Oct 19

Nuts and Bolts - v1.3 Update Now Available

Voxel Eras - DestinyHailstorm

Hey everyone :)

If you're in the Discord or read Dev Log 1, you may already know Voxel Eras has been getting moved from using OpenGL, to Vulkan, which has been a bit of a journey, but we're here!

After being left in the custom game engine trenches for a few months, I decided I'm giving you all a fraction of the suffering, so you're getting a bunch of new parts you'll need to make, as well as machines to make them in.

So, grab a bucket of plates, and bolt yourself in, it's update trailer time!

https://youtu.be/du6EP6xn0rA

Quickly before getting into the patch notes, I want to briefly talk about future content.

Future Content

Looking forward, v1.4 will likely contain some part of the Steam Era, some additional Clockwork machines, stairs, in world water, and a rework of Carbon Steel (to be harder to obtain of course).

If I push it, I'd like to have the update out by December in time for some sort of holiday update, we'll see how far I end up getting by then.

Anyways, TO THE WALL OF PATCH NOTES WITH THEE!

New

Tutorial - A short introductory tutorial has been added.
Rods - A new crafting component, made from ingots.
Screws - A new crafting component, made from rods.
Rings - A new crafting component, made from rods.
More Plates and Gears - More variants of these crafting components have been added to match the other new components.
Hammer - A clockwork machine that can make plates automatically.
Bender - A clockwork machine that can make rings and tubes automatically.
Lathe - A clockwork machine that can make rods, and screws / bolts automatically.
Trash Can - Disposer of the unwanted, can destroy items.
Slabs - Up down, vertical or horizontal, slabs for Stone, Stone Brick, and Oak Plank have been added.... Can someone tell Mojang vertical slabs aren't that hard?
Toggle - A wiring mod (which is disabled by default) component allows you to interact with it to toggle if it outputs signal or not.
Piston - A wiring mod component that pushes the blocks in front of it, as well as pull if configured to do so. This is more of a last minute "fun" addition that'll get more polish in the future, like the rest of the wiring mod.
Buttons - A wiring mod component that when interacted with stays on for a short duration.

Graphics

Moved away from OpenGL to Vulkan - Graphics requirements have changed, you will now need a Vulkan compatible graphics card to play Voxel Eras. Vulkan 1.2 devices with extended feature sets, or Vulkan 1.3+ devices should be able to run the game.
Antialiasing - Added a graphics option for antialiasing, which helps increase clarity on edges of objects.
Anisotropic Filtering - Added a graphics option for anisotropic filtering, which helps increase clarity of textures at grazing angles.
Improved Dithering - The appearance of dithered transparency has been greatly improved, and is further enhanced by the antialiasing setting.
Lighting Smoothness - If you want a bit more of a "retro crunch", or are running games on a potato, turning this setting down will sharpen the lighting, as well as reduce the amount of samples needed to keep the lighting from looking noisy.
Skybox Rework - The skybox now has a sun, as well as different blending to the horizon.

Modding

All Textures Are Now Animatable - Previously this was a feature restricted to voxels, however, now all textures respond to having an animation file provided with a texture.
BREAKING: Voxel Textures Reworked - Voxel definitions now must provide a loaded texture's identifier instead of the path to the texture, this was done for universal texture animation.
BREAKING: Texture Animation TOML Changed - The array field "frames" has been renamed "frame_layout", and a new field has been added, "frames", which specifies how many frames are in the animation.
Shaders can now be hot reloaded.
Textures can now be marked to have linear or cubic interpolation (as opposed to the default, nearest)
A generic "clockwork_crafter" helper has been added
Game state now has a new "is_readonly" property... this is effectively "is_client" but I didn't name it that because you shouldn't use it for that! It's used by prediction to not cause side effects.
A new PostProcessing system exists, however currently does nothing outside of base game.

Music

New track First Sparks
New track Starting The Revolution
New track Workshop
New track Increase The Output
New track Current Bliss
New track Greater Visions

Balancing

The Chopper now takes 8 instead of 12 seconds to chop a tree, no longer cuts non tree logs, and properly resets progress on completing an operation.
The Grinder's cost is now 2 Clockwork Cores, 2 Carbon Steel Tubes, and 3 Carbon Steel gears, as opposed to 1 core, 3 tubes, and 2 gears.
The Clockwork Drill now costs 4 Oak Planks, 1 Pig Iron Gear, and 2 Pig Iron Plates, as opposed to 4 planks, 4 Wooden Gears, and 8 Pig Iron Ingots.
The Winder now costs 3 Clockwork Cores, 3 Wrought Iron Geras, and 8 Wrought Iron Plates, as opposed to 1 core, 1 Carbon Steel Tube, and 2 Carbon Steel Gears.
The Planter now costs 2 Clockwork Cores, 1 Carbon Steel Gear, and 4 Carbon Steel Tubes, as opposed to 2 cores, 2 gears, and 3 tubes.
Logs now burn for 8 seconds instead of 4, making them on par with the workbench plank recipe.

Changes

The Era Menu has been improved - While not perfect, it's far more descriptive and up to date with current content.
You can now specify a port when starting a server - Have fun :)
Selecting a quickbar slot now selects the slot itself - This is opposed to selecting the construct that is set in that slot.
Pipetting will now change the selected slot if one is selected - Which makes adding things to your quickbar much easier, where if no slot is selected you get the previous pipette behavior.
When building, you no longer are able to interact - Previously this required crouching, which isn't very intuitive.
Alloy Furnace Inputs Have Been Changed - Fuel is now required from the bottom, with all other sides accepting either of the input resources into either slot.
Pipes no longer need a Wrench to configure - This means the Wrench has been removed from the game, however, this in combination with the above building change makes this option far more appealing.
Pipe Configuration (previously Wrench) Insert Disable Extract UI has been flipped vertically, as it's more intuitive.
Pressing Modifier (Left Alt) now allows you to clear a quickbar slot.
Leaves have had their connection distance set to 3, this has been reduced to 2 to improve nearby tree decay.
You can now toggle fullscreen with F11.
Inserting into the grinder automatically is now limited to 5 items.
The Winder Extension now continuously spins when it has available energy, making it more clear that it is setup correctly.
GPU Override - You can now specify which GPU the game runs on in the settings menu. (Nerd note: It can be changed and applied without closing the game if you're not in a world!).
Asset reloads in some cases can now be recovered from with a "Try Again" button.
Machine audio distances have been reduced from a minimum of 3 meters, to 2, and a max of 15 meters, down to 12.
Adjusted FOV changing from sprinting to stay on at lower velocity, have a slightly higher max FOV, and behave better.
The terrain rate setting has been removed, as this is neither useful or helpful outside of preventing large server load (this will be fixed with multi threaded terrain generation).
Press Z to zoom in at what you're looking at!
Winder top texture replaced with the more typical top face of clockwork machines, this was confusing as people expected this to be an automatic input, which it is not. I may revisit this.
Added Prediction Debug menu, which shows when player prediction does not match the server result. It is expected that prediction errors will be displayed during normal gameplay, these are currently (and may stay) unhandled in some cases.
This update introduces save format v6, with backwards compatibility for v5, and removes support for v3 and v4 saves.
Added Timing Debug menu, which shows client side CPU consumption per frame. This can help diagnose lag spikes or odd behavior.
Booster now can read signal through a solid block.
UI theming has been updated.
Mod issues when loading a world are now more clear.
Text boxes show more hints and useful info when no text is provided.
Hovering over some settings in the Settings menu will now provide additional information.
The inventory has been moved to the bottom of the build menu, moving the quickbar closer to the construct list.
Auto Pause when the game is unfocused has been disabled for now, as this causes more issues than it fixes at the moment.

Fixes

Grabbing items now works in more situations.
The game clock has been changed (again) to improve stability of multiplayer, as well as general game feel.
Instant crafters should no longer make a sound when a craft was not completed, but a craft was attempted.
Removed Hatsune Miku from the slim model's default skin (she might still be hiding in your wifi)
Items that stack to 1 no longer display an item count
Commands now output to the chat again
The game will no longer crash if it fails to initialize Steam authentication (you can thank a recent Steam outage for this one)
Setting a quickbar slot in the Build Menu should now be much more consistent
Jumping should no longer cause glitching (coyote time prediction failure)