2019-10-21 Animals, Stargazer

[Haxus]

Animals
After a marathon of code writing, gen4 animals are now fully integrated throughout the SoH code, with one exception. Biosphere data at worlds continues to use gen3 animals because gen4 animals are not complete enough to replace them.

Avatars in primeval world now use gen4 bodies. This can provide an illustration of variations within a species. The villagers are all created using the same species, not the exact same DNA. By contrast, in gen3 creatures, each DNA combination is a species so every villager and town person is exactly alike.

Body poses are not finished; that is the topic of the week. Gen4 bodies in the update today will only pose standing, walking or running. Any other pose will not work, including dead/dying and head only poses. Those should be done in the next update, possibly later this week.

From here onwards, work on the new animals will be focused on the animals themselves. As soon as a few more pieces are finished, they will be ready to make avatars, at least within the capability currently available. That capability will expand as I finish various aspects of these new animals.

Stargazer
The indigenous village now has a new member, the Stargazer. All new avatars created after this update are strongly advised to speak to the Stargazer, to learn a bit of information critical to your survival. The Stargazer will be found at the outskirts of the village.

[Deantwo]

Stargazer

Interesting, I will have to check 'em out and add them to the wiki.

[Haxus]

There seems to be a problem with this update. I am working on it. Could possibly require a rollback to the backup made when this update was posted.

[Celarious]

I've noticed that my GPU sits at 100% permanently after this update in Primeval Mode, even with all graphics settings set to minimum. Is that normal?

[Haxus]

Problem was fixed. Servers restarted.

[Deantwo]

Problem was fixed. Servers restarted.

Are we waiting for a client update too? Issue with my ships does not seem fixed.

Nevermind, after a while it just popped up.
Maybe it is only because mine are old-style ships, but it seems to take the ship quite a while to load in.
Not sure if sitting down in the chair helped or not.

Or not? Yeah, still having issues. Can't make it reliably make my ships appear.

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Found a way to make my ship appear. A workaround I guess.
I am lucky enough to logout where the command station is, so I press the hotkey to enter the chair. I then press one of the on screen "Headlight" button (or press L) and my ship instantly appear. I will test a little more if I have time.

I do not own a new-style spacecraft, so I don't know if the issue is fixed there or not.

[Vooker525]

New style spacecrafts are not visible too. Changing lights didnt help. Probably because all my ship is self illuminated and doesnt have controllable light sources. Can order officer to switch lights if someone is not logged in near chair

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There is performance issue with gen4 characters. Looks like some of their shapes are rendered with as many polygons as possible. Or hairs. Or shaders.
There is a screenshot Max graphics settings and small number of lights (5 max). Many characters, trees, smoke, some buildings in distant but probably are not rendered. GPU is at 68%


Same settings but render distance for trees was reduced to minimum and its primeval world. GPU spikes to 99% most of the time

[Lochar]

I am having same trouble, flying around in invisible ship and pretty much stuck there unless I release my berth.

[Vectorus]

I'm also getting massive GPU usage on the new characters, 98% of a GTX 1070 and 8GB VRAM. Similar performance to being on a ringworld with your HUD switched off.

Note that my old Zapomatic, which used multi-million polygons, barely got a reaction from my video card; so it's something that's handled differently between ships and creatures.

[Haxus]

Client update will be posted shortly. After fixing the bug, I got busy working on other things and forgot to post a client update. I'm terribly sorry, realized it when I woke this morning.

I'll look for the cause of the massive GPU usage.