Hey guys!

Over the past few days I’ve continued my work on the lunar base mission with a nice steady rate of progress with some feedback from Tiy and George along the way. As I’ve stated previously, I don’t wish to spoil any plot details, but I’m okay with teasing a small piece of the environment. You may also notice a subtle new feature that crept its way into the game. Blocks are now capable of casting light.

It can be challenging at times; sculpting out a cave environment in such a way that it looks natural while also keeping the player’s ability to traverse it firmly in mind. That said, I think it’s coming along nicely.

On a side note, yesterday’s upload of the nightly build failed, so if you’re interested in trying out Kyren’s new projectile code, the update only went live a couple of hours ago. Personally, I’ve already noticed a huge improvement!

Area-of-effect projectiles like grenades are hitting and damaging multiple enemies far more reliably. The issue of projectiles outright disappearing when shot point blank into an enemy’s face is gone. If you have a bunch of monsters clustered together and you land a melee attack it now damages all of them as it should, rather than just a fraction. The PvE combat is feeling really good right now. Nice work, Kyren!

Anyway, that’s it from me. Stay classy and good night!

Projectile disconnect fix is complete and pushed to master.  It’s less of a fix and more of a.. near total rework.

I promised I would go into more detail but.. it’s late so here’s the very VERY quick version:

Projectiles are now proper synced entities with entity update deltas and everything, and damage is sometimes applied where an entity is not necessarily the master entity.  Our old concept of a disconnected entity is gone, and there has been a lot of simplification with other damage and status related parts of the code.  Self damage no longer routes through the damage manager, and instead entities can produce arbitrary damage notifications themselves.  Damage requests and now also a new thing called *hit requests* can travel over the network before being applied, and there is no longer a need for direct status effect requests over the network.  Total change in lines of code: -120

PvP needs lots more work still, but PvE locally and over network should be MILES better.

Sorry, I was supposed to do the daily update yesterday and I missed it :(

I’ve been working on a ton of things lately, instancing and unique world support, world <-> world warping, new world generation types and general world generation fixes, material light sources.

But right now I’m fixing a loooong standing series of bugs in starbound regarding projectile disconnects between the client and server.  I’m basically done, and with any luck you will see it in tonight’s update.

If I finish and merge today, I’ll do another post later today that goes into how the fix actually works.