Lay of the Land 0.7.0 Temples & Castles Update Part I

Hey everyone,

The Temples and Castles Update Part 1 is here.

I hope you enjoy the update and thank you all so much for the support :)

You will need to create a new world.

Improved Castle Dungeon

The castle dungeon has been completely overhauled. It is now procedurally generated and much improved and better designed. Its labyrinthian halls hold many dangers and treasures. Enter at your own peril ;)

Improved Boss Battle

The stone golem boss battle has been improved with a new arena and many bug fixes.

New Structure Placement System

I've rewritten the games structure placement system to support bespoke placement requirements. The new harbor structure for example needs to be placed half in water/land.

There is also better support for many buildings in the same structure. For example the observatory/library is a 2 building structure that is placed near each other & connect with roads separate from the main road network. The windmill is also a part of the harbor structure.

Performance Improvements

I have made many optimizations to reduce CPU bottlenecks. The games performance is now much more consistent, stutters less frequently and will utilize your GPU much better.

Changelog

Structures

• Completely refactored structure placement system with support for multiple buildings able to be independently positioned/rotated.

• New Harbor Ruins

• Improved Cathedral Ruins

• Improved roads

• Better blending of structures and terrain

• Structures that cant be connected to the road network no longer have a disconnected bit of road

• Various other structure improvements

Castle Dungeon

• New procedural castle dungeon

• Improved stone golem boss battle

• Environmental traps: Spike Traps, Magic Beam Traps and Bear Traps

Useables

• Bear Trap

Performance

• Improved render thread performance by dramatically reducing number of draw calls with a voxel mesh merging system. Expect much better performance during sunrise/sunset

• Improved steaming of assets reducing traversal stutter

• Improved game thread performance

• Improved management of rendering components to reduce the number of components being used/created.

• Improved world loading time

• Many other small performance improvements

AI

• AI with a ranged attack will now no longer shoot at a wall if they can see the player but something is blocking their firing line

• AI will now attack you from much further out if you ranged attack them

• AI will now prefer to wander onto certain voxel id’s. e.g deer prefers grass. this should reduce things like bears wandering into your house etc

• Added ai death particle sound

• Increased ai step up height to 75cm

• AI will no longer spawn near obelisk (player spawn location in new world)

• Basic ai swimming

Misc

• Added missing build mode control hint

• Added a small knockback to arrows

• Added hotbar keys to inventory

• 3d ambient sounds now have occlusion

• Metal hit and impact sounds

• Improved throwing bombs/molotovs

Fixes

• Fixed tomato seed collision

• Physics objects now make less unnecessary noise

• Fixed building shape modes not resetting when unequipping a voxel item mid placement

• Fixed removing vegetation with flint dagger

• Fixed spelling error in anvil ui

• Fixed being able to use boomerang while using shield

• Fixed couches

• Fixed sand/gravel particles

• Fixed skeleton aiming

• Fixed skeleton legs not moving while throwing bomb

• Many other small fixes

Known Issues

Performance on low end systems in the castle dungeon can still sometimes be poor. Please lower your render distance until this is fixed.

How to Install

• Download the files attached on this post

• Place the downloaded files into the folder where you want to install the game.

• Double click LayOfTheLand_0.7.0_Installer.bat (if a Windows Defender Smart Screen window pops up, just click "More info" and then "Run anyway". If you're worried, you can see the code of the bat file by right clicking it and clicking edit to open it in notepad. The bat file is just extracting the zip files for you)

• Wait for the installer to finish

• Open the LayOfTheLand_0.7.0 folder

• Double click LayOfTheLand.exe

Thank you for all the support and I hope you enjoy the game :)