v0.117.0-rc10 Whole Worlds

Everything in rc8, plus big terrain edits and marks that no longer stall the frame, planets that give their memory back, wheels that roll, and posts the crew cannot walk through.

Big edits stay smooth

• A large dig or flatten is made in the background and lands whole a frame or two later, so one big edit no longer freezes the game. Anything that reads the ground in between sees it as it was before the edit. terrain.pending() counts it until it lands.
• decals.add returns at once. A big mark is laid over the next few frames within a small budget each, and decals.landed(id) says when it is down. A dig re-lays only the marks it reached.
• Landing on a new world no longer hitches for seconds: far ground is put away a little at a time, and chunks are prepared off the frame. The time it takes shows as terrainStreaming in perf.hitches.
• On Linux, memory a planet no longer needs is handed back to the system, so a game's footprint falls when ground is put away.
• A planet generated over an existing terrain no longer shows grey squares or the inside of the far side of the world.

Physics

• Free wheels roll. A plane's ground roll and a coasting vehicle no longer drag as if their brakes were on, and a driven wheel can no longer pull its craft faster than its motor allows.
• A capsule (a walking crew member) can no longer pass through a post or pole narrower than its own height, moving or still.
• Many moving parts touching each other cost far less: 1,000 cost about a hundredth of what they did.
• spawn(prefab, pos, fn, { body = false }) spawns a prefab with no physics, for parts that are only seen.

Scripting

• A script that runs past its time budget once is skipped for that frame and runs again the next. Only three overruns in a row stop it until it is edited, so a single slow frame no longer stops a script for the rest of a game.
• input.simulate numbers mouse buttons as input.button does (0 left, 1 right, 2 middle), takes mouse, scroll and text, and a simulated click reaches the game's UI.
• scene.load(name, { additive = true, parent = node }) places a scene under a node, where it rides along as the node moves.
• Turning a camera on from its Camera component's active turns the others off, as setCamera does. The component also exposes projection.
• draw.setFrame(node) draws debug lines and shapes in a node's space, so they stay on it however fast it moves.
• draw.text and draw.rect land in the right place in a shot or capture of a different size, shot --after waits for models still loading, and perf.scriptMs reads real values in shot.

Plants and materials

• Scattered props give way to walkers only when their source has bend above 0 (scatter.create{ bend = 1 } for grass), so rocks stay put. Bent props now spring back upright once the walker has passed.
• Materials take a near fade: a surface dissolves as the camera comes close, between two distances (nearFadeStart, nearFadeEnd). Dithered and fading surfaces keep their full shadow.
• A material faded below full opacity and then brought back to 1 draws as it did before the fade, solid or cut out, instead of staying blended.

Upgrading

Projects upgrade themselves when you open them; nothing to do. Upgrading no longer rewrites scenes, prefabs or materials to record their blend mode: it changed nothing about how they draw, and dropped the comments in them. A project's own settings are still written to project.ron.

A project made on rc7 now keeps drawing imported models' materials as their files describe. rc8 set such a project to classic (0.116) instead; if yours was upgraded by rc8, set Imported materials back to as each file says in Project Settings.

What upgrading cannot change for you:

• Scatter sources that should part around walkers need bend = 1; it was on for every source in rc7 and rc8.
• input.simulate{ button = 1 } now means the right button; use 0 for left.