I've been extra busy this week, fixing things related to the playtest based on feedback. Many thanks to the people who provided feedback, I think it's now in a better shape than before, and ready for sharing with more people via Steam. If you're interested to try it out, and you were waiting for a more stable release, well, now's the time! Head over to Steam and try it. Here's the Steam announcement link

Steam finally accepted my upload, but after that I just replaced it with a different newer build, but apparently the check happens only once; that's good news for iteration of course, as one does not have to wait days to hear back from them.

Without further ado, here are the most major changes since the playtest version last week, in no particular order:

  • All windows/screens include a back button, that, well, allows you to go back a screen
  • Most screens include a "status bar" of sorts that shows some keybindings for that screen, e.g. Esc to go back.
  • You can bring the splash screen on demand in world forge. It also includes an "ok" button.
  • Zoom in/out simply with mouse wheel, plus optionally by holding some button and pressing +/-
  • Tooltips now disappear faster
  • Tooltips are now not using async, which might fix some crashes in the biome generation screen at least
  • There's a single type of game loading now, which is the equivalent of a quicksave.
  • World naming logic is slightly different. When you start a new world, you're requested to put a unique name, and that name is used for savegames.
  • World Forge music was not looping - fixed that
  • Audio level percentage is now a percentage over a dB range, rather than linear
  • Build ID is now included in bug reports and feedback form
  • In settings screen, World Forge section in controls now called "World Forge Specific", to highlight that there are other shared controls, like camera
  • In settings screen, you can clear a binding with right click or re-set a binding with left click
  • In settings screen, every time you hover/focus over an element, there's a status bar -like line that tells you what can you do to change values, e.g. press right/left or space etc
  • In settings screen, there are now "back" and "apply" buttons: the apply button saves the changes, whereas the back button discards your changes, but asks you first with a dialog.
  • Clicking buttons should now play a sound, not just hovering over them
  • When using edge panning in world forge, the right edge is now detected properly
  • World forge radiobutton tooltips highlight that they are radiobuttons.
  • In world forge UI, there are some additions:
    • a status bar with common controls at the bottom
    • a log line just above that, which shows a message when you try to paint something and nothing happens, because of some rule (e.g. you can't paint high elevation in sea)
    • a line on the top-left showing the active brush
  • There's an "error" sound when you try to paint something which breaks some rules; in addition to a log message, you also hear something.
  • Fixed a bug where sea coast would appear inland! It's something that you can't see though, so I'm happy that I somehow discovered it.
  • Last but not least: I had to disable NativeAOT for the C# build because it was really messing with things, causing weird errors sometimes. The result is slightly larger set of files to download, but that's about it!
  • I did try to cross-compile of macos, but because I had to build the export templates too, at some point somewhere the process went wrong, and didn't want to dig too deep in that rabbit hole... So, Mac users, the day shall come, at some point!

That's it, thanks for reading, and have a nice weekend!