There haven't been a lot of news lately. This is partly for personal reasons, but also because behind the scenes I am making plans for the actual content of the game (world building, deciding on the available places, technologies, goals, dialogues...). It's progressing well, and the main parts of the story are already done. All of this so far is difficult to share, but to take a break from it I also had fun making the plants and trees grow dynamically: [previewyoutube=WeAYohezMKI;full][/previewyoutube]

This is a big update, that comes with many improvements to the game engine, but not many new features. This is necessary to allow future improvements, like the introduction of mobs. Meanwhile I'm also working on the story, which is not yet part of the game.

Gameplay changes

• Added a health system
• Implemented death and respawn
• Added a robot printer in the factory bay
• The player drops robot parts when dying
• The player looses health if it falls from too high
• The gravity beam cannot counterbalance an infinite amount of velocity anymore
• The player explodes when it dies, pushing away nearby drops and entities

UI changes

• Added a health bar
• Added customized window borders
• Changed the color and font of the texts
• Adjusted spacing in the toolbar
• Added missing tech tree items and sorted the existing elements
• Fixed wrong output icon in some recipes (for the saw and the mold)
• Moved the developer command prompt to the right

Engine changes

• Unified the drops and player code into a single physics engine
• Moved part of the game definitions to json files, which allows for limited modding
• Lots of code refactorings and architectural changes, improved the overall maintainability of the code

Bugfixes

• Fixed crash when trying to use fruits
• Fixed a memory leak occuring when failing to load a save file
• Fixed crash when creating an empty world in the editor
• Fixed camera bug when moving to another world

Trivia

• Added a tilting animation when moving
• Re-adjusted the player and gravity beam's hitbox and position
• Added an animation on the robot arms when changing the selected tool
• Added a wind sound effect when falling from the orbit

I didn't post a lot of updates recently, but the game is still progressing smoothly. I have worked a lot on the physics engine, and now on the health and respawn mechanics. On top of this I have made progress about the story, and revamped a bit the user interface to make it look nicer. [previewyoutube=myF_WWj8a3w;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]

(a video preview of this update is available here)

Gameplay changes

• Added the item stand, which can display one item and automate the vacuum gun
• Added the switch, which allows to manually route the power to the left or the right of it
• It is now impossible to build multiple interact-able objects in the same tile
• All items, including the tools and blueprints, can now be moved and dropped
• Added a maximum linear and angular velocity impulse when throwing too much mass at once.
• The iron ores are now magnetic again

Quality of life improvements

• Items can now be manually looted by pressing E (by default)
• Items can now be directly retrieved from crates by pressing E (by default)
• Looting an item now adds it into an existing stack (if any), instead of always being added to the toolbar
• The quantity of items in the stack is now shown along with the item being selected with the mouse

Bug fixes

• Fixed camera "jumping" when moving between ships in orbit
• Fixed a bug where the player was drifting horizontally after moving to another ship
• Fixed inability to use the magnet to another ship/planet
• Fixed the X-Ray of the smart laser that was invisible in other worlds/ships
• Fixed a rare crash during the undocking procedure
• Fixed rare power transmissiog inconsistencies in the gear mechanisms
• Fixed inconsistency in the visual style of the iron gears

Performance improvements

• Reduced memory usage of the world's data
• Improved the time required to load and save the game
• Improved the performance of math operations (overall CPU usage)

Trivia

• The vacuum gun design now shows a gear to hint about it's automate-ability
• The star is now at the origin ([0, 0] coordinates) instead of the first planet
• Added developer commands to get specific items
• Lots of code refactoring and insuring future maintainability

Gameplay changes

• Fluids can now be looted directly using the vacuum gun
• Interactive world content can now be used by pointing it with the mouse as well
• Using a yellow/gold border color for interactive elements
• Unified the maximum range for all the actions
• Optimized the fluid mechanics to prevent tiny amounts from flowing forever
• Fixed wrong ores rotation on other faces of the planet

UI changes

• Removed unused organic waste from the tech tree
• Renamed the "Rotate player" control to "Switch gravity"
• Now hiding the arrow buttons for unavailable settings

Bugfixes

• Fixed building and digging progress bars disappearing when moving the cursor
• Fixed registering clicks outside of the scrollable area in the settings
• Fixed plants not displayed from a long distance
• Fixed wrong gravity when the bounds of a world does not include the origin
• Fixed memory leak happening after removing a world/ship
• Fixed the game crashing when used with a secondary monitor on a Steam Deck

(a preview of this update is available here)

Inventory

• Changed the behavior of the inventory to use a conventional slot and stacks system
• Removed max mass of inventory, added a defined slot amount instead
• Introduced an item stack system and limit (100 items per stack)
• Allow merging different stacks in the inventory
• Allow dropping whole stacks directly from the inventory, using a right click from the mouse
• Removed the mass property of items
• Adjusted centering of the fruit sprites in the inventory slots
• Made the number of columns in the inventory a constant that does not vary with the resolution and UI scale

Toolbar

• The toolbar now has it's own item slots and behaves like an inventory, rather than only containing shortcuts to items in the inventory
• Fixed the behavior of the drag and drop between the inventory and toolbar
• Throwing or building an item uses the currently active item stack rather than the first item found in the inventory or toolbar
• Prevented accidentally changing the active toolbar selection while using the inventory
• Fixed the tools and blueprints that could not be moved between the toolbar and inventory

Crates

• Crates can now be fully used as a normal storage slot, without conflicting with normal item actions
• Set the crate max quantity to a single stack (100).
• Possible interactions with the crates now show-up in the top-right tooltip information
• Added a visual indicator when a crate can be interacted with
• Allow using crates located in another world/ship nearby

Item and tools

• Allow (again) the direct use of an item that is selected with the mouse
• Reverted auto-stacking of dropped items
• Made the dropped items vary in size depending on the quantity
• Hiding the action cursor when an action is not possible
• Improved readability (border color) of the progress bars during various actions
• Dropped items are now shown on top of the player rather than behind
• Adjusted the looting rate of items when cutting a plant.

Other changes

• Removed entering game name when starting a new game
• Fixed visual glitches during the transition between the loading screen and the game
• Auto-saving does not unexpectedly transition to a black screen anymore
• The root block of plants does not block the light anymore
• Fixed centering of the loading and saving texts
• Fixed the save screen still appearing after closing a game, causing the game to crash when the player tried to load one
• Fixed camera scale glitching when jumping too high on the moon

Gameplay changes

• Added crates, which can store a large amount of a single item
• Looting a new item now automatically adds it to the first empty toolbar slot
• Added a maximum storage amount on the inventory
• Allow transfer of items between crates and the inventory directly when the inventory is opened

Quality-of-Life improvements

• Items selected with the mouse in the inventory can now only be used via the toolbar
• Highlight the action-able objects in the world
• Clearly show quick access buttons on the toolbar and inventory items
• Simplified the displayed quantity on inventory items, and slightly changed it's design
• Changed how the recipe quantities are displayed in the item tooltip
• Organic waste is not needed anymore as an ingredient to build a fire camp

Bugfixes & Performance improvements

• Fixed visual glitch in the starfield on Steam Deck
• Fixed various item recipes that didn't handle multiple input stacks
• Reduce memory allocations in handling the dropped items
• Unified the maximum distance for player actions (digging, researching, transferring items...)

Astral Divide will be exposed at the Tokyo Game Dungeon on saturday, january 20th! If you can, please come take a visit and play it on stand G-5, near Hamamatsucho station. https://tokyogamedungeon.com

Gameplay changes

• Implemented scalable collisions between planets and ships
• Entities (items and player) now fully collides and interacts (including gravity) with all planets and ships around it, rather than being a background decoration and needing to "switch" to it.
• Sounds can now fully be heard from planets and ships nearby
• Dropped items does not automatically stack anymore
• Made it so changing the primary action button in the settings does not affect the UI
• Slightly improved the behaviour of the vacuum gun when throwing items

Performance

• Reduced overall memory consumption by about 60~70%
• Improved performance of dropped items when there is a large number of it

Bug fixes

• Fixed memory leaks happening when reloading saves without restarting the game
• Fixed rare crash when quitting the game and many others related to audio processing and multi threading
• Fixed crash when docking to a planet
• Fixed crash when getting out of a ship and colliding with a planet during the same frame
• Fixed game crashing when using keyboard buttons unknown to GLFW
• Fixed memory leak related to displaying fruits in the inventory
• Fixed many tiles that did not drop anything
• Fixed many tiles that did not have build/dig sounds
• Fixed another crash happening when the player is exactly at position 0,0, because there is no gravity
• Fixed some tiles that could be instantly researched
• (partially) Fixed camera stuttering when jumping between worlds and ships

Misc

• Changed the architecture of the physics engine
• Many other codebase refactorings