New Features:
Added Water Simulation Stepping Setting - it's now possible to increase Water Simulation Iterations, which will speed up water flow
Villagers will now display the reason in their window when they don't go sleep or eating
World Creation Screen will now display a warning about possible framerate drop on very big maps
World Screen now also shows the actuall size in blocks/tiles.
Bugfixes:
Items on the floor without a stockpile allowed to take it were blocked for build orders
And a lot of small minor findings were fixed
Additional Information
So from a developers standpoint this is a quite huge update - but most of it will not be seen by the player, so let's get a little sitrep about these changes:
Basically a lot of tinkering went into the water simulation, with the ultimate goal of being able to have dynamic water related events, like floods or low water levels, maybe even dynamic high/low tide. For this to be possible in future versions, the water simulation needed some care to be able to handle all those things. Unfortunately - as in Exipelago, the Water is permanently simulated as a whole and for some technical reasons like floating point precision) this basically results in low simulation speeds of the system. To cope with that problem, the simulation is now stepped. Speaking more technically, each frame the Simulation runs several iterations, which makes it faster without losing any precision. The downside of this (as in Exipelago the Water Simulation is done on the GPU) the more iterations the system does, the more taxing this gets on your GPU.
For that reason the Setting Window now has a "Game" Tab, where you can select the simulation speed. It will be set to "1x" per default and you can cramp it up to "8x" - be aware tho, this can significantly drop your framerate, especially on bigger islands. Feel free to try different settings.
Therefore the "World Creation Screen" will now display a warning about it, when you select Bigger World Sizes. In case you experience low FPS, turn down your Water Simulation Speed in the Games Setting Window.
I don't know currently, which world sizes will be selectable in the final game, so feel free to enjoy your privilege of less restrictions due to Early Access Participation.
Speaking of Early Access Privileges, in case you wanna play around with the Water Simulation, I added 2 Console Commands to play around with (will not work in final game). Top open the console, simply press "PAUSE" on your Keyboard in a running game, and the console window should pop up, the following command will be working during Early Access:
Where <num> is the difference to default sealevel. For example, "sealevel 1" will raise the worlds sealevel to default+1. "sealevel 0" will reset it to default again, "sealevel -1" will set the sealevel to default-1 and so - the base for this number is always the default sealevel (and not the current sealevel). So in case you just want to test things, now you can flood your island or drain the ocean.
Happy Building!
Added Water Simulation Stepping Setting - it's now possible to increase Water Simulation Iterations, which will speed up water flow
Villagers will now display the reason in their window when they don't go sleep or eating
World Creation Screen will now display a warning about possible framerate drop on very big maps
World Screen now also shows the actuall size in blocks/tiles.
Bugfixes:
Items on the floor without a stockpile allowed to take it were blocked for build orders
And a lot of small minor findings were fixed
Additional Information
So from a developers standpoint this is a quite huge update - but most of it will not be seen by the player, so let's get a little sitrep about these changes:
Basically a lot of tinkering went into the water simulation, with the ultimate goal of being able to have dynamic water related events, like floods or low water levels, maybe even dynamic high/low tide. For this to be possible in future versions, the water simulation needed some care to be able to handle all those things. Unfortunately - as in Exipelago, the Water is permanently simulated as a whole and for some technical reasons like floating point precision) this basically results in low simulation speeds of the system. To cope with that problem, the simulation is now stepped. Speaking more technically, each frame the Simulation runs several iterations, which makes it faster without losing any precision. The downside of this (as in Exipelago the Water Simulation is done on the GPU) the more iterations the system does, the more taxing this gets on your GPU.
For that reason the Setting Window now has a "Game" Tab, where you can select the simulation speed. It will be set to "1x" per default and you can cramp it up to "8x" - be aware tho, this can significantly drop your framerate, especially on bigger islands. Feel free to try different settings.
Therefore the "World Creation Screen" will now display a warning about it, when you select Bigger World Sizes. In case you experience low FPS, turn down your Water Simulation Speed in the Games Setting Window.
I don't know currently, which world sizes will be selectable in the final game, so feel free to enjoy your privilege of less restrictions due to Early Access Participation.
Speaking of Early Access Privileges, in case you wanna play around with the Water Simulation, I added 2 Console Commands to play around with (will not work in final game). Top open the console, simply press "PAUSE" on your Keyboard in a running game, and the console window should pop up, the following command will be working during Early Access:
Code:
sealevel <num>Where <num> is the difference to default sealevel. For example, "sealevel 1" will raise the worlds sealevel to default+1. "sealevel 0" will reset it to default again, "sealevel -1" will set the sealevel to default-1 and so - the base for this number is always the default sealevel (and not the current sealevel). So in case you just want to test things, now you can flood your island or drain the ocean.
Happy Building!