Quick Morningstar Update for June!

Currently, I (Thain) am in the middle of a move and some medical issues, so I've been out while the rest of the team toil away in my partial absence.

One of the ongoing updates is a change to our biomes, creating new ways to differentiate the various materials the cliffs & rocks are made of instead of reusing the basic rock texture from the prototype.

The Sandstone Cliffs are looking really good.

We also have slate cliffs ready to go.

The Tiling Tops are for the "Max Level" of "mountainous" terrain. Basically we've decided to have pseudo-Z-levels, similar to StarCraft 1, in which there is a water table below which nothing exists, and a "mountaintop" level above which nothing exists. In between is a +1 level, a 0 level, and a -1 level. 

The 0 level is where cliffs can be mined out to become caverns. Above that cavern is either thin roof, or tick roof, or mountain roof. Similar to RimWorld, but here you can visually confirm it and see it. You won't be able to mine out anything on 1 or -1 to make caves, only mine them out for removing them. So you COULD wipe out an entire mountain or big hill if you want to. 

We also made "Forest Cliffs" that are made of Trees. This way we can have massive, dense stands of trees without having to render 9 individual tiles of single tress, possibly thousands of times. Which would annihilate performance. 

We'll still spawn singles near these dense walls to even them out visually, and make harvesting singles easy. But you'll be able to mine out the dense tree walls for some speed penalty, reducing them from 9 trees to 8 per "block." 

Dense tree areas will be ideal for lumber operations, but will slow travel rate on the overworld fast travel screen. 

This new system really takes things to another level and checks off important visual and mechanical questions we've faced since day one.

All these features, save the ramps and elevation changes, are in. The radial now targets the ground and doodads/characters, it expands and contracts when firing, and shows the angle of impact. All the caves exist now but we have some questions about collision with roofs and how to handle incomplete roofs, especially in regards to building off the 0 level, which currently we can't do. Everything must be built on level 0, so it's not possible to build on top of a cliff roof or cave's roof yet. 

There have been a lot of new developments in character animation as well, which I hope to show off in a video after the new build is sent out later next month. 

We're still hoping to meet the June milestone of having the Character Editor merged with the World Editor, and all the tie-ins for character sorting with the optimized world once again in July. This will mean that in August, we are reaching the biggest milestone, having all the collision, physics, characters, terrain, and layer sorting implemented in a vertical slice of these features. 

From August then we are working towards a Pre-Alpha, and the Combat Arena Demo will take center stage to workshop and dial in the fun of combat encounters via James and I, while Curtis splits off with Kent to develop the Open World Campaign & Sandbox. 

We'll remain forked again until January when we are done with the Combat Arena as a sub-feature of our Scenario Framework, and we then focus 100% on developing the campaign and sandbox open world from there on. 

We hope to release the Combat Arena as a standalone build distributed to our Patrons. It's a long ways off, and there are still a lot of questions to answer between then and now, but that's the goal.