Greetings Founders! CardLife's July Update is now live and we've decided to call it the 'Day/Night Update'. With this content patch you will see a brand new lighting system which makes all the visuals much more vibrant, a bunch of quality of life improvements and at long last some optimisation tweaks which should more frames per second across a wide variety of PC hardware.
NEW Lighting System
Not only have we added a new day/night cycle to CardLife with a pretty new skybox to accentuate the different lighting conditions, we've also added new flare, sun shafts, bloom and ambient occlusion effects to the game. The result is a much more vibrant look to both indoor and outdoor areas which should create a more inviting experience:
NEW Monster - Dryad
The Dryad is a low-level monster and shares characteristics with its namesake in Greek mythology. This creature has been balanced so that you can kill it relatively early in your character's development and it'll drop magical essence which you can use to enchant your equipment.
NEW In-Game Settings Menu
We've always wanted to add more options to the in-game menu and your feedback on the official forums and Twitter have ensured that us adding more functionality has stayed near the top of our To-Do List. Version 1 of the in-game menu features new mouse control settings (rejoice inverted control fans) and different sound level controls. We plan on adding control rebind options in version 2 of the menu, launching in the August update. Our tech mastermind Seb has been working on basic client optimisation tweaks for the past month and with our off-site tech team GhostShark Games. This update features multiple client optimisations from their effort and during internal tests we've seen double-digit gains on frames per second. Obviously, every person's PC is a slightly different specification and may experience less or more of an effect from the changes, so please let us know in the official forums if this change has made a positive impact on your experience.
NEW Client Optimisation
This update features multiple client optimisations from their effort and during internal tests we've seen double-digit gains on frames per second. Obviously, every person's PC is a slightly different specification and may experience less or more of an effect from the changes, so please let us know in the official forums if this change has made a positive impact on your experience.This update features multiple client optimisations from their effort and during internal tests we've seen double-digit gains on frames per second. Obviously, every person's PC is a slightly different specification and may experience less or more of an effect from the changes, so please let us know in the official forums if this change has made a positive impact on your experience.
Other Improvements
- We're started to tailor the 6 different quality settings in the Configuration menu (Fastest, Fast, Simple, Good, Beautiful, Fantastic) to have more meaningful differences in terms of performance. Stage 1 of this work goes live in this update.
- New dynamic trace line when cutting down trees. This will prevent players wasting time by cutting diagonally across the stump.
- Players no longer spawn in zones that are hard to traverse on joining a new server
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where remote players could not be seen to change the weapon/tool they're carrying
- Fixed a bug where the "timeout" messages triggered when you're unable to join a server do not seem to respond to the user selecting the OK button.
- Fixed an issue which caused the frame rate to drop drastically sometimes when chopping down trees/digging holes.
- Fixed an issue where Tungsten looked far too much like gold.
- Fixed an issue where customisations of created items via the forge disappeared after player logged off and back on.
Incoming Server Wipe
As part of the optimisation changes for the Day/Night update, we will be commencing a server wipe of the official CardLife servers (1 thru 6) on Monday, 30th July. Servers 1- 6 have been renamed to 'PVP-Official-CardLife-00X (Old) - will be reset 30/07/18' so all players will know of the impending wipe.
The reason for the reset is that all the structures on our previous servers (some of them have over 40,000 different buildings) are causing mass frame rate drops for all those who play on them and it's going to take us time to debug and fix the issue causing the slowdown. To cover off the delay, we will have to reset the servers to their default state.
We've launched 3 new servers so that you can begin playing straight away and experience the optimisation tweaks that we've made in the Day/Night update. These are called '(New) PVP-Official-CardLife-001', '(New) PVP-Official-CardLife-002' and predictably enough '(New) PVP-Official-CardLife-003 '.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CardLife is still in an early alpha stage of development, so be sure to share your thoughts with us on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and our Official Forums. Remember, your feedback is vital to us making CardLife the very best it can be!
