Exp. Update 0.04.E3

Exp. Update 0.04.E3 is an update for Stranded Deep released on June 24, 2015.

Two large bugs have been hanging around on the stable build, one being the unusually long loading times for OSX Yosemite users, and the second being the more recent NVIDIA driver upgrade causing consistent crashes.

The upgrade to Unity 5 on our experimental build has fixed these problems and improved performance in general. So in between working on the terrain and coop, we decided to push forward with this update and will be testing it’s stability in the next week or so as a candidate for a stable release. Bug reports are handy, so if you find any post them here on the steam forum here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/313120/discussions/7/

Everything else is progressing nicely. Unfortunately, a lot of it is pretty boring to read about. We’ve been running a lot of test projects for coop gameplay, testing the best ways to sync everything between players, ai, etc and the larger island tests are also looking promising.

Bug Fixes

 * Watch – Tweaked screen elements for better visibility. Adjusted specular and added normal map and glass effect.
 * Watch – Fixed backlight not lighting up at night.
 * Lantern – Fixed missing glass shader and light effect.
 * Bucket – Fixed missing water shader.
 * Liferaft – Yellow lift raft has returned.
 * Player – Fixed lighting errors with torch and player arm.
 * Player – Fixed arm effects shader to work with new lighting model.
 * Player – Proper skin shader is back.
 * Player – Fixed standing under ceilings and going through them.
 * Player – Fixed inaccuracies between ground collisions.
 * Moon – Fixed the moon halo appearing under the ocean.
 * Crabs – Fixed slow crab moving speed.
 * Trees – Fixed tree billboards not rendering to depth properly, being overwritten by fog, etc.
 * Shadows – Fixed a bug where underwater objects were casting shadows on the ocean surface.
 * Crafting – Fixed crafting object highlight and placing object highlight for crafting and building. Optimized memory required for batching.
 * UI – Fixed incorrect widget highlighting colors caused by a new HDR color picker in Unity 5.
 * UI – Fixed a bug where confirmation dialogues would not appear over options menu.
 * Crafting – Fixed a bug in the crafting popup menu where the scrolling list would not reset to the top.
 * Crafting – Fixed the first element in crafting popup not highlighting on first open.
 * Crafting – Fixed steps not locking into position.
 * Saving – Fixed a bug where the following items would not be saved: Landshark sign, multi-story foundation, multi-story steps, windowed walls, and label maker.
 * Menus – Fixed a bug where you would exit to a black screen after dying.
 * Containers – Tidied up all container, cases and console colliders. Changed from mesh colliders to compound primitive colliders.
 * Bouncing Container Items – This is a problem between primitive colliders and mesh colliders. The bouncing items should be fixed for containers. It may still be a problem for rocks.

WIP and New Content

 * Unity – Upgraded to latest version of Unity, 5.1.0F3.
 * Antialiasing – New SMAA algorithm. Changed antialiasing render settings.
 * Ambient Occlusion – New ambient occlusion effect.

Known Issues

 * Ocean – The ocean surface underwater is currently being affected by ambient occlusion.
 * Foliage – Back faces of bushes and larger trees aren’t being lit correctly.