Craftica Update: New Village System, Various Improvements and Optimizations

This update mainly includes a new village generation system and various improvements to the multi-threading support. It also includes many other improvements and optimizations, making the game running more smoothly without lagging caused by large village generation. Also this update has made some progress in the support for the multiple player mode.

Village System

• Completely rewrote the village generation system;

• Supports generating large villages with more structures;

• Supports two architectural styles: Eastern Asian and European;

• Direct generation of structures in the scene, instead of using pre-generated structures;

• More variety of houses and workshops;

• Different internal structures and furnishing for houses;

• Added new bed, chair and lamp items;

• Added new defense tower and water well structures;

• Redefines habitable house by a sheltered bed with access to a door;

• Added a new Duty Post item, to prioritize warrior generation and deployment;

• Improved path planning and navigation for villagers and warriors;

• Supports generating of fenced yards with mangers to spawn farm animals;

Improvements

• Supports climbing up and down a ladder (W key for up, S key for down);

• Supports ladders in path finding and navigation;

• Switched to physics ray cast for locating surface point for navigation;

• Improved navigation mesh generation and the handling of obstacles;

• Supports pointing a point to go with right mouse clicks in the advance mode;

• Improved character movements and agent path following to avoid jittering;

• Improved the handing of view modes with a new camera tracking support;

• Improved terrain block storage and simplified their loading;

• Improved some materials and added support for texture orientation adjustment;

Optimizations

• Improved multithreading support and the handling of computational tasks, reducing blocking in the main thread and improving multicore cpu usage;

• Moved some extra computation for terrain and village generation to threads;

• Improved mesh optimization for collision shapes;

• Improved and optimized the models of some standard items;

• Removed a large number of obsolete items, reducing the base memory usage while increasing game loading speed;

Work in Progress for The Multiple Player Support

• Preliminary support for users and for interfacing external user systems;

• Preliminary support for multiple player game creation and joining;

• Preliminary server and client support;

• Preliminary communication mechanism between a server and clients;

• Preliminary support for state synchronization with incremental data;