Upstairs Downstairs

Now then, survivors. Let’s do the thing.

NEXT

This week we released version 41.77 into our Unstable beta. This is primarily aimed at fixing the Linux crashes that have been plaguing server hosts, and so far seems to be a mission success in that regard.

It also improves client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to, configurable through the server options. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection.

We’ve had a successful wider test of 41.77 with more than 30 people on a server without any crashes, and we’ve tested a modded setup afterwards as well.

Upon release there were servers running mods with 41.77 just fine, but unfortunately it seemed that some mod setup constellations caused conflicts that resulted in black screens for some servers.

We have just pushed a hotfix we believe will resolve this.

If, however, you run a 41.77 server and you are still experiencing players unable to log on (only seeing a black screen) then please send us: the list of ModIDs (specifically the “Mods=” line from their server.ini, the workshop= line, and your server logs.

Posting these in the forum release thread or in our Discord techsupport channel would probably be best.

Likewise, any reports of ongoing server instability or general misbehaviour – please let us know ASAP.

THEN

We’re still adding tweaks and polish to our final B41 patch that we’ll put out once the current network improvements are fully tested, released and stable.

This is the current changelist, with notable additions in the past few weeks on show here if you already read up on what was incoming in our last blog.

OOH, 42

Build 42 will be a very big update, and it will appear a sizable amount of time after Build 41 is fully wrapped. We’ve announced most of the things that we currently have brewing for it, but there’s one thing we’ve only hinted at so far – and which is very likely to feature.

As regular readers may remember, a while ago we wrote a blog called Techdoid that detailed some of the big engine improvements we have slated for 42.

Amongst them is a new rendering pipeline which allows for entire chunks to be cached with a depth buffer, which will afford us MASSIVE rendering and scene construction improvements and should rid us of all the performance issues we’ve been plagued with due to the isometric draw order over the years.

There’s also a new light propagation system, which allows for light to naturally leak through doors and windows, providing much more atmospheric and believable lighting

We also got rid of the 8 storey limit on chunks: specifically we allowed each chunk to have its own unique defined height up to 32 levels.

Finally, we discussed that we’d fixed the many areas of the codebase that used static casts to round the player’s position to determine what chunk or tile they were on to using Math.floors instead. This method allows for negative coordinates to work where prior the calculations would have failed if the player was stood on a tile with a negative coordinate.

This in theory will allow for us, or modders, to build north or west to the same extents as we currently