Progress Update

Just a quick one to say I'm still making progress on multiplayer but nothing to share as an update yet. Its typical that just as I say that I can make smaller updates I get stuck into a can of worms that its taking a while to sort out! I'll go into more details for the patch notes themselves once its ready but as a quick summary:

• I've removed Steam Cloud for various reasons but its meant rechecking/rebuilding a Lot more logic than I expected

• Working on Multiplayer is very repetitive so to keep myself motivated I do a half day on it and a half day on other things

• I've rebuilt the starting area you spawn in to be more interesting and to show off some of the blocks in Aiyana

• I've added a some new blocks

• I spotted something that resulted in a Huge performance gain. Rendering blocks takes 4x less memory now plus a big boost to actual rendering times (I've yet to measure the exact gains). I've done this because I want to work on new biomes with much larger mountains that are best appreciated with a larger draw distance

• Since I had to rework things a bit for this performance gain, I'm taking the time to rebuild some internal rendering code but in so doing I noticed that it was taking a significantly long time to quit the first time whilst I'm working. This was Really apparent working on this technique because it was causing Unity to crash constantly until things stabilised

• I've had to rebuild how I render blocks that are not perfect cubes to fix this long unloading/quitting time, which as a result makes my development Much quicker and saves me a ton of sanity!

• But in so doing, I now need to check Every block works with the new systems and make some tweaks to their shaders where appropriate

Its actually been a very productive month, I just ended up working on bigger things than I intended and they now need some time to be properly tested and stabilised before I can release them. To give a bit of context as to why this takes a bit of time, here is a pic of 1 of every block type currently in Aiyana