Spawn Recall and Settings Buttons Restored Those buttons were put back on the button list in the view. Harvest Ring Bug Harvesting operations at rings are broken due to parent planet's axial tilt. Fixed. Render Ring Bug Rendering of rings when you are inside them is broken due to parent planet's axial tilt. Fixed. Story Typo A typo was reported in the story. Fixed. Snow Capped Peaks Snow capped peaks were lost when worlds changed to the Perlin noise generated terrain. I never see snow capped peaks any more. The bottom of the clouds and the snow line were both lowered, among other related changes. This does not consider air temperature so don't be surprised if its too warm for snow on a snow capped peak at the equator. This change will affect worlds that already exist. Tall hills may become snow capped. This will cause a slight change in resources because ice will appear as a resource in the snowy areas. Smooth Terrain Sometimes the bumpiness of terrain is so smooth it creates weird shorelines that look like big round blobs. A slight change was made to the initialization of the Perlin noise parameters so terrain will not be so flat. This change will not affect worlds that already exist. Ring Rendering Rings around planets suffer from a number of rendering problems.

• Rings overlap the planet incorrectly as you approach the planet from a distance. They look correct up to a point then suddenly they overlap the planet completely, incorrectly, where the back side of the ring is in front of the planet instead of behind it.
• Rings are clipped by the atmosphere incorrectly when you are close to the planet. This is seen as a ring seeming to disappear as it passes behind the transparent layers of the atmosphere.

All of these stem from the fact that the ring is rendered as a single object. Today I bit it off and did the work to split up the ring model into multiple pieces that are individually rendered. This appears to have done the trick. Grass in Snow The grass plants should be removed from areas of snow. Shrubs and trees can stay. This would help the appearance of snow coverage. Done. Snow Sound When walking in a forest with snow on the ground, I hear forest noise instead of snow noise. This seems wrong. Fixed. Snow now takes precedence over foliage. Snow Transition The drop off of snow density going from solid snow to areas without snow is linear. This would be prettier if a cosine interpolation was applied. Done. Stargate Beams Render The energy beams from the cones to the sun are clipped incorrectly by the ringworld arc section I am on. Fixed. Commodity Demand Prices Commodity prices used to be modulated by local supply and demand. That was lost when the new cities were implemented. Done. Ladder Pose When climbing a ladder my body is straight and stiff, not animated. Finished ladder stationary and climbing poses. Close Stories Bug I started a new game and created a new avatar. I didn't like my starting location so I returned to the main screen, deleted my avatar, and started again. This time Targoss never appears even though the story shows as running. Fixed data cleanup error when restarting the universe from scratch. UTC Nerf Dates and times are expressed using UTC notation. Is this necessary? All dates and times are now expressed in the local time. The UTC was a holdover from when the server was formatting some of those strings. They won't be doing that any more. Mission Orders Crash The Harvest Minerals mission order causes a crash when it is selected and your ship is not near a world. Fixed the crash. This mission order is obsolete and it was removed in a previous update. I restored the obsolete commands to reproduce this crash, mainly to insure the crash could not be cause in any other way. System Gen for Scan Solar system scans and starmap searches must regen solar systems in memory to search or display them. This is due to the fact that the server does not send the entire universe to the client so the client must improvise. Unfortunately the result is not always correct, particularly in systems where one or more worlds have been destroyed by asteroids. Solo game now accesses the full game universe data rather than regening systems for that kind of information. This applies to several processes: solar system survey scan, starmap search, mission orders, XML export. Mission Orders Mission orders are limited to the data available to the client. This results in buggy feeling things like the Go To Space Station order not listing any space stations in the system until you get near them. Mission orders ui was changed to access the full game universe data. Starmap Search The starmap search ui needs work. There are too many controls on one dialog box. It is difficult to see the results. Starmap search ui was split into two pages. The first page contains the search criteria. The second page contains the search results. Added a button to the range section of the search criteria to fill in the galaxy location with your current location. Eliminated the use of solar system regen to display results. Solar systems are displayed using global universe data.

[ 2024-01-19 17:39:24 CET ] [ Original post ]