Final devlog (probably)

Terrain & World Gen

The old terrain was hills everywhere with puddles in between, and the mountains were random spikes shooting straight up out of flat ground like something was stabbing the map from underneath. So I rewrote the whole generator.

There’s real seas now with islands and deep water, and coasts start with a proper wide beach before the land slowly rises. Mountains come in long ranges with foothills, bare rock on the steep parts, a treeline and snow on top, and deserts are one big desert instead of a sand patch in the middle of nowhere.

Getting the mountains right took way longer than I want to admit. First they went up like walls, then there were 40 block deep trenches running in perfectly straight lines for hundreds of blocks through the hills. Turned out the math that works out how far you are from the coast completely loses it deep inland, so now it looks out in eight directions for the actual coast instead of guessing. Old worlds keep their old terrain so nothing you built gets new ground under it.

Caves & Structures

Caves are actual caves now: huge caverns, long winding tunnels, ravines, water pooled at the bottom, and stalactites. They also don’t break out of the side of every hill anymore, which is where all those random gaps and chasms were coming from.

Old mineshafts run through them with lamps and plank bridges over the drops, and there’s pyramids out in the desert with a lit room inside. There’s also something hidden under the pyramids but I’m not telling you what.

Water & Animals

Water has actual waves now, flat at the beach, bigger out in deep water, and way bigger in a storm. Also fixed far away water reflections breaking into lines.

The animals were ghosts this whole time; you could walk straight through a turtle. Now they’re solid, punching one knocks it back and it runs off, and swimming into a school of fish scatters them. The fish were also translucent, fixed that. And the black squares that flashed on screen when it rained are gone (funny NaN issue).

Lighting & Performance

Caves are properly dark now unless something lights them, and lamp light hangs in the air a bit so lamps actually glow instead of just painting the wall. Lighting runs on its own thread now so it doesn’t eat into your frame, and sun shafts and lamp glow render at half resolution, which made them way cheaper and you can’t tell.

Also fixed a bunch of random bugs:

• Game freezing for a few seconds when you broke a block somewhere new.
• The world sometimes thinking it was still loading forever.
• Memory getting corrupted when you closed the game.
• The settings back button hiding off the bottom of the screen at 720p.