Following Seas 0.4 (New version scheme, new engine version.)

Major Update

Apologies for the long wait between updates -- especially with several significant bugs impacting the experience. I'm currently under a state-of-emergency due to flooding -- and we've been getting a lot of weather and power-outages.

Fixes

Ropes are now more resistant to over-shortening, and additional methods have been added such that ropes that are considered too-short are automatically adjusted.

Fixed an issue that would prevent world recentering from occurring under specific circumstances, resulting in serious stability issues the further the player ranged from the origin point.

Fixed many instances of ropes that existed in incorrect local space orientations -- resulting in behavior as if gravity was inverted.

Fixed persistent mooring ropes failing to maintain tension on load.

Fixed major lighting shifts when equipping the quadrant or spyglass.

Fixed many issues with player controller that were causing jitter, hopping, sliding when receiving no input, and various other issues. This should also reduce the amount of terrain-collider pass-through as well, though work is ongoing.

Changes:

Migrated to Unity 6.

This was a major change, requiring significant time investment and reworks to various elements. I expect there will be some issues I've yet to encounter, but I feel this transition is worth pursuing.

Namely - the migration to default DX12 has enabled numerous optimizations. (DX11 is still supported as a fallback.)

The engine also has various changes to lighting, reflection probes, multi-thread calculation, and culling. (And many other things -- too much to describe here.)

Related to this change -- various graphical changes have been made:

• New sky and volumetric clouds. Should be more vivid overall, with more varied cloud conditions.

• Much improved planar reflections on ocean surface, which should also be more lightweight on performance.

• Much improved ocean-shadowing, particularly on foam.

• Improved multi-layer overlays, such as the quadrant constellation view.

• Totally new screen effects, that are more dynamic, and no longer cause rendering issues with sky objects. (i.e. sun visible through clouds.)

Above is an example of the old Clouds

Above is an image of the new sky.

In terms of performance improvement -- I expect it will vary widely. On my system I generally see minor improvement - 5-10fps gains. However some systems may see much greater, or worse, performance -- hopefully for the most part it's better or the same, but with such a major change there's bound to be some issues.

I'd originally intended to release this as a beta -- but given the size of the playerbase I feel that would slow things down overmuch.

Other Changes:

Added a toggle light for the compass to aide in night-navigation.

Changed version to be 0.X rather than 1.X -- as it doesn't really make much sense to have release start at 2.

Numerous lighting, material, and object changes to the intro cutscene.

Added additional ships to the start menu rotation, and enabled time progression to give more varied lighting.

I know there has been many bug reports I've yet to address. I will now be focusing on those, plus any new reports introduced through the engine migration.