Worldfall beta 0.9.8

0.9.8 beta: statues, VR, shape the land, one world, kings' orders

General fixes (16 October)

• Digging sound: the shovel's sound no longer plays for ever. It was the game's held shovel-power sound, which never stops once started as a one-shot; the town's dig crews set it off too.
• Your weapon stays yours: towns no longer swap a piece of your gear for one from their armory. The body you control is left alone; arms come through the smith, loot and the armory trade as before.
• Bedroll: after a night on the bedroll your weapon's slot is chosen again, so the next click isn't another night and another save.

Fixed on 16 October

• Caves: E at a cave's mouth goes in with a shovel or a pickaxe out.
• Pickaxe: the pickaxe from a trader or the workbench mines rock and ore.
• Ending it: "It's over between us" works when your partner lives in another realm.

Added on the afternoon of 15 October: textures on pack models

• Image textures: a pack model with an image plugged into its material's Base Color is drawn with it, through the model's UV map. PNG and JPEG, packed into the .glb by Blender's exporter or saved beside it in models/. A textured material keeps its image where the game would recolour the slot, and the kind's grain is left off it; light, shadows and the finish still apply.
• Crisp or smooth: images 64 px or smaller are drawn texel by texel, bigger ones blended; "textures": "crisp" or "smooth" under the model in worldfall.json chooses. Pixels under half alpha are holes.
• The pack's card in F2 > Mods lists every texture it drew, and says why one could not be read.
• Fixed: every model drawn white on the GPU renderer right after the textures update (trees, people, hands). The texture sampler now only runs for a pack model that carries an image.

Added later on 15 October: statues, VR, settings

• Statues: Humans, elves, orcs and dwarves each raise their own hero on a round column you can climb, with a ruin of its own when pulled down. Every statue is one size now.
• Other peoples' houses: Cats, bees, ghosts and the other peoples now give you land for a house.
• Moving to a new village: When your king founds a new town, a herald asks you first instead of sending you.
• Stuck: Valleys in a Terrainy world shift slowly instead of jumping, and never under a house. If you are held fast, you are eased out.
• Ice: Frozen water is a still white sheet with pale cracks, not open sea.
• VR: Effects match in both eyes and shadows are drawn once for both. Rooms are real 3D in the headset. Point at the wheel to pick, the hotbar is on your wrist, the sticks move a highlight through windows. Menu button: tap for settings, hold for the map. Left-handed mode in F2 > VR.
• Settings: F2 is sorted into sections, and every setting has a small ? that says what it changes.
• Classic: F2 > Graphics > Look: the painterly picture with crisp pixels in the distance and deep blue nights. It replaces the GPU finish row.
• Far creatures: Creatures far away and out of sight are simulated less often while you play in first person (F2 > Graphics > Crowds).
• Fixed: on the CPU renderer frozen water is drawn bright, as on the GPU, not dark blue-grey.

Added on 15 October: shape the land

• Flat or Terrainy: the first time you enter a world in first person it asks which land it has. Terrainy carves valleys with the rivers in their beds, ridges, hill terraces, mountain tarns that spill as streams and waterfalls, and sea cliffs under the hills. Flat is the land as before. The answer is kept with the world.
• Dig and fill: a shovel or a pickaxe on the hotbar; hold the left button on the ground to dig, the right to fill. A shovel moves soil and sand, a pickaxe rock. Digging gives dirt, sand, stone and ore; filling spends them. Dug earth is raw and greens over days. Dig deep enough and the game's own tile changes, so the map, towns and water agree.
• Cliffs: steep faces show their rock in layers with ledges. A drop of more than two tiles hurts you; everyone slows on a cliff.
• Lakes: a hollow dug above the sea fills with rain over a day or two, spills as a stream with a waterfall at each drop, and fields within three tiles of any water grow a quarter faster.
• Caves: cut three bands into a rock face with a pickaxe and it opens: ore veins and dens with beasts, often a hoard deep in, and one cave in four is a dungeon with a boss guarding a special weapon. Bring a torch.
• Earthworks: in planning (Y) the Earthworks tab drags a job over the ground (level, lower, raise, moat, canal, terrace). The town's idle folk dig it for a wage per tile; a dig crew can be hired for a day; a king orders royal works with R from the treasury. Building sites are levelled by their builders as they go up. Towns no longer build on cliffs.
• Earthshaping: a spell to raise, sink or split the ground at range, taught by an enchanter once you pass a teacher's trial.
• Climb up: jump at a rock, a roof, a stack of crates or a wall and you pull yourself onto it.
• Rocks and bushes: rocks and ore take the look of the land they lie in, with a rough grain; fruit bushes match their biome and are smaller.
• The sea has a floor: shallows show the sand through clear water, deeper water darkens with depth. Ships heave, pitch and roll on the one sea everyone swims in.
• Courtship over days: a romance meter fills over days of talk and fades when you are away; flirting is an exchange answered gently, boldly, playfully or sincerely, three a day; ask about them and remember what they say; hold Tab for romance, opinion, mood and devotion; new courting quests, then a ring from the workbench and a proposal on one knee.
• Voices: people say their lines in their own voice, made of the game's own talk sounds (F2 > Sound > Voices). Women and children sound their age.
• Young animals: pups, kittens, chicks and a rooster have models of their own.
• Faster in big worlds: a town of 4,700 people went from 11 to about 20 fps in first person with the same picture. Trees stay past 30 tiles; the flat map is held while the 3D god view covers it; F2 > Graphics > World steps.

Added on the evening of 14 October

• The map and 3D agree: day and night run on the game's map too (F2 > Game > Map night). Houses on the map light their windows only while someone is in and awake, draw curtains at dusk, smoke while someone is home and open the door as people pass (F2 > Game > Houses on the map).
• Look inside: zoomed in close on the map, the roof under the mouse fades to show the floor plan and who is in it. Click someone to select them; G takes them over and you wake where they were. Everyone in a house has a place there, the same on the map and in 3D. Leave a body indoors and the view rises out through the roof.
• Near you, people use the door, sit where they sit down, and those with a torch carry its light.
• Finding people: ask anyone "I'm looking for someone." for a name. The town hall's ledger lists the town's people.
• Far trees and buildings in 3D: past the detail distance they are their 3D models instead of the game's sprites (F2 > Graphics > Distance > Far trees and buildings; Low keeps sprites; GPU renderer only).
• Classic finish: closer to the CPU look, with darker blue nights.
• 3D god view: faster over big towns. Crowd detail (F2, off by default) animates far people on the graphics card.
• House stairs: no more view jumps going up and down, and fewer invisible walls in rooms.
• Campfires: walk over the stones and under the pot. Step into the flames and you catch fire.
• Smoke and mist fade where they meet the ground and trees instead of cutting a hard line.
• Packs: models made in metres come out the right size, and "fit" scales a model to the one it replaces.

Added earlier on 14 October

• Ships on order: on your town's card on the war map, order transport, trading and fishing ships from the king's purse. A free dock builds them, up to three of each kind per dock.
• Quicker boarding: soldiers near a ship step aboard at once, and the order bar has a Board button.
• Guards: as king, hold E on someone to order your guards to kill or execute them. Killing a foreigner offends their realm.
• Lights: set down standing torches, wall torches, lamp posts and braziers anywhere on land (Y, Lights). Each costs supplies from your bag, and they never go out. Towns put up their own lights as they grow.
• Forging: crafting is a grid with a recipe card (stats against what you wear, what you have and need, the odds of each quality). Pieces are forged in a queue with hammer blows at the workbench; each workbench level adds a roll for quality.
• Carried items: people carry what they work with, on the shoulder, in their arms or over the shoulder. The item on your hotbar is in your hand and goes to your mouth when you eat. The ten work tools are remodelled.
• Voices: people speak in their own voice, by their traits, job, age and mood, and remember you between talks.
• Rivals: you can court someone who already has a partner. The partner gets jealous: first a warning, then a brawl. Being seen costs you standing in town.
• Subspecies: all ten mutation skins and eighteen kinds of egg in 3D; the fire spirit, fire slug, bioblob and unicorn fixed.
• Slower years: three slower speeds in the game's hourglass, and F2 > Game > Years pass.
• Weapons: all 53 held weapons remodelled, with crisp forged and cut forms, real metals, one-colour grips and flat butt ends.
• Fog and effects: the glow of fires, torches and blasts no longer washes the picture in fog.

New

• Join codes: hosting shows a short code with a Copy button. A friend types it in to join; the code holds your address.
• Steam players join through Steam, with an Invite friends button on the host's card.
• Worlds hosted on your home network are listed by themselves. Phones and Macs join from this list or with a code.
• Update and join: when two players are on different versions, the older one can update from where they got the mod and restart straight into the world.
• Lightning strikes redrawn: a leader from the cloud, a branching white stroke in a blue glow, sparks and electricity over the ground, two restrikes and a glowing scorch. Far strikes still show as a bright fork.

Changed

• No port forwarding: the host's router port is opened automatically where the router allows it (UPnP).
• The host card warns when Windows treats your network as Public, which blocks others from joining.
• Animal droppings are a soft brown coil instead of something that looked like stones.
• Homes no longer wait a day before they grow another size.

Fixed

• A refused player only saw "Connection closed". The restart after syncing mods didn't wait for the game to close.
• Copied gear in multiplayer: a weapon or armour a joiner put away came back in their hand while it was also in their bag.
• A piece another mod keeps off your hand now stays in your bag instead of vanishing.
• On WorldBox older than 0.51 Worldfall now stays off and says how to update, instead of throwing errors every frame. A repeating error is logged once a minute, so the game's console no longer slows the game.
• Kings couldn't open View scene from inside. It now opens from a house, a ship's cabin or a mine, and you command the battle from there.

Downloads

• Worldfall.zip: the plain mod (Windows, Linux, Steam Deck, Intel Macs).
• Worldfall_NML.zip: the NeoModLoader version (also on the Steam Workshop; use this on Apple Silicon Macs).
• Worldfall_Android.zip: the NeoModLoader version sized for phones (early, untested on real phones).

Multiplayer needs the same version on every PC: update to 0.9.8.

SHA-256

• Worldfall.zip 2058e4f30831a02ee76d31891ec49492af55972c53a3f58d62bd2039e4e033d3
• Worldfall_NML.zip 8edcdc283a6c1f958d780136cec4dfef6c5629f090308a0d620e697d2deda876
• Worldfall_Android.zip 5c117195fe43990edb3da9bf0bbcfe49c8d5361b4269427192ea39d2c5224838
• Worldfall.dll (in Worldfall.zip) 7bc78a6bcf63bee55a6c1b928e3ef2b8f15b5726882cc871f835b31f3059d0f7