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:
Get you “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.” - on stand by. This Testing release contains a wide collection of improvements, but most significantly, a first implementation of player creates Signs. Everything from “SHOP” to “Home Sweet Home”.
Please checkout @Jiivita’s video that explores and introduces the new Signs:
Great work and thanks from the dev team. 
Important:
Your character skill trees have been reset!
All skill points have been refunded. You will be asked to re-skill your character when you first enter the game world. (Don’t forget to learn your inventory expansions!!)
Release Notes:
- Art + Animation + Assets:
- Improved scale, rotation and position of objects for storage, plinths, basket and GUI.
- Softened the Warp edge VFX to look more consistent with the Portal VFX.
- Improved the 3rd person take hit small flinch animation.
- Fixed artefacts with rain and snow weather FX caused by horizontal drift.
- Consuming food and brews is now quicker.
- Make Spitter projectile physics smaller.
- Fix Spitter shooting animation to be in-sync with the projectile.
- Fix for characters playing the wrong animation when creeping after running.
- Updated all animations to have a short time to impact for a more responsive feel.
- Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Updated how colour of crafted output items are chosen.
- Randomise the rotation + flip of resource decals on blocks.
- Building:
- Fix placing torches onto invisible walls when placing a torch whilst selecting a flower.
- Allow changing the “type” of grass on a block using seeds directly without having to remove the old grass first.
- Fix that when placing blocks on top of grass that now don’t remove the grass, that the long bits of grass were not at least being removed.
- Beacon plots can now be coloured from Gleam to help distinguish between your different beacons.
- Allow more than 25 adjacent storage blocks in any orientation.
- Update Beacon Plot drawing to be clearer, plus fix not always drawing plot surfaces and not drawing plot when placing beacon control.
- Allow non-activated portals, and non-locked signs to be broken as individual blocks. Once activated, or once locked, the entity will become breakable as usual as an entire unit together.
- Machines:
- Machine crafting (including spark-cores and pipe networks) re-worked for performance and stability (was causing a fair amount of server crashes), generally speaking, you shouldn’t notice the difference, except that various restrictions will now have been lifted, such as being more free with placement to put machines that are a different type right next to each other for example. Pipes will now also show correctly whether they are connected to a spark-core with non-zero spark or not so you can see if a pipe is able to transmit spark to a machine. This also fixed bugs if you ever had longer pipes, where the machine GUI would show the incorrect amount of available spark if the spark-core was too far away from you. The one exception to this is spark-cores, which are now constrained to be at most 4 blocks wide on any axis, this may mean that one or more of your spark-cores may be removed from the game, but in locally migrating all the live worlds, this was less than 10 across the whole universe so actual impact is minimal.
- Machine pipes now have much tighter physics rather than being the full voxel size, and client will do a better job at predicting the changes to pipes and their neighbours when placing and removing them, now being much more important that they have tighter, dynamic physics shapes.
- Machine engines and advanced engines will now render lightning when connected, and not fully worn, towards the machine that they are powering… not that engines are available just yet for users to actually player with…
- Machines can now take ingredients from the machine output and players backpack.
- Various fixes around durability/wear of machines and sparkcores etc, correctly displaying wear in the GUI and preventing stacking which destroyed the wear state of the machines/cores. Power-cores will now correctly wear out, and display wear in the GUI and must be routinely repaired as machines do. Wear is now correctly applied to crafting tables, furnaces and unreleased engines. When placing spark-cores and machines, the durability values will be combined appropriately to get an average value. Wear will now also be visible in the hud details when hovering over machines, powercores etc.
- Portals:
- Portal activation/rendering logic update, portals should be much more responsive in terms of starting to load and being rendered when looked at, and will now take into account occluding geometry to not allow the client to start connecting to a portal that he can’t even see which may “sometimes” mean a portal takes longer to load because it waits to start loading until you can see it, but generally will mean far less “pointless” loading of portals just whilst walking around a town.
- Portal visuals updated when a portal is not being rendered to not just be a flat grey/black colour, but to use the atmosphere colour of that world with a more interesting effect displayed.
- Portals will now be visible through other portals (always as the above coloured state, no recursive portal through portal through portal through portal rendering nonsense!).
- Signs
- Initial implementation of Signs.
- Signs have a display text visible in the world, and a longer piece of additional text that can be read by anyone regardless of permissions if they interact with the sign.
- The display text on a sign has a choice of regular, bold, or italic font and will auto-scale to try to best fit the sign, the text is multiline and be left or right aligned.
- Signs come in two types, a “standalone” sign that is a fixed, sub-voxel size and is like a placard that can be rotated.
- The other are “combining” signs which are always 1m in size, and will combine with neighbouring sign pieces that are of the same block type, colour and direction, to make up bigger and bigger signs (10x10 at maximum).
- The combining signs will be placed as “crates” similar to machine blocks, and whenever a valid rectangle is made, will be replaced with proper sign pieces showing it can now be interacted with.
- Once a combining sign has had text added to it, it will stop combining and will be broken as a whole. Once a combining sign has had text assigned to it you can then rotate the sign text and change its properties.
- Signs have fixed physics similar to a door piece (but thinner) so will be collided with and walked on top of. The standalone sub-voxel sized signs will still have a fixed physics shape the same as combining ones.
- Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Character now doesn’t start placing blocks until the mouse selects a valid place to put a block. This makes building vertical columns far easier just look down, hold place block and jump.
- Fixed projectiles failing to hit the player often when the player is stood right next to a wall.
- Fix for client misprediction when walking at an entity while killing it.
- Physics:
- Physics tweaks to prevent the player fitting into half-block gaps consistently now.
- Physics tweaks to make swimming a bit more responsive and to fix issues of not being able to consistently swim above the surface of the water, and not being able to consistently jump out of the water onto ledges.
- Prevent edge-climb ability being used whilst attached to a grapple to not conflict with existing grapple-jump behaviour (no more accidentally letting go of grapples when near ledges due to edge-climb)
- Prevent edge-climb ability, grapple jumps, and jumping out of water from activating unless facing in the direction of the ledge.
- Creatures:
- Resistance is now a percentage chance to take no damage rather than a damage reduction.
- Elemental creatures resistances now consider element class.
- Fix for creature idle animations repeating until the creature moves. Creatures now randomly pick a new idle animation each time they complete an animation.
- Cuttletrunk projectiles now fire faster
- Death
- A new presentation has been implemented for when you die. You now need to hold the RMB to return to the sanctum after you’ve died.
- A negative status effect is now applied when you have been defeated. The Death Sickness reduces your attributes temporarily.
- Your health is restored to 25% after you’ve died. You’ll need to consume food to replenish your health.
- These changes are part of the new resurrection system where players can resurrect other players.
- Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- All skill points have been reset! Visit the skill screen to reallocate them.
- The crafter feats have been split up into the following categories: “Basic Crafter Feats” and “Advanced Crafter Feats” as there were too many for one category.
- Skills
- Added advanced block placement skill (in the core tree) to allow choice between fully rotational placement and simple placement.
- Reduced number of mastery skills from ten down to five, and balanced the effects across them.
- Added chisel skills to allow use of precision chisels (part of the tool mastery tree).
- Increased the number of skill points gained to be 1200 at level 50. The skill tree and the number of skill points is still a work in progress and will continue to change in future releases.
- Rearranged Resurrection and Rage & Focus skills in preparation for the release of those features (in the future).
- Objectives
- The number of items required to complete Hunting Creatures has been reduced.
- The number of items required to complete Time To Collect Resources has been reduced.
- The Fire Pit and Crucible objective have been merged into a single objective.
- The UI for the objectives shown on the HUD has been improved.
- Added an objective to teach players about adding Friends to their Beacons.
- Removed the sprint skill – you can now sprint from the beginning of the game.
- GUI + HUD:
- Main Menu
- Added new Knowledge screen with the information of resources and recipes currently unlock by the player. Press K to access the screen or access it via the Main Menu.
- Please note the shortcut for friends list has been removed.
- The Knowledge list expands when you discover new items and recipes.
- Social section has been removed. You can now find your friends list in the Character section.
- Improved footer legend information for all GUI menus
- The completed section of the Journal has been merged into the Objectives section to compliment the new filter system.
- Social has been removed from the Main Menu. The Friend list is now located in Character menu.
- Added new Knowledge screen with the information of resources and recipes currently unlock by the player. Press K to access the screen or access it via the Main Menu.
- Fix issues with various GUI screens like the warp screen that occur for a period of time after changing character (like not being able to warp to your location or beacon for a period of time for no particular reason).
- The beacon Permission tab now shows all your Characters (as well as your Friends).
- Added filter bar in machine, knowledge, character, objective and universe menus.
- Furnace crafting GUI has a perfectly smooth timing bar showing the crafting process, and much better responsivness when starting and stopping the furnace. The GUI now correctly clears the information about what is going to be burned when you remove the inputs.
- Improved GUI objective log presentation.
- Made GUI Field Of View consistent across all GUI screens
- Added new game options to show/hide gain, combat and chat logs.
- Improved the stamina bar feedback.
- Show Mastery effects on item detailed info popups
- Crafting:
- Updated recipe lists GUI, separated out Mass and Bulk crafting into tabs.
- Added reason why something cannot be crafted to Craft button.
- Corrected text and icon showing skill required to craft ingredients.
- Main Menu
- SFX + Music:
- Creature projectiles have audio attached to them.
- Explosions now have elemental variations.
- Engine:
- Improved Windows client crash handler. If the client crashes there should be a higher chance of generating a minidump to enable debugging of the crash. When the client is restarted after a crash which created a crash dump you will also be offered the chance to submit the crash dump to us, this will upload the minidump and previous session game log to us with the simple click of the yes button when asked (i.e. no more hunting down crash dumps to email to us).
- Change of log locations. On Windows the log is still found in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Turbulenz\Boundless but is now simply called log.txt rather than boundless_log.txt, we also now rotate the logs so you’ll find log.txt, log.txt.1 etc with up to 4 logs kept. On Mac OSX the log path has now moved to Library/Logs/Boundless/log.txt in your users home folder. As with the Windows version the log is rotated to main the 4 most recent logs.
- Don’t intercept app command keys to try and fix media keys not working with apps like Spotify.
- Fixed issues in updating of Level-of-detail chunks when blocks are modified that would lead to straggling bits of geometry hanging in the air after removing natural terrain, or that would lead to the lack of proper slope-generation in the LODs of user-built structures. This will not affect any issues that already exist in the worlds, but any changes to the worlds from now-on will have proper lodded-geometry created.
- Increased the accuracy and resolution of block-lighting’s affects on normal mapping, block-lighting should look more “accurate” now in terms of lighting directions. An immediate result, is that the sanctum corridor is now symmetrically lit, instead of having the left side far too dark with strange lighting artefacts.
- Made liquid simulation more intelligent in the presence of all the new more complex shapes.
- Reduce chunk data by >50%, giving quicker downloads, better caching and lower RAM use.
- Added support to allow delivery of chunk data via CDN’s, this will help reduce load on the servers and also allows users to fetch chunk data faster where other users in the same geographical region have previously loaded those chunks.
- Fixed a controls issue that led to things like “sticky keys” when going through portals to another world if keys were released at the instant you stepped into the portal.
Resolved Known Issues:
The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.
- Breaking the Campfire during the initial tutorial will reset some objectives and display the ‘Build a Temporary Campfire’ objective again.
- Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
- Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
- Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
- If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
- Pressing the Enter key on the Rename Beacon box will disable game functionality. Avoid this by clicking the Confirm option instead.
- Some feats are not shown on the GUI
- Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/ crashes the game on start up.
Known Issues:
The following items are known issues in this release.
- Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
- Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
- Damage indicator circle can sometimes remain on screen even when no damage is received.
- 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.
- 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 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 may unequip themselves after adding a stack of items to a smart stack.
- 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.
- Number of available feats is incorrect.
- 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.
- Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
- Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
- Shift-clicking any inventory item on the Furnace GUI when ingredient slots are full will cause that item to disappear. To retrieve that item, break the Furnace.
- Skill descriptions are not final.
- 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.
- When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
- When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.
- Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.
Testing 181.1:
- Fix being able to bulk craft with out the skill.
- Fix crash entering none ASCII text.
- Fix crash right clicking on items in storage.
- Fix sign colour crafting and placement.
- Fixed an issue where the death penalty reduction skill was actually increasing the death penalty
- Fixed an issue with remapping the interact button to a key other than ‘E’. NOTE: If you have already remapped the interact button you will need to select “Reset Controls To Defaults” on the Main Menu and redo your button choices before you’ll see a change.
- Fixed memory leak when changing world and moving to new areas.
- Significantly reduced memory use in the culling mesh and lighting generators. Can save >200mb in complex environments.
Testing 181.2:
- Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Removed objective claiming to fully complete an objective. Now the objectives autocomplete automatically when the player completes all the subtasks.
- GUI + HUD:
- Updated GUI’s newsflash presentation.
- Added new newsflash events.
- The Boundless Characters of all of your Steam friends are now automatically added to your in-game friends list making it easier for new players to connect with their friends already in the game.
- Engine:
- Holding a torch or other light-emitting block in your hand, and placing it onto the ground should now produce very similar results in terms of the characteristics of the light’s brightness and falloff, though holding it in your hand will still produce a “spherical” falloff rather than the “diamond” shapes falloff that lights placed in the world will have so along diagonals, the hand-held light will still reach a bit further.
- Changed the interaction distance to be the same as the block placement distance.
- Removed options to disable weather and volumetricFog. These are debug options which persisted into the GUI. The PostEffects option is also removed to simplify the screen as all it did was hide some of the other option toggles. There will be more changes here in the near future.
- Portals and Warps and World:
- The way the client chooses which meshes to use across different levels of detail has been updated and should remove the vast majority of z-fighting seen whilst waiting for the world meshes to be created, and you should no longer ever find yourself stood inside of low-level detail meshes for the world.
- Portals/Warps should generally load in much faster than before, with the game better prioritising what to load and create meshes for.
- Portals/Warps that are open, but not “fully rendered” (showing the “Waiting for Data” message) will now show a progress bar of the loading in the HUD so you can have an idea of how long it will take to fully load and become able to be walked through.
- The the way the server deals with physics meshes has changed, making them a persistent part of the world instead of created on-demand. This means the server no longer has to create physics meshes for the world which would often cause stalling/laggy behaviour when there were more players/creatures on the world due to it being too slow to create them, they are now loaded out of the world data directly and is much more responsive, this should hopefully mean that you never see laggy behaviour when going through portals/falling from heights/speeding around with the grappling hooks on busier worlds.
- Travelling through a portal/warp should virtually never cause mispredictions or rubberbanding even if changing inputs whilst going through.
- Travelling through a portal/warp, it was previously quite easy in more confined areas to end up teleporting up out of the ground after going through the portal because the spawn location calculated was inside of the terrain. This should no longer be possible.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed a crash bug when the players travel through portals/warps.
- Fixed the latency graph to sample the max latency every 0.1 seconds rather than the current value every 0.1 seconds.
