Hey guys, welcome to dev blog numero 6. Weekly blogs are back! The main attraction of this blog is the new seasonal changes but before we get onto that, let's talk about some of the smaller stuff.
So, this is what we have planned for Alpha 5. What has been accomplished so far?
* Well, we have sound effects for the mech and the anomaly event now lasts forever or until it has been dealt with. As we implement more and more stuff related to beacons, there will come a day when you'll be able to customize them just like in Subnautica, by being able to change colors, having different types of beacons that can be turned off/on and so on but for now at this early stage, we don't need that kind of complicated system.
* We also added a new 'Furniture' merchant, where you can sell/buy any type of building except the main and ancient assemblers. Speaking of trade, almost all items can now be traded. All manufactured items have their prices based on their most basic components instead of an arbitrary number. So if a copper ore costs 50 onyx, then a copper bar made of 2 copper ore will have a base price of 100 plus a little extra to account for labor. This little extra keeps growing the more complicated a manufactured item is so it will always be in your best interest to sell finished goods if you want to make the most profit.
* Rovers and mechs have a beacon attached to them.
* Stack splitting is now possible by holding 'Shift' and right clicking on a stack of items. That will halve your stack into 2 inventory slots.
* It will now rain (and snow) much more often than before, where it could sometimes take 15 days before a single rain drop occurred. Now it should happen every few days.
* Map creation times have been reduced from ~2:40 minutes to 2 minutes. Further improvements to this and map loading times are planned.
* The rover uses less hydrazine than before.
* Added a 'Brightness' (or gamma) slider in the options menu. This slider appears only in game, not in the start menu due to the fact that it won't affect the brightness of UI, therefore making it pointless to put it in the start menu.
* Added a latitude slider when creating a new game. Latitude is basically how North or South of the planet you are on. The farther you are from the equator, the more temperatures will drop, the more night day cycles and weather vary and so on.
That's about it for the quality of life stuff. There have also been 2 bug fixes. Now, is Winter really coming?
This was not originally planned for Alpha 5, but we thought 'eh why not, can't just push an update without some big change'. So we came up with this: seasons. There will be 4 seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter. Up until now, weather didn't really affect anything in the game. With Alpha 5, weather will affect world visuals such as snowy landscape, differently colored trees and it will also affect temperature, which will in turn affect a whole bunch of things.
Temperature levels have been static at around 23*C in the current version of the game. No longer! Depending on the weather, time of day and of year, the temperature will fluctuate. If you jack the latitude slider all the way to the North pole, temperatures will hover around -30*C to -40*C but if you put it at 0 (at the equator), temperatures will hover around 30*C meaning that you'll never experience winter. For a balanced experience of having the proper 4 seasons that Europeans and Americans are used to, the slider is by default left at 45, which corresponds roughly to central Europe and northern USA.
So what does temperature affect? Well, for now nothing except fire spread. With Alpha 5, temperature will affect the wildlife and flora. Certain animals and monsters won't appear when it's too cold or too hot for example. It will also affect crops. Certain crops won't grow if it's too cold or if it's snowy. Your foodstuffs will also degrade over time if they're left out in the open or stored in a normal container starting with Alpha 5. To preserve your food, you'll need to store it in a fridge or in places where the temperature is less than 0*C very much like in Rimworld. Later on, temperature will also affect your own character, but we'll need to have the Alpha dedicated to character equipment out before we do that.
Most biomes will have these 4 seasonal changes, which we think is pretty cool. You don't see that very often in games.
There are of course some challenges to this whole system being implemented. First, we need to adapt trees at runtime to correspond to the current season. While this sounds easy, it's not. Not with Unity's default tree system. So a big overhaul of how trees are used in the game is required. That was going to happen at some point anyway, since later on you'll be able to chop and grow trees.
Second, we need to adapt the current time cycle. As of now, we have a realistic system to represent time, such as 12 months, the correct number of days per month and so on. What we need is to reduce the year from 12 months to 4 months so we can have a meaningful gameplay experience. So we won't have a traditional date in the game anymore, more like just 4 seasons and each season will have around 10 days. This is actually very hard to simulate. The current realistic system we have uses some deep math to simulate the position of the sun, moon and galaxy based on longitude, latitude, day and month of the year and so on of the Earth. Adapting these computations to reduce the year to just January, April, July and October while maintaining all the other features somewhat realistic might not be possible (if we were to skip from January to April at the end of January, the celestial objects will also teleport, which will change the lighting of the scene as well). So we'll have to see what kind of coding magic we can come up with to make a smooth transition between the 4 seasons possible.
Any questions, let us know. Until next time!