Dev update 🛠️
Big performance win. The stutters that hitched the game while walking around the world are gone. Crossing chunk borders was forcing the GPU to recompile shaders mid-frame, sometimes three times over. The shader warmup got rebuilt so everything compiles before it's ever drawn, heavy work like grass generation is now spread across multiple frames, and a rendering bug that was flattening the frame is fixed. Exploring is dramatically smoother.
Creature highlighting got the same treatment. Hovering over an animal or entering war mode near one would make the game jerk for as long as the cursor stayed there, and it was invisible to every profiler available. The culprit was the way the game figures out what's under your cursor: it forced the GPU to stop mid-frame every single time. That's rewritten so it never stalls the frame at all, and hovering over things is now free. Profiling tools improved along the way (worst-frame tracking instead of averages, since an average can hide a stutter) so regressions like this get caught early.
Controls got a real pass. WASD movement with middle mouse to swing the camera, so the mouse isn't the only way to play. Shift-to-run no longer fights the direction keys, holding right-click to run while left-clicking now actually registers the click, and there's an Escape menu with fully rebindable keys.
Potions are in. Five kinds across three grades:
- Healing: instant, no channel, no interrupt
- Cure: clears what's poisoning you
- Stamina: a stam boost for when you need to move
- Venom: coats your blade instead of being drunk, so a poisoned sword behaves exactly like one you found that way
- Explosion potion: a thrown bottle with a four second fuse, visible to everyone nearby, including whoever threw it. Full damage at the center, half at the rim, and it hits friend and foe alike
All potions share one ten second cooldown, so a bag full of them isn't just a second health bar. Bottles glow from the inside, which makes one dropped in grass at dusk findable. Sold by a new Alchemist rather than off the provisioner's shelf.
Looting is now live for everyone. A corpse isn't owned the way a backpack is, so its window works as a subscription instead. If several people are looting the same body, everyone's window updates as items come out of it. No more grabbing at something that was already taken.
Quality of life. The login screen no longer stalls while the world loads behind it, plus fixes to animations and name labels.
In progress: a real NPC aggression system. Instead of a mob always swinging at whoever hit it last, creatures keep a threat ledger, so group fights have actual shape and tactics matter.