Hi everyone!

It's been a while so I'd like to write another update for people who don't check on our Discord server. In the last dev diary ( https://demiansky.itch.io/songs-of-the-eons/devlog/341192/january-2022 ) I mentioned that we're porting the game over to a custom engine. This process has been largely completed, with the most important systems like climate and vegetation already in place.

Many, like elevation, still need further tuning to get them to the same level of quality as that found in 0.2, but that is an iterative process and won't stop work on features closer related to gameplay.

Climate in particular ported over almost 1:1:

Plants stayed largely the same too:


Some of the systems changed a lot (tho, unlike elevation and erosion, largely for the better). For example, bedrock and stone layers. Previously, tiles were assigned a general category of rocks (acid plutonics, basic volcanics, limestone, etc) which were then further defined for the purpose of the local 3d view. That lead to tiles having duplicate data, as we couldn't modify old rock generation without rewriting it.
The two are now merged and rock types have explicit, concrete names, like andesite, gabbro, peridotite, etc.

Among new features is the ability to view local elevation at a subtile level within the tile inspector:


This should help with finding natural harbors or defensive positions, without having to load the city view itself.

On a related note, SotE uses square tiles now. These are much easier to work with when it comes to rendering and cache oriented optimizations so they'll be useful going forward. However, as it turned out, they do come with their own set of problems -- our old approach to erosion doesn't seem to mesh very well with them.

Lastly,  some of the things that were difficult (or impossible) to mod when we were using Unity are now exposed in human readable .lua files. This helps a lot with development as we can modify them more easily without having to recompile the game or wait for Unity's serialization to finish:

As usual, Solitarian streamed some of these developments:

As you can see, these videos are from 2+ weeks ago. I apologize for not posting them sooner.  I was originally hoping to only post this dev diary after Solitarian streams a build with the local 3d view included, but I decided to post it now instead, after being asked about it by people on our Discord server.

My work right now is split between incorporating feedback on the world generator and working on societies. I'm hoping to have some exciting news regarding them within the next two weeks. I'll keep you guys updated and post another dev diary when SotE has interactive gameplay features.

~ Cal