The User Experience Update (v1.8-rc.1/2/3)

Most valued players,
version 1.8-rc.1 to 3, a testing release, is now ready for download in the account manager. Make a backup of your old world before updated. Also remember to apply the remappings.

Originally I wanted to work on world generation related features, but decided to shove in an update to improve the overall user experience of the game. One of the most requested UX feature by you, the community, was to have some way of looking up crafting recipes in-game, the ability to do multiplayer more easily and a left hand slot for light sources. Furthermore, over the months we have accumulated quite a list of major issues on the mac OS version, most of which are caused by 3rd party libraries. Principal rich text support was another feature that I believe will greatly improve the user experience in the long term. All of these points, and more, have been addressed in version 1.8.

[Edit:] Released rc.2 to fix the cooking crash and players able to continue walking after they died.
[Edit:] Released rc.3 to fix the the game not launching on linux .

The mod api
Amongst a bunch of mod api updates, I also dropped the code obfuscation for another 40.000 lines of engine code, which should give modders another edge of power and control over the game engine. This means from a grand total of ~240.000 lines of code that are compiled for each release

• 140.000 lines of code are under a readable source license and on github (vsapi, vsessentialsmod, vssurvivalmod) for everyone to take a peek
• 47.000 lines of code are not obfuscated, meaning with an off-the-shelf decompiler you can look at the code, albeit without code comments
• 50.000 lines of code remain obfuscated, at least half of which I still plan to drop the obfuscation for
   

No time to loose
As always, this update took way longer than what I would have hoped for. The improved macOS support alone about 30 hours of my time. Nevertheless, I did and always will continue to strive to bring you new updates as fast as possible, while still ensuring that I can also do so in the long term. As hinted in the last updates my wife Saraty and I are currently forced to prioritize our health issues over everything else, of which there are bunch.... not counting our other adult responsibilities of ensuring a livable income and raising a child. Le sigh.

Screenshots

Butterflies now spawn in the world

All creatures now have a death animation and linger around. Drops need to be harvested from their dead bodies. Unharvested dead animals will decay to bones after 3 days, bones decay after another 3.


A survival handbook that lets you look up all blocks and items and their crafting recipes. Press 'H' to open.

Improved Hotbar UI and left hand slot. The left hand slot can only hold light sources right now.


"Open To Internet" for easy multiplayer setups


 

Game updates

• Feature: Butterflies flutter around to brighten up your day
• Feature: Can now craft stone bricks and polished rock in survival mode (see recipes below)
• Feature: Improved creature death. Killed creatures no long poof out of existence, they leave a carcass behind that can be harvested for resources and will eventually decay when left untouched. Dead creatures decay to bones after 3 days. Bones decay after another 3.
• Feature: Ingame Block and Item Handbook 
  • Let's you look up crafting recipes, what items are used for and how to obtain them. Open by typing 'H'
  • You can also mouse over an item in your inventory to open the detail page of that item by pressing ‘H’
  • Please note, this feature is a work in progress and thus not all information is listed there yet
• Feature: Improved macOS Support
  • Fixed: Typing special letters not fully supported (i.e. could not type @ on german keyboards)
  • Fixed: Copy&Paste not working
  • Fixed: While ingame shaking the mouse cursor enabled the "Shake mouse pointer to locate" feature of macOS
  • Fixed: While ingame moving the mouse cursor quickly caused it to escape the game window and interact with the desktop
  • Fixed: Game icon in the menu bar very blurry
  • Fixed: Game not using custom cursor graphics
  • Fixed: Crash reporter not launching and "Client Thread crash" message box crashing the game
• Feature: Simplified hotbar - removed username and exp bar. Health and Saturation numbers now visible only when hovered over with the mouse cursor
• Feature: Added left hand slot. Can only hold light sources and holding an item in your left hand drains hunger 25% faster
• Feature: Implemented UPnP and NAT-PMP discovery. Players can now "Open To Internet" \o/
• Feature: Added creature bots for creative mode and/or video making (ask tyron if you want to use them) 
• Feature: Can now left click into the empty area of the creative dialog to get rid of items (previously needed to click on a slot)
• Feature: When pressing Q or shift+q to drop items and hovering a slot the items of that hovered slot are dropped instead
• Feature: Rich text support in some selected areas
• Feature: Added context sensitive cursors icons. Text fields now have a text cursor and rich text links now have a finger cursor
• Feature: The screens single player, multiplayer and mod manager now resize to fit the window height
• Feature: Main screen background image now pans and zooms weirdly and no longer gets stretched or squeezed when the window is resized
• Feature: Added server setting to disable fire spreading
   
• Tweak: Gameplay balancing changes
  • Rebalanced player nutrition system. Nutrients should drain slower now.
  • Locusts now spawn only below y < 93 
  • Eating cooked meals now have double the saturation loss delay (=doubled the time when saturation will start dropping again)
• Tweak: Categorized keyboard controls list, should be now more intuitive to read
• Tweak: Jumping makes the first person held items lag behind for more immersion
• Tweak: Bamboo blocks can no longer be used as a replacement for wooden planks during crafting
• Tweak: Notably improved performance in case where there are hundreds of entities in small spaces
• Tweak: Removed fast animations settings, now always on fancy animations. Sorry low end users. Therefore fancy animations are now slightly faster and aforementioned gains should mitigate the performance drop. Fancy animations was required for other features to work.
• Tweak: Significantly improve server performance when there is thousands or tens of thousands of land claims.
• Tweak: Small performance improvement on the particle system
• Tweak: Dropped items now have the players velocity added
• Tweak: /land info command now a bit more informative. Added server privilege debug mode
• Tweak: Tool racks now show their contents in the block info
• Tweak: Made default dropped ground transform larger, made default fp held block transform larger 
• Tweak: Breaking snow/coal layers in creative mode now breaks all of them
• Tweak: The game tries to pre-select a more suitable window width/height and GUI scale on the very first startup
• Tweak: The settings tab now has toggle buttons instead of plain text buttons because they were not intuitively recognizable as tabs
• Tweak: In the settings interface tab, add a notice that the translations are community created and may be incomplete
• Tweak: More api documentation and language entries
• Tweak: Minor performance improvements
• Tweak: Reduce CPU overhead for occlusion culling by 25% but might overcull. We need to test and see how well it works.
• Tweak: copygirls floaty gui tweaks
  •    Floaty GUIs have been re-positioned a little to show up closer to the center of the block.
  •    Holding Ctrl to move the view while block dialogs are open has been removed, but replaced with the ability to hold Alt while in mouse-look to get the cursor back temporarily
  •    This works well with the new GUI Mouse Lock setting which you can find under "Interface" just below Floaty GUIs. Having both enabled allows you to open in-world block GUIs like containers, fire pits and the quern, without the game taking away your character's camera controls. You can then move items between dialogs using your crosshairs or use the previously mentioned Alt key method which is the only way interact with your hotbar and inventory with the new settings on, currently.
  •    Sneaking while a dialog is opened is now possible again to allow for sneak-interactions with held blocks / items.
  •    Opening a dialog doesn't suddenly stop you from walking around
     
• Fixed: Incorrect textures on molds 
• Fixed: Hitting straw dummies does not wobble for other players in multiplayer
• Fixed: Should fix some wonkiness with crucibles when placed down in creative mode
• Fixed: Charcoal pits not smoking until relogged
• Fixed: Fences not attaching to paper lanterns
• Fixed: Server crashing on some linux shells
• Fixed: Might fix server exception spam / crash in some rare situations
• Fixed: A crash when digging/building on y=0
• Fixed: Standalone server not verifying player auth, added server config to disable it
• Fixed: A rare sqlite exception during server shutdown
• Fixed: Resetting key mapping not updating the player control keys until the game is reloaded
• Fixed: Should fix players able to sleep in beds they have no permission on (due to land claims)
• Fixed: Lanterns and chests having the wrong model/texture for other players in multiplayer right after placing them
• Fixed: Eliminated a bunch of memory leaks
• Fixed: After dying and reviving the player was stuck in the death animation until restart
• Fixed: Mods are now unpacked outside the temp folder. This should fix some server runtime issues on certain linux systems as well as mod loading issues on clients
• Fixed: Microblock chisel textured the log wrongly
• Fixed: Carpets popping off when trying to place them on upside down slabs
• Fixed: CTRL+C on Linux and Mac not firing proper server shutdown sequence
• Fixed: Memory leak related to chest GUIs
• Fixed: Sign texts not showing after being imported by worldediit
• Fixed: Command .noclip crashing the game
• Fixed: Crucible empty after placing and picking it up again
   

Modding updates

• Feature: Variant placeholders (e.g. {rock}) in blocktypes, itemtypes and entitytpyes can now be used everywhere.
• Feature: Added ability for items to add custom journal texts
• Tweak: Made chiseled blocks resistant against blockid changes (now stores block codes instead of block ids)
• Tweak: Made saplings more easily moddable. Can now supply treegen code in the sapling json file
• Tweak: Added trailer effects mod for the last scene of the trailer. Can be activated with /slomo, /glitch and /rain
• Fixed: Don't crash and instead log a readable error if a tree generator code has no associated registered tree generator
• Fixed: Game crashing on invalid texture definitions. Now logs an error instead
   

Mod api code changes

• Feature: Added EntitySpawn and EntityDespawn events to the client and server event api
• Feature: Added CollectibleObject.GetHeldItemName() for custom block/item names
• Feature: Added sound memory leak debugging
• Tweak: Implemented a common method for vertex warping for all shaders. Moved all shader uniforms into IRenderAPI.ShaderUniforms
• Tweak: Entity behavior classes CollectEntities, EmotionStates and Health are now public 
• Tweak: Game time speed is now a float instead of an int. Added a global time speed modifier: GlobalConstants.OverallSpeedMultiplier
• Tweak: copygirls inventory tweaks
  • Create slot indexer (get and set) for inventories
  • Tweaks to IInventory 
  • Now has this[slotId] indexer which can also be set!
  • Now also an IReadOnlyCollection<ItemSlot> (Which means we can now do foreach (var slot in inventory) { ... })
  • Marked GetSlot and QuantitySlots obsolete
• Tweak: Improve ActiveHotbarSlotChanged event
  • This event can now be cancelled on both the client and server sides.
  • Removed the old ActiveHotbarSlotChangedEvent / ChangedActiveHotbarSlot from APIs.
• Removed: Ditched IEntity, IEntityAgent, IEntityPlayer and IEntityNpc. Use Entity, EntityAgent, EntityPlayer and EntityNPC directly instead

New Crafting Recipes