v0.117.0-rc8 Whole Worlds

Everything in rc7, plus projects that upgrade themselves to keep their look, script suggestions that fit what you are typing, bodies whose every size follows their node, and rivers, belts and rocks.

Your project upgrades with the engine

When you open a project made with an earlier version, or the Hub upgrades it, the engine now brings it up to date before loading anything, so it looks and behaves as it did. Each change this release makes to how things draw or move comes with its own upgrade. A file that needs nothing is left untouched, and every file changed is listed in the Console. New projects get the new defaults.

Suggestions that fit what you are typing

The script editor now suggests only what exists where you are typing. After input. you see the input library and nothing else. A value returned by find, spawn, raycast or nav.agent offers its own fields. Inside scatter.create{ you see the options it takes, and a hook's parameters know what they are. Every match is listed, best first, and a note says when an entry only works in fixedUpdate. In Solar's own scripts the suggestion you wanted now appears about three times as often, and wrong suggestions are down by about 95%.

The engine's script library, the file external editors read for completion, is no longer meant to be committed to a game's repository: new and upgraded projects keep .floptle/library/ out of git, and the editor rewrites it from the installed engine.

Every size follows the node

A sphere or capsule body's radius and height now scale with its node, as a box always did, and so do joint anchors and axes and a gravity volume's reach. The Inspector shows the size a scaled body really collides at. Fitted physics objects weigh 500 kg per cubic metre, with density shown beside mass, and new characters weigh 70 kg.

Models and materials

Project Settings choose how model textures are filtered (as each file says, always crisp or always smooth) and whether imported materials draw as their files describe or as they did before 0.117. A model's own choice still wins. Materials now have a blend mode, opaque, cut-out or blended, instead of inferring it from opacity; setMaterial{ blend = "blend" } sets it, and fading a material below full opacity still turns blending on.

The engine finds Blender wherever it is installed, including a Steam library, so .blend and USD files convert. Blender 5 no longer reads .dae; export those as .fbx, .obj or .glb. Models converted by earlier versions are converted again, with all their maps.

Moving worlds

• node.carry gives how far the world under a body was carried this tick. A script that positions a kinematic part on a moving planet adds it, the way it uses dt, and the part stays put. assembly.info gives it too.
• Every planet, moon and rock has a reach, how far around it things are carried with it. space.belt{...} spawns a whole belt of rocks on their orbits.
• Rocks can be irregular: smallBody = { shape = "potato" }, "binary" or "rubble" in a planet recipe, streamed like planets.
• terrain.impostorAt(id, { pixels = n }) says when a planet switches to its far ball, and the ball takes the colour its ground draws.
• Planet recipes record the generator that made them, so a world saved on an older version regenerates exactly as it was.

Water and weather

The water simulation takes springs, riverbed friction, a fixed sea level and waterfalls, which water.falls() reports, and a steady river costs almost nothing. Cloud decks shade the ground beneath them. A scattered prop told to glow with no colour glows in its own colour, or else the field's tint.

Upgrading

Projects upgrade themselves when you open them; nothing to do. What upgrading keeps the same: sizes of scaled bodies, joint placements, gravity reach, model texture filtering, imported material looks, each material's blend, and how generated worlds look. What it cannot change for you:

• A script that set a sphere or capsule radius on a scaled node now sets it in the node's own units.
• setMaterial{ alpha = ... } below 1 now also switches blending on.
• A tilted box or polygon body that does not turn now collides at the angle it is drawn, not square to the world.