Lenses work from sunlight up to roughly y = -10.
You can now have unlimited optic power from the sun,
but conducting it all the way down from the surface is
more of a pain than having a loop at depth.
- No day/night cycle, no sun/moon.
- Get rid of clouds too.
- Skybox is now 100% texture-packable.
- Natural light diminishes with depth.
Night-time no longer disrupts gameplay topside, but
skylights are no longer useful to an infinite depth and
artificial light is necessary for all deep mining.
This prevents chopped planks from landing atop the
log below, and all sorts of other recipe annoyances
when items scattered are not necessarily scattered
far enough.
Setting hp_max before player actually emerges in a
join event seems to prevent damage flash (MT engine
issue 7876) for new players.
Old players rejoining for the first time since the
change will still experience it though.
It seems that when we access metadata too rapidly
it pulls data out of order or something, so that the
player damage time stuff is unstable, and healing can
start immediately, or more than 8 seconds later.
Caching this stuff manually seems to work around the
issue, and it seems that the metadata system is at
least EVENTUALLY consistent, so it's still good for
long-term use or across world unloads.
- Player hp_max is 8 now, so most injuries will block
a whole slot each time.
- Player can be reduced to 1 slot, not 2. The 2 slots
was from back in the day when players needed to go
to the surface to heal faster, to help them get up
there. Now the 1 slot is only needed in case the
player is trapped in fire or something.
- Damage effects now don't stop playing just because
the player has reached maximum injury, and healing
is also delayed by continued injury.
Reinterpreting the grass side as a mask instead of a texture
causes some really ugly artifacts with texture packs designed for
legacy textures and not overriding this.
Renaming the texture prevents the collision, and creates a sane
fallback for texture packs that don't have an override.
Many of the textures replaced in this update were original textures
from the start of NodeCore, meant as placeholders, but which nobody
ever got around to officially replacing. A lot of these textures have
gotten a lot of criticism, and they're becoming a distraction.
The new textures aren't necessarily spectacular (they're the result of
a couple days of work instead of a couple of hours) but hopefully they
will bring the old artwork up to a more current standard, which can
be maintained consistently throughout the game.
Some liberties were taken, such as completely reinventing the image
of lode from a chrome-like shiny grey metal to something dull, rusty,
and more iron-like.
A lot of the new textures, particularly natural terrain, are smoother
and flatter, which should make them somewhat less distracting.
