v0.117.0-rc20 Whole Worlds

Everything in rc19, plus worlds that arrive without stalling the frame, planets a built game can generate, shaders that build beside play, and fixes to scatter queries and JSON numbers.

Worlds that arrive smoothly

• When a saved planet is loaded because a body comes near it, its shadow volume and terrain palette are made in the background, and its file is decoded on several threads. The frame it arrives on costs about half what it did.
• A generated planet landing meshes the ground around the player in the background, makes its first collision near the player before it lands, and replaces only its own collider instead of rebuilding the whole physics world. Its landing frame went from several hundred milliseconds to tens.
• At most a few full-detail chunks are meshed on any one frame during play; the rest follow a few frames later on the workers.
• Model shadow shapes are baked in the background, and the old shape keeps casting until the new one is ready.
• A camera alone coming up to a world that is not loaded yet streams it in instead of stalling.
• A built game can now generate planets. terrain.generatePlanet worked in the editor but its world never arrived in an exported game.

Shaders beside play

• assets.warm builds two shaders at a time.
• During play, a frame that needs a shader still being warmed carries on without it, and that shader is built next. A UI shader is built the same way the first time it is drawn. Until it is ready the element or surface draws its plain look, for a few frames, instead of stopping the game to build it.

Naming the time

• A scene change is broken into steps in perf.parts: sceneSave, sceneParse, sceneTeardown, sceneSpawn, sceneTerrain, sceneMaps, sceneModels, scenePhysics, sceneAudio, sceneSession and sceneScripts.
• Reading a terrain file is terrainLoad, and its palette terrainPalette.

Fixes

• scatter.near finds props wherever they settled. A prop lands on the real ground, which can lie tens of metres off its patch's surface, and a query there found nothing. Digging near such props now clears them too.
• json.decode reads a number written at full precision back as exactly the same number. About one in six came back a hair off.

Upgrading

Nothing to do.