Update 0.3.1 - Planets

Summary
Medieval Engineers is back in action with a great new update! With the introduction of a highly detailed planet, a phenomenal world map that shows a symbolic depiction of the world, a fully updated rendering engine and many optimizations. Engineering in medieval times has never been this awesome. Not to mention all the other new additions to the game, like doors, new particles, a wardrobe, land ownership, and finally the ability to play as a female engineer!
Now it is possible to enjoy claiming territory, working together with allies to defend it from enemies, or siege and destroy other player’s castles! Go hunting for deer, fight off barbarian attacks, design your own banners, or simply enjoy the view of the world from atop your own castle. Most features of the game support modding and the Steam Workshop, which already has thousands of items available to use with the game.
Marek's Blog post: Medieval Engineers Re-Launch - https://blog.marekrosa.org/2016/10/medieval-engineers-re-launch_18.html

Wallpaper


Features
The most important parts for this release are, of course, the new features we added to the game. We list them here so you can easily see what was added over the past few months.

Planets
Highly detailed planet with hidden surprises. There are lots of places for you to discover, nice views, and well defensible locations. In the future, we will add more resources, and other elements that make the planet more interesting.
There is now a safe haven on the planet for you to start. This area is claimed by the Engineers Guild and cannot be claimed by players. It contains some basic structures so you can start from there, but you are free to move elsewhere.
It is also possible to mod the planet. A modding guide will be coming soon™.

Female Engineer
You can now play as a female engineer! Simply build a wardrobe and switch to the female character there. In the future, we will add some way for it to remember your preferences so you don’t have to keep switching every time you join a new server.

Improved Building
Similar to what Space Engineers introduced a while ago, we now have animated block rotations. This will make rotating your blocks a lot more understandable.
Building and pasting blueprints over trees will now remove the trees.

Decay system
Fallen castles will slowly decay from the world. This means that debris will not cause permanent server slowdowns.
Abandoned constructions and castles will also be removed if ignored by players for too long. This also helps ensure that lively servers don’t get destroyed by abandoned junk scattered around the planet.

Area ownership
You can now claim areas! Claiming areas will allow you to finally protect your things from thieves, they will be unable to just go through doors and gates.
In order to prevent players from claiming the whole world, you have to pay minor taxes to maintain your claim.
Claimed areas have an outline while building so you can see what you own.

Contextual GUI
Most interactable elements in the game will now have a contextual GUI. Through this GUI you will be able to configure elements in a more user-friendly manner.

Advanced world settings
We moved the advanced world settings from the custom world screen into a separate screen, and tidied it up.

World map
Of course, a large planet to play on is one thing, but you also need a way to see what it looks like. For that purpose, we have added a world map that will show you where people have started building their castles.

Compass
One of the ways to navigate around the world is using a compass. So we added a basic compass. It will inform you where to find your claims, the directions of the areas around you, etc.

Fast travel
Planets are pretty large, so knowing where other players are is not enough. You also need to be able to get to them. To that end we have introduced fast travel. Through the map you will be able to initiate fast travel to areas, which will help navigate the planet.
The fast travel is configurable through the game, you can add cooldowns, distance limitations, and limit whether or not players can only travel to inhabited areas.

Customizable Banners
Heraldry was a pretty major part of the Medieval Times and so we now added heraldry to the game. Decorate your castle with your own banners, or with your faction’s banners!
You can design your banners at the banner workstation, which you will have to build and place in the world.
It is also possible to mod the banners, you can find the modding guide here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=766998916

Wardrobe
The wardrobe allows you to change your engineer’s visual appearance. Change the suit colour or character model as you please.

Unified use and pickup keys
In order to remove the endless confusion with “Which key do I press?” we have unified the use, interact, pickup and configure keys into one cohesive key. Simply aim at what you want to interact with and press the F key. This is of course a rebindable key.
There are also interaction hints that will display on the screen, telling you what you can do with the object. You can disable them in the game settings screen.

Small doors
Finally you can lock your house. Place some doors and no-one will be taking your goulash from you! They also animate more nicely now.

Auto-walk
Walking long distances is a drag, so we added auto-walk. Press T and enjoy the walk. Pressing forward or backward will stop the movement. This key is rebindable in the key bindings.

Player inventory saved on the server
Player inventory is now saved on the server, if you disconnect or crash you will no longer lose all your things!

Improved renderer
We have the new renderer as well, and the results show.

Fixes Highlights
There were so many minor changes and fixes we cannot possibly list them all. So here are the highlights of the most important ones:
- unified pickup and interaction keys
- added system that puts you back on the surface if you fall through the planet
- added trees that drop wooden sticks, find them in the forests
- added small stones to the world, find them near roads
- added new particle effect for torches
- updated loading screen, it will now show what you saw when you saved the game
- updated character animations
- updated barbarian animations
- updated various GUI screens
- F12 no longer opens the developer menu, press Alt+F12, Shift+F12 or Ctrl+F12, no need to rebind your steam bindings just for our games now!
- tweaked barbarian AI, they no longer stop to ponder existence every now and then
- removed Castle Siege, unfortunately it was causing too many problems
- removed 32-bit support
- improved plants and other objects on the ground being difficult to find
- improved interaction on wooden gates
- updated manipulation tool, still WIP
- updated many texts for consistency
- fixed being unable to turn off flying in survival if you turn off admin mode
- fixed aiming problems while building/interacting with grids
- fixed being able to walk up very steep slopes
- fixed crossbow shooting and animations
- fixed camera problems with animations
- fixed lots of crashes.
- fixed an issue with modded scripts being discarded (Thanks Phoenix84)
- fixed some bugs with the workshop integration (Thanks Phoenix84)

Performance Fixes
Of course we also worked hard on improving the performance of the game. We did some major changes to the way the old grid system was updating, and this should lead to a much improved server simulation speed.
Additionally, we improved the renderer performance in several scenarios, allowing us to have much denser forests than previously.
- optimized grid updates
- optimized draw calls
- optimized particle updates and drawing
- optimized parallel functionality
- minor optimizations to destruction
- disabled Structural integrity on distant areas
- reduced default view distance
- reduced default vegetation draw distance
- fixed loading and replication priority on grids

Multiplayer Fixes
We also tried to improve the multiplayer experience, though the core engine part of the multiplayer is still being worked on by a separate internal team.
- removed some excessive client state synchronization
- fixed building sound issues
- fixed an issue in character state synchronization
- max players no longer limited to 16

Wednesday update:
Version 0.3.1.87423:

Fixes:
- Added interaction highlight to female engineer.
- Added interaction highlight to the easter egg. What could be there..?
- Added a keybinding reset, since we made so many changes to the keybindings the old keybindings needed to be reset. It will only happen once.
- Added a popup informing players when their system's memory does not meet minimum requirements. Since it may cause issues, it's best to give players a heads-up.
- Updated the ingame help screen.
- Updated some particles.
- Minor fix to the parallel threads for the dedicated servers. This should lead to a minor performance improvement for dedicated servers with less than 4 cores available.
- Tweaked building behaviour of large blocks. Cube outline should no longer disappear when unbuildable, distance checks should be better for regular blocks.
- Tweaked deer jump distance.
- Fixed some issues with building blocks.
- Fixed a minor rendering issue with the banner flags.
- Fixed resource decay set to off causing instantly decaying trees.
- Fixed rotation of multiblocks using the wrong keys.
- Fixed collision on the easter egg, it should be easier to walk around it now.
- Fixed the manipulation tool not dropping the manipulated object when the engineer died.
- Fixed the manipulation tool not resetting the manipulated object's velocity after starting manipulation.

Crash fixes:
- Fixed a crash on the server when too many players are harvesting plants at the same time. Added some logging information, if you see something suspicious in the server console let us know!
- Fixed another crash with harvesting plants.
- Fixed a crash in the banner system.
- Fixed a crash in the claim block and respawn system.
- Fixed some crashes in the definitions manager, some mods were accidentally causing some crashes.
- Fixed a crash in the math library.
- Fixed a crash with fracture pieces.
- Fixed a crash writing to the log when the game was shutting down.
- Fixed a crash in the manipulation tool.
- Fixed a crash with the doors.
- Fixed a crash when objects that need a material have no material definition.
- Fixed a crash in the ingame voice chat system.
- Fixed a crash when crafting the max producable amount.
- Fixed a crash in research definitions, some mods were causing crashes.
- Fixed a crash in the fast travel system.
- Fixed a crash on the map.
- Fixed a crash when players started placing blocks.
- Fixed a crash when a button icon was being converted and produced a bad result.

Thursday update:
Version 0.3.1.87521:

Fixes:
- Stones now directly go to your inventory while mining. This should reduce the performance issues on dedicated servers.
- Each time you start a new world the easter egg will be in a different location.
- All trees now correctly spawn logs when cut.
- Increased number of stones in the forest.
- Added a frame around the wooden plank door, this should make it easier to build and deconstruct.
- Added maximum floating objects to world settings.
- Removed dev/stable branch code from ME, your mods should be without the development tag now.
- Fixed an issue when rendering on embedded hardware, like Intel HD 4000 chipsets.
- Fixed some minor issues with the female engineer animations.
- Fixed lootbags attempting sub-orbital flights.
- Fixed various issues with the compass.
- Fixed door schematic icon.
- Fixed highlights on doors.

Crash fixes:
- Fixed a crash when building a multiblock inbetween two different grids and they were slightly out of alignment.
- Fixed a crash that could happen when the server goes down while the client is interacting with a wardrobe.
- Disabled grid navmeshes to fix several AI navigation crashes. New pathfinding is being worked on.
- Fixed a crash when AI is spawning after the renderer crashed and is busy trying to recover.
- Added additional logging to logs to help us find and solve future crashes more easily.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when pasting grids.
- Fixed a crash when swapping items in inventories.
- Fixed a crash when playing with foliage disabled.
- Fixed several other minor crashes.

Friday Update:
Version 0.3.1.87601:

Fixes:
- Added mining particle.
- Removed F12 tip.
- Temporarily set contested time to 6 seconds to circumvent a bug.
- Fixed issue where trees on a DS could be moving unpredictably after being cut and falling onto another tree.
- Fixed access permissions in the safe area.
- Fixed a bug in area ownership groups.
- Fixed some minor thing in the logs.

Crash fixes:
- Fixed a crash that could occur on world load.
- Fixed a crash when building.
- Fixed a crash in the environment items. (Mushrooms, berries, herbs, etc)
- Fixed a crash in the multiplayer code.
- Fixed a crash in the renderer.

 

SERVER SIM SPEED ONE!!!!