It was a foolish mistake and it could end up a disaster....
Subsistence 64 Bit has arrived in Alpha 57 available in Experimental Build. Will Hunters show today?
We are playing Subsistence : Version Alpha 57
Alpha 57 has the following updates :
Moonlit Nights and Moon Cycles:
I've finally taken some time to work on the night-time visuals and added a dynamic moon cycle.
This isn't a total nerf to the darkness of nights. The moon moves through its own cycles (currently set to 8 days), and the light emitted is dictated by its fullness. So there will still be many near pitch black nights.
It is also tied in with the weather system, such that if the skies are overcast, this will deprive players of brighter lit moony nights. I considered tying it in with months/seasons also, but given the adjustable nature of the seasons, I thought it best to leave it as a separate system.
Physics Based Base Destruction:
Previously when base items were destroyed, they would simply disappear with a destruction sound. I've now added individual destructible meshes for almost all pieces.
Now during attacks/raids, building pieces will explode/collapse and glass will shatter into physics-based pieces. I think this greatly helps immersion during gameplay.
Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights):
Sometimes during clear nights, the northern lights will be visible and light-up the sky. This is not something that will happen every night and the intensity will vary across nights when they are visible.
As with the moonlight, storm fronts will obscure their visibility and their intensity will be muted by overcast skies. I think this adds some cool diversity to the world over the passing of time.
Big Performance Overall:
I have made some substantial performance improvements (for worlds that are highly populated with buildings and many light sources). The screenshots below shows a benchmark of these changes, comparing rendering a scene in Alpha 55 to Alpha 56 (using the world data from Europe#2). I will explain the technical changes below (for those interested):
Distant lights optimization: (dev details)
One of the most expensive performance costs are individual light sources. In densely populated profiles there may be hundreds of individual light sources dotted around the map, all casting rays and dynamic shadow cascades. Many having overlapping cascades (which can be extremely expensive).
Many of these lights may be extremely far from the player to be barely visible, yet still use their same quota of GPU performance.
There may be many lights in close proximity to one another, yet be so far from the player view they only occupy a tiny fraction of screen space (such as a base with 20 lights in the far distance).
Lights would still render, even if they are muted-out by much brighter lights (such as midday sunlight).
I've added an LOD system to drastically reduce the number of light sources required to render the same scene.
Far distant lights (in close proximity to one another) will now cluster into a single source (reducing the expense of ray casting and overlapping cascades).
Lights that are overpowered by another light (meaning they would not be visible anyway) are now disabled.
Lights that are entirely outside of the current view are disabled completely.
There may be some quirks with this new system, and I will continue to make tweaks moving forward. However the performance increase is huge and should benefit many players.
Putting buildables to "sleep": (dev details)
Another big performance improvement: Previously all buildables would "Tick" with the game engine, meaning each frame they run some logic to check if they needed to do something. When there are many 10's of thousands of buildables placed in the world, this can add a lot of performance cost.
In Alpha 56, buildables are now put to "sleep" when no events are occuring for them, and wake up only when needed. This takes a lot of pressure off the CPU and will allow further scaling of the game.
First Person Clothing Modeling:
I've always found it very jarring to see bare arms in the first person view when my character is wearing long sleeved clothing. This was especially awkward to see during winter and blizzards.
#survival # kage848 #subsistence
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