Small Vending Machine & Performance Improvements

Thank You!

First of all, thank you all for the support. The terrain update was a massive undertaking for us and the response from the existing community, as well as all the new players, has been absolutely amazing.

We immediately broke our all time concurrent player record and then repeated that for several more days in a row.

Recent reviews rocketed up to overwhelmingly positive which is heartwarming to see.(if you haven't already, consider going and leaving a review, it helps a lot!)

Thank you!

Small Vending Machine

At a fraction of the capacity, with 12 slots, the small vending machine serves as some useful compact storage for anything from food to ingots. It's just one by three small grids in size, so much smaller than the large version. This repeatedly came up as something we wanted during a play session, and now here it is.

Terrain Optimizations and Settings

We’ve heard from many of you that you’re experiencing lower than expected fps with the new update, especially on Vulcan. We’ve done some optimisations under the hood to help improve terrain performance as well as exposed some new settings to give you better control when tweaking your performance.

Terrain Tessellation

Tessellation is a process performed on the GPU. We use it to define small details in the terrain like rocks and cracks. The Terrain Tessellation setting controls how finely the mesh is subdivided, these small subdivisions are then pushed inwards or outwards using a heightmap texture that matches the terrain color texture.

Terrain Detail

In order to render terrain out to 1.5KM, as we get further from the camera we sample voxel data at increasing steps to form terrain LODS (levels of detail). The Terrain Detail setting controls the thresholds at which we switch to lower detail LODS. Lower detail LODS bias downwards and tend to be smoother; distant features appear “flattened” at the lower quality settings.

Minable Render Distance

The Minable Render Distance setting controls the distance at which mineable ores are drawn.

NOTE: if this is set higher than the “Terrain Detail” setting distant ores will appear to “float” over the terrain.

Shadows

The Shadows setting affects the number of Cascades (Shadow LODS) and the distance that shadows are drawn. At lower quality levels we only allow large objects to cast shadows.

Community Localization

A big thank you to the community members who have provided us with comprehensive translations for Chinese(MRhythm), French(CedricDx and Gosti_FR), and Russian(AlexusYT) languages.

They created a git repository that's maintained and allows us to easily pull their updates directly into the game.

A big thank you to everyone involved!

Game Serialization Improvements

On some large bases people were experiencing game lag during saving. This was due to saving locking some processes for the entirety of the save process, including zipping the save. Saves now only lock game threads while necessary and release them before compressing the serialized data.

Steep Terrain Glitch

There was a visual glitch with the terrain data on Vulcan causing extremely weird normals on steep mountains. This means that we have regenerated the terrain data for Vulcan but we have kept the old map in the game but hidden so that those with a current save on Vulcan will not have to update their terrain data, this will mean that they will still see the weird normals on existing saves.

Indirect Addressing Fix

There was an issue with causing indirect addressing