Hello again! Friday Update 3 has landed, and with it a slew of fixes and changes.
You can play the game here to try out the new changes!
Let’s get right into it:
What’s new & changed
- New block placing system, based on a brand new Lua raycaster! This will fix all of your longstanding issues with slabs, liquids and plants, and make building much more pleasant and significantly less buggy. Everything just works!
- Overhauled donations! This doesn’t apply to early testers (you already unlock every in game item to play with) but donation rewards now come in multiple tiers. As you donate, you can collect Points, which go towards unlocking the next donation tier. Each tier unlocks a set of new blocks to build with.
- All donation products are now much cheaper than before.
- The hotbar now works with touch. If you have a touchscreen laptop, why not try tapping the hotbar slot you want to select instead? Wider support for stuff like selecting blocks, chat, and block placement will be coming in a future update.
- Cloud shadows have been removed due to excessive lag.
- The sky renderer has been revamped - takes up far less CPU power and has a neat two-colour gradient that looks more visually interesting. Clouds are also a bit lower now.
- Fog is a bit brighter and starts further away, so you can see across the world much better.
- Optimised rendered blocks by properly culling occluded faces of blocks. Previously there would still be some instances left over after rendering which were unnecessary. Somehow this made frame rates ~30% faster on my computer
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - Removed the early access message from the corner, and replaced it with a static version number, to reduce distraction and free up some extra framerate otherwise spent updating the text colour.
- Optimised the text renderer to run less frequently. Previously, any change in a text label’s properties would trigger a re-render, now only specific relevant properties are listened to. This improves the performance of text in scrolling frames, for example in chat and the new donations screen.
- Reduced the number of block render updates dispatched when blocks are replaced locally - this is primarily aimed at block render updates due to placing and breaking blocks locally.
- Sand and gravel now fall instantly, rather than one block per tick, reducing both block updates on the server and block render updates on the client.
- Water and lava now attempt to flow down before flowing outwards, which makes liquid flow slightly more realistically
- Fixed a bug where going to the donation screen from the select block menu and then closing the donation screen would invalidate the game’s UI state.
Known bugs in this version
- Saplings, mushrooms and flowers can be placed in unsupported locations (e.g. in mid air). They will still uproot like normal after being randomly ticked.
- The computed player bounds are too large, stopping players from placing blocks directly overhead.
As always, feel free to leave your feedback, bugs and suggestions - I try to respond to as many DMs as possible!
See you in Blox 