v0.117.0 Whole Worlds

Whole planets you can walk, dig, fly round and build on, with rivers, mountain ranges and weather, that stay smooth while they stream in around you. Craft with hinges, pistons and wheels. Water to float on. Volumetric fog with light shafts. Meshes, textures, pictures and now compute shaders a script makes itself. This is everything from the v0.117.0 betas, rc1 to rc38.

Worlds

• Planets several times the size generate in seconds, with mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, rock belts and climates, and a built game can generate them too. Big planets hold only the ground near you and give back the memory they no longer need; terrain.stats() and terrain.setBudget() say what terrain holds and keep it to a budget.
• Ground streams in wherever the camera goes, without stalling the frame, and new ground near you is drawn exactly the way it collides. Planets save only what you dug.
• Digging and marks land without a hitch. Big batches of terrain edits are spread over frames under a budget a game can raise, and decals wait for the ground they belong on.
• Solid ground stays where it is drawn on a world moving along its orbit, through every frame, so nothing falls through and a launch pad is where it looks.
• Wind and lightning for scripts. Wind carries smoke and bends plants.
• Water to float on and drift with. A water volume of density 0 is there for its look alone, for games that float things themselves, and freezing or thawing water is instant.
• Scattered props keep their model's look, sway like the plant, and can be found and highlighted one at a time.

Craft and physics

• Craft articulate, with hinges, pistons and gripping wheels, and keep their place and their hinges on a moving world.
• Physics costs a fraction of what it did for big craft and vehicles on the ground. Craft, parked vehicles and light props come to rest and fall asleep, in the wind or with a thruster on, and a plane lifting off over terrain costs a tenth of what it did.
• A mesh becomes a tumbling physics object in one step, every body's size follows its node, and a walker can no longer slip through a narrow post.
• The floating origin distance is a project setting.

Looks

• Volumetric fog worked out once for every four pixels, shared through plants like the rest of the view, with light shafts from the sun's shadow map at a fraction of their old cost.
• Shaders that read the scene behind them, shader materials that draw together, and shaders that build beside play rather than in front of it.
• Models keep their PBR maps and the filtering their files give their textures. Models in any common format convert themselves with every map in place.
• First-person arms and tools drawn by a stacked camera are shaded by the terrain around them, and the sky keeps its sun through the fog.

Made at runtime

• Meshes and textures a script builds itself, and pictures a script draws with image.new, many times faster than painting pixels from Lua.
• Compute shaders: gpu.buffer, gpu.texture and compute.run run programs on the GPU that draw nothing, for procedural textures, particle swarms and simulations, on every platform Floptle ships to. See Compute shaders.
• Players can hand a running game their own files: a picker the game opens, or files dropped on its window.

Smoother, and easier to tune

• Saves never stall a frame or lose a player's data. assets.warm prepares a level before its first frame, and spawns a game can spread over frames keep busy moments smooth.
• A profiler that names what a slow frame did, and new projects start with a catch-up budget, so an expensive moment slows the game for a moment rather than stuttering.
• The refresh rate follows the window, and scripts keep running on a busy machine.

Scripting

• Script suggestions fit what you are typing. Node handles compare equal, and a destroyed node's handle stays dead, never driving a node made later. findScript(kind, { quiet = true }) looks without a warning.
• floptle check compiles every script, and fails on a syntax error at its file and line.

Building and the Hub

• Exported builds draw textures the way Play does.
• Beta updates are one switch in the Hub (Settings → Beta updates), and versions are listed in the right order. Updating to this release also moves a Hub that showed an old beta as the newest.

Upgrading

Projects upgrade themselves to keep their look. Nothing to change by hand.