Hi guys,

So today the tile rendering changes were almost completed. (Just a few bugs left with platforms and pipes).

On a lot of computers you’ll see an absolutely huge performance increase because of this and we’d love to hear about how it works on yours.

So if you’re playing with the nightlies, please give it a go. It should come out some time tonight/tomorrow.

You can find out what FPS you’re getting by using the /debug command and the /togglelogmap command. You’ll see your current FPS displayed under render_fps there. If you want to see what your maximum fps is you can disable vsync via config to hit above 60.

As always, if the game is crashing on startup in the nightlies, just delete the universe and player directories (after backing them up) and delete starbound.config.

Hopefully the performance increase will be as huge as it’s been on our test machines!

Hey folks! I’m afraid I don’t have anything terribly exciting to report today as I’ve continued chipping away at the same task I have been for the past week, which is making more cool stuff to find underground.

I must confess, it’s been a bit tricky working on underground content of this nature. These things can’t be terribly big and it’s not really possible to know what kind of terrain to expect around a given piece without manually painting it yourself, and doing so can cause a couple of distinct problems.

First, it can drastically decrease the ability for any given microdungeon to appear, as it tends to result in increasingly larger pieces. The smaller a microdungeon is, the higher its success rate of it spawning. The other problem is chiefly that manually carving out the surrounding terrain to form the kind of shapes you want can be really time-consuming, and that clashes with the objective of pumping the underground full of as many of these things as possible. As a result, I tend to keep the shaping of terrain around these things fairly minimal.

For now, I’ll be continuing to work as I have until I’m needed on the progression stuff again. Allow me to leave you with a sample of one of the many Avian microdungeons I designed today.

Most microdungeons won’t be as easy to spot as this one. ;)
Until next time guys!

A lot of work has gone in to the gate system today. We’ve been designing exactly how it should look and producing mockups. Most of the art here is George’s but I wanted to show you what we had so far.

It’ll likely change a bit by the time it’s finished.

Click for full sized gif!