Dear Community,
in the back of my mind I always feel like I could be so much quicker developing the game if only the circumstances were just right. But then I wake up to the real world where I have previously made commitments as a father, husband, home owner and, for better or worse, leader of the team behind Vintage Story. When I do make a commitment, I usually honor them for many years. Not to mention the whole world dealing with the worst pandemic in a century, the gardening season starting and my less than stellar health conditions. I did also allow myself to slow down a bit, to reflect over the previous 4 years of very intense game development. Felt almost surreal to be peacefully sitting in the sunshine and not having the feeling of being a huge slacker
Anyhow. I think I'm getting back on track now. In recent days I finally started to tackle one major part of the seasons mechanic - seasonal foliage. I made a video of the work-in-progress I got so far. Its a fast forward cycle-through of seasonal colors. Note that each type of foliage has a different color range.
There is still more major parts of the seasons mechanics left to do before we could think of a pre-release. Beyond that, there's also a number of nifty features already implemented for the upcoming release, which I already showed off in Discord on #devlog:
For modders an .obj and .gltf Loader, which lets you import models from popular 3d modelling programs. For example, sloped blocks \o/
The world map will be persistent
Block Entities are now handled more efficiently. Amongst others, this means the game can handle dozens of thousands of chiseled blocks easily. Here's 62.000 of them in one screenshot running at a smooth frame rate. In version 1.12 this would cause extreme delay when placing/removing blocks nearby so many chiseled blocks.
Chutes got an upgrade. There will be horizontal and vertical chutes, including an archimedes screw for vertical upwards transport, which requires mechanical power
Some extra graphics fidelity is a must
Water surfaces will feature specular reflections
There will be an experimental immersive first person mode that should give you another edge in world immersion
And lastly, I rewrote how plants in pots and planters are handled in the game, so you can expect a few interesting additions on that end
Adding new game content like this, ideally while tackling interesting programming challenges is something I thoroughly enjoy doing, I am supper happy and grateful that I can do this full time now. Thank you very much for your support! And now, onwards to v1.13!
Edited by Tyron
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