Since my last post I've been focusing on Multiplayer and making pretty good progress. The nice thing about it is that I can make progress without feeling like I need to hit milestones for a release. This means I can easily swap between bug fixes/improvements and multiplayer so I plan to continue releasing smaller updates like this one whilst I make progress behind the scenes.
Excessive Animal Spawns
There is currently a bug where animals will sometimes spawn in excessive amounts on a few chunks. I've tried looking into this one a few times to no avail because animal spawning is complex. Its because I have systems to account for chunks unloading a lot, which happens if they are on the edge of your vision and you move around a bit such as going back and forth in your base. What happens is animals spawn on a chunk and wander to new ones. As chunks reload, they check if they have ever spawned animals and if so they dont spawn again. Without this, as you wander back and forth chunks would constantly spawn a new animal to wander onto a new chunk. The alternative is to tie animal spawns to their original chunk, the trouble with this though is that if animals wander far (as they can do) then they will suddenly dissappear as their original chunk unloads in the distance. This bug means something is wrong with one of my systems and I can't spot what it is. But...I'm currently working on Multiplayer and animals are going to be extremely complex to do properly. What similar games do (without dedicated servers) is the easy option of tethering, meaning you must stay within a given distance to the host to play together. I want to completely avoid these systems because they are frustrating. What I'm anticipating is that once I start on trying to get animals to work properly without tethering I probably need to rework their relationship with the chunks/world anyway which would make working on this bug a moot point. Even if not, this bug is Significantly worse/more consistent in multiplayer so it has to be solved as part of it.
Bugs and Changes
Fixed the stats screen getting stuck on screen when pressing Esc to close it
Updated button textures again (subtle change)
Updated the visuals of the stats screen
Updated the descriptions for the different bed types
Updated the description for the campfire & fishing spear crafting recipes
Updated one of the rooms in dungeons to prevent being able to spawn a Tiny dungeon
Fixed a freeze caused by dying right after pulling a dungeon lever
Updated the collider height for bushes and some flowers to be more accurate
Fixed various tutorials being shown when opening a chest
Fixed being able to scroll the quickbar whilst inventory and chests are open
Fixed tools used manually on the hotbar and not on your toolbelt causing less damage
Added a forward arrow to gates so its clear the direction it opens
Fixed and improved the logic for animals avoiding protection totems
Aggressive animals will now actively avoid wandering to the starting island until you place your first totem
Changed how the compass works for the map so its showing the cursor position instead of the players position
Added a better safety feature that will properly kick you out of a block instead of getting stuck inside it
Enabled the Main Menu button and fixed a Ton of logic behind the scenes so it can work properlyThis needs more testing so its disabled for the final releaseImproved how A.I handle damaged, large and structure preview blocks
Slightly reduced the memory footprint per enemy
Fixed enemies in dungeons being able fly through the terrain to attack you from under the floor
Overhauled the pathfinding logic so enemies wont try to start attacking you if they can't easily path to you (E.G enemies in room underneath you in dungeons)
Fixed the Sundial not breaking with any tools and always taking 1 damage
Fixed levelling up sprinting cost labelling it as an increase rather than a decrease
Fixed poisoned water using the same material as normal water
Updated the poisoned water to look quite different from water
Fixed poisoned water not triggering its effects consistently
Fixed being able to open furnaces at an absurd range compared to crafting benches etc
Fixed the claim all button of the achievements still being interactable after manually claiming everything
Fixed crafting benches sometimes instantly closing
Fixed more subtle issues with the crafting bench not rendering nicely when its got a block beside it