Welcome to the return of TeraSaturday, a not-so-weekly update post about all the neat stuff that has been going on in the world of Terasology! Half blog, half changelog, completely cool.
📰 Since last TeraSaturday ...
We had the November Play Test last Sunday, trying out all the new and exciting things that have been added over the last months. We all tested the first release candidate for the upcoming stable version to identify weak spots we want to smooth out. You can download Engine 4.1.0 / Alpha 17 Preview (Release Candidate 1) as Terasology (Nightly) #1119 in the launcher. @Skaldarnar streamed via twitch, you can watch the (slightly trimmed) recording below - as always, feedback is welcome 🤓
We would like to say a warm "welcome 👋" to @HajdaM and warm "welcome back 👋" to @iHDeveloper who both jumped straight from play-testing into coding, e.g., by improving performance or the integration with Discord. @Michael P and @Niruandaleth are still crawling through the JOML conversion 👩🏫 and @DarkWeird, among other things, disassembles our engine into smaller subsystems 👨🔧
Overall, we again merged more than 60 PRs on the engine and in module space over the last week, with more contributions from @4D enthusiast and @Cervator. 💪
🐛 Bug Fixes 🐞
🕹 You may enjoy this play-test video by Lowricsec who gave our May release a try. This has slipped our attention for 3 months, but here you go 🎮 Videos like these are a great source of both inspiration and new bugs to fix. It helps us to identify the issues that really affect the player, and we often also get some suggestions on how this might be fixed.
@Niruandaleth and @Skaldarnar took this as an opportunity to address some of those bugs. They tweaked the brightness at night, adjusted the player height and model scale, pushed the name tags back into place, and got rid of some bugs which crashed the game. Health regeneration was also fixed, so no more blocks regaining their health faster than you can hit 'em. @DarkWeird also contributed here, investigating some networking issues to make the "Join Game" work smoothly again.
🚀 Module/Feature Highlights
Finally, we want to give you a little sneak peak at the world generation improvements @4D enthusiast is working on. On the long way to bringing back pretty overhangs you can now find overgrown cave entrances in the world (with the Caves world generator plugin). There are more improvements to lakes and surfaces in general, but this deserves it's own highlight spot 😉
