v0.117.0-rc6 Whole Worlds

Everything in rc3, plus craft that fly low without dragging the frame down, grips that hold on a moving planet, and big worlds that load and land without stalling.

Flying low stays fast

A craft flying near a planet could cost 40 to 60 ms of physics a frame, enough to drop a game from 60 frames a second to under 10 on a climb. Near ground the engine looked for the closest surface even in open air, where there was none. Now it doesn't, and an assembly only checks the colliders near it. The same climb costs a few milliseconds.

Grips and gravity hold on a moving planet

• assembly.grip holds. In rc3 a craft moved by assembly.teleport still read its old place until the end of the frame, so a grip taken right after could weld it to ground far away, and it slid or tore loose. A teleported craft reads where it was sent at once, and a grip out of the craft's reach is refused with a warning.
• When the world recentres around a far-travelling player, a planet's gravity and its water move with it, so "down" no longer swings for a tick.
• Water declared with water.addVolume follows its planet every physics step, so things float on a lake on a moving world.
• raycast, spherecast and overlapSphere see each part of an assembly, and ignore passes through the whole craft.
• A joint keeps its rest pose when the craft around it is rebuilt.

Big worlds load and land smoothly

• A planet saved by an older version now saves small after its next save, as rc3 promised. A planet with edits loads in the background, and a large one resumes in about half the time.
• A generated world no longer freezes the frame for seconds as it finishes.
• Scattered props settle with the ground's height read straight from the terrain, so walking or flying low through a field stays smooth.
• perf.hitches() rows carry parts, which name the work inside a slow frame: collisionRebuild, terrainEdits and planetLanded.
• Undug ground shows only its own surface material. The patches of subsoil that showed through are gone.

Plants, beams and decals

• Scattered props wear their prefab's material, so sway, backlight and colour reach every plant, and a tree crossing between detail levels no longer looks see-through.
• Jagged beams join cleanly at every kink, so a lightning bolt's glow is one ribbon.
• A decal on terrain stays on the ground when the ground under it is dug.
• Surface shaders can read vertexColor and skyRadiance(dir, roughness), and a lake's water.surface stays inside its basin.

Smaller things

• Upgrading a project leaves effect files alone unless they really need migrating, and says which files it changed.
• A number in a script's scene parameters, such as a seed, reads back exactly.
• scatter.near returns where a prop landed, with settled = true.

Upgrading

Nothing to do. Two things look or behave differently:

• A world generated with caveDepth = 0 now shows its subsoil and rock layers under the surface. Before, everything under the surface was deep rock.
• assembly.grip refuses a point more than one unit beyond the craft's parts.