Hello and welcome to the 22nd CardLife DevBlog,
Back to normal this week after last weeks Audio focussed DevBlog. So here is what we have been up to this week:
New Patch (24) Live
Patch 24 is now live and as usual can be downloaded automatically by the launcher. Here are the patch notes:
- Sprinting (by pressing shift) now uses stamina
- The stamina bar depletes as you run and then regenerates over time once you have stopped sprinting
- This is the first step in implementing the hunger system
- New work-in-progress sound effects for digging/mining have been added
- Draw distance has been increased for higher quality settings
- Draw distance has been decreased for Fastest quality setting
- The time it takes for holes to appear after a dig should be dramatically improved on lower specced machines
- The build has now been switched to 64 bit from 32 bit
- We had to do this in the short term to remove the 2GB memory cap, but unfortunately the game will no longer work on 32 bit machines
- This may cause your build to corrupt on download - please just use the repair button to fix this
Ongoing Work - Trees & Bushes
Cian has continued his work on the trees and bushes and made some really good progress. You can now cut down trees with the Hatchet tool which is really cool and we have started to work on the special effects and audio to go with it. We have also started to implement the hand and sickle tool for harvesting berries from bushes. Here is a work in progress sneak preview of chopping a tree down with the hatchet:
Ongoing Work: - Memory & Performance
Ed has made some good progress with the memory and performance issues we were having on lower specced machines. What we found out is that due to the build being 32-bit it was reaching it’s maximum limit (~2GB) and then paging to the hard drive. This was causing massive slow downs in frame rate and in some cases crashing. We have changed over to 64 bit and this should alleviate that but we have also spent a lot of time optimising how much memory we are using - but we still have a lot of work to do on this as part of our overall terrain generation improvements. Another aspect that Ed has been looking into is the speed at which a hole appears in-game after a successful dig on lower specced machines. Ideally this would be nearly instantaneous and Ed has made some big improvements on this which should be in the live build.
Ongoing Work: Audio
Brian has started to implement the audio hooks that will tie all the sounds to the actions in the game - such as digging, chopping down a tree etc. This will make a huge difference to the feel of the world and I’m really looking forward to getting these sounds in. We have started to add some of them with the first few work-in-progress sounds for digging/mining being in the live build. If you haven’t already you should also check out last week's DevBlog: Sounds of CardLife if you want more information on the vision for the audio in CardLife.
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We have also made some good progress with the Hunger and Connect the Dots crafting system but the majority of that work has been infrastructure or bugs so nothing really to discuss. One last thing to mention is that we have updated our Forum style template so you should have a look at that and tell us what you think.
As always if you have any feedback, questions or comments please feel free to contact us at any of our social portals: Facebook, Twitter and our very own Forums.
Cheers,