Hello and welcome to the 19th CardLife DevBlog,
New Patch is now live, more tech updates to talk about and the continual and ongoing saga of what we have been up to this week - so let's get to it:
New Patch (17) Live
You can grab the patch by logging into the launcher and it should download automatically. If you ever have any trouble downloading the patch, you can try running it as an administrator - that usually fixes it. Anyway here are the live patch notes:
- The world is now textured with additional materials such as compact dirt, stone, compact stone, sand and snow
- Sand and snow are placeholders
- Additional materials will still only give you dirt at this point when you mine them
- Oak & Spruce trees are now scattered across the world with Spruce being found on mountains and Oak being found lower down
- Springberry bushes have also been added to the world
- Both bushes and trees are non-interactable at the moment but they will be in future updates
- Improved camera settings so you can actually see much farther
- An update to the lodding system (lod = level of detail) which ties it into the graphics quality settings, so you will see lots of trees on fantastic and less trees on fastest
- An improvement to the terrain generation so it builds additional lod 0 terrain cells in the direction you are moving (so you cannot outpace lod 0)
Terrain Generation
As you will notice in the build, materials such as dirt and stone blend together smoothly so it looks like two cardboard materials butting up against each other (see last week’s DevBlog for more information on this). This has had a performance impact though and so we have decided to bring forward some of our planned terrain generation improvements - with the first improvement having already been launched - padding lod 0 terrain cells in the direction you are moving. Let me take a step back though and explain why we are doing this.
Firstly the terrain is split into several different sized cells (think squares looking from a top down view). The closer cells near the player character are smaller and contain much more detail such as making the terrain look like cardboard with the stepped effect that you can see in-game - this is called Lod 0. As we get further away from the player character though we don’t need to render that level of detail so we merge 4 of those lod 0 cells and combine them into a larger much less detailed lod 1 terrain cell - this lod doesn’t display the edges of the cardboard as that makes the terrain mesh much more complicated so it’s a huge performance saving. This then continues on and on into the distance until we are rendering massive parts of the terrain in one cell that is only a few polygons. This is a pretty standard lodding system in video games but we have a few unique problems.
The main issue for us is that if you have a lower specced machine (i.e. 2 core cpu, integrated graphics) you can outpace the terrain generation and get to lod 1 before it has updated to lod 0 - and this breaks the immersion of the world as it no longer looks like cardboard. The further complication is that we also want you to be able to fly around on dragons and move really fast so this will only exacerbate you outpacing the terrain. We always knew this was coming so we have taken the steps to begin work on it now - with the first piece of work being dynamically adding more lod 0 cells in the direction you are moving so it’s harder to outpace the terrain.
The larger piece of work that we will be starting on though is doubling the width of the voxels (i.e. lowering the overall resolution) which means that there is less data needed to actually build the terrain with. This brings with it other issues but I will elaborate on those in a future DevBlog as this part is already getting quite long and is probably really boring to most of you - so apologies for that :)
Ongoing Work - Gameplay
The rest of the team though is motoring on with the gameplay. Aldo has made further progress on the CTD crafting system. We did a review last week and it didn’t feel quite right so we have decided to implement a new algorithm that creates the drawing space around the dots you connect. This is so people can heavily customise what they are crafting without actually breaking it i.e. you can make a wolf look like an skeletal wolf but you can’t turn into a skeleton warrior.
Brian has been working on the tool framework - so that we can start adding lots more tools to the game such as hands, hatchet and sickle. He has also been working on figuring out the exact amount of materials you get when you edit the world. Mike has been working through some technical pipeline issues but he has got back to creating the snow and sand textures now so hopefully they will be updated in next week’s build.
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The weeks are passing by so fast now and we are getting closer to realising a small little bit of the true vision of the game - I can’t wait! Please keep giving us your feedback and hopefully I’ll see you in-game.
Cheers,