v0.117.0-rc7 Whole Worlds

Everything in rc6, plus models that convert themselves with every map in place, meshes that become physics objects in one step, big planets that hold only the ground near you, and scripts that keep running on a busy machine.

Bring in any model

Drop an .fbx, .obj, .stl, .ply or .gltf into your project and it converts to .glb on its own, in the background, and again whenever you re-export the source. With Blender installed, .blend, .dae and USD files convert the same way. The Assets panel shows the source and its model as one, and placing the source places the model. A .glb you made yourself is never overwritten.

Materials come across the way the artist set them: base colour, normal, metallic and roughness, occlusion, emissive, transparency and two-sided faces. Older FBX materials are translated, so gloss becomes roughness and a bump map becomes a normal map. Textures are found even when they were moved, renamed or saved as another format, and anything missing is named. FBX skeletons and animations come across and play. Each conversion writes one summary to the Console of what went where.

OBJ materials now load, where before every OBJ converted grey.

A mesh becomes a physics object

Add a Rigidbody to anything with a mesh and it fits itself: a box to a cube, a sphere to a sphere, and the new Mesh shape to anything else. A moving Mesh body collides as the mesh's outer hull and tumbles, bounces and comes to rest on a face; a static one collides as its exact triangles. The body starts at the node's rotation and scale, so it collides where it is drawn. Right-click a mesh and choose Make it a physics object for a fitted, falling body with mass from its size, and press Fit to mesh after reshaping it.

Boxes now meet floors and walls built in the editor properly. Before, a box could sink through a blockout floor or pass through a wall. A selected body always shows its collision shape, and the rollback-netcode switch has its own section and says it turns off gravity, floors and walls.

Big planets hold only the ground near you

Terrain far from the player is put away and remade exactly when you come back, with a light stand-in meanwhile. A 1.5 km planet that held 2.8 GB of terrain now holds about 250 MB, and a saved planet resumes in a few seconds. Ground you have dug is never put away. Collision follows moving bodies as well as the camera, so a fast craft far from the camera lands on the ground.

Script terrain edits land a few milliseconds a frame, in order, each where it was aimed on its planet; terrain.pending() says how many are left. An edit made while a world is still loading lands on top of it. A hidden terrain body costs nothing, so a game can draw its own stand-in for a far planet. Relief layers take a latitude band, for mountains at the poles.

Scripts keep running

The engine stopped a script that ran past its time budget by wall-clock time, so a busy machine could stop a script that was doing nothing wrong, for good. The budget now counts the script's own processor time. A project sets it with script_budget_ms in project.ron, or --script-budget-ms on floptle run and floptle play, and a stopped script's message says how long it ran.

Every script reads the same time within a frame, and after a long load the fixedUpdate clock stays within a tick of update's, so a vehicle no longer freezes after a time warp.

Craft, water and plants

• assembly.teleport brings everything jointed to the craft along. A rover parked on its wheels can time-warp, and far debris lands instead of hanging in the air.
• Every query's ignore takes a node or a list, and ignoreStart skips only what a cast starts against.
• Decals re-lay only the marks a dig reached, so digging near many decals is quick again.
• The sea's underwater look stays out of sealed caves.
• scatter.setInteractors{...} bends plants away from a walking character, and the last detail band fades out instead of cutting off.
• setMaterial on a model changes only the settings you give it, keeping its textures and cut-outs, with new alphaCutoff and doubleSided settings.

Smaller things

• ui.setScale(s) sizes the whole interface, wrapped text stays in its box, and a font named only by a style loads.
• UI images stay sharp when drawn small, grain looks even on light and dark, and a 9-slice takes pixels per unit.
• input.simulate{...} presses keys for tests, and app.wallClock() gives real time.
• Scene parameters take whole numbers and numbers written as text.
• A shader's vertex offset can sample a height map.

Upgrading

Nothing to do. Some things look or behave differently:

• Imported models now draw the material their file describes. Metallic and roughness apply without a map. An opaque material no longer cuts holes where its texture has transparency, and a material exported with backface culling is not drawn from behind. A model that relied on the old look may need its material adjusted, or overridden in the Inspector.
• A new Rigidbody on a mesh is fitted to it and set to turn. Box bodies have slightly rounded corners, about 2 cm.
• setMaterial on a model with no material of its own now changes only the settings given, instead of replacing the model's look.
• The script time budget counts processor time, not wall time.