I've made a bit of progress optimising the Post Processing (PP) effects (which are basically like filters for pictures on social media) but ultimately decided that these updates have gone on too long and to come back to this later. PP is still probably about 25% of the overall rendering time for Aiyana, which is really huge and I have made some improvements with this update. However its also vital for Aiyanas visual style so I need to be really careful about how I optimise it further, which is going to take time.
I've also had various bug reports for things I would really like to get sorted so it felt right to change gears and start to work towards getting this beta build ready for everyone to use instead of being a tech demo.
Getting Stuck
One of the more serious bugs that has been raised is around getting stuck and unable to move. I've not got to the source of why people are getting stuck yet but I have improved the logic for getting unstuck in general so it should help in more scenarios.
In the meantime, one thing I wanted to point out is that you can press the home button on your keyboard to get unstuck at any time, even in the current live branch. It will run the same logic as the button in the main menu, even if the button is hidden (which is another bug report I've had).
NIght Time Enemies
I've had reports of night time enemies still being out during the day after using a bed. I've tried to recreate this one but no luck yet, which means I might have inadvertently fixed the cause of this in the Beta whilst fixing other things. If it still happens once the Beta finally releases, please let me know and I'll look into it again.
Bugs & Misc
Since I'm working towards releasing as usual I thought it was time to get back into the habbit of listing the changes in more detail. The majority of these issues are only relevant to the beta branch but some are just general fixes as well. E.G the bending grass bug listed first was only a bug in the beta branch and not the live build. However the next bug about dirt transforming affected both.
Fixed bending grass being reset whenever you edit a chunk
Fixed dirt not turning into grass whenever you place blocks ontop of it and then remove that block
Changed the create world button to be brighter
Fixed the confirm dialogue screen not rendering over other UI (e.g when deleting worlds/characters)
Fixed backups not exporting properly
Fixed the night lioness not causing any damage
Fixed the hanging mushrooms in the lost civ not using new instancing/culling systems
Same for red mushrooms in the swamps
Fixed food quality icons being hidden for quickbar items when using portals
Updated the logic for getting unstuck to hopefully fix more scenarios
Fixed the store duplicates button for chests not merging if you have an entire chest of the same contents
Reworked how the Scythe spell calculates ground in an attempt to prevent it not affecting a constistent shape
Fixed the ceiling in Lost Civ not rendering properly
Tweaked the fog formula so things don't look like they are popping into view as often
Updated leaderboards UI to handle longer names more gracefully
Improved how grass LODs are swapped in so its less jarring (was previously disabled)
Fixed various flowers always rendering with green grass (E.G should have been snow or savanna)
Reduced the resolution to HBAO to half for most of its quality presets
Fixed the loading screen not appearing in builds
Micro optimised the blur step of Volumetric lighting
Fixed various issues with clouds ramping up for rain
Tweaked when tree LODs are rendered so they look a bit better (I went a bit far optimising them previously)
Fixed seeing vines floating in mid air
Fixed errors thrown when too many insects spawn
Added proper prediction to frustum calculations to prevent flickering on screen edges at lower FPS
Fixed performance dropping significantly in Lost Civ (caused by a bad light setting for purple crystals)
Fixed tree leaves looking a bit brighter than intended
Reduced the distance that grass LODs get displayed (to improve performance)
Updated the FPS section of the settings screen to also show the lowest FPS of the last 60s
Fixed fog not animating in the menu scene and always rendering at max distance
Fixed an error with insect load data (not entirely sure what issues this would have caused)
Fixed seeing daytime insects out at night after loading into a world saved at night
Fixed edible items like berries and mushrooms showing a quality bar even though their quality cannot be increased currently
Fixed an utterly bizzare interaction between clouds and lights that would have then render strangely
Updated the checkboxes in the settings screen to respon when clicking the text as well to be more user friendly
Fixed portals found in the world not having proper selection effects (only applies to newly found portals that are not submerged in water)
Fixed insects still sometimes flapping their wings occasionally when dead
Fixed a freeze when looking at underwater portals in a very specific way