News

Fidelitous Vintarians!
We've continued refining the game.  Version 1.2.2 is now available for download in the account manager.

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

Social Vintarians
Vintage Story v1.2.1 should make the multiplayer experience significantly more pleasent. In addition, from now on I'll release the game also as a simple .tar.gz archive for download in the account manager, which should make it a lot easier to install and update linux game servers.

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"

Adventury Vintarians
We might just have invented ectasy in voxel form. See for yourself by downloading 1.2.0 in the acccount manager

I've also started to migrate some of the first mechanical power back bone from vintagecraft to vintage story. No visible progress to show on that front just yet.

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