Spiritus Astrum

The artwork is going very well.

The modelling and texturing is all done, and I have setup most of the textures, prefabs, etc, in unity.

The next goal is to add the control scripts for the new items.

This is needed to connect them to my inventory system, and make them usable in the world, etc.

I am adding some more art to the game now. This is mainly designed to give the player more crafting and building options, and it will, in turn, allow me to test and improve the crafting and item persistence features, which is my main goal.

I want the player to be able to create furniture and simple structures, and then move furniture around inside the structures. This should all be done persistently, and should be saved on future playthroughs.

It should also be visible to other players.

There are also a lot of other improvements and optimisations that I want to make.

I should be able to finish almost all of this this month, and I have some more testing planned for next month.

I have made some changes to the inventory system to allow for easier crafting of small items.

When accessing the active inventory when a crafting item is in the world, the crafting dummy will now be visible in the active inventory and can be interacted with directly.

The active inventory is the inventory that exists in the world, and allows the player to move and select actual gameobjects. The GUI is only used to display items and move them between the active inventory and the bulk inventory.

This solution does work, but it is still quite clunky, and I will need to do a larger rewrite here in the future.

I have added some new harvestable resources and items to the world, which I intend to use to test and improve the crafting and inventory systems.

These items were added to the world with relatively little difficulty.

I have also tested and improved the rotation and movement of the items in the world. There were several bugs that caused strange behaviour when moving and rotating items, especially large items, these have now been fixed.

The next step is to optimise the crafting system and add better options to craft smaller items.

I have been focusing on debugging and improving the crafting and inventory system.

This system is very complex, and needs a lot of refactoring.

In particular, I need to add a better way to craft small items either in the inventory or in the world.

Currently, this is done by creating a dummy item on the ground, and combining other items with it to form the finished item.

This is fine for large world objects, but it can be difficult to interact with small items like this.

I don’t want to add a solely gui based approach, since this would hurt realism, so I plan to try to add some kind of immersive crafting system that works better for small items.

I have made some client and server improvements to the Login system.

It is now possible for the user to have multiple characters stored on the server, and by using a different username for each, the user can select which one they want to play as.

The save/load system in the game does not allow for multiple saves per character, this is by design (I do not want players to be able to save before a major decision, and load again if they don’t like the results, this harms immersion).

However, I do want players to be able to experience the world in different ways, with different characters, possible at the same time, this is now supported.

The client variables (inventory, etc) still only support one character, I will need to optimise this in future, but the server side support works great.

I have also made changes to the database to improve security, which is an important step before release.

I have made some minor improvements to the item placement system, as well as some other minor improvements and bug fixes.

However, the most important improvement that I made was when I discovered a serious bug in the ground cover paging system.

The system works by finding nearby terrain chunks and rendering any ground cover objects on those chunks, and hiding any ground cover objects not on those chunks.

This system was always quite slow, but I assumed that this was due to the large number of ground cover objects that are being rendered (I am not using instancedmeshes yet, this is an optimisation that I will add later).

However, while improving this system using the profiler, I noticed that the distance to each terrain chunk was always 0.

It turned out that there was a simple bug that was resulting in every single terrain chunk being scanned, instead of just the neighbouring ones.

I was not rendering any more objects than necessary, since I had another check in the code for this, but by searching all chunks instead of just neighbouring ones I was effectively searching through tens of thousands more objects than needed.

This problem was solved relatively easily, once I figured out what was causing it, and the performance of the project has increased massively as a result.

The traffic system is now done.

I have added some simple placeholder art to it, which I got from the asset store, and I have added simple random colours.

There are still some minor issues, such as odd looking rotation when the vehicles are going around corners, but it works quite well.

I have also fixed some other minor bugs, and added some new artwork to the ground cover system.

I have solved most of the remaining issues with the traffic system.

I have found some problems related to paging the cities in and out, but these were preexisting.

There is an also an issue with the AI spawning in the wrong location that I need to fix, and I need to do some more testing on the mechanics of the system, but it is mostly done.

The only work remaining is to add the placeholder art and some final, last-minute, improvements.