The First 4D Miner Early Access Update Is Now Available!

Hello 4D HyperSupporters!

You all now have exclusive access to a newly-updated version of 4D Miner through itch.io!

Here is the link to the official download: https://mashpoe.itch.io/4d-miner-demo/patreon-access

Itch.io allows content to be made available exclusively to Patreon supporters. If you don't already have your Patreon account connected to an account on itch.io, the link above should walk you through the setup process.

In an earlier post, I asked all of you what I should add to the game next, and you chose improved lighting.

One of the major downsides of 4D game development is that certain things are much more computationally expensive, and lighting is a very unfortunate example of this. Lighting calculations are already expensive enough in 3D, and adding an additional dimension introduces a whole new order of complexity.

This meant that I needed to implement a bunch of optimizations in order to make the game playable after introducing ambient occlusion, which is the technique I used to improve the game's lighting.

If you haven't already seen my Patreon post about 4D Miner's new lighting system, I highly recommend you check that out. It has a link to a cool video showing off how "4D shadows" work with the new lighting!

Even with the optimizations, the game runs slower when "smooth lighting" is enabled, so I added an option in the settings menu to turn it off. Since the optimizations took longer to implement than I expected, I decided to add some other features to make this into a better update. This is good news to players with slower computers, who might not otherwise be able to enjoy this update!

I was able to add two highly requested features: world seeds, and flat worlds!

Each time you create a new world, a random seed will be generated, which means the world you create will be completely unique! You can also manually enter your own seeds, and you will always get the same world if you enter the same exact seed in the world creation menu.

Flat worlds are just like superflat worlds in Minecraft. Sadly, there is no "creative mode" in the game yet, and you spawn in without any items, so there isn't really a way to build anything in a flat world without editing your save file.

There are two easy ways to do this. You can manually edit the players.json file in the folder for your flat world, or you can replace the players.json file with a copy of one from another world.

In the future, before a "creative mode" is added to the game, I will probably either make the player spawn with a bunch of items in flat worlds, or make a "bonus chest" generate near the player's spawn point in flat worlds.

The final feature included in this update pertains to the game's credits. Now, all of the 4D HyperSupporters and 4D Supporters are listed in the credits of the game, and the HyperSupporters' names are displayed with some fancy colors!

In addition to all of the features I mentioned, this update also includes various bug fixes. The game will no longer crash if you spam the "T" key, various instances of the game crashing when minimized are now fixed, and I was able to make the view bobbing less jittery.

I also added new bugs to the game! The biggest one I currently know about is that clouds are no longer visible. I haven't been able to identify the cause yet, but I decided not to let it delay the release of this update.

I plan on releasing a new Patreon-exclusive update at least once a month. When new updates are released to patrons, previous updates will become available in the demo on Steam.

Since a lot of you wanted me to add a passive mob to the game, that's what I'll work on next. I already have a great idea for a new mob that I think will integrate nicely with the rest of the game!

Remember to check out the event planned on the 4D Miner Discord server for a live Q&A session! More info can be found in the #announcements channel.

For the next several days, I will be working on a devlog video, along with another video that features a bunch of content from the Discord server, so now is your last chance to submit content to the #4d-creation-compilation channel!

I hope you will all enjoy this new update along with some of the other content that I have posted on Patreon!

Thank you all so much for your support!

Mashpoe