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Painful rerelease

We had to make it quick

Model Changes

Adjusted Textures - Luke

Looking at MSC models and materials outside of MSC, i have realised, my models do not exactly match other models and world materials.
I was going for a lower res more bland texturing.

I had adjusted the textures on almost all my models to be some higher-res, and crunched their colour ranges down and added dithering.

All these changes have been re-uploaded to asset.party

We have been working on fixing and rewriting a lot of the game jam code, and we are finally proud to present My Summer Cottage again!

Some things needed full rewrites, some things needed improvements, and some things still need a lot of changes.

We will keep working on the game till we have it in a state ready for a standalone Steam release!

There's more content that we're working on but couldn't implement in this release due to garry suddenly wanting to open the floodgates and featuring our game, so expect them soon-ish.

Visuals Changes

Hello, this is wheatleymf. For this "re-release" update, I have worked on fixing bunch of graphics stuff that has been bugging me since gamejam days.

Since April, I've made number of changes to shaders. Visually most of them will appear the same, some will look slightly better: for example, terrain shader has been significantly shrimplified and now should probably perform slightly better than before. I won't explain too much about exact changes since it's just technical yapping, just keep in mind that it's better now.

Ceitine also asked me to redo the water shader. After some tinkering and experiments, I think I was able to make something that visually fits our current semi-retro style of My Summer Cottage. 
Also, SSAO is now enabled. It should add some very nice subtle detail and shading to corners and other spots, which is something I really like when baked lighting is not an option. You probably won't notice at first, but trust me, it really does a good job at making look every scene slightly better. There is no option to disable it for now, but it makes sense to turn this feature into a toggleable feature in settings.
Pretty irrelevant for players, but there were many backend changes to shaders as well! In April, I did a lot of work on updating the code for our primary models shader, giving it some new features for artists. We haven't used any of these yet, but I imagine they'll do a good job adding better detail. 

In future, we will likely switch to a custom shading model. The only difference will be more retro stylized lighting - it is still work in progress, and if it turns out to be something neat, you will hear (and see) more about it. For now, live version of My Summer Cottage will keep using the standard model. 

UI

Matek, shlako, gio and I have been working on making the UI better and fixing up stuff.


For this update we have a reworked (still a little in progress) inventory UI with a brand new hotbar system! 


We got many requests for settings such as disabling vertex snapping and changing the field of view, so shlako made a settings menu! Although most of it doesn't work yet, it'll be fully implemented before long.


Along with the new additions we have some other UI improvements to make the experience better for widescreen resolutions.

NPC

A new NPC now spawns near mushroom fields, make sure not to harvest it.

Character Controller

Since we were, and still are unable to make use of the Navmesh due to it just refusing to work on bigger maps, we were forced to handle NPCs as if they were bots, they can see around them and we simulate their movement rather than following premade Navmesh paths.

Unfortunately the default character controller implementation in S&box is just too laggy, your fps is cut in half with 10 players, so imagine what it would do with 50 NPCs that use it.

It took me about 2 weeks but I managed to implement our own Character Controller using the Collide and Slide algorythm, you can find more about it here: https://www.peroxide.dk/papers/collision/collision.pdf

I'm seeing anywhere from 55% to 210% performance improvement with it and we're thinking of releasing a streamlined version soon.

As a side note, we finally increase the amount of NPCs spawned in the city since that doesn't drop your FPS (as much) anymore, and we made them killable this time, so have fun!

User Comments

Grafis
6 Days Ago
Noice

NOICE

SharpMars
6 Days Ago
Rod
6 Days Ago
no longer thinkpad gaming
5 Days Ago
🤯
Novostranger
5 Days Ago
you guys have finally improved the game considerably
badandbest
5 Days Ago
ducc
5 Days Ago