So I’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news is that the second beta release of Forge World Ultimate is now available, and includes a handful of new terrain objects.
The bad news is that I’ve run into a few issues that are going to likely force me to limit the scope of what I offer within the map.
Controllable Bipeds Online
The first thing I found out is that, when I tested controllable bipeds online, it was causing other players to crash. I at first assumed this to be an issue with the map somehow – however, these all worked perfectly when playing alone and when using splitscreen (which is possible on PC within the development tools)
Turns out, however, that this is a known issue and is an actual limitation of Reach itself – controllable bipeds will cause desync between two clients, and seemingly that desync results in a crash. I explored converting the biped tags to vehicles – but the trouble is that when doing so, the bipeds were stuck being ragdolled and were essentially dead – so that was no good.
So, I added a (CRASHES ONLINE) warning to the category name – and for now at least, plan to keep them available as an option for players who may find them enjoyable or useful in single player.
However, this issue is nothing compared to the much more crucial issue, and is why I say that the plan is to keep them available “for now”…
Cache File Limitations
I have found out that there is indeed a hard limit as to how much content a cache file can contain. How did I learn this, you may wonder?
Well – when compiling a level at one point, I was met with this:
Not what you generally want to see when building a level. I’m not sure if the limitation has to do with actual file size, or if its simply a hard limit on the amount of tags which can be loaded at any given time. In either case, there’s a limit somewhere – and I’m currently balancing right on the edge.
I do plan to do a few optimizations to some of my custom objects – which, really, should’ve been done regardless.
First and foremost, the terrain flats are going to be optimized – the current version of them uses far too many triangles – as at the time, I thought I had to in order to have the model look smooth. Turns out, however, that isn’t the case – the issue is just that I had neglected to use “Smooth Shading” within Blender prior to exporting. After doing so and re-exporting, the model will still have smoother shading – even with a minimal polygon count.
Additionally, I’ll be simplifying some other models – mostly for aesthetic reasons. The cliff wall objects I put together are okay, but the heavily jagged nature of them causes them to be lit in a particular way where they have quite a few dark shadows – and they just end up looking terrible. A similar issue happens with the terrain slopes – this can be hidden by placing flats on top of them, but still – it’d be a lot better if they looked decent out of the box, right? As such, both of these will be simplified to some extent – not heavily, just enough to make them a bit prettier and less polygon-heavy. Ideally, I want to make sure they still line up with their old physics models – because manually configuring collision and physics models is a fairly tedious procedure, and I’d love to not have to do that again.
New Content
That being said, let’s go over some of this new content – even some of the stuff that looks less-than-perfect currently:
You can expect the appearance of the slopes and cliffs to be improved a bit – and I may attempt to touch-up the crystal formation shaders as well, but otherwise – that’s the bulk of it.
My hope is that the optimization will allow me to both finish the core planned content (large ship scenery, additional natural objects, etc) without cutting any existing content – however if I am unable to do so, it may be necessary that some or all of the controllable bipeds be cut – simply because they already won’t get much real practical use outside of machinima as it is, and if I need more space – that’ll just be the first to go by default. But as I said – I’ll be doing my best to ensure that as much content remains in at release as possible.
At any rate, if you’d like to download this release (or any past releases of course), check the download portal – linked below.