Status Update 28 Feb 2020
Professional Farmer: Cattle and Crops - Digital Supporter Pack · published
As per the last update, we have been working hard on the Tombstone migration. This is almost finished and the first test version with Tombstone version 2.9.1 is heading to the test department today.
Almost all features have been transferred over - except for the new font rendering (Slug) and the new sound format. Also the editor widgets are still displayed the old traditional C4 way, with rounded buttons instead of the new square layout.
The rest of the engine migration will now mainly take place in the editor. The code under the hood is already almost completely transferred from Tombstone, but the GUI panels are still the old ones because they are harder to replace in the middle of production.
CNC can load assets from both C4 and the Tombstone Engine. In principle, besides many basic tasks in this branch, almost the entire renderer was replaced/reworked. The renderer still works with OpenGL but with a much slimmer driver interface which actually requires OpenGL 4.3 with a Direct State Access API.
The generation of the OpenGL shaders was heavily reworked and there were many changes that also broke our custom changes and had to be repaired first. Currently the tessellation on the field is still affected.
All multithreading optimizations of the Tombstone Engine have also been adopted. This concerns especially the light/geometry interactions. So the culling - to see if a geometry should cast a shadow - is swapped to jobs which are calculated on as many cores as available.
But if the tests go well and no further major problems occur, the update 0.9.5 for the community could follow in the next two weeks.
We also continue to work, in addition to a multitude of fixes and improvements, on AI bug fixes and a new extensive tutorial system which should make it easier for beginners to get started and provide you with tips and infos. This should make it possible to pause the running game in order to play a specific tutorial mission to learn the operation and contexts, or even a whole tutorial chain from the main menu.