You can now finally progress to the next metal tier - bronze \o/
Took way way longer than I hoped, but now it's done at least. For the next version I will try to add some basic animal life to attain food from so starving is less of an issue. 

Here's a tutorial video on how smelting works now

Updates

• Feature: New Smelting System
  • All smeltable blocks or items now have a new property "Temperature" that increase when being heated and drops when being cooled
  • Smelting of ores now must happen inside a Vessel that is placed in the fire pit. This expands the firepit inventory by 4 cooking/smelting slots.
  • Can now mix and match ores and ingots to create pure or alloyed metals. Currently available:
    • Tin bronze: 88-92% copper, 8-12% tin. Double durability than copper and quite strong
    • Bismuth bronze: 50-70% copper, 20-30% zinc and 10-20% bismuth. Slightly higher durability than tin bronze but somewhat weaker (slightly less damage on swords, slightly less mining speeds)
    • Black bronze: 70-90% copper, 8-16% gold, 8-16% silver. Highest durability and strength of all bronze alloys.
  • Added ingot molds to pour in molten metal 
  • Added bronze tools for bismuth bronze, black bronze and tin bronze as well as their respective crafting recipes.
• Feature: 5 new blocks: Skull Cobblestone, new Barrel with variants, Straw Bed, Crate and Bone-y Soil
• Feature: 2 new survival music tracks "Building" and "Creating"
• Feature: Eating food is no longer instant and plays an animation while eating
• Feature: Modding Updates
  • Added ability to perform a ray trace from any position to detects collisions with blocks or entities
  • Can now have custom, non-instant and animated uses for items/blocks
  • New Event for Blocks/Items while being held by the player
  • New Event for Blocks when the player collides with them
• Tweak: Changed Intro Track to use "Night To Day" again
• Fixed: Lava glowlevel and light values missing
• Fixed: Items not in general tab in creative inventory
• Fixed: Chest contents dropping while opened and the player dies
• Fixed: Crash when mods register their own blocks/items
• Fixed: Some weirdness related to loading/unloading entities resulting in odd behaviors with dropped items or drifters

As mentioned 2 posts ago I've been inactive for 2 weeks, hence the lack of updates. For the last 2 days I've continued my work on implementing the bronze age, which turned out to be a lot more time consuming than I originally thought, as it requires more than just 2 new features, such as item temperature, held item animations, ore-in-container smelting, alloying as well as a new block with a custom renderer. A big part of it is now complete however, so you can probably expect a new version in 2-4 days. 

In the coming update there will also be at least 2 new blocks and 2 new tracks from Hayden.

Looking forward to work on the next thing already!

At long last, a new game version. It was supposed to include the new entity animation system. It's all implemented but one last glitch remained that will require some more work to fix, but after two months fiddling with animations I wanted to work on something else again. So now with the help of Josh and Hayden we have creative tabs and ambient cave music.

I actually forgot to fix that weird texture bug with torches, so enjoy creepy torch textures with our brand new creep cave sounds! >:D

Updates

• Feature: New music track "To Dawn, from a Very Rainy Night"
• Feature: Ambient Cave music
  • 33 ambient track pieces that are dynamically composed together when being in places devoid of sunlight (i.e. caves)
  • Dynamically blends tracks when moving between overground and underground 
  • Improved music system that will allow more kinds of dynamically composed tracks in the future
• Feature: Added tabs for the creative inventory
• Feature: New blocks: Paper Lantern, Chair and Table
• Feature: New server config to enable disable spawning of creatures
• Feature: New server command /serverconfig Allows setting various sever settings while the server is running. Currently available: 
  • maxchunkradius: Set max view distance
  • maxclients: Set max allowed players that can join
  • antiabuse: Enable/Diable anticheat mode
  • onlywhitelist: Toggle whitliste mode (=only allow players to join that are on a whitelist)
  • entityspawning: Disable/Enable spawning of creatures (=drifters)
• Feature: Mod API updates
  • Refactored API namespaces to follow a cleaner design pattern
  • Added IBlockEntityContainer interface to access block entity inventories
  • Added GetLightLevel() method for convenient access to a positions light leves
  • Added getters for sunlight and blocklight levels in the world accessor
  • Added ability to load hierarchical shapes for blocks, items and entities
  • Added ability to render entities from a shape, added support to load and run animations
  • Improved documentation in various places
• Tweak: Drifters no longer target player in creative or spectator mode
• Tweak: Placing stairs now are placed upside down depending on whether targeting the upper or lower half of a block
• Tweak: Increased max configurable mouse sensitivy from 150 to 200
• Fixed: Played picking up items after death
• Fixed: Game instance not fully stopped after leaving a world, causing increased memory usage and potentially other weird behavior
• Fixed: Create NPC command not working
• Fixed: A crash the sometimes occured when loading a world

Nobody likes delays. A series of inconveniences and other responsibilities prevented me from doing much programming on the game. And then, last week, my family including me caught quite a cold, sigh. Due to this there's no new release as of right now.

We were not inactive however:

• CreativeMD continously adds new articles to our mod documentation and took a first dive in the engine code.
• Luke has been writing several pages on the game story
• Hayden made several great cave sounds as well as a new track that will be in the next release
• Josh joined the team as game programmer 
• Ivan continued his work on building dungeon sections 
• And I, Tyron,
  • wrote a new About us page that replaces the previous Team and Vision pages
  • implemented the basics for animations in the game engine
  • added a few features related to animations to our model creator tool
  • been on the lookout for an Animator to make us animations. Contact me if you are interested!

For the coming 10 days I should have more time to work on the game, interupted by a 2 week period of low activity, beyond which my availability should be back to normal again.

Overally my lifes situation has not changed greatly and we still have the same dedication to push the game forward as always, so hopefully in the comming week we'll have something nice to release again!

Updates

• Feature: First hostile creature: Drifter. Includes:
  • Basic but modular AI System: Wandering around, seeking players, attacking the nearest player
  • Basic path traversing: Walk from point a to point b in a direct line. Ability to step on 1 high blocks.
  • Powerful creature configuration: A creature is merely a json file. Creatures and can added, removed or modified by touching only those files (custom models not implemented just yet).
  • Basic movement interpolation on the client. Creatures and other Players now should move smoothly
  • New server command: /entity [spawn|count|removeall] [entityname]
  • Custom texture as well as idle, hurt and death sounds
  • 0.5 second red tinting when being attacked. Spawn particles on death.
  • Basic spawning and despawning mechanic. Drifters (for) now spawn in dark areas where the light level is below 8. 
• Feature: Very Basic combat system
  • Ability to punch other players and creatures. 
  • Added attack power property to items. Swords, Knifes and Axes now have extra attack power (visible in the items tooltip)
  • Durability reduction on items with durability when attacking
• Feature: Engine/Mod API Updates
  • Able to register entities, ai tasks, entity renderers and particle property providers
  • Able to spawn particles server side (=> broadcasted to clients)
• Tweak: In multiplayer a joining player is now regarded as spectator until the client sends a ready signal. This should prevent getting killed while still joining.
• Fixed: Item texture overlays property not working
• Fixed: Crash when trying to craft something
• Fixed: Not able to start a singleplayer world if in serverconfig.json whitelisting is turned on
• Fixed: A client crashing in a certain situations when joining a multiplayer world

Demonstration Video
(Something seems to have gone awry with the encoding. I'll upload a better quality clip tomorrow)

Please note that I had to make a backwards compabtility breaking change this version. If you load an old savegame you will get thrown back to the spawn point with full health and hunger, but everything else should work fine.

Updates

• Feature: World Edit Updates (all documented on the How to use page)
  • Ability to grow/shrink the selection,
  • Added ability to mirror or repeat a selection.
  • Coordinate Hud now shows the horizontal orientation
• Feature: Video recorder tools. Added .vrec tool to do ingame video recording, also offering video compression. 
  • .vrec start - Starts recording
  • .vrec stop - Stops recording
  • .vrec toggle - Starts/Stops recording (usefull for mapping onto a keyboad key using the Macro Manager)
  • vrec fps [number] - sets the video framerate of the recording
  • .vrec tickfps [number]  - sets the game framerate (should ideally cause lagfree recording if set but I'm having minor troubles with it syncing up perfectly with the video frames. Setting it to the same as the video framerate will probably help with lag though). 
  • .vrec codec - lists all available encoders that compresses your video (install x264vfw for an mpeg4 encoder). Most encoders seem very laggy unfortunately, I probably have to optimize some more here.
  • .resolution width height - Sets the game window size to given width height
• Mod API Updates
  • Entity and ItemStack class now part of the API, allowing a bunch of things that weren't possible before
  • Extended the Render API so that the rendering of entity items, entity players and other entities can now be rendered using the render api alone
• Tweak: Reduced sound range of all sounds
• Fixed: Hay block not blocking light
• Fixed: Some Stairs blocks causing neighbouring block sides to be come transparent
• Fixed: Rare client crash when exploring the world

Updates

• Feature: Added an API call to look at all registered world gen handlers. Should allow completely custom world generation by clearing all handlers.
• Tweak: Some API Methods now are getters instead of methods
• Fixed: Keymapping lost after every update
• Fixed: Ores not getting consumed after being smelted in the firepit
• Fixed: Client Crash when breaking blocks in certain situations
• Fixed: Client Crash when opening the chest inventory in certain situations (cause not yet known, so might still produce wonky behavior)
• Fixed: Client Crash when trying to connect to a server in certain situations (related to ingot piles)

A lot of time also went into improving the model creator to make the creation of animals easier. Beyond that, I felt like adding various planned small-ish features in no particular order, so here you go!

Game Updates

• Feature: Stackable Ingots and Firewood: Shift + Right click on the ground with ingots or fire wood to make pretty piles
• Feature: Tool racks: For neatly organizing your tools. Crafted from 6 sticks (3 top, 3 bottom)
• Feature: Beginner bag: 2 Slot baskets crafted from 15 cattails (fill 5 slots with 3 items each in the crafting grid)
• Feature: Block ambient sound system. Each block may now emit forever looping ambient sounds.The first 2 blocks using this mechanic is water and lava.
• Feature: Firepits now emit an ambient fire sound when lit
• Feature: First person item rendering improvements
  • Now lags behind the players camera rotation, giving a more immersive feel
  • Moves out of sight when looking straight up
• Feature: Item/Entity boyancy. Light items now float on the water surface instead of going under
• Feature: Mod API Additions
  • Added soundByType blocktype property
  • Added client side mesher api to allow for injection of custom meshdata into the terrain tesselator (used by the ingot piles and tool racks). 
  • Unified Block/Item properties into a common Collectible class. Gives some additional properties to blocks. 
• Tweak: Addd geartwos updated server.sh script
• Tweak: Made water yet again more transparent
• Tweak: High fertility soil deposits now only 1 ever block thick
• Tweak: Allow early low-yield harvest of pre mature crops (but only one stage before completion)
• Tweak: 4 times lower chance of getting a second seed from a mature crop
• Fixed: Snow layers not generating on top of tree leaves
• Fixed: Bunch of bugs with firepit inventory
• Fixed: Correct sound system attenuation
• Fixed: Server crash related to farmland
• Fixed: Players loosing privileges/roles on a smp server after every version update
• Fixed: Creative inventory scrollbar not updating to right size after searching something
   

VS Modelcreator Updates

• Feature: Improved Saving/Loading Mechanic. Now behavors more like a classic image/text editor
• Feature: Added ability to move and delete keyframes
• Feature: Added undo/redo capability
• Feature: Added crude version of single texture mode that is more suited for creature creation
• Feature: Added attachment points manager. Let's you define attachment points for later use in game (e.g. where the held sword goes)

Game Screenshots

Last friday I managed to complete the first major milestone for having creatures in the game - which is being able to create animations in the model creator. It was a tedious task. To celebrate, I "allowed" myself a break in the form of minor non-essential updates on the game. I also fixed a lot of major bugs however. I'm quite glad I finally got the major performance hit fixed for users of certain radeon graphics cards.

Updates:

• Feature: VS Model Creator Animation Features Completed. Can now build basic animations with keyframes that will be later support by the game engine. Downloadable at https://github.com/tyronx/vsmodelcreator/releases
• Feature: Added Cooper's Reed. The perfect lake prettifier. Naturally generates nearby and inside water. This work also opened the door to more water based plants and blocks in the future. In fact, any block now may be configured to be inside water. 
• Feature: Added Saguaro Fruit. On rare occasion, saguaro cacti are generated with harvestable fruits. They do not regrow at this point in time though.
• Feature: Server Whitelisting: Can now put a standalone server into whitelist-only mode and /whitelist or /unwhitelist specific players
• Feature: Players now drop all their items on death
• Feature: The /op and /privgrp commands no longer require the player to be online
• Feature: Added crafting recipe for raw blue/firebricks which can then be burned into burned bricks, which can then be crafted into brick blocks
• Feature: Added ability to burn 8 clay piles into hardened clay in the fire pit
• Feature: A rough mechanic for fall damage reduction when landing in water. Should no longer take damage when slowed to a near halt and then touching ground.
• Feature: Cinematic camera now allows to create endlessly looping paths using the commands
  • .cam close  - to close a path
  • .cam loop [num]  - to loop num times. Or indefinitely if no number is supplied
• Feature: Debug screen now also displays the game version and the graphics card info on the left side
   
• Tweak: Added a low chance for very wet and temperate climates, tweaked tint map to have very dark grass in such areas. Fixed a few oddities in world generaiton.
• Tweak: Signs now only require 1 plank and 1 stick to craft
• Tweak: Cinematic camera paths are now white/blue checked to show the individual steps
• Tweak: Cinematic camera recordings should now actually be lag free, independent of the current ingame FPS
• Tweak: More block info for farmland and growing grops, e.g. Now shows the current growth stage.
   
• Fixed: Very bad FPS (1-20 instead of 100-200) on certain radeon cards. 
• Fixed: Cinematic camera now moving correctly or in the correct speed in certain situations
• Fixed: Saplings not growing at all. Sigh.
• Fixed: Player unable to rejoin a multiplayer server in certain situations
• Fixed: Players teleporting around in multiplayer after opening a dialog while moving.
• Fixed: Game crashing when it doesn't find a block shape
• Fixed: Player standing inside farmland after exiting/loading the game and gltiching weirdness in multiplayer when standing on farmland
• Fixed: Some Bread texture too large and overly pixelated
• Fixed: Standalone server not using a supplied world seed through serverconfig.json
• Fixed: Backpacks disappearing when picked up in creative mode
• Fixed: Server disconnect messages not arriving on the client, which instead showed some connection lost error
• Fixed: Several bugs related to kicking/banning players, especially as admin
• Fixed: Firepit smelting progress hardly visible, now in green instead of black. Corrected dialog title.
• Fixed: Shift+Left click in the crafting output window consuming ingredients but not crafting enough output items, effectively destroying items.
• Fixed: Player picking up items that instantly end up in a currently opened container when the players inventory is full. 

• The Story Excerpt page is finally done. Took us over a month to decide which art style we want to go for. This should give you a small peek of what is to come some day.
   
• I wrote up another page that summarizes an age old question: What makes Vintagestory different from Minecraft?
   
• Model Creator: The tool we use to design the games block received some convenience updates, code refactoring and is now underway of becoming also an animation editor that should allow everyone to add animated creatures to the game. It's the first important step in allowing us to implement animals/mobs.
   
• Game 
  • I ended up spending one day fixing up the cinematic camera. It should now finally work bug-free and will have 2 new features.
  • Fixed the ingame recorder to actually record lag free videos. 
  • Might have finally found the cause of very bad overall performance for certain Radeon graphics cards
  • Added some more useful information to the debug screen
     
• Video: With above fixes in place I was able to do some pretty recording again, check below

Next week should there will probably be a 1.2.8 ready for download. Until then, sayonara!
 

3 Feature Release in one Week? Because we can! Very happy with having survival inventory working now, it was one of those features I never was sure on how to implement in the best way. The same goes for sapling growth, since the tree generation system is actually a seperate mod.

Updates

• Basic Bag/Backpack Inventory
  • Added all remaining code to make survival inventory work as planned. The idea is that your default inventory only consists of the 10 slots in your hotbar and you can further expand that space with bags. Well, now we have the first bag! 
  • Can now craft Linen Sack from 8 Linen Cloth which expands your inventory by 4 slots for each sack.
  • Can now craft linen cloth from 4 flax twines.
• Feature: Very Basic Sapling Growth: Planted saplings now will grow a tree after 5-8 ingame days.
• Feature: Added new crop: Soybean
• Feature: Added small, rare deposits of high fertility soil. These are very valuable for growing crops.
• Feature: Berry bushes now also regrow based on the internal game calendar, which means they grow even if the chunks are not loaded
• Feature: Tool breaking sound whenever a tool runs out of durability
• Tweak: Shift+Left click on the crafting output slot now crafts as many items as it can
• Tweak: Shift+Left click on a creative inventory slot now creates whole stacks
• Tweak: All the crops generated during worldgen should now have a higher chance of being mature
• Tweak: Worldgen should generate more mushrooms
• Fixed: Random crash caused by farmland. (NullReference Exception)
• Fixed: Crops never growing if they were planted on dry farmland that was later given access to water
• Fixed: Crash when using the API to register custom block entities or blocks.
• Fixed: Added missing API access to registering items, block behaviors and entities

Updates:

• Feature: Farming!
  • 4 kinds of grains and 4 kinds of vegetables now naturally spawn in the world. Each have a 70% chance of dropping seed, or 100% if fully grown. Hint: The best place to find them are temperate areas. 
  • Can now craft a hoe using 2 sticks and 2 stones or copper ingots (same way as in minecraft)
  • Can now till the ground using the hoe, turning it into Farmland.
  • Farmland has several unique properties
    • 3 nutrient cageories (N-P-K), whereas each crop drains a different nutrient level.
    • Farmland has to be moist for crops to grow, so ensure you have a nearby water source. Moist Farmland is visually darker than dry one.
    • Farmland slowly recovers it's nutrients, except for the one thats currently in use by the planted crop. Fallow farmland will always recover all 3 nutrients.
    • Fallow Farmland has a low chance to grow tallgrass on it. Those pesky weeds!
    • Farmland grows the crops independent on whether the chunks are loaded or not. So you can leave for a large adventure and return home with all your crops matured. It does that by making use of the internal game calendar, so e.g. setting /time speed 0 will essentially stop crop growth.
       
  • Many new items and textures related to farming, such as seed bags and new vegetables/grains.
  • All the seed bags also display what nutrient the crop will need and how long it will grow.
     
• Feature: Block Info HUD (Waila Mod anyone?)
  • Use 'B' to toggle it. 'B' is the default key binding, feel free to change it in the controls.
  • Will show you information about the current block you are looking at.
  • Can show additional, block specific information. First use is showing the N-P-K Levels for the Farmland
     
• Feature: Water Buckets
  • Can now pick up and place water source blocks
  • Can now be crafted from 5 planks + 1 flax twine
  • Flax twine can be made from 4 flax fibers that drops from mature flax crops
     
• Feature: New Music Track "Adventuring"
   
• Feature: Added Mod API Access to the internal game calendar
• Tweak: Performance optimized particle system! Should now run about twice the speed as in the previous version.
• Tweak: Player will not get hungry 3 times as long when starting in a new world.
   

Screenshots

Some of the new crops as well as the block info HUD in the top middle

Rice, Carrots and Onions ready for the Harvest

Rye naturally spawning in the world


FPS graph with 18.000 particles in 1.25 (left) versus 25.000 particles in 1.2.6 (right)

Updates

• Tweak: Newly spawned/respawned player will not get immediately hungry
• Tweak: Peat bricks now can be used as fuel in the fire pit
• Tweak: Fire pit now burns 4 times longer when first constructed
• Fixed: Tallgrass not breaking when the block below is broken
• Fixed: Native copper ore not spawning at all
• Fixed: Eating mushrooms gave too little saturation
• Fixed: Player Saturation not reseting on respawn. Now the player always respawns at half saturation
• Fixed: Blocks not interactable (i.e. firepits, chests) when player was holding an item 
• Fixed: Itemstack Tooltip not disappearing when pressing ESC in a Firepit Dialog
• Fixed: Flame and Arrow Symbols in Firepit dialog not scaling correctly with different gui scales
• Fixed: One more fix to prevent backpack slots turning into normal storage slots
• Fixed: Peat bricks placing weird transparent blocks
• Fixed: Player not able to pick up still stackable items on full inventory
• Fixed: Player not able to shift+click items out of the crafting output slot in certain cases
• Fixed: Generall crafting wonkiness and wrong output numbers appearing
• Fixed: Some areas completely devoid of tall grass

Dearest Community, I hope you all had a great christmas! 
In the meantime we completed the basic smelting system as well as everything around it for it to make sense in a survival game world. Currently you can only make use of copper ingots. A lot of features were needed to support it in a meaningful way which took away most of the dev time, so it is not very feature rich just yet.

Updates

• Feature: Basic Smelting
  • Can now use Firepits and Stoves to turn fuel + ore into metal ingots. 
  • Can now craft copper tools from copper ingots (same recipes as for stone tools)
  • Can now construct firepits by shift+right clicking on the ground with 1 dry grass and 3 fire wood
  • Can now craft fire wood from log + axe (above in the crafting grid)
  • Can now gather dry grass from breaking tall grass with a knife
  • Can now craft a knife from stick + flint (above in the crafting grid)
  • Flint now spawn naturally on the ground amongst other patches of loose stone
• Feature: Better item and block tooltip
  • Added smelting and burn temperature information
  • Added nutrient information
  • Removed debug infos (can be made visible again using the command .edi)
• Feature: Game optimizations
  • Switched from Gzip to Deflate, saving on CRC calculations and memory. Saves ~2-4% CPU on server+client
  • Added a fast random generator to Deposit and Cave generation. Saves ~4-6% CPU on server
  • Cache a single value in terrain tesselation: Saves ~1% CPU on client
• Feature: Automatic World Save File Upgrader
  • The compression optimization broke compatibility with pre 1.2.4 world save file formats, but VintageStory will now automatically probe what version a world save file was created with and upgrade the save file format on world startup.
• Feature: Worldgen updates
  • Feature: Added single-block rivers to world generation. They generate on rocky faces over- and underground.
  • Tweak: Less dense patches of tallgrass
  • Tweak: No more grass under under lakes, should also allow gravel and sand in the right climates
• New Modding Features:
  • Items can now also have any kind of shape that can be created with the VSModelCreator (example: Firewood)
  • Custom Item Types are now possible (example: Firewood, Dry grass, Stones)
  • Crafting recipes can require a tool without consuming the tool completely (example: Firewood)
  • Blocks can now be made edible (example: Mushroom)
  • New Event for Blocks and Items: OnUseItem
  • MarkBlockDirty/MarkBlockEntityDirty/MarkBlockUpdated Methods in IBlockAccessor for more precise control on what kind of updates a block should receive.
• Feature: Added Item ID Remapper. Prevents adding/removing items to the game messing up your current items in old worlds.
• Feature: Can now place loose stones on the ground by Shift+Right click on the ground with a stone
• Feature: Mushrooms are now edible too (not very healthy, but might keep you from starving)
• Feature: Added bamboo hay block
• Feature: Added Ingots (item only at the moment)
• Graphics Tweaks:
  • Many item and block graphics improved
  • Added dithering to night sky (reduces color banding)
  • Night fog no longer weirdly purplish
  • Increased overal scene contracts
• Fixed: Dropped Items reappearing (but disappearing on collection) in certain cases
• Fixed: A bunch of crashes that I observed for the first time
• Fixed: Berry bushes not regrowing berries when placed by world generation

I've had little to no time for most of the week due to real life errands, but I did manage to cram in a few tasty new features in the 2 extra days of delayed release. I've also aquired a few more talented hands for drawing item textures and illustrations for our first story page that we can release to the public still this year I hope.

Updates

• Feature: New Blocks
  • Added carpets with 6 variants
  • Added new 3 new variants for linen cloth
• Feature: New Items
  • Bread, various Berries and Vegetables. Can be eaten.
  • Flint, Flax, Feather, Arrow and Twine. Currently no use yet.
• Feature: Hunger! 
  • The green status bar now acts as a saturation indicator. Once your saturation runs out, you will receive damage every few seconds until you die. 
  • Can now eat items to regain saturation and health. All new food items can be eaten
  • Can now harvest berries from the berry bushes that spawn naturally in the world
  • Berry Bushes now slowly regrow berries (every 40mins)
• Feature: Added new "Fast graphics" option that turns off drawing various parts of the leave blocks
• Tweak: More messing around with distant tree and transparent rendering. Should now hopefully look right.
• Tweak: Command issued from console are now also Logged
• Tweak: More flexible handling of BlockEntities, can now be individually configured per block instead of being bound to the Block class.
• Fixed: Client crashing instead of displaying error when attempting to connect to a server with a different version.
• Fixed: Fixed last severe bug known to me: Black chunks after reloading a world
• Fixed: Visible seams between snow layer and frosted grass
• Fixed: Yet another attempt of fixing invisible mouse pointer bug in the menu. Maybe now for the last time.
• Fixed: API call to SetBlock should now also generates any associated BlockEntity

Despite all my efforts in trying to push survival gameplay I somehow inadvertently ended up doing more of a graphics and detailing update. Le Sigh. Nonetheless we do have some survival updates. Loose stone now generate all over the world to make it easier to collect stones in early survival, peat and clay deposits now generate the surface, the latter being essential for smelting and required for various recipes. I've also continued working on the smelting system, which is now coming close to completion.

Updates

• Feature: New blocks
  • Grass Covered Clay and Peat
  • Raw and Burned Vessel for holding up to 4 items
  • Loose Stones
• Feature: New items
  • Pile of Blue/Fire Clay
  • Peat Brick
• Feature: Several graphics updates
  • Much more elegant block selection highlight. Now perfectly placed on top of the block and anti aliased.
  • Can now define how block sides should be merged and ambient occluded for each block face. This allows for better rendering of glass, ice, leaves, slabs and similar blocks
  • Can now define what blocks should always be drawn on top of others, allowing for e.g. leaves always be drawn on top of any adjacent blocks. Makes leaves look way better when adjacent to solid blocks, as those sides can now be drawn as well. Also eliminates several sources of Z-Fighting (flickering of textures)
  • The Weighted Blended Order Independent Transparency system should now more correctly mix together half transparent blocks, particles and clouds 
• Feature: More Worldgen updates
  • Added Clay and Peat deposits to the surface. Added ability to place deposits depending on climate.
  • Ice lakes now generate naturally
  • Very tall grass now varies in height randomly 
  • Loose stones now spawn all over the surface, making it easier to gather stones in early survival. Added ability for the block patch generator to place blocks based upon the underlying rock type.
  • The tall pillar landforms are now not as tall and stepped, making look like the pillar mountains in the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park
  • The humongous mountains landform now sometimes have very large caverns in them
  • Slightly cooled down the planet ;-)
  • Fixed: Sand and Gravel longer mixing vertically in strange ways
  • Other minor tweaks to some landforms
• Feature: Can now place lanterns and torches on top of fences
• Feature: 3 more crafting recipes for cobble stone, cobble stairs and cobble slabs (requires stones and clay as ingredients)
• Feature: Added GearTwos updated server.sh script with 2 new features: backup and update
• Tweak: Water source blocks now also flows into several direction if several downward paths of the same length are found
• Tweak: Several block tweaks
  • Lantern survival breaking speed reduced to 1 second
  • Can now place attachable blocks like torches and wool/leather/linen layers on top of upside down slabs and stairs
  • Added ability for blocks to have random shapes which are randomly selected based on where they are placed in the world
  • Added new blocktype properties:
    • glowLevelByType: Same as glowLevel but typed for the selected block
    • SideAo and SideAoByType: If blocks around it should be ambient occluded
    • RenderFlags (8-bit value, lowest 3 bits used for offseting the render depth, the hights bit used for reducing alpha transparency loss over distance)
    • SnowCoverage: true/false, determines if snow layers can stay on the block
    • FaceCullMode: 
      • Default: Default behavior
      • NeverCull: All block faces are always rendered
      • Merge: Removes any block face that is opaque and adjacent to an opaque block face or block with same blockid
      • MergeMaterial: Same as merge but checks for equal material instead of equal blockid
      • Collapse: Same as merge, but removes only 1 of 2 faces if adjacent to blocks with same blockid
      • CollapseMaterial: Same as collapse but checks for equal material instead of equal blockid
      • Liquid: Removes any block face that is adjacent to an opaque block face or adjacent to a block of the same material
• Fixed: Some block sides becoming transparent when placing stairs or slabs
• Fixed: Active slot item info box popping up whenever an item got damaged
• Fixed: Another attempt to fix mouse cursor not visible when disconnected from multiplayer
• Fixed: /welcome and /announce only allowing 1 word
• Fixed: Pre v1.2 worlds no longer openable
• Fixed: Crafting planks from logs only ever returning birch planks
• Fixed: Shift+Left click from the crafting output slot duplicating the item
• Fixed: Client crashing when a half broken block in survival is instantly broken in creative mode
• Fixed: Client crashing in certain situations in multiplayer when using inventory
• Fixed: Client rarely crashing in multiplayer when server is shutting down
• Fixed: Client crashing when window is resized to 0 height
• Fixed: Server rarely crashing when a player connects
• Fixed: Server crashing when a mod crashes in a certain way
• Fixed: Players rarely not able to pick up items
• Fixed: A world edit undo via /we undo after /we mmby x y z being applied incorrectly
• Fixed: Covering/Uncovering light sources not correctly relighting neighbour chunks
• Fixed: Stairs on top of stairs causing the lower stairs to be wrongly darkened

Pictures

Improved Block Selection Highlighter

Prettier ice, ice lakes generating naturally
 

Loose stones now generate on the surface
 

Large Caverns now naturally generate in the humongous mountains landform

New wooden path block

It should also eliminate the need to install the game via wine for Linux users (you still need to manually install mono though). Furthermore one could even go ahead and build a small auto updater script by checking the version url!

Updates

• Feature: Added a more Linux compatible release of the game to the account manager - a .tar.gz archive.
• Feature: Re-added New Version notification (was lost during the gui redesign)
• Feature: Add a client mod api call for rendering items/blocks into gui
• Feature: Made chunk-generator-thread ticktime configurable to boost chunk generation speed on powerful servers (servermagicnumbers.json)
• Tweak: Some minor aesthetic corrections on the main menu screen
• Fixed: Setting other players gamemode did not inform the client causing weird behavior for that client
• Fixed: Server shutting down after 6 hours
• Fixed: Not able to place/remove blocks with default privilege group level in multiplayer 
• Fixed: Player Models not visible
• Fixed: Several issues with custom chat groups (the /group command)
• Fixed: Seeing other players with flymode on constantly falling down in multiplayer
• Fixed: Game crash when doing anything with inventory in multiplayer
• Fixed: Game crash when trying to save a sign block text
• Fixed: Game Crash when typing "/time set"

Please note block entities, like Chests and Signs now use a new method of saving their data to the savegame. It will cause old signs and chests to loose their data and will log an error. Sorry about that. I did this update to make those blocks more resilient against future updates. 

Up next we will probably try to get some of the most essential survival features done so you can actually make use of the new prettier terrain.

Updates

• World Generation Updates:
  • Remade all Landforms: The world should now look significantly more varied and unique. Also way more traversable with big flat building grounds.
  • Improved forest generation: The terrain is no longer covered in trees. There are also large patches with only light or no forestation. Added a tree generator to produce massive redwood trees. Tweaked several of the tree generators. 
  • Wider range of colors: Brown wintery forests and yellow Savannahs galore!
  • Larger Biomes: Double the size of climate areas
  • Much more deco: Worldgen now also generates frosted tall grass, berry bushes, ferns, lily pads and very large patches of heathers/western gorse to imitate heathlands.
  • And many many other tweaks
• New Blocks
  • Berry Bushes: Red Currant, Black Currant, White Currant, Blueberry and Cranberry. Can't harvest them yet :<
  • Lily Pads: Basic version of lily pads on the water, will receive some more love in a future update
  • Tall Ferns: 2+ block high ferns for a perfect addition to the jungle underbrush
• API Updates
  • Feature: Network API that let's modders set up custom network channels and network message for arbitrary communication between client and server
  • Feature: Shader API let's modders define and load their own GLSL shaders and use them during rendering
• Feature: The client now supports basic video recording with the command .rec. The big advantage of that is it should be absolutely lag free video recording, no matter how laggy your game is. Unfortunately it does not yet support audio or compressed video recording yet.
• Feature: Added 2 server side tools to quickly prototype worldgen configurations. There is now also a mod api property that let's you disable auto generation of chunks (api.WorldManager.AutoGenerateChunks = false) 
  • /wgen del [radius]   - deletes given radius of chunks near the world center
  • /wgen regen [radius]  - also deletes, but also reloads all worldgen config files and regenerates those chunks.
• Feature: Remade all tree leaves textures. They now look more consistent with the rest of the art style.
• Tweak: Potential lag reduction on slower machines (uploading of mesh data now happens less often and in bigger batches)
• Tweak: Updated several other textures
• Fixed: 2-3 Crashes when trying to play on a standalone server
• Fixed: Crash when trying to rename a world 
• Fixed: /stop not exiting standalone server without hitting enter key
• Fixed: Server<->Client Player Position Desync in Multiplayer, causing the player to teleport weirdly in certain cases
• Fixed: Chests instantly breaking

[Edit:] I've released version 1.1.1 which fixes the wrong worldedit tools numbering

Updates

• Feature: New blocks
  • Added bed, altar, echo chamber, book shelves, omok table top and about 80 new blocks of various colors for creative mode only
• Feature: New graphics option: Sepia Slider
• Feature: WorldEdit Updates
  • Feature: New tool for generating trees using the engines tree generator.
  • Feature: New tool for simple lake generation that performs a 1 deep flood fill within a limited range
• Feature: Mod API Updates
  • Several updates to make modding much more convenient. The Visual Studio Project of the official sample mods now let's you start the game directly within the IDE, you can break the game and use edit&continue!
  • Added several features for mods to become moddable. First example: The game content mod now adds a new tool brush to the world edit mod if it is loaded.
  • Added new events, can now register listeners for LogEntry events and player gamemode changes
  • More convenient access to the files assets through a new IAssetManager interface
  • Large rewrite on how player related data is accessed, should now be much easier to use
• Tweak: Updated textures for blocks for crafting table, improved model for the flower pot and new graphics for all potted flowers, updated 2 leaves textures, 
• Tweak: Added ability to use a wildcard for a blocks texture, this automatically adds the textures it finds in the given path as random textures.
• Tweak: Reduced memory usage by 170 MB
• Fixed: Player unable to place certain blocks very close to him
• Fixed: Respawning not giving back full health when clicked too quickly
• Fixed: WorldEdit mod and movespeed carrying over to survival mode when switching gamemods
• Fixed: Blocks nearby lava transparent
• Fixed: Low level water sometimes overwriting higher level water
• Fixed: Lighting glitch where sunlight would not spread into neighbouring chunks
• Fixed: Properly shutdown server when an exception happened during startup
• Fixed: Disconnected screen showing black background and menu on the left
• Fixed: Major sources of lag when using /we blu or block data imports with light sources multiple times
• Fixed: Shift + Left mouse click not working to get items from the creative inventory
• Other: Updated entity model format to use json in preparation for the entity animation system
• Other: Added combustible options to blocks and items in preparation for smeltable and burnable items/blocks. Added tree attributes to blocks and items to hold any custom data.

Pictures
 

If you have old worlds that are important, copy&paste this into your chat bar - it will fix the broken flowers. Close and open the world to see the changes.

As always we continue to add new features at breakneck speed.  Version 1.0.10 is now available for download in the account manager.
The world edit documentation is updated to reflect the latest additions.

Updates

• Feature: Basic Survival Crafting is now complete! The first recipes are added too (Planks, Torch, Stone Pickaxe, Stone Axe, Stone Shovel, Planks Stairs, Planks Slab, Door, Fence, Fence Gate, Chest, Ladder, Sign)
• Feature: Massive WorldEdit Additions
  • New Tool: Grow/Shrink - allows for three dimensional growing or shrinking of an area, layer by layer. Has 2 modes: Grow/Shrink any blocks or only selected blcoks
  • New Tool: Eraser - formerly integrated in the paint brush tool now separate to allow for greater functionality. Basically does the inverse as the paint brush tool.
  • New Tool: Line - draws lines between points. Has 2 modes: Line strip or single origin
  • Paint Brush Overhaul: Can now select width/height and length of a brush shape. Added 8 new shapes: Cuboid, Cylinder, Half ball up/down/north/east/south/west
  • Air Brush Overhaul: Now behaves more like an traditional air brush. Has 2 draw modes and 2 apply modes.
  • New Brush Positioning mode: Can now select between Centering or Attaching the brushes shape to the selected block)Added replace modes to the import tool: The Import tool now no longer places blocks with a higher replacable value than the existing blocks. Can change this behavior with place modes 0 (replacable check),1 (only replace air) or 2 (replace everything)
  • Added Ability to (vertically) flip block data (for the import command, the paste command or the import tool)
  • Added Ability to copy and paste a selected area (previously required an extra step with export then import) 
  • All tools that allow defining a radius now have 2 additional commands to grow/shrink the radius by +1 or -1
• Feature: The game now also supports client side mods! Any mod can now define if it should be loaded on the server side, the client side or both. A fairly extensive Client API is also already available (including full world access and a render api)
• Feature: Flowing Water now does basic path finding within a 3 blocks radius to search for a single downward path instead of spreading everywhere.
• Feature: Added ColorByBlock property to block particles to take on the color of the blocks texture (from a random position)
• Tweak: Much improved rendering of held items (finally fixed misaligned faces + added shadings)
• Tweak: Increased client block ticking scanning range and speed (e.g. causes blocks to emit particles from 8 blocks further away)
• Tweak: Doubled mining speeds for all tools
• Tweak: Flowers and Mushrooms now break instantly in survival
• Tweak: Improved offline mode experience: 'Offline Mode' Text no longer clipped and added second counter while trying to validate session
• Tweak: Itemstack quantities now more visible
• Tweak: Active Slot Info Text now also shows whenever the active slot is modified
• Fixed: Maybe fixed the IndexOutOfRangeException-Crash that randomly occurs
• Fixed: Water in some cases removing blocks that it shouldn't
• Fixed: Several rendering glitches with water
• Fixed: All held items were mirrored
• Fixed: Game no longer crashes without internet access
• Fixed: Player picking up items in survival despite full inventory

Screenshots

New Brush Positioning mode

New Paint Brush Shapes

New Grow/Shrink Tool (adds/removes layers of blocks)

New Line Tool


Overhauled Air Brush Tool

The first house ever built entirely in Survival mode \o/

Improved Held Item Rendering

Updates

• Feature: Water now spreads, can have different height levels and has a flowing animation
• Feature: New command .liquidselectable - toggles whether liquid blocks should be selectable like normal blocks
• Feature: Added WorldEdit move commands to move around selected areas
  • /mmu [length]: Move selected area by length blocks (if length is not supplied length will be 1)
  • /mmd [length]: Same for down
  • /mmn, /mme, /mms, /mmw: Same for north/east/south/west
  • /mmby x y z: Move in by given x/y/z length
• Feature: Fly Axis Lock: Allows locking the X, Y or Z axis to e.g. allow hovering over a landscape in a fixed height.
  • .lockfly [0-3]: 0 = no lock, 1 = x-axis lock, 2 = y-axis lock, 3 = z-axis lock
• Tweak: Improved Font rendering quality (now correctly overlaid with premultiplied alpha masks)
• Tweak: Drastically improved performance when selecting large areas using /we ms and /we me
• Tweak: Worldgen generates some more caves
• Tweak: Breaking cacti blocks breaks any cacti blocks above
• Tweak: Lanterns now can also be attached to ceilings
• Tweak: Added california poppy to world generation
• Tweak: Reduced walking speed by 25%
• Tweak: Cloud Layer position is now relative to the total world height
• Fixed: Worldedit Airbrush tool not allowing large brush sizes
• Fixed: Flying not possible in spectator mode
• Fixed: Game not remembering the last active hotbar slot 
• Fixed: Player not able to pick up multiple itemstacks from the ground
• Fixed: .cam load crashing the game when no points supplied
• Fixed: Rendering glitches with FPS graph (didn't show at all on some machines)
• Fixed: Hopefully somewhat reduced the unknown blocks appearing for a single frame when building/breaking
• Fixed: Several rendering glitches with water
• Fixed: Day/Night transitions speed 0 on new worlds
• Fixed: Topsoil block underside showing grass
• Fixed: Some blocks dropping white particles instead of their block colors
• Fixed: Added all missing block translations

Updates

• Feature: Ladders are now climbable
• Feature: Added universal block drop system. Allows a block to drop any combination of block or item stacks with a selectable random quantity
• Feature: Add new item: Stick
• Feature: Added skols Linux Installer scripts and files. If you install the game with vine and run the install.sh you should hopefully have the game working under linux. Skol also wrote some instructions about it.
• Feature: Leaves and Branchy Leaves now drop Sticks and Saplings. Rock now drops Stones
• Feature: A singleplayer worlds file name can now be renamed within the game
• Feature: Added command .cam tp [off or on] to prevent the cinematic camera teleporting the player back to the original position on path end
• Tweak: Improved version updating experience - removed 2 unecessary message boxes, create desktop icon is always checked and the player is informed that his worlds won't be lost
• Tweak: Many adjustments to the new ui style (colors, sizes, font, etc.)
• Tweak: Updated API Documentation (apidocs.vintagestory.at)
• Tweak: Raised max world height selected from within the game from 1024 to 1536 (survival) or 2048 blocks (creative). Raised the warning value for creative worlds to 1024 blocks. 
• Tweak: Clean up some parts of the rendering code to reduce some opengl state switches for minor performance gains (< 1%)
• Fixed: Changing Gui Scale broken after joining and leaving a world
• Fixed: Tooltips clipping outside the game window 
• Fixed: Mouse captured in a small rectangle when starting a single player world in windows mode and unfocusing the game window
• Fixed: Itemstack Quantities not shown at the right coordinate on small or large gui scales
• Fixed: Dropping items into a slot using right mouse click not updating itemstack quantity
• Fixed: All Paintings having the same texture in the inventory
• Fixed: The server log in the single player starting screen should display correctly again on different gui scales
• Fixed: Player name tag box wrongly sized on small or large gui scales
• Fixed: .cam start not putting the player in flymod causing massive jerkiness
• Fixed: Itemstack info not disappearing when closing the chest inventory using the Escape key
• Fixed: Shift + Left click on an item to move away an itemstack not working
• Fixed: Vintage Story Logo on the main menu now longer in bad quality from resizing

By the concept of Nachtfalter the game now has an all new Logo and menu/in-game-dialog layouts. It looks super pretty \o/
Thats what we've worked on for pretty much most of the week since last update.

Updates

• New Logo for the game, website and account manger
• From the ground up redesigned menu screens
• All in game dialogs are alsjo adjusted to fit the style

Thanks to Nachtfalter we have a super pretty video to show this time, demonstrating merely one new feature of v1.0.4 (and in part v1.0.6): The chimney block. It also gives you a glimpse of our new Logo and new Youtube Channel.

Updates

• Feature: Signs are now writeable and can also be placed on walls!
• Feature: Much improved performance when placing/removing blocks, in part due to a completely new localized sun relighting algorithm.
• Feature: Overall slight improved performance due to the removal of two rather slow code obfuscation methods.
• Feature: Added Stone Path Block. Gives a 15% movement bonus while walking on it.
• Feature: Added Frosted Grass Blocks. Gorgeous winter decoration <3
• Feature: New Particle property "SelfPropelled": Particles can regain their velocity when collided, when freed again. (Smoke Signals!)
• Feature: Added block behaviors. This is an elegant solution for certain blocks that behave in several ways. This now allows for the chimney block auto-orient when placing. Surely will have many future applications.
• Feature: Readded Mechanical Power Blocks: Currently only useful for decorative purposes.
• Feature: Random Rotation for the Import Tool. Using /we imrrand [off or on]  will randomly rotate the placed import file.
• Feature: New Flower: California Poppy
• Feature: Added 2 new commands to assist in long flyover cinematics
  • /sendchunks [0 or 1]  - stops standard chunk loading to reduce potential lag sources during recording
  • /forceloadchunks x1 z1 x2 z1 [sendtoclient]  - loads given area of chunk columns and forces the server to keep them in memory. If 'sendtoclient' is supplied, these chunks are also sent to client, unaffected by the /sendchunks command.
• Feature: Added 2 new server configurations to assist in underground cinematics (in serverconfig.json)
  • SkipEveryChunkRow: 5  - will skip generating every 5th stripe of chunks
  • SkipEveryChunkRowWidth: 2 - makes the skipped stripe 2 chunks wide
     
• Feature: Readded basic rails block. Can't be properly connected yet around curves and stuff. Also there is no minecarts yet.
• Tweak: Overall graphics quality improvement - godrays shader slightly more intensive, high bloom levels brightens the sky somewhat less, slightly increased color contrast, better bloom quality
• Tweak: New ice textures
• Fix: Item Textures now correct again
• Fix: Using several colored torches sometimes caused some blocks to have the wrong coloring
• Fix: Resolved an uncommon client side crash in certain cases when loading a world with dropped items 
• Fix: Singleplayer Loading Screen should no longer scroll out of range on a large gui scale
• Fix: Chimneys continue smoking after the block is removed in certain cases
• Fix: Topsoil not showing grass coverage in the creative inventory
• Fix: .help now shows all commands with the correct '.' prefix
• Fix: One major source of network lag when dropping many items 

• Added multi-block highlighter. Used in WorldEdit 
  • when selecting an area for exporting/clearing or filling
  • when using the Import tool: A preview when importing block data
  • when using the Paint brush tool: Shows the paint brush size 
• Added Ability to rotate blockdata (0, 90, 180 and 270 degree) (list of commands)
• Added long range block particle emitters (up to 128 blocks away), added chimney block that emits smoke particles using the long range emitter.
• Added a gamma slider to the graphics settings that let's you do gamma correction.
• Importing block data that contain light sources is now 10-20 times faster. 
• Attempted some optimizations to improve overall performance. Should at least reduce choppy framerates. 
• Added "New version available" Notification to the main menu

Fixes

• Fixed mouse cursor invisible when being disconnected from a multiplayer server
• Fixed Pen and Cross icons overlapping the cell in multiplayer server list
• Fixed particles stuck in blocks where they shouldn't be stuck
• Fixed .fog client command not accepting decimal numbers.
• Fixed some client commands crashing on invalid arguments
• Fixed server crashing on some non-fatal errors (mod loading and chunk generation)
• Fixed a InvalidOperationException during chunk loading which likely prevented certain chunks (containing entities) from loading
• Fixed a crash in the singleplayer screen when 2 worlds had the exact same modification date