So...its been a long journey for this update. Frankly far too long and its been the most difficult thing I've ever had to code, and its still far from finished. Honestly, I was close to giving up and reverting this update multiple times because there where points where despite literally months of hard and stressful work I was seeing the same FPS as the currently live build. I've decided what I will do is post it to the Beta branch but I do not recommend anyone tries to use it to play Aiyana. Instead its there if anyone is curious to check on my progress or if you are more tech savvy you can profile it to see exactly what is changing. I'm doing this to be open. So you can see the state of what I'm working on and try to get a sense of why its taking so long. I feel like I've been saying the equivalent of "trust me bro" for a while now and to be honest its putting a lot of pressure on me. I can see the potential with these techniques, but its taking so long to rework almost every aspect of Aiyana to hook into them and since I've already spent so much time on this, it feels like I should power through and get it finished. To put things in perspective, this is the current default draw distance in Aiyana:
This pic was taken whilst up high so its purposely a bit of an extreme example to help explain my point. This next image is what I'm aiming for: The difference is pretty huge and helps the world feel much more expansive. It will also influence gameplay and give a good reason to climb a mountain so you can spot those rarer biomes and feel like you are exploring rather than stumbling around hoping to find things. So despite it taking so long, it feels like this is important enough to justify the time and it not just me ticking the box of "other games in the genre can do this, I should be able to as well". Although in my defence a lot of the artistic decisions in Aiyana do make this more difficult (E.G real trees instead of cubes). For anyone that does want to have a look at the beta here are a list of caveats to look out for:
Fish and flying insects have been disabled
Existing worlds may load with a seed corruption (as though two different worlds have mixed)
Clouds don't look as nice and their shadows render strangely when looking from below
There is a flickering with the main terrain rendering, which is worse at higher distances
If you look around quickly at a low FPS, you will see gaps on the edges of the screen
Controller support has been added to a ton more things, however this was done by a contractor who didn't have the best attention to detail that has resulted in some mouse/keyboard interactions being utterly broken. Ive found and fixed a few, but not had a chance to check everything he changed yet
Cave generation has changed and vines have been added but occasionally rendering will utterly stop whilst exploring them
My intention is that by releasing in such a raw state I can take the pressure off myself a bit and share updates more regularly as I make more incremental progress towards the end goal instead of me aiming to deliver something people can use right away.
E.G I can now aim for the next update to be something like "Fish are working again" instead of "Everything is done"