Lay of the Land 0.5.0 The Ambience Update

G'day everyone. I'd just like to start off by apologizing for the long delay between major updates and the lack of content in this update. The huge boost in popularity the game received from the building video lead to a huge number of bug reports and an extended hotfixing period. This is not a bad thing, I am extremely grateful for all the support and these bugs needed to be discovered and fixed at some point. I have also recently moved house 600km away from where I was living. As you can imaging this was extremely time consuming and I am only just now starting to get back into the swing of things.

You will need to create a new world.

Weather

I've added weather to the game. Each weather type can either be weak or strong. Also each biome can have unique weather e.g rain in Mystical Forest and dust storms in Outback Canyons.

Procedural Ambience System

I've made a procedural ambience system that places/adjusts ambient sounds depending on the surrounding environment/weather conditions. No more generic looping background ambience round here.

New Points of Interest

I have also added a variety of minor points of interest to the game. These replace the enemy camps you could find along roads. Their loot is currently super boring but that will change in the future.

Changelog

Weather:

• Added Rain

• Added Thunderstorm

• Added Dust

• Added Dust Storm

New Structures:

• Graveyard Ruins

• Obelisk Ruins

• Windmill Ruins

• Small Ancient Ruins

• Well Ruins

• Arch Runs

New Ambient Sound System

• Dynamic ambient sounds (birds, crickets, flys etc)

• Dynamic wind sounds

Voxel:

• Approx 2-3x speedup in voxel data generation speed by making use of Intel ISPC.

• Added Bedrock Voxel Material

• Added bedrock layer to bottom of world

• Added Vine Voxel Material

Misc:

• Increased thatch crafting amount produced

• New water shader

• Made day/night cycle faster. A day length is not 15 minutes

• Added horizontal rotation states to windows to allow for skylights

• Tools now target voxel directly on crosshair for edits

• Player now spawns in Obelisk Ruins

• Added invert mouse option

• Made damage received from physics objects more consistent

• Copper and Steel Shovels are now found in Windmill Ruins and Well Ruins

• Added enemies to mage tower

• Added copper and steel plate loot to observatory and abandoned quarry

• Explosions now remove vegetation

• Foliage draw distance now changes with view distance

• Dig edits now have an animation

• Can now shift click items in and out of hotbar

• Removed gold coins from loot tables

• Added open world folder button to load world menu

• Moved world save directory to AppData/Local/LayOfTheLand/Saved/SaveGames

Fixes:

• Fixed spelling error in crafting tutorial

• Fixed glass placed as a prefab being black (will only apply to newly placed glass)

• Fixed crash when removing foliage that is super close together

• Fixed accidently being able to craft glass

• Fixed max world name length

• Fixed crash when building at height limit

• Fixed nav mesh generation crash

Known Issues

• Loading screen does not show 1 frame after loading/creating world

• FPS drops when sun/moon is low and player is facing away from sun/moon. Cased by shadow rendering.

• Large lag spike when pausing game

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_0.5.0_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_0.5.0 folder

• Double click LayOfTheLand.exe

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