We’ve released version 5.4 of Eco, adding some new features and a lot of new bug fixes.
Should make playing a lot smoother! Update or pick it up here: www.strangeloopgames.com/eco, and you can join us and the community on our Discord chat room here: Discord.gg
Added new effects for interacting with the landscape.
Check out our first-pass effects here:
Got a new underwater effect running:
Performance
- Upgraded the server to .Net 4.6.2. If you are running under mono on Linux or OSX, you may need the current beta of mono (4.8)
- Trees on the minimap are now batched, which should result in improved performance
- Improved performance of visibility checks for world chunks (Thanks @ChronosWS!)
- Pooled plant objects for faster instantiation (Thanks @ChronosWS!)
- Updated speedtree shaders to use instanced rendering. This should dramatically improve performance for most users, if their GPU supports it (DX11 / OpenGL 4.1)
Bug Fixes
- Further improvements to chat functionality and channels. Should fix numerous cases of messages becoming missing.
- Fixed problem with renderscale slider that caused unnecessary render target creation every frame.
- Fixed issue with world objects where sometimes the crafting timers did not properly count down.
- Fixed vehicles not remembering how efficient they are on various terrain after a reload of the server.
- Fix plant highlighting when the highlighted plant changed shape during highlight
- Fixed a stack overflow issue on some machines due to expression compilation
- Fixed an issue with the chunk builder when building meshes that had more than 65534 vertices.
New Features
- Oil is now a finite resource. Fixed numerous issues with harvesting oil with pumpjacks.
- Real effects for diving underwater.
- Beginnings of animations for character avatars
- New block effects
- Added mouse sensitivity control
- Triggered the freshness (Thanks @stett!)
- Improved block targeting and placement cursor
- Backup plugin now saves its config, and has settings for frequency of backups to keep
Next up: 5.5
Eco 5.5 is going to be a much faster turn around, and we’ll have a ton of new stuff we’ve been working on in there (economy system, contracts, currency, tax, farming, tech tree balancing). We’re hoping for a couple weeks, and it will affect a lot of the early game, so it could be a good time to restart a playthrough but not required.
Thanks and let us know any questions as always!
-JohnK, john@strangeloopgames.com