
• Fixed: Creatures attacking through blocks, they now test for line-of-sight before damaging players
• Fixed: Animals often spawning in the wrong climate
• Fixed: Animals sometimes spawning inside blocks
• Fixed: Animals glitchy y-movement when walking against blocks the can't step on
• Fixed: Sound Attenuation now correctly applied on large distances
• Fixed: Rendering issues with transparent stuff on Intel HD cards, removed previous workaround fix 
• Fixed: Setting view distance sometimes not working
• Fixed: Surface music playing in too quick succession without breaks inbetween
• Fixed: Lakes generating incorrectly on some occassions
• Fixed: Block schematic import in worldedit having issues with block entities
• Fixed: Rotating block schematics in worldedit did not correctly rotate tool racks, paintings, beds, stoves and doors
• Fixed: One of the wood stepping sounds playing only in the left speaker
• Fixed: Player sometimes spawning in mid-air and falling to their death after starting a new world
• Fixed: Bamboo block names missing
• Fixed: Worldedit Eraser and Paintbrush tools not working correctly on replacable blocks like tallgrass and liquids
• Fixed: Block Breaking Decals now render correctly on 0-voxel thick models \o/
• Fixed: Another possible issue that would cause Ruins to spawn floating above ground
• Fixed: Made the top layer of lava inside caves emit light again
• Fixed: Game not remembering if block info and coordinate hud was opened from last play session
• Fixed: Cheap fix of white particles spawning when eating items/blocks
• Fixed: Possible fix for entities spawning stuck inside blocks
• Fixed: Server not loading any blocktypes/entities/itemtypes if one of them has wrong json syntax
• Fixed: \r in install.sh and Vintagestory.desktop (but several more bugs seem to exist in the linux version)
• Fixed: Version number not displayed in the list of installed programs on windows

VS Model Creator Updates

• 5 Bugfixes related to UV-Box drag&drop
• Bugfixes to improve compatbility with old model files
• Documented one more shortcut in the controls dialog

Screenshots

Trap doors, new sapling models and harvested state of reeds

Anvil 3x3 crafting recipe replaced with a massive anvil mold.
 

Bloomeries for high temperatue smelting up to 1.500 degrees celsies (Iron Ore melts at 1.482 °C)

Slot Quickfill and Underground Ruins
     

Godrays Improvement

Without godrays

New Recipes

Thanks to the testers @Saraty and @redram I think it is safe to declare 1.4.5.2 as stable. Beyond bug fixes we've been preparing the engine for a more consistent clay forming experience and some groundwork for the upcoming underground structures has been also added.

Game updates

• Feature: Improved clayforming
  • Now plays a satisfying sound when placing/removing voxels
  • Easier to add new voxels, one no longer needs to attach to existing voxel. Placing them directly on the green outline works as well now
  • Ability to duplicate a layer with a 4th game mode. This will allow realistic size clay forming recipes (i.e. the planter) without making these recipes super tedious in a future update
  • Fixed minor render bug 
  • Rotated ingot mold recipe to be consistent with the final product
• Tweak: New version notification now shows the available version number and "click to download" hint
• Tweak: Whole tree chopping now consumes less durability and fixed some weird issues with it
• Tweak: Improved commands /time set and /time add.
  • /time set now only alters the time of day instead of the whole date. The colon may be omitted now (:)
  • /time add allows larger ranges than 24 hours. The colon may be omitted now (:)
• Fixed: Mod asset loading was broken
• Fixed: Logs no longer burnable
• Fixed: Log item names broken
• Fixed: Lag spike issues when placing or removing items in the firepit smelting slots
• Fixed: Sign blocks had wrong collision/selection boxes
• Fixed: Charcoal pile again not dropping enough charcoal
• Fixed: Sign texts starting to glow when liquid metal is poured into a mold on some machines
• Fixed: Firepit block state no longer switching between lit<->extinct
• Fixed: Autosave going haywire if a very large interval is chosen. Can now set to 0 to disable autosave.

Mac
This update comes way later than I hoped for, but such is life I guess. @Thalius asked about the status of the Mac OS Version of Vintage Story, and so while actually intending to work on other updates I did have a look at the issue. One thing leads to another and I ended up spending 30+ hours on a mac os build. It required me to completely ditch OpenGLs outdated fixed function pipeline and rely solely on "modern" rendering mechanics. It seems Mac OS is quite picky in this regard as it doesn't let you mix&match between these 2 methods. This upgrade does not raise the system requirements however, so linux/windows users should be unaffected.

There are several more issues under mac os but none of them are critical, so the game should be fully playable.

Stable/Unstable Releases
As another measure to make the game more accessible for everyone I've introduced the concept of stable/unstable releases on the downloads page as well as a recommended version. So now if you are not eager to have the latest version of VintageStory you can stick with the stable release and thus less likely to encounter game breaking bugs.

Website updates

• Improved Downloads page
  • Now shows the recommend download for your OS
  • Added differentation betweens stable and unstable releases. We will try to tag versions that we expect to be buggy as unstable
• Updated front page roadmap and added some system icons

Game Updates

• Feature: The game now runs under Mac OS X. Added a mac os version to the downloads plage.
  • Comes with all the features as the normal windows version, but there are still some significant known bugs:
    • On some systems a mouse click inside the window seem to click at 0/0 where the mac os menu is. If that is the case for you, use the game in full screen (e.g. via Fn+Ctrl+F11 - you can also change the fullscreen key in the Settings!).
    • No simple way installing a new version without loosing previous save games (currently you have to manually move the 'VintagestoryData' folder to the new app)
    • Smithing/Knapping/Clayforming and Block highlight block/voxel outlines are very thin
    • Taskbar icon unsharp/blurry
    • Renaming the app might prevent the game from starting up at all
    • Breaking soil seems to drop soil with a strange texture
       
• Feature: Bamboo trees: Pretty jungle decoration
• Feature: Whole tree felling: Trees broken by an axe will now break as a whole. If your axe does not have enough durability it will only break partially.
• Tweak: Added worldedit setting to disable ambient particles
• Fixed: Lighting issues around underground rivulets
• Fixed: Some saltpeter blocks wrongly rotated
• Fixed: Water walking sound no longer playing

VS running on Mac OS
 

Bamboo

Thanks to everyone that visited our booth!
Saraty and Tyron

Picture by Creative Cut

Game Updates

• Tweak: Updated the game icon to use the tree of the vintage story logo
• Tweak: Improved flint knapping experience
  • Tweak: Players can no longer mess up. The game prevents you from removing voxels that you need.
  • Tweak: Can no longer break below block while having a flint in hands
  • Tweak: Amplified knapping sounds
  • Fixed: Minor texture issues on the flint knapping surface
  • Fixed: Player able to to break the flint knapping surface while working on it
• Tweak: Many block info texts are now much better formulated
• Tweak: Improved ladder climbing experience
  • Player climbs upwards as long as he is walking towards the ladder block (i.e. also when walking backwards)
  • No longer floaty left/right sliding
  • Sneak+Walk on top of a ladder lets you slowly walk over the edge to climb downwards
• Tweak: Improved collisionboxes for wooden fence corners. They now tightly fit the model.
• Tweak: Drifters now have a 20% chance to enter a fearful state & run away after getting damaged
• Tweak: Bighorn sheep now drop more meat
• Tweak: Fat is now edible and extra nutritious
• Tweak: Reduced vertical attack range of creatures by 1 block
• Tweak: Increased creature min spawn distance to player from 10 to 18 blocks
• Tweak: Increased spear durability
• Tweak: Added missing track "Peaceful Village"
• Tweak: Cinematic camera now puts the player in the correct game modes when running the camera path
• Tweak: Prettier itemstack info box, now auto sizes and removed some useless infos.
• Fixed: A weird infinite loop causing massive lag when changing view distance and afterwards fly mods. Only seems to happen on some machines.
• Fixed: Shading issue on iron doors
• Fixed: Bighorn females always aggressive
• Fixed: Placing stuff on tool racks crashes the game
• Fixed: Multiple Snow layers dropping only 1 on breaking
• Fixed: Creatures not multiplying
• Fixed: Block breaking decals no longer disappearing in some cases
• Fixed: Some file naming issues causing the client not to start on linux (i hope i fixed them all)
• Fixed: .fog and.cam command crashing the game with invalid args
• Fixed: Weird underwater horizontal floating issue when walking straight
• Fixed: z-fighting on ice blocks and chicken feet
• Fixed: Light items dropped in water not floating all the way up to the surface
• Fixed some other very minor things
• API Feature: The blocktype configuration now allows a -"byType" modifier everywhere! (thanks to CreativeMD)

[Edit:]
Was forced to also release 1.4.4.2 because all blocks became unstackable

Game Updates

• Feature: Knapping
  • Same as clay forming but can only remove voxels. Uses flint as ingredient.
  • Removed grip recipes for stone tools, these now require the flint knapping mechanic. Some tools are no longer available in stone form at all.
• Feature: Spears
  • New weapon that can be used as a thrown weapon or in hands 
  • Flint spears are crafted by knapping, metal spears through smithing
• Feature: Limited Attack ranges
  • Reduced default attack range of 4.5m down to 1.5 meters
  • Swords, Axes and Knifes and Spears increase this attack range again
• Feature: Creature Emotion States
  • Basic implementation of reaction based behaviors. Bighorn sheep now become aggressive or sometimes fearful when attacked and will react accordingly.
• Tweak: Reduced hunger drain by 40%, reduced damage taken from hunger by a factor of 4
• Tweak: A bunch of shader tweaks. Nighttimes is now a tad brighter, nighttime clouds are now darker, night skies are more intense and broad daylight is a bit brighter.
• Tweak: Bighorn sheeps now have double the health. Lowered health for chickens though.
• Tweak: Some attempts in improving attack animations of creatures
• Tweak: Rock and Logs can no longer be broken without a tool
• Tweak: Reduced drifter spawn count by half
• Tweak: Bows have durability now
• Tweak: Increase default render distance of clouds
• Tweak: Doubled search radius for dynamic lights (they no longer emit light after 60 blocks instead of 30 blocks distance)
• Tweak: Flints now 25% more common
• Tweak: Animals swim a bit more naturally now
• Tweak: Harvested berries now enter the players inventory directly
• Fixed: Spam stacking wood not working
• Fixed: Placing flower in flower pots not removing it from the inventory
• Fixed: Big Workaround for GUI going haywire when pouring metal that hopefully didn't break something else
• Fixed: Some Stair sides becoming transparent when a block is in front (was a fundamental issue in the engine, maybe finally fixed now)
• Fixed: Some minor render glitches with water
• Fixed: 2 crashes when near the map edge
• Fixed: Anvil mold craftable (not yet finished)
• Fixed: Snowlayer white pixels poking through bottom edge, seams between frosted grass and snow layer
• Fixed: Several issues preventing creatures from spawning in groups
• Fixed: Child creatures not following their parents
• Fixed: Snow layer step sound only hearable on left channel

I've also finally went ahead and eliminated a bottleneck when creatures spawn or load which caused very big lag spikes on some machines. I hope you can enjoy a buttery smooth voxel exploration experience now.
 

Game Updates

• Feature: More user friendly Clayforming visual guides
  • Voxels that need to be placed are outlined green
  • Voxels than need to be removed are outlined orange
• Feature: Clayforming recipes update
  • The 3x3 grid recipes for ingots molds and crucibles are now gone
  • Added new clayforming recipes for: Ingot Molds, Crucibles, Planter, Flower pot, Hammer, Hoe, Shovel and Sword
• Feature: Improved command line argument handling for the game client. Now uses a linux style convention and can now print to console. Added/replaced console options:
  • --addOrigin to tell the engine to also load assets from given location
  • -p for selecting playstyle on new worlds (1 for survival, 3 for creative)
  • -o/--openWorld for opening a world
  • --createWorld for a new named world
  • --rndWorld for a new world using numbered name
  • -c for connect (e.g. -cexample.com  or  --connect="example.com")
  • -v for version
  • -h for help
• Tweak: Updated Ladder Model and Texture
• Tweak: Less than half the clay usage from clay forming
• Fixed: Eliminated a major source of lag spikes caused by entities loading/spawning
• Fixed: Ruins generated by WorldGen sometimes not touching the ground on all 4 corners (hopefully fixed)
• Fixed: WorldEdit Tree Tool not generating trees
• Fixed: All toolmolds baking into the axe mold.
• Fixed: Breaking a block below a clay form doing weird stuff.
• Fixed: Game crashing when not selecting a clayforming recipe
• Fixed: Jump + E causing player to jump endlessly while inventory is open
• Fixed: Cave music track starting right after joining a world, even when on the surface
• Fixed: Breaking charcoal piles breaking in one go and not returning enough charcoal
• Fixed: Crash when clicking outside the list of available clayforming recipes
   

Game updates

• Tweak: F4 now also hides clayforming and smithing recipe outlines
• Tweak: Disabled again that players get stuck in blocks, instead using some other hacks to get players to sync better in multiplayer
• Tweak: Plant tint update to make some jungles less dark green
• Tweak: Added more omph to ore blasting bomb. More particles, now also breaks some rock and should damage the player more likely.
• Fixed: Several issues related to placing/removing seaweed and reeds
• Fixed: Clayform dropping invisible block when broken
• Fixed: Weird block breaking action when interaction with clayforms
• Fixed: Using Fireclay for clayforming crashes the game
• Fixed: Gamma slider not enabled when switching back to creative mode
• Fixed: Tool rack not dropping their contents when broken
• Fixed: Mining tiers wrongly assigned
• Fixed: Many sounds not correctly attenuated in multiplayer
• Fixed: Players able to mine 2 blocks at once
• Fixed: Other players held light sources not correctly applying dynamic lights in multiplayer
• Fixed: Text line breaks in the graphics settings dialog on some gui scales
• Fixed: Tab key not correctly cycling through input fields
• Fixed: Fixes player able to break water blocks with lily pads in hand

I wanted to push out flint tool knapping with this update, but got ambushed by a wave of bugs that made me question if my machine i'm testing on still is working correctly. Well I hope I fixed all the annoying ones. Flint knapping will have to wait until the 1.4.4 release.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the addition of dynamic lights, that should make caving and night time exploration a lot more interesting!

Game Updates

• Feature: Dynamic Lights
  • Held and dropped light sources now illuminate the world
  • Current dynamic lights limit is 5, configurable in the graphics settings
• Feature: Scene Gamma Levels can no longer be changed in Survival Mode
• Feature: New Creatures
  • Completed the Wolf family (Females and Pups)
  • Bighorn Sheep Family (Male, Female and Lamb)
• Feature: World Generation Updates
  • Lakes now generate Seabeds (Sand, Gravel or Muddy Gravel)
  • Deep Lakes now grow seaweed
  • Caves intersecting lakes should now be actually fixed
• Feature: New blocks
  • Iron Doors, Iron Fence (only in creative mode for now)
  • Aged planks, aged chair, aged table, aged bed (only in creative mode for now)
  • Aged planks with blue wallpaper (only in creative mode for now)
  • Seaweed
  • Muddy Gravel
• Feature: Ice is now slippery
• Feature: Pausing - Entering the escape menu in single player now pauses the game
• Feature: "Meta Block Mode" for Creative Mode
  • Toggled with CTRL+F4
  • Allows placement of special meta blocks for use in special schematic export configuration
• Feature: Reduced memory consumption of a standard singleplayer session by 200 MB
• Feature: Can now place empty mobile containers inside normal survival slots
• Feature: Significantly Improved the WorldEdit Flood Fill tool
  • Can now toggle to check for enclosure
  • Actually works in an understandable way now
  • Added ability to do 3D flood fill
• Tweak: Lava splash particles now also glowing.
• Tweak: Long text in text input fields now scroll horizontally to stay visible
• Tweak: Reduced amount of surface copper ore
• Tweak: Player walking now wobbles the camera slightly with step sounds in sync with the wobble. Step sounds now also hearable for other players in multiplayer.
• Tweak: Sprinting now makes you hungry 33% faster
• Tweak: Sapling growth size now randomized
• Tweak: Redone wooden bed graphics to be more consistent
• Tweak: Added a copy-to-clipboard command: .cp
  • .cp posi: Copies current position to clipboard
  • .cp chat: Copies current chat history to clipboard
• API Tweaks:
  • Side property now also in IWorldAccessor
  • BlockBehaviors now also available on the client
• Fixed: WorldEdit Import tool source definition not working with subfolders
• Fixed: Unknown items now also use the unknown texture instead of being invisible
• Fixed: Breaking light sources leaving behind a slight tint on the blocks
• Fixed: Game crashing when the server tries to load a creature whose type is unknown (i.e. by a previous mod). Now these entities will get deleted instead.
• Fixed: Drifter animations broken in several ways
• Fixed: Rare crash when exiting the game
• Fixed: Jerky movement of dropped items
• Fixed: Miiight fix a driver crash on amd cards related to clay forming
   

Screenshots

Seaweed and muddy gravel as seabed

Bighorn Sheep


Some of the new blocks (available in creative mode only atm)

The waving grass feature added in 1.4.2 breaks the scene rendering on AMD Graphics cards if enabled. This version should fix that.

In other news - I have decided that the beginning of October shall mark our next major milestone.

• We'll release the game as "Vintage Story - Survival Edition"
• We'll do a new Trailer presenting all survival features
• In all likelihood we will offer a Demo Version of the game with limited playtime.

And finally, @skodone joined the team to contribute art and assets, raising the total number of regular contributors to 8 \o/
 

Game updates 

• Fixed: Waving grass breaking most blocks no longer rendering correctly
• Fixed: Some issues with pumpkin growth

As always, we do actual testing *after* a release, because we are professional like that...
This release should fix all major issues with 1.4.2.

Game updates

• Tweak: Hay can now burn
• Tweak: Gravel dig sound slightly less obnoxious (reduced volume by 7 db)
• Fixed: Crash when trying to bake clay or clay bricks in the fire pit
• Fixed: Snow layer waving in the wind on frosted grass
• Fixed: Completing a clay form not removing the clay forming surface
• Fixed: Collected items not merging with items in ones hotbar (i hope o.O)
• Fixed: Cattail placeable in illegal positions
• Fixed: Uncommon crash when joining a multiplayer server
• Fixed: Tool molds not bakeable at all
• Fixed: Attacking entities with weapons did not update their durabilitiy on the client side
• Fixed: Should fix players able to place blocks where other players are standing
• Fixed: Bowls not stackable
• Fixed: Drifter hurt sound and water splash sounds not attenuating over distance

This update one of a few major updates that drastically changes initial survial gameplay experience. Our plan is to elongate the stone and copper age and offer more interesting mechanics during this time period.

Game Updates

• Feature: Waving Grass! Dust particles in warm and wet climates!
  • Can be disabled or reduced in the graphics settings
• Feature: Clay Forming
  • Right click + sneak with a piece of clay in hands creates a clay forming surface
  • Left click with clay in hand to remove clay voxels, right click to place voxel
  • Hit 'F' with clay in hand and looking at the clay forming surface to select how many clay voxels to place/remove
• Feature: Sitting. Hit 'G' to sit down
  • Highly suggested while clay forming, otherwise very fiddly to form right now
• Feature: Fire
  • Sneak + hold down right mouse button with a torch to ignite a block
• Feature: Stones are now throwable to cause a small amount of damage to entities
• Feature: Charcoal production
  • A firewood pile with a firepit on top now turns into charcoal pit
  • If a charcoal pit is created and deprived of oxygen within 15 seconds all firewood piles will turn into charcoal after 18 ingame hours
  • If the charcoal pit is expoed to air at any point the whole pile will burn down and no charcoal is created
• Feature: Tool Casting
  • Using the new clay forming system one can now create tool mods and cast copper and bronze tools directly without the need to smith them first. Currently only the axe and pickaxe can be created through this way.
• Feature: Pumpkin crop
  • Custom, realistic growing behavior unlike other crops
  • Rare find in seed vessels found in ruins
• Feature: Ore/Tool Mining Tiers
  • Player can now only break ores if their pickaxe has a high enough tier
• Feature: Surface Ores
  • Shallow ore veins now spawn surface ores that can be picked up like stones
• Feature: Torch burnout. Ditched old torch crafting recipe.
  • Torches now burn out after 48 ingame hours
  • They can now be created by placing sticks in the firepit 
• Feature: Oil Lamps
  • Replaces the torch as the permanent light source
  • Crafted from bowls (made by the new clay forming system) and animal fat, which drops from wolves
• Feature: Storage Space tweaks
  • Chest now holds 16 items instead of 12
  • Stationary basket made from reeds that holds 8 items. 
• Feature: No more stone pickaxe \o/
  • You have to create your first pickaxe by collecting surface ores and performing tool casting
• Feature: New Music track "Through the Grass at night"
• Feature: Fast Graphics Mode is now really fast by downsampling the scene. Reorganized graphics settings.
• Tweak: Optimize Startup. Loading a single or multiplayer world should now happen up to 20 seconds faster
• Tweak: Half transparent rendering tweaks to reduce glitchy rendering effects
• Tweak: More Natural Rock Strata transitions
• Tweak: Block breaking particles now disappear at at random times and glow if their parent block is glowing.
• Tweak: A tweak to reduce occurences where caves break through bodies of water
• Fixed: Frustum Culling disabled, causing the graphics card to render way more than it needed to (=big fps hit)
• Fixed: Modloader asset loading not working under linux
• Fixed: Raw clay not burnable to hardened clay, raw clay bricks not burnable to burned bricks.
• Fixed: Creatures stuck in water at times
• Fixed: Drifter despawning right in front of the player
• Fixed: Last serious bug in the animation system. Animations now play correctly \o/
• Fixed: Shot arrow position desync
• Fixed: Sun/Moon Stutter when walking
• Fixed: /wgen del not removing entities
• Fixed: Able to stack up arbitrary items on top of wood piles
• Fixed: Ingot/Plate/Wood piles not dropping their contents if the block below them was broken
• Fixed: [API] Entity texture 'order-of-precedence' not properlry respected 

Screenshots

New Recipes

Clay Forming

Fire

Charcoal production steps
    

Tool Casting

Pumpkin Crop

Surface Ores

Oil Lamp and Basket

Updates

• Small Fun Feature: Can now hop inside or drop items into the opened create
• Modding Feature: Blocktypes can now define multiple selection and collision boxes
• Tweak: The players center point of item collection is now in the middle center and not bottom center. This means the player pick up items higher up, but no longer pick up items a block below him.
• Fixed: Cow skull block missing shape when the game is run under linux
• Fixed: Opened crate showing invisible block sides in certain cases
• Fixed: Client command .reloadmodels not working
• Fixed: Stutter on dropped items
• Fixed: Block breaking overlay moving with the camera

This release fixes a number of non-critical, yet annoying issues and should improve the survival experience with many multiplayer fixes, the addition of shears, quartz glass, 6 slot bags, connecting fences, placeable lilies and cattails as well as a significantly cheaper crafting recipe for bombs.

Particularly for UmbraCreations there is now also an ability in WorldEdit to remove the largest bottleneck when it comes to placing *many* blocks - lighting. By delaying the lighting calculations until all block operations are done one can remove many redundancies in the lighting process which should make it easier to work on very large builds.

Thanks to a valuable hint by CreativeMD I was also able to remove the frame stutter while the player is moving aound which appeared independently of the FPS Rate, it should now be super smooth as long as the FPS Rate is high enough \o/

Thanks to Skodone, we can also safely declare multiplayer as a tested and stable part of the game. 

The 2 larger features I've mentioned last time are not ready yet for release, but we have made some significant progress on them. We are also planning a large overhaul and extension of the first few hours of the survival experience, such as ditching the stone tools in their current form. It is something we always wanted, but implementing other game mechanics took precedence. Now, our schedule is slowly freeing up :-)

Game Updates

• Feature: Added Shears
  • Crafted from any metal on the anvil
  • Very useful for removing tree leaves
• Feature: Ability to delay block lighting during world edit, significantly speeds up operations where you have to draw or import a lot of blocks
  • When importing a lot of block or using a very large brush you can now disable lighting via /we relight 0 which completely disables all lighting calculations, you can then relight a marked area using /we mre, this may lag the server for several minutes but should otherwise complete much faster then when using traditional lighting. To recap:
    1. Disable lighting: /we relight 0
    2. Make large edit operations
    3. Mark the affected area (/we ms, /we me) 
    4. Relight the affected area: /we mre
• Feature: 6 slot backpacks
  • Crafted from raw hides that drop from wolves
• Feature: Quartz glass
  • Added clear quartz as uncommon drop when mining quartz
  • Added quartz glass and recipe to craft it from clearquartz
• Feature: Clay ingot molds, loot vessels and planters now fall when the block below is removed
• Feature: Can now place water lilies on water and harvested cat tail on the ground or in water
• Feature: Fences now connect to solid walls and connect to free standing fence gates.
• Tweak: Cattail and Grains now more nutritious
• Tweak: Removed collision box from water lilies
• Tweak: Vines do not drop if not directly broken
• Tweak: Reduced color tinting effect of colored torches in broad daylight (because unrealistic)
• Tweak: Ore blast bomb recipe now gives you 10 bombs instead of 1
• Tweak: Entities will now get stuck if their collisionbox intersects with a block collisionbox. Might introduce new bugs, but should fix other players in multiplayer falling through blocks.
• Fixed: No more stutter while moving around! You might have noticed that the game seems to slightly stutter while moving around, even when the game runs at a high fps rate, this long standing issue is now resolved \o/
• Fixed: Block info names not displaying the correct name but internal block code
• Fixed: Wolfes, Chickens and drifters no longer able to step single blocks
• Fixed: Minor held item glitch (item moving up after attack + looking down)
• Fixed: Upside down stairs making certain block sides transparent
• Fixed: Able to add a raw mold to a baked one and vice versa
• Fixed: Ingot mold fill level not showing
• Fixed: Entities in water no longer swim above the water level
• Fixed: Player name tags rendering in front while player is behind (again)
• Fixed: Name tags rendering in front of gui dialogs
• Fixed: Player able to right click non-bag items into the bag slots
• Fixed: Multiplayer issues when 2 or more players smith on the same work item
• Fixed: Breaking ingot piles dropping a pile block and spawning particles at the wrong position + wrong color
• Fixed: Forge hitbox/selectionbox not tightly fitting the model
• Fixed: Wrong texture for tinbronze shears
• Fixed: Placing coal in forge not consuming the coal

After playing a whole bunch of Mount&Blade I went ahead and build an archery system inspired by that, a skill tree is still lacking though. Beyond that I spent some extra focus on stability, so this build contains a lot of bug fixes. Under the hood this update also contains 2 larger updates that are not quite finished yet, but I will look forward to deliver them to you in a complete form in one of the following releases. Until then, I hope you can enjoy the new archery system and freshly added gold/silver tools!

Game Updates

• Feature: Archery
  • The Bow is now fully usable when supplied with arrows
  • Intricate aiming system, Mount&Blade Style
  • Can now smith metal arrow heads on the anvil
  • Chickens now drop plentiful feathers
  • Can now craft bows from sticks and twine as well as arrows from flints or metal arrow heads, sticks and feathers. Metal arrow heads do extra damage compared to their flint counterparts.
    
     
• Feature: Added New tool + Recipe: Saw 
  • The planks, planks stairs and slabs now require the saw
    
     
• Feature: Added Gold/Silver variants of all tools + recipe
• Feature: Added 5 day grace timer before monsters spawn in a new world.
• Feature: Added Haydens new/updated tracks 2x Heartbeat and 2x Sunny Village (each with a survival and creative variant)
• Feature: Added hp/food current and max values to the hotbar hud
• Feature: Added /giveblock and /giveitem commands to get items without using creative inventory (with macro => awesomeness).
• Tweak: Copper deposits now larger and more common, gold and silver deposits now half as common
• Tweak: Simplified ore names, the previous ones are still 
• Tweak: Crafting planks, plankslabs and plankstairs now requires the saw
• Tweak: Increased mining speed for bronze picks
• Tweak: Damage vignette strength now based on the amount of damage received
• Tweak: Wolf will no longer damage player if he managed to get out of range during the attack
• Tweak: Crop block now shows the nutrient levels of below farmland
• Tweak: Wolf attack process + animation now faster
• Tweak: Improved multi-line text editing. Home and End key now jump to start/end of line and Ctrl+Home/End to start/end of text. Textareas can now ensure that multi-line text is visible when adding new lines or moving the cursor, applied to the macro editor.
• Tweak: Firewood burns longer
• Tweak: Fancy reappearance of held items when using them and look up
• Tweak: Disabled Server AntiAbuse Mode, since it's incomplete and buggy
• Fixed: Server should no longer prevent admins to interact with out of range blocks
• Fixed: Third person camera clipping into the terrain
• Fixed: Creative inventory general tab not showing all blocks/items in certain situations. 
• Fixed: Using pickaxe on ores not improving mining speed
• Fixed: Several inconsistencies when pouring metal, should now be exact and not loose or duplicate units of molten metal.
• Fixed: Wolf attacking creative mode players when close by
• Fixed: Ingots pickable from molds at high temperatures, now reduced to 20% of its melting point
• Fixed: Wolf not seeking survival players if a creative player is nearby
• Fixed: Healing not possible in creative mode
• Fixed: Game crashing when trying to place a non-ingot item on a forge
• Fixed: Breaking anvil not dropping its contents
• Fixed: Game crashing on corrupt savegames
• Fixed: Entity duplication bug that causing errors to be displayed when starting the server and probably some other issues
• Fixed: Placing ingots on the ground replacing some blocks that it shouldn't (like anvils)
• Fixed: Stop eating food early still consumed the item
• Fixed: Frosted grass causing underlying block to be transparent
• Fixed: Ingot Molds, Forges, Anvils and Tool Racks not synchronizing correctly in multiplayer
• Fixed: Mouse cursor not visible after getting disconnected from a server (this time i found the cause!)
• Fixed: Player Name tags going all funky when the player is right behind you
• Fixed: Players getting disconnected from a server in certain cases
• Fixed: Chickens not spawning correctly
• Fixed: The chunk column the player spawns in sometimes didn't load
• Fixed: F4 not hiding GUIs outside creative mode

We're back from the 4 day ReVersed Festival and it was awesome! We've met so many great and interesting fellow game developers as well as curious players. We showed our game to some 40 people or more. We also gave some interviews about our game. We're definitely looking forward to the next one.

At the festival we showed off a new animal - the wolf. Here is now the official update with it. Enjoy!

Game Updates

• Feature: Added hostile creature: Wolf - Currently very dangerous, so best avoided until there is armor / ranged weapons in the game ;-)
• Feature: Loot Vessels - random loot found in ruins
• Feature: Mega Screenshots - Hit Ctrl+Alt+F12 to make 4x resolution screenshots
• Feature: Added suffocation damage for living entities when inside blocks
• Feature: Chicken now try to avoid water and can swim out of it
• Tweak: Cattails are now edible (The Long Dark anyone? ;-)
• Tweak: Changed crosshair to black/white dot, experimental
• Tweak: Flints slightly more common
• Tweak: WorldEdit Gui - can now use mousewheel to increase/decrease number values by steps of 1 or by 0.1 if shift is held down.
• Tweak: Fixed white border issues when looking at blocks at a distance
• Tweak: Hitting an entity now plays a "Slapping" Sound
• Tweak: WorldEdit now also does overload protection on too large brushes (limited to 50 currently)
• Tweak: Updated hammer and ember block texture
• Tweak: /time set day now sets the time to 8am instead of 9am
• Tweak: Entities stop seeking players if they switch to creative mode
• Fixed: Some items/blocks disappearing when attacking an entity with them in hands
• Fixed: Placing raw and burned molds using wrong textures
• Fixed: Some wonkiness with the creative inventory
• Fixed: Rare crash when server is under heavy load
• Fixed: Crucible not adding 4 slots to firepit
• Fixed: Crash when putting a non-smeltable item in the crucible slots
• Fixed: Desync issue when working on an item on the anvil
• Fixed: Hurt color now again applied when a entity gets damaged
• Fixed: Chickens spawning in the desert
• Fixed: Crash when closing dialog with the 'X' button
• Fixed: Issues when trying to smith an axe

In preparation for the upcoming presentation of Vintage Story at the Vienna GameDev Meetup and the ReVersed Festival here a new release that includes the long planned world edit toolbar, so that we can more easily show off the world editing capabilities of the game. This toolbar is merely an interface to already existing functionality which has been available through commands for quite a while now, but greatly improves the accessibility of these tools. We'll hope this will make for a great presentation in the upcoming week! :-)

Website Updates

• New story excerpt - Ghosts

Game Updates

• Feature: World Edit Toolbar
  • A more user friendly way to use the world edit tools, does not yet support all of the features that the command line interface offers
  • Hit the Tilde (`) Key on your keyboard while in creative mode to activate
  • Offers some additional client side settings, such as modifying the clouds and fog density or color
  • While the gui is opened the player can still place and remove blocks
• Feature: Explosives
  • New resource: Saltpeter - appears on cave walls
  • New resource: Blasting powder - crafted from sulfur, coal and saltpeter
  • New block: Ore blasting bomb - an explosive best suited for mining ores. Crafted from blasting power, flax twine and a piece of linen. Place on the ground, ignite with a torch and enjoy the show!
    
• Feature: New block: Full shingle block
• Feature: New soundtrack "Midnight"
• Feature API Updates (none yet documented, bug tyron for questions):
  • New generic "JsonDialog" that allows mods to create their own guis from a given sets of gui elements. 
  • Mods can now register and hook up to keybord events
  • Added ability for particles to spawn other particles (i.e. particle trails)
• Tweak: Some modifications to the world edit commands
  • Block entities are now also exported/imported
  • Lake tool is now called "Flood Fill" and has a configurable search radius parameter via /we tr
  • The dimensions for the Paint brush and eraser can now be set individually via /we tsx, /we tsy or /we tsz
  • The Tree tool now takes a minimum and maximum size for the tree instead of a minimum and random add parameter.
• Tweak: Added hen fleeing sound
• Tweak: Added particle effects to standing lava
• Fixed: Hen walking animation not always playing while it's walking
• Fixed: A rare server crash occurring randomly (hopefully)

Change Log

• Fixed: Chicken not always dropping meat
• Fixed: Crops and other patches of plants too common
• Fixed: Items disappearing when survival inventory is full (now for real!)
• Fixed: Some entities untouchable on world reload

After a long break I've completed the 1.3.6 release. As always I want to be transparent about what I've been up to. Already last year my wife and I picked up a new hobby - Gardening. I have to admit, few things are as rewarding as seeing your own food grow. That however also means that the month of may is usually the busiest time of the year where we do a lot of seeding, planting, watering and overally tending to our crops. By now we grow a wide variety of vegetables, berries and herbs with our constantly expanding area of self built raised garden beds. 

Anyhow, the bulk of planting is now done and I will be able to slowly resume work on Vintage Story again. 

For starters, here's to videos of the 2 most significant new features: Smithing and Chickens

Change Log

• Feature: The first basic implementation of the Smithing System is now complete. See above video. 
• Feature: Added ruins to world generation
• Feature: Added first friendly creature: Chickens
  • Includes 3 types: Roosters, Hens and Chicks each with up to 8 different textures
  • Basic behaviors such as pecking the ground and staying in a group
  • Hens will spawn chicks if a rooster is nearby, up to a group size of 20 chickens
  • Killed roosters and hens will drop meat that can be cooked and eaten
• Feature: New Model for the drifter with very buggy animations   (will fix for next release)
• Feature: Vignette Effect (darkened screen edges) that flashes red when getting damaged
• Feature: Performance optimization - loading chunks and saving the game now noticably faster at the cost of 10% increased RAM usage
• Feature: New music track "Nostalgic"
• API Features:
  • Added entity debug mode. Displays arbitrary information above entities. To enable:
    .clientconfig set showentitydebuginfo 1
    /entity debug 1
  • Added ability to create and add entities during worldgen
• Tweak: Some weird experimentation with clouds. Please send me some feedback if they look better or worse now
• Tweak: Sound attenuation is now linear - fixes drifters hearable from very far away
• Tweak: VintageStory client and server exe files are now also digitally signed which may help with them getting detected as false positives by AntiVirus software
• Tweak: Improved tool tip texts in the graphics settings
• Tweak: Fences can no longer be jumped over
• Fixed: Entities that are underwater became invisible when the player looks at them while above water
• Fixed: Trying to change keymapps in the settings caused the list to scroll up 
• Fixed: Server Exception when players typed '{' or '}'
• Fixed: Rare bug where the player suddenly could no longer control his own character
• Fixed: Recording with Fraps very laggy
• Fixed: Items disappearing when inventory is full in survival
• Fixed: Changing controls no longer causes the controls list to jump up

Updates

• Fixed: Loading/unloading and disconnected screens only showing a brown background
• Fixed: Game crashing when turning up music value from 0 while a world is opened

Updates

• Fixed: Login Screen not displaying anything beyond the background
• Fixed: Durability bar of an item/block sometimes visible when it shouldn't be (cause by block picking via mouse+middle click)

Despite our efforts, the smithing system has not just yet emerged from the complex networks of game mechanics needed to make it work. We made a few major advancements though

• There's now a Forge which lets you reheat metals and work items.
  • Shift + right click with coal or lignite to refill fuel
  • Right click with a torch to ignite
  • Shift + right click with ingots or plates to place for heating
• The current work item can now be picked up, reheated and placed back on the anvil using right mouse click and shift+right mouse click
• Working an item on the anvil with the hammer is now mapped to the left mouse button instead of the right one. Any item now may override the left mouse button default behavior.
• Added some fancy particle effects when working a hot piece of metal
• I've started implementing smithing recipes and a (currently useless) dialog for selecting the desired smithing recipe.
• Hot blocks/items now also glow in the gui, in the players hands or when dropped on the ground

I'll also make a tutorial video once the smithing system is complete.

Updates

• Feature: New Block: Forge. Can be used to heat ingots and plates to working temperature for (incomplete) smithing on the anvil. Requires coal as fuel and a torch for igniting the coal.
• Feature: Added blocks basalt and obisidian. Added new behavior where mixing lava and water creates these 2 blocks.
• Feature: Added ability to change any client configuration at runtime through the command .clientconfig
• Feature: Variable Sampling Pixel Rate. Enables two things:
  • 0.5x Sampling rate: 50% performance gain at the cost of reduced graphics quality for ultra low end hardware. Set via 
    • .clientconfig set ssaa 0.5
  • 2-4x Sampling rate: Very laggy but allows making massive screenshots (e.g. 7680x4320 pixels). Set via
    • .clientconfig set ssaa 2
    • .clientconfig set scaleScreenshot 0
• Feature: "Rock Quarrying" Mining all the blocks around a Rock block will now drop the rock itself.
• Feature: Reworked world generation component responsible for spawning patches of plants/blocks/stuff. The world generator should now spawn many plants/flowers/crops more commonly again. Also patches of blocks now also spawn more likely together with forests, shrubs or other patches.
• Feature: Performance Improvements
  • Improved speed of Terrain Collision detection by 15%: Gives a nice FPS boost when 300+ Entities are loaded
  • Improved chunk tesselation speed by 4%: Makes chunks load a bit faster
• Feature: New API Method
  • IBlockAccessor.GetBlocks() - retrieve blocks from within an area. Runs faster than when calling .GetBlock() many times
  • OnBeginAttack/OnAttacking/etc.: A collectible may now also override the block breaking action via left mouse click. 
• Tweak: Hitting Enter in the Chat Window now unfocuses it immediately. Previously you had to hit enter twice which was unintuitive. 
• Tweak: The Sky is now less white in creative mode by setting the correct sea level. 
• Tweak: Hitting the F1/F2 keys in creative mode now decreases/increase the speed by 1 instead of setting it to a fixed value of 1 or 5. Holding the Ctrl-Key changes the speed in steps of 0.1
• Tweak: Players now start with 8 bread until there is enough survival content that prevents starving
• Tweak: Added Luma render pass. Improves anti-aliasing quality done by FXAA
• Fixed: Badly randomized topsoil grass transitions
• Fixed: Gold and Silver ore not smeltable
• Fixed: Gold and Silver ore deposits now spawning anywhere. Now spawn as subdeposits in quartz
• Fixed: Right Ingot on a double mold block not retrievable with right click
• Fixed: Crash when calling /bir remap
• Fixed: Bloom shader effect affected by blocklight/sunlight
• Fixed: Metalplate missing blockside shading
• Fixed: Coopers Reed in water having only 1 visible diagonal side. Now renders as a full cross again.
• Fixed: Either Water flowing too slow or lava flowing too fast
• Fixed: Some behavior and graphical glitches with water/lava

Pictures

Forge block and hot ingot on an anvil
 

More richly decorated worlds due to improved block patch generator
   

Fixed badly randomized grass tinting

• Tweaked sky horizon, now takes on the fog color, making fog actually foggy.
• Tweaked Bloom and Godray shaders. Particularly the godray shader has a less overexposed sky now. 
• Tweaked berry bushes and crops to appear in warmer climates as well, should be a bit more common now.
• Fixes or at least reduces the occurence of the server crashing
• Fixes player no longer able to die

[Update 23.4.2017] There's currently a fairly common server crash occurring, I'm working on a fix

While I did make some more progress on the smithing system and animals, I decided against waiting any longer for these features to be ready and release an inbetween version. Since last update I added the ability for tools to have tool modes that the player can select from. This enables you to properly shape your work item on the anvil. Still missing is a forge to heat the ingot, a recipe matching system and some pretty effects.

Beyond that, we've now closed the suggestions tracker and moved all the suggestions either to the new suggestions reddit at /r/VSSuggestions or our internal tracker.

Updates

• Feature: Added falling block physics for sand and gravel
• Feature: Added Skull Cow block to deserts
• Feature: Added Max FPS Slider for manually syncing monitor refresh rate with game refresh rate for reduced stutter (38 FPS works best for me)
• Feature: Added metal plate and plate piles
• Feature: Lava now flows like water, albeit slower and emits light also when generated during worldgen
• Feature: Improved Game Performance
  • Moved block and sun relighting computations into a seperate thread. This causes light sources to appear fractionally after placing them therefore however cause no more lag. This is particularly helpful while loading newly generated chunks as these can cause many updates from settling rivers.
  • Fixed random heavy frame stutter while chunks are loading (due to lock contention)
• Tweak: Tools now have a higher attack power than using bare hands
• Tweak: Gravel Step sounds a bit smoother
• Tweak: Some API methods in Collectible.cs and Block.cs now marked virtual
• Fixed: Sky darkening every day at 12:00
• Fixed: Sun shine halo cut off
• Fixed: Drifters not despawning, causing them to be a pretty rare find
• Fixed: API method entitypos.GetViewVector().Z inverted
• Fixed: Game crashing when it fails to load a mapchunk, now logs an error instead
• Fixed: Stuttering problem when teleporting very far away
• Fixed: Hovering items over items in the creative inventory + hotbar key created only ghost items
• Fixed: Mipmap level now at 4 by default
• Fixed: Hunger level going down in creative mode
• Fixed: Controls Dialog getting oversized when the window is resized or the gui scale changes
• Fixed: Stove Block disappearing on world reload

Yet again, I could not bring out a new release within the time frame that I hoped for. One of the causes includes my whole family catching a pretty severe cold for the second time this year, though luckily I have been spared so far. But I digress, here's some game related updates!
 

Game Festival

So I just got the news today that in all likelihood I will be attending the A.MAZE Game Festival Berlin to show off Vintage Story at one of their open screen booths. They accepted my submission, so I guess I should be going ;-)
 

Community

Since the previous game update the forums and chat have become very active, which is awesome! It's getting hard to track all the ideas floating around, so we'll probably try and find a better solution to tracking these, ideally a single place for where people can vote and sort the suggestions in various ways.

The old Chat service will be discontinued by the developers of this forum software, so I had to switch over to an alternative. Discord seemed to be a nice choice, so I hope to see you all there!
 

Model Creator

I've done a lot of work on the Model Creator and uploaded 7 new releases this month. The updates were mostly to improve the stability, consistency and ease-of-use when creating creature models and animations. After all, the better we can work with this tool, the faster we can churn out high quality models and animations for the game. Beyond that I also implemented the ability to export animations as animated gifs, because communication is key! Here's the first ever gif export:

By the way, if there's anyone that thinks he can do way better animations than that: I NEED YOU! PLEASE CONTACT ME!  (serious)
The model and texturing was done by saraty, which is a great first milestone for her to be able to do that.

The other new feature is automatic texture reloading. Combined with a PS Action to automatically export the current image as png through hotkey, you have near instant texture reload, this should greatly speed up the texturing process since you get quick feedback on how it looks.

Game

Smithing
I've got a half finished implementation for a smithing system which hit a minor road block that I have to solve first: Selecting from a list of smithing techniques. Probaby will be some special form of gui dialog. Here's a short video that demonstrates some of the ideas behind the smithing concept. It's inspired by redrams suggestions in the forums.

Animations

I probably spent another 10 hours or more fixing the remaining bugs in the animation code, which was the last roadblock that prevent me from adding new creatures. This component was probably the hardest one to implement into the game so far, so this calls for a celebration that it's in a usable state now! 

 

Max FPS
For anyone experiencing stutter, this new graphics setting could fix it, by manually syncing the FPS to your Monitors refresh rate. For me the game ran smoothest when limited to 38 FPS
 

Joshes Updates

Josh has been actively working on the ever growing list of smallish tasks. Since the last update he fixed that lava lakes are dark during initial world generation, that lava can spread like water and added the long planned cow skull block to deserts.

That's all folks! I hope to finish the new smithing system soon and make a release with it. Until then, stay classy.