Testing 164: Smoother Loading and Smoother Projectiles!

This update is accessible via the “Testing” release of Boundless on Steam.

Please report all issues discovered with the update to this support thread.

Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.

(Thanks @Rafur)

Overview:

This release of Boundless is another step towards updating Live. We’re planning for the next Testing update (165) to be the Live release candidate. So feedback on this version is particularly valuable. The update includes improvements across the game and engine.

Release Notes:

  • Art + Animation + Assets:
    • Added campfire and beacon control meshes. These show the fuelling state of the beacon (on, low, off) and cast a little light.
  • Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
    • Titanium now needs gold alloy or silver alloy (rather than both).
    • Totem Ammo now only needs base metals an a standard workbench (rather than gold alloy and a powered workbench).
    • Totem Ammo renamed to Warp Crystal.
  • Creatures + Combat + Characters:
    • Player projectile damage to blocks is now predicted client-side.
    • Player projectiles should feel much more accurate at closer distances now, this was due to the visual offset to make it look like the projectile comes from your hands being applied for far too long.
    • Projectiles shot by creatures now work in such a way that clients can perfectly predict whether they will get hit or not by the projectile, no more feeling like you missed the projectile but then it hitting you anyways! A downside, is that the creature’s projetiles now take longer to fire, which makes it easier for you to trick the creature into firing in the wrong direction, but this is somewhat counteracted by the creature projectiles now being able to curve slightly towards the player too.
    • Reduce size of player hitbox (Was way too big) and physics, and increase/modify the sizes of creature hitboxes/physics slightly to better match the visual meshes.
  • Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
    • XP Actions
      • Players now earn XP by completing the following actions: placing blocks, defeating creatures, mining blocks, crafting items, and chiseling blocks.
      • XP is awarded to the player who is placing, mining or chiseling a block.
      • XP is awarded to the player when an item has been crafted. For machine crafted items, the XP is stored until the player enters the Beacon where the item was crafted.
      • XP is awarded to all players who have participated in defeating a creature (this includes players who have healed a player currently in combat).
      • The amount of XP awarded per action is based on difficulty.
    • Experience
      • Coins have been removed from levelling up, as they are now exclusively earned through completing Objectives or by trading with other players.
      • Experience required per level has been increased due to the new XP Actions.
    • Objectives
      • Fixed an issue where items in a Smart Stack were not being tracked by the objective task
      • XP rewards have been rebalanced for the Tutorial
    • Variable sized player backpacks:
      • New players start with 16 inventory slots.
      • Slots can be unlocked in groups of 4 by purchasing “Inventory Space” skills in the Exploration skill tree.
      • Existing players will be gifted all “Inventory Space” skills for free and will see no change to their inventory capacity.
    • Stamina rebalancing:
      • Stamina drains at a much slower rate.
      • Movement costs stamina.
      • Consumable items restore stamina as well as health.
      • Stamina regeneration is disabled by default and must be unlocked through the “Stamina Regeneration” Endurance skill.
  • GUI + HUD:
    • Open Portals and Warps may now have their directions flipped directly in the GUI instead of requiring complex care when setting up to get things right.
    • Fix for the damage indicator and damage log appearing before the player was actually damaged.
    • Fix for the damage log showing twice when healing yourself.
    • Partial update for plinth and trading GUIs
    • Updated Furnace GUI
  • SFX + Music:
    • Updated Hopper SFX.
    • Updated slide SFX.
    • Fix missing Spitter SFX.
  • Engine:
    • Add some measures to un-stuck players/creatures automatically if they manage to get stuck in the ground somehow.
    • Choices of which chunk to mesh next are now also moved onto the meshing threads, and should give faster turnarounds on chunk deltas from breaking/adding blocks to seeing the new meshes.
    • Chunk meshing is now multithreaded (fixed at 2 threads for now). Assuming you’re not network bound on receiving chunks (even max download rate is likely still not enough if your chunk cache isn’t full of the chunks you need), you should see the world render in more quickly now, but at the very least re-meshing of a chunk when breaking/placing blocks should now be faster, nearly 2 times as fast in local testing.
    • Fix an issue with pushing players into 2-high gaps when jumping when moving along the Z-direction! Oops.
    • Fix horizontal(flat) portal/warp rendering.
    • Resolve inconsistencies between generated grass, and whether grass can be placed by hand, and when it is removed by world simulation (squashing grass by placing a block ontop), can now place grass by hand at the bottom of corners correctly.

Resolved Known Issues:

The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.

  • ‘Advanced Movement Controls’ objective has incorrect text.
  • ‘Defeated’ information always displays a penalty of 0% carried tool durability.
  • Consuming meat and starberries causes the game to display duplicate message on the HUD.
  • Error on tooltip entitled ‘How To Place Blocks’ incorrectly states that a Campfire must be placed within a plot to complete the objective ‘Setting Up A Crafting Table’. It should say ‘Crafting Table’.
  • Shift-clicking an item from the selling plinth will show odd numbers and will not always go in the shopping basket.
  • Shift-clicking and dragging on the coin icons from within the trading menus may cause a crash.
  • Shop Stand and Wanted Basket menus use the old plinth names.

Known Issues:

The following items are known issues in this release.

  • Assigning both mouse buttons to ‘Use Left Hand Option’ will disable the left mouse button. To fix delete C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\boundless\user_settings\yourname\controls.json.
  • [new] Blocks placed over item drops will destroy them.
  • Buying plinths that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
  • Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
  • Cannot sell some items even if the tint matches on a Buying Plinth.
  • Cannot switch tabs on Inventory menu using shoulder buttons on a controller.
  • [new] Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
  • Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
  • Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
  • Game does not display a message when the maximum number of planet markers has been reached.
  • Gem grappling hooks retract automatically when hanging.
  • GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
  • If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows - Microsoft Support
  • Item placed into buying plinth will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
  • Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the buying plinth.
  • Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
  • Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
  • [new] Occasional visible specks appear on screen
  • Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
  • [new] Placing an item into the Crafting Table will somehow miss the intended slot and will drop instead.
  • [new] Players may occasionally teleport when mining.
  • Portal UI text overflows when the portal token name is very long.
  • Skill descriptions are not final.
  • Some creatures may disappear instantly and drop items before their bodies hit the ground.
  • Some Extractor machines lack animation.
  • Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
  • Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
  • The recipes are not final.
  • Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.
  • Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/ crashes the game on start up.

Testing 164.1:

  • Fix coins not being received correctly, e.g. in trading, footfall.
  • Fix physics causing teleporting, e.g. up trees and steps.
  • Server crash when some users joined.
  • Unlock inventory slot expansion skills for existing users.

Resolved Known Issues:

  • Players may occasionally teleport when mining. (or walking around under trees, or many other cases… was introduced in the aim of preventing people becoming stuck in the ground, but was a bit too conservative… working correctly now)
  • Blocks placed over item drops will destroy them. (previous logic was attempting to move the objects a single block in all directions before teleporting to the top of the world, but would end up pushing it deeper underground instead… working correctly now)

Testing 164.2:

  • Fix for repairing machines crashing.
12 Likes

Please share any cool screenshots from the update with us, and I’ll attached one to the release note. Thanks!

3 Likes

aww but I like the name of Warp Locstion Picker Upgrade

Portal changes and warp crystal are awesome. Not that the others aren’t.

Can’t wait for these changes to come to live when they’re ready

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feature! :stuck_out_tongue:

7 Likes

Lots of nice things. :smiley:

Where to?
Any interesting place?

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Witch-space!

Just up the tree you’re mining. (It’s weird :confounded:)

Update: this is the issue here.

7 Likes

Sweeeeeet!!

6 Likes

Lol awesome!

Edit: lol guess I should have read the comments first… this has been mentioned a few times already

Wow that’s a bit crazy xD

3 Likes

Minor correction to the release notes, it turns out that the teleporting issue can occur even if you are not mining, as demonstrated in the link provided by James.

2 Likes

Thank youuuuuu

THANK YOUUUUUUU

Are the bugged objectives fixed yet? Like the cook meat in a furnace, gain “X” exp, smelt ores, etc.?

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We still need to fix all the objectives that are not working, but the examples you have listed should theoretically be fixed. If not, report them in the associated thread.

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It looks like a result of additional anti-stuck measurements.

And bug similar to that has been happening in World Builder earlier: when you place block and here is any blocks above you then it teleports you on top of the highest block above you

I seen the objectives for the bomb and lances. Bombs and lances in game are craftable now? What is the recipes?

If James didn’t mention it I doubt they’re in game. I think they’re trying to get the objectives system in a good place that makes sense so it’s probably just trying to frontload some work and whatnot.

3 Likes

Update posts have info about things implemented and things being worked on but not to be in game yet. They just talk about progress they made in development that particular week. Bombs are one of those things they mentioned as making progress with in their office but not to be in game just yet.

Just for clarity’s sake, it should be noted this isn’t an update post but a testing release post. It talks about things that are actually on the testing server. But since bombs weren’t in game with the last testing release and aren’t mentioned in the first post by the dev team then it’s safe to assume that they aren’t in game yet.

I really like the stamina changes! The game feels much more fluid with this. Is there a possibility that it will regenrate at a very slow rate in future without using skillpoints?

Updated OP with details of Testing 164.1 release.

8 Likes