Hello everyone!
HavenCraft Alpha 6 releases next Thursday, September 24th! This time, it’ll also release as a demo on Steam, so be sure to wishlist it there as well.
Time for some more Alpha 6 reveals, and we have a bunch!
You’re building a new town after your old life got destroyed in the catastrophe, and there are many things your villagers are now missing. One of these is a place for spirituality!
You don’t have to build your temple this grand, but you certainly can!
The temple is an advanced “public-service building”, like the tavern. You unlock it in the midgame, but can keep extending and upgrading it as you unlock more and more advanced pieces:
All kinds of new furniture can be used to decorate and upgrade the temple.
Good news for the builders! I’ve already seen a lot of cool buildings in some of the saves you’ve sent me, but the reality was that we only had a handful of materials and patterns to choose from. This changes now!
For Alpha 6 we more than doubled the number of walls, floors, wooden beams, etc. Check it out:
New walls, floors, and wood beams.
Besides the house pieces overhaul and extension, we also revamped a bunch of workstations. The workbench, stove, grindstone, and the shelves all look much better now. You’ll see them soon yourself!
So, one time I mentioned that we want to have at least 300 villagers living in end-game towns. One player took that as a challenge and built some HUGE towns.
Which is great! That gave us a lot of real-world performance measurements for large towns. We optimized the heck out of these saves and we ended up with a lot of improvements.
Big towns run way better now.
Villagers: The villager behavior got eleven rounds of optimization. Villagers now skip most of their thinking (don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds :D ). Especially for sleeping, sitting, idling, etc. they just chill and wait for a bit before thinking of something else to do.
Work planning: This is the most expensive part of villager behavior. There is lots of pathfinding involved and lots of conditions. Villagers need to check each stockpile on their plot, each farm bushel, each workstation, each item they need to collect or deposit in order to accomplish a task. That’s why this calculation got a major overhaul, now running on other threads so the main thread isn’t blocked by it.
Rendering: We already introduced optimized “batched rendering” in Alpha 5, but now we optimized and improved it a lot. Running faster and with better LOD-models, too.
Everything else
It’s not perfect in all aspects yet, but that’s the nature of game dev! Now go ahead and break the game again, send us some saves, and we’ll optimize it more!
This is the other big visual change!
So far, lighting in HavenCraft looked great at night, when the torch shadows make the game very atmospheric. But if you were indoors during the day, you’d get neither torch shadows nor significant sun shadow effects, so the game ended up looking quite flat.
We managed to implement a new kind of ambient lighting, which works “kind of” like the SSAO you see in other games, but not really. The effect is much better, much clearer, not restricted by screen space calculations and very performant. It’s custom-built for HavenCraft and it’s basically a “lite” version of global illumination that looks good without heating your GPU too much.
In short: the lighting is much better!
Without and with the new ambient occlusion.
HavenCraft can be a bit like the Sims or Founders’ Fortune in that it’s fun to watch your villagers go about their day.
That’s why we spent a lot of time on the animation system. Not only is the tech itself better (no more sliding across the floor, villager <-> furniture animation is synced up), but we also made a ton of new animations, some even with particle effects, sound effects, and so on.
New animations in Alpha 6:
I know some people have been asking for more sound effects, and Alpha 6 is taking some big steps here.
First up, we added footstep sounds, properly changing with the material you’re walking on (wood, stone, grass, snow, etc.). There’s also swimming sounds and a lot of additional sounds for animations, like hammering at the forge, sowing and harvesting crops, sharpening tools at the grindstone, etc.
That’s far from all changes for Alpha 6, but you’ll be able to find the others in the changelog in the next post. Or find them yourself when it releases next week, on Thursday, September 24th.
I’m already looking forward to your feedback, but until then: Happy playing!
