Just a quick one to say I'm still making progress on multiplayer but nothing to share as an update yet. Its typical that just as I say that I can make smaller updates I get stuck into a can of worms that its taking a while to sort out! I'll go into more details for the patch notes themselves once its ready but as a quick summary:
I've removed Steam Cloud for various reasons but its meant rechecking/rebuilding a Lot more logic than I expected
Working on Multiplayer is very repetitive so to keep myself motivated I do a half day on it and a half day on other things
I've rebuilt the starting area you spawn in to be more interesting and to show off some of the blocks in Aiyana
I've added a some new blocks
I spotted something that resulted in a Huge performance gain. Rendering blocks takes 4x less memory now plus a big boost to actual rendering times (I've yet to measure the exact gains). I've done this because I want to work on new biomes with much larger mountains that are best appreciated with a larger draw distance
Since I had to rework things a bit for this performance gain, I'm taking the time to rebuild some internal rendering code but in so doing I noticed that it was taking a significantly long time to quit the first time whilst I'm working. This was Really apparent working on this technique because it was causing Unity to crash constantly until things stabilised
I've had to rebuild how I render blocks that are not perfect cubes to fix this long unloading/quitting time, which as a result makes my development Much quicker and saves me a ton of sanity!
But in so doing, I now need to check Every block works with the new systems and make some tweaks to their shaders where appropriate
Its actually been a very productive month, I just ended up working on bigger things than I intended and they now need some time to be properly tested and stabilised before I can release them. To give a bit of context as to why this takes a bit of time, here is a pic of 1 of every block type currently in Aiyana