Testing 168: Tweaks, Fixes and Performance!

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.

Overview:

This release is a quality focused iteration of Release 167. We’ve fixed a wide spectrum of issues discovered in Release 167 and many older issues.

Release Notes:

  • Art + Animation + Assets:
    • 3rd person jump land no longer played automatically after sliding.
    • Consume 3rd person animations added.
    • Fixed creature decals.
    • Lightcube activation 3rd person animations added.
    • Slowed Wildstock run animation.
    • The top of Ice blocks is now tinted along with the rest of the block.
    • Upped block vertex distortion from 0.13 to 0.250 so ‘raw’ material types look more organic.
  • Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
    • Any recipe which can be hand crafted can now be crafted instantly on a crafting table.
    • Beacon fuel has been modified slightly.
    • Beacon Plotter, and Plot Remover now need ingredients to make.
    • Beacon plotters now smart stack.
    • Disabled being able to grapple other players. Was not intended, and causes griefing and an instance of rubber-banding whenever a player is grappled by someone else due to the inability to predict correctly. Grappling friends will be enabled again in a future update.
    • Fix torches can be placed on doors.
    • Fixed beacon control effects not always changing state.
    • Fixed grapple claw not showing in storage.
    • Ice and Glacier can now be broken with the totem and wooden tools. Gleam can only be broken with copper tools and above.
    • Skills needed to craft initial recipes tweaked (Copper Tools and Weapons, Fossil Extract, Glue, Nails and Extractor are now basic recipes, Titanium Firepit and Crucible are Machine 1 Recipes).
    • Stone spanners how have durability.
    • The range of tools is now dependent on the Control attribute.
    • Timber is now a fuel source for a Beacon.
  • Creatures + Combat + Characters:
    • Fix for creature drops sometimes appearing before the creature finishes it’s death animation.
    • Fix for creatures sometimes twitching during death animation.
    • Fix for dropped items disappearing when dropped while facing a wall (they didn’t actually disappear they would teleport to the top of the wall).
    • Fix if no valid NPC spawn points can be found for a player then no more NPCs will spawn for any other players.
    • Fix projectiles don’t harvest creature drops.
    • Fix spawning to not allow NPCs to spawn outside the max distance from players. This stops huge spam of NPCs when lots of players stand on a high tower. A new creature spawning system is in development that will allow for aggressive creature raids.
    • Improved pick up logic so that if a pickup falls through the player they will pick it up.
    • New Wildstock melee attack:
      • The Wildstock melee is now properly predicted. This fixes issues where players were hit by the Wildstock but on their screen they avoided it.
      • This makes dodging the Wildstock a lot easier so to address the balance the Wildstock will now charge for much longer and will change direction 3 times.
    • Only spawn new NPCs near to players (not portals). Portals can still keep NPCs alive but they won’t spawn new NPCs in.
  • Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
    • A New Dawn Feat has been renamed to First Steps.
    • A number of text changes has been made in various areas of the game.
    • Fixed an issue where the Daily and Weekly timers were displaying the wrong information.
    • Max level has temporarily been reduced to 35.
    • New Objective added to teach players about Chiseling blocks.
    • Objective “Build a Warp To Your Beacon” has been updated.
    • Re-balanced recipe skills to improve the beginning of the game.
    • The second exit from sanctum now behaves like the first, remaining open permanently once open unless manually shut down.
    • XP awarded for crafting has been reduced.
    • XP awarded for feats has been adjusted.
    • XP awarded for killing creatures has been reduced.
  • GUI + HUD:
    • Added new feats menu on the objective screen.
    • Changed block placement highlight to be more obvious and will always render if a block is held in either hand. It now has more colours:
      • Green - In beacon with permission to place and valid placement.
      • Orange - Outside of a beacon and valid placement (these blocks will be regenerated).
      • Red - Cannot be placed here.
    • Disabled block outline for tools (except Chisel).
    • Fixed seeing planet markers through other planets.
    • Fixed tooltip position to avoid showing it out screen.
    • Speed up GUI rendering, especially when HPET is enabled on Ryzen.
    • Updated item details popup box
    • Updated Portal GUI
  • Engine:
    • Fixed artefacts in sun-lighting of entities to be much closer to voxel lighting results, and fixed a couple minors bugs in block-light directions for voxel rendering.
    • Fixed breaking decals sometimes showing as barbed grass texture.
    • Fixed for water not flowing out of chiseled blocks when they are removed.
    • Fixed incorrectly trying to render more than one portal, killing performance for users.
    • Fixed portals getting stuck in grey state when going back and forth between worlds.
    • Fixed random specks on the screen when holding light sources, particularly the light cube.
    • Fixed the two known crashes in the new multithreaded rendering leading to random occasional crashes for players.
    • Fixed too many portals becoming active when there are multiple world connections, killing performance for users.
    • Increased the variability of error messages shown on portal/warp HUD info, whether portal is trying to reconnect/connect, is grey because we’re still waiting for data, or because we’re already rendering another warp/portal, or is black because we already have too many active portal connections.
    • Portals that fail to connect to the destination world will now retry after a short interval (currently 5 seconds) instead of remaining stuck grey until you reload the game.
    • Reduced one of the bottlenecks associated with updating the game for rendering, may improve FPS slightly for players whilst moving around the world or going through portals.
    • Reduced the cost of entities on the other side of portals.
    • The game will now monitor network status to servers refusing to connect to servers if the network would not be stable enough to play, or disconnecting servers if the network becomes too unstable once you’re already connected. In the case that this is the world you’re currently in, the game will try and log you out appropriately so that you will be put back into the sanctum (and you can choose to do a standard log-off to reduce that time if you wish), but in the case that the server is too unresponsive, or that the server really does go down for whatever reason, you will still end up onto the error screen where you will need to wait until the the character data becomes available to use again.
  • Server:
    • Fixed server crash using the furnace.
    • Fixed server crash when a player changes to a tool/weapon in the sanctum then hits a block or entity after going through a portal.
    • Reduced bandwidth usage of physics state from the server
    • Reduced network socket traffic ~2x.
  • World Builder:
    • Fixed most cases of being teleported up whilst editing a prefab.
    • Fixed worldbuilder where some prefabs would crash as soon as you joined in the client, and fix a crash if disabling blocktypes whilst viewing a world-generation in the client.

Resolved Known Issues:

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

  • 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.
  • Cannot switch tabs on Inventory menu using shoulder buttons on a controller.
  • Fixed Feats - Daily and Weekly Login tasks not functioning. (However, you may need to wait up to 24 hours to see the fix.)
  • Gem grappling hooks retract automatically when hanging.
  • Occasional visible specks appear on screen.
  • Sound effects for Portal and Warp Conduits may be missing.

Known Issues:

The following items are known issues in this release.

  • [new] Beacons which are greater than 100 metres from the centre may not function correctly.
  • [new] Illegal protocol message sometimes appears after going through a portal.
  • Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
  • 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.
  • 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 https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
  • If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
  • Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
  • Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
  • 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.
  • Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
  • 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.
  • Placing an item into the Crafting Table will somehow miss the intended slot and will drop instead.
  • Portal UI text overflows when the portal token name is very long.
  • Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
  • Skill descriptions are not final.
  • Some creatures may disappear instantly and drop items before their bodies hit the ground.
  • 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.
  • Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/ crashes the game on start up.
  • World Builder currently does not work on Mac.
  • Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.

Testing 168.1:

  • Removing level cap as we have people at 50 now.
  • Support packets in protocol beyond 64kB.
14 Likes

I must get all my @Scratchnwiff griefing out of the way before this hits Live…

6 Likes

Welp… Guess it’s time to get all my crafting done before this hits…

4 Likes

Seems to be 1xp per item crafted now, regardless of what it is - for what I can test anyway - as opposed to sometimes 4 or 5xp/item on the live version.

thanks for that

4 Likes

Now this is awesome, creature raids are now a feature!!
We did it!!! :doug:

14 Likes

From the center of what?

I believe he means plots @brook-monroe

On a different note, I am curious how the level 35 restriction is going to affect players who are already a higher level.

The new feats display is great.

Are the XP values dependent on current level though?

14 Likes

Oh my goodness. So much better. <3

“No creatures were harmed in the development of this feature.”

… a total lie.


Gut question - assuming that there are always ambient creatures to discover in the wilderness whilst exploring, roughly how often do you think the game should trigger a creature swarm raid?

12 Likes

What causes said swarm? Does it simply happen at random intervals to each player? Should it maybe only happen if you’re a certain distance away from Beacons, to catch people off-guard in the wilderness?

2 Likes

Maybe once (or twice) a week, but alternate the swarm location between the top 5 settlements on a planet - It’ll give people even more reason to visit other places!


Edit: This is also taking into consideration that creatures will not be as easy to kill in the future as they are currently. You don’t want a swarm raid to prohibit people’s enjoyment of the game, so I think too often will be too much.

4 Likes

thanks that you add this … it’s a pity … I lost a lot :frowning: see you at the final release

I think it should be based on a lot of things, such as how many players are active in the area, how often creatures are killed, and how long since the last event nearby. It should happen between once every 3 days and once every two weeks for a settlement of about 2 dozen active people, more often for larger settlements and less often for smaller ones. Maybe have some more variations like increasing the size of the swarm based on the number of players nearby, as well as having different tiers & elemental variants randomly.

It would also be cool to have ‘herds’ that don’t necessarily attack the player unless they’re really close, and have an alpha that is a tier higher of the same creature. This could have some interactions with the other creatures too, like a group of spitters could attack the herd and the alpha runs over to fight them off. Would add a bit of life to the landscape if anything.

5 Likes

I think the swarm should start with a high enough threat level, as a form of retaliation.

I’d say max once every hour but others may disagree

1 Like

I thought they were always in the center.

are you reduced a jump height twice?:scream::cold_sweat: please dont do this on live!!

1 Like