The need arose to develop a new system capable of determining rare resource positions without rolling for all of the spawns in that area. The main user of this system would be the map, as it would gain the ability to scan for rare resources anywhere in the world. It's a complicated task though that touches on a variety of different systems, and at the root of most of those system was the biome generation math.
When I stopped using a third party tool for world generation last year due to its increasingly slowing performance, it was up to me to develop my own system for biome creation. I always had it in my mind that there would be some day in the future when there would be either procedural biomes, or dozens of hand-crafted biomes. I developed two very different systems to "force" biomes into certain locations after rolling a random number on a table that could do just that, generate any number of biomes. Unfortunately both systems were chunky, very unnatural, and not very perfomant.
Instead, I've for the first time (personally) written a much more normal noise based system that produces very random biomes:
This also brings back the ability to customize the frequency of each biome during world creation, as well as the size of the starting area, the blend distance to be used between biomes, the general scale, or frequency, of the noise used to determine biomes, as well as a new optional archipelago setting:
The archipelago setting will separate mountains and swamps from grasslands and desert with channels of water (whose width you can customize) make travelling around with boats a very viable system, and honestly just makes a lot of cool land formations. I love building on islands and sheer cliffs for some reason. Because of the extreme difference in height between the mountain biome and the ocean biome it is now possible to have quite steep cliff-sides, so I've upgraded the object spawning systems to be able to understand terrain steepness, and can now assign a maximum or minimum slope to any object:
All-in-all I hope it makes for a much more interesting landscape, but the improved performance and capabilities that it offers me under the hood are very real. I have fixed the funky lines that show up on the map in this patch, but for the most part have yet to switch on the new features that I'm working on with the map.
This patch will require a world "update" which will attempt to reposition buildings to the now changed surface height of the new biomes wherever they may end up. Or of course this would be a great time to start a new world, into which you can bring any already made characters. The map update will reset some of the spawned objects and rare object positions, but it won't mess with the biome noise, which is really the only reason I ever need to force a world update.
Outside of all that, I've fixed a few problems with multi-player, and animations in general. One bug that looks like it has been around for a long time was only affecting clients connecting to servers or hosts that turned up their stone spawn frequency, causing server and client resource positions to not match up. Found today and fixed, thanks to a player report!
Thank you so much to everyone that has put up with my mistakes and adventures in coding as I try to bring Solace Crafting to a solid 1.0 release. I know we were in the middle of working on animations, but there was an increasing number of problems and performance issues cropping up due to the old biome system, and wounded ego aside, I'm quite happy to be rid of it.
Work on map improvements continues!
v 0.7.4.0 2021.04.14
- Replaced circular "forced" biome system with a noise based system
- Reduced maximum ocean depth (meaning less deep)
- Added an "archipelago" setting to world creation
- Updated world setting restrictions and added more descriptions
- Added the ability to check the slope of an area for object spawn rules
- Updated MP nametags to reposition themselves based on the height of the player
- Fixed a number of animal animation running twice
- Fixed a number of animals not playing their attack animations
- Fixed MP animations jerking funkily
- Fixed a bug causing clients to load resoures different in MP worlds than the server if the stone spawn frequency was altered
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
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[ 2021-04-14 14:07:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
- Solace Crafting Linux [2.77 G]
Background
My name is Kyle Postlewait (35) and I got into game development years ago because I can't find the game that I want to play. I am not a veteran game developer. I do not have any published AAA titles. I am self-taught and I make mistakes. Having said that, I'm tired of survival crafting games being abandoned, focusing only on PvP and guns, or turning into major time sinks. I quit my day job in February of 2018 to focus on Solace Crafting full-time, and am doing everything I can to make a great fantasy survival RPG despite the tremendous challenge that is game development. Please don't buy into early access expecting a fully polished AAA game and then give it a bad review. In return, I promise to make sure that this game is NEVER ABANDONED. If sales are more than enough for me to survive, then I can hire more help. First and foremost I will always work to secure financial longevity and legal stability, and maintain all intellectual rights, never selling power to sponsors, publishers, or anything that could endanger continued development.
Early access ends when there is enough content to constitute selling the game without the above warning. Even after we leave early access the game will continue to be improved and expanded on, and has a long list of planned features post early access including other dimensions and multiplayer.
All features listed on this page are undergoing constant improvement and are subject to change.
Short description
Solace Crafting is a crafting and building heavy survival RPG focused around player crafting, building towns, and summoning NPC townspeople. With an open class system, open-recipe crafting, customizable enchanting, modular building, defensive structures, town management, distance-based difficulty, and an infinite game world, players are free to move and level at their own pace. With an uncapped leveling system you can try to push further than anyone ever has. You can try and make the ultimate sword, staff, or anything, thanks to complete control over all recipe settings. Build massive towns full of NPCs not limited by physics-based construction. Seek out rare enchants and exotic resources.About the game
SurvivalSolace Crafting starts out much like similar survival games: you need to make clothes to avoid freezing to death, you need to find food to keep from starving to death, and you should build shelter from the dangers of nightfall.
Crafting
Once you are surviving it's time to evolve. Build resource processing and crafting facilities to create improved weapons and armor. Leveling up your professions levels up your recipes and allows you to unlock new recipes and crafting abilities. Our crafting system is quite unique, allowing even the creation of custom sets. I definitely recommend you watch the getting started video available above.
Role-Playing Game
Once you're armed and ready it's time to push back against evil and it's minions. Level-up and develop your character using an open-class system of evolving skill trees. Mix melee, ranged, magic, and heals however you like. Skills are being designed with fun and visual uniqueness in mind, not minimalism and strict balance.
Solace Crafting
Crafting and placing a solace will allow you to instantly return to it from any other solace in the world, letting you create your own points of interest. Be careful though as the further you travel in any direction, the more difficult everything becomes. In order to level up a solace you'll have to defend it from waves of attackers that will try and stop the procedure. Build static defenses to help protect your solaces during upgrades.
Town Management
An upgraded solace allows you to summon townspeople. In order to summon higher level NPCs you'll need to push deeper into the wild, setting up towns of various sizes as you go.
Astral Travel (not yet under development)
When the time is right you will find your way to the Elemental Planes. Most heavily affected by the infectious anger and hatred, these have becomes dimensions of extreme danger, both environmental and sentient. You must find out where the hatred stems from and find a way to put an end to it once and for all. The Elemental Planes are also the birthplace of all resources mundane and exotic alike. Only here will you find the purest, most powerful resources for crafting and enchanting equipment worthy of a hero.
Developed by a gamer
I started learning how to make games years ago because the design decisions of so many of the games I played often made so little sense to me. Here are some of the design decisions I refined over the years that I do my best to uphold:- No pay-to-win, no pay-to-play, no paid DLC, no gacha or gamble mechanics
- No metered progression
- Level any and all professions freely, no arbitrary caps
- Minimal sub-ingredients, minimal crafting and refining timers
- Completely open, point and level based branching skill trees
- Multiple, incremental skill points every level
- Classic roles, not forced balance. Some classes may be harder than others.
- Unlimited player levels
- Completely open physics-based world, no off-limits
- No "realistic" building physics that destroy everything
- Unlimited access to parallel realities (alternate seeds)
- Shape and color your avatars freely instead of using preset races
- Allow alternate characters in the same world
I know how to, and will accomplish everything written here. It's only a matter of time. If the game sells I can hire help with what I'm bad at and focus on what I'm good at.
I know a lot of fans of the survival genre are pretty jaded, myself included, after so many titles have lost their leadership, changed projects, or plain given up. I'm here every day hoping to heal that sore and would very much appreciate your $15 support if any of this interests you. There are months of frequent patch notes and forum discussions between me and players here on Steam as proof that I'm capable of more than a couple new items after weeks of silence, something far too common in game development!
Multiplayer, and all of its many features will absolutely be implemented when a much more content rich single player experience has been achieved. Multiplayer like single-player will be PvE oriented and grief prevention/anti-cheat will always take top priority. Turning single-player towns into multiplayer guildhalls complete with defense quests and special achievements is something I very much look forward to, and have quite a few plans for.
Unix and Mac support will be tested and released soon.
The best is yet to come!
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04+
- Processor: Dual Core 3 ghzMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 680
- Storage: 8 GB available space
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