Patch 1.6 News: Biome Maps! Elevated Roadways!

Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2024

Genre: Action, Indie, Simulation, Strategy
Developer: L Twigger
Release Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017

Video

Biome Maps!

Finally an alternative to seas of green. This patch offers 3 new kinds of maps - Desert maps, Snow maps and Mesa biome maps!

Desert maps consist of sandy plains littered with the occasional cacti, hilly regions of sand, and oases with palm trees.

Snow maps provide a winter landscape with Pine Trees (and the occasional little pine tree)

Mesa maps have plains of red sand and sunburnt trees in the hilly oases

Custom Road Lots

I've added some elevated road lots that can be manually placed. This contains straight sections, overpasses, water sections, corners, T intersections with lights, cross intersections with lights and ramps.

To allow alternating streetlights I've also added a ALT_AVAIL flag for LotPack items.

Repair Macrobuilder

You can now repair with the macrobuilder! There is now a button that lets you click+drag to repair damaged lots. Note that this obeys the normal rules for repairing - lots must be insured and either owned or racketeered by you.

New Blocks

A few new blocks have been added - the Cactus plant for deserts, Yellow Tall grass for Mesa. There is now also Snow Blocks and Red Sand blocks and the typical shapes you get with a block ensemble.

Performance Upgrades

I've done some make-game-run-faster work. Mainly more intelligent entity culling. This results in a average case ~10% increase in FPS in built up areas.

Bandits in dungeons are not drawn if you are not in a dungeon, and surface bandits are not drawn if you are in one. In addition sun/moonlight shadows are not drawn while you are underground. These changes result in a massive speedup (over the previous version) in hilly regions near dungeons.

Bugfixes and Polish

Some longstanding bugs have been fixed. Most noteably NPC animations locking up when running at high framerates (at high framerates the NPCs are not moving very far per frame, making the renderer think that they are standing), map scrolling locking up at high framerates

The debug menu has been neated up a bit, and now has a framerate analyser (this helped me diagnose and do the perf updates listed above).

Lets Build Server Reset

Finally, the Lets Build Server has been reset, the new map is another massive desert map

Full Changelog:

VERSION 1.6.0 - 06/10/2019
==========
- - Added Biome Maps! You can now choose between Temperate/Desert/Snow and Mesa maps!
- - New blocks! Cactus, Red Sand and Snow!
- - You can now disable/enable all mods/lotpacks in one click on the Installed Mods menu
- - Added "Wasteland" lots, you can create one with /lot wasteland.
- - Did some optimisation improvements to rendering mobs (bandits + base defenders) + optimised rendering all entities. This should increase framerates by about 10%+ on the street, and help reduce fps drops in crowded areas (I've seen +50% fps in some situations)
- - Surface mobs are not drawn while in a dungeon, and dungon mobs are not drawn while on the surface
- - Shadows are disabled while in a dungeon
- - Did some optimisation of the Lua garbage collector, free's up 0.5ms of frametime on both the client and server
- - Minor optimisation work on entity particles
- - Added a "Build an Airfield" mission that unlocks when you have $100k, 10 Reputation, 100 Residential Population and there are no existing civlian Airfields on the map
- - Improved autodetection of graphics cards (RTX, TITAN and any Amd "RX" cards are now considered to be "powerful" cards)
- - The F3 debug screen has been polished a little bit + has a frametime analyser now
- - Rockets now penetrate half a block when they hit a block
- - Rubble particles from explosions are now kicked more vertically (rather than just collapsing into a crater)
- - Rubble particles now have their lifetime reset whenever they are kicked by an explosion
- - Added /rotate command. This is the same as the /copy command, but with 4 extra arguments (1 required, 3 optional), the number of 90 degree turns (0,1,2 or 3), and whether to mirror on the X,Y and/or Z axies. (Y to mirror, anything else to not mirror)
Example: /copy X1 Y1 Z1 X2 Y2 Z2 nTurns MirrorX MirrorY MirrorZ
The Mirror args can be safely ommited
- - Added a /lotrange command. This executes a /lot command over every lot within a specified range
Example: /lotrange X1 Z1 X2 Z2 (command)
- - Added /mirror which is an alias for /rotate
- - Frametime analyser now has Min/1% Low/Avg Framerate/Frametime info displayed
- - Updates SDL to version 2.0.10 (prev: 2.0.2) (windows only)
- - Updates SDL_Mixer to version 2.0.4 (windows only)
- - Updated SoLoud to latest
- - Fixed Mob animations becoming locked up at high framerates.
- - Entities owned by a faction are now all despawned when a faction is eliminated
- - Fixed CTD when despawning entities when repairing lots
- - Fixed some blocks not giving the right items back when destroyed
- - Fixed a issue with placing Slope Blocks trying to place a Slope Block Corner
- - Fixed scrolling on the map being broken at high framerates
- - Fixed Bandit flags appearing on hidden dungeon lots in hills
- - Fixed bandit weapon muzzle flash + sfx not playing if bandit not moving
- - Fixed vehicle state not being updated clientside every tick if its being occupied by a player while stationary
- - Fixed sound clicking/popping on some sound effect start
- - Fixed bandit muzzle flash pointing to the ground when firing last round

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