FOUND — Update 0.4.55

(everything since 0.4.54)

This round is about the island's surface: a whole new set of ground textures, real footprints, fire that spreads through grass, new cacti and new forest plants. And a round of performance work aimed at the short frame-rate drops.

New ground

Seventeen ground textures, blended. The ground is now a mix of moss, bright moss, grass, mud, dry leaves, soil, cracked dry earth, gravel, rocky ground, bare rock, beach sand, desert sand, scorched earth, magma rock and three kinds of snow. They melt into each other with ragged edges, no straight cut lines anywhere.

Where things are:

• Forest: moss with brighter patches, grass under tall grass, soil and dry earth in the bare spots, mud patches, dry leaves under trees.
• Rocks and slopes: gravel and rocky ground around boulders, bare rock on steep slopes.
• Beach: desert sand mixed with sandy ground and a little rocky ground. The strip by the water is always sand; the sea floor is desert sand.
• Desert: sand only, even on steep dunes, with cracked earth along its edge.
• Volcano: black magma rock right next to the lava, scorched earth around it.
• Snow: thin snow at the snow line, deep snow inside, wind-blown snow on the slopes. Lake shores in the snow get snow, not beach sand.

Lava and ice. Lava has a new molten texture. Ice is the old flat, pixelated ice with a few faint crack patches.

Lava meeting water now forms a black crust pool on the water's surface, with glowing veins, pillow lava and steam, instead of seeming to run under the water.

Footprints

You now leave shoe prints in snow, mud, damp soil (after rain) and along the water's edge. They take the colour of the ground they are pressed into and fade away after a while.

Fire

• Grass burns. Flames burn the grass under them away. Burning petrol scorches the grass it covers and now and then lights the grass at its edge; the fire creeps a little and dies down, it does not become a wildfire. It doesn't catch in the rain.
• Burning trees fall burning. When a burning tree comes down, it lights the grass along its trunk, sometimes the trees it hits, and anything standing there.

Plants

• New cactus model in the desert.
• New forest plants: ferns, broad leaves, flowers and low leafy plants all over the forest, a few in the snow. Gather them for fibre.
• The old small bushes are gone (berry, fibre and thorn bushes, and the decorative shrubs). They clipped through the new grass; better ones are coming. Berries have no source for now.
• Desert grass: small, sparse clumps of dry blades in the desert, coloured by the sand under them.
• Grass that is walked on now lies almost flat and stays down much longer (45 seconds).
• The new grass is the default now, also for existing installs.

Settings

• Settings > Grass: forest shares of tall / short / bare grass; desert clump spacing, frequency, size, density, blade height and tint; how long trampled grass stays down.
• Settings > Grass > Ground: the mud patch amount (was "needle patches").

Fixes

• The ground of dig sites no longer shows a square outline.
• A green patch no longer shows on steep desert slopes.
• Fog no longer disappears while the game is paused.
• Footprints are bigger.

Performance

• Removed the short stutters that came from the volcano scanning the whole island, the task list searching every item on the map, and an extra camera render for the horizon colour.
• The ground shader skips work that the new textures cover anyway, and uses a cheaper noise.
• Cacti use levels of detail: far ones are drawn with far fewer triangles.
• Press F3 twice in game for a frame-time readout: CPU and GPU time, which one holds the frame back, V-Sync / frame cap, resolution and graphics card.