Play All of the Latest Features in the New 4D Miner Snapshot Build!

Hello HyperSupporters!

In my previous post, I mentioned how I sometimes feel bummed out when I don't have enough "flashy content" to show off to all of you.

I recently realized a lot of that is my fault.

On one hand, I do have to spend a lot of time working on technical stuff (and a lot of that has really payed off), but on the other hand, I am also frequently adding cool stuff to the game as I go, but I don't make it accessible as early as I probably should.

I seem to have it in my head that I can't release any new updates to the game unless there's enough new content, and "enough" seems to be very arbitrary and inconsistent for me.

I've recently had a lot more fun working on 4D Miner after I started frequently posting screenshots and videos of new features I'm working on in the #4d-hypersupporters channel on the 4D Miner Discord server.

I seem to get a lot more encouraging feedback when I show off more stuff as I'm working on the game, even when it's just little things.

4D Miner Snapshots

Not only have I gotten tons of helpful and encouraging feedback from sharing more clips and screenshots to my patrons, but I also feel like there is more excitement around all of these new features as a result.

In fact, when I started sharing videos and screenshots of these new features, some of you asked if I could make them available in some kind of "snapshot" release, kind of like what Mojang does before they release a new update to Minecraft.

"Snapshots" are basically mini updates that allow players to have access to newer features before the next full update is released.

You can play all of the latest features in 4D Miner right now on itch.io:

https://mashpoe.itch.io/4d-miner-demo/patreon-access

There are now two separate downloads: one for the latest "larger" update, and one for the latest snapshot. The snapshot build will have all of the most-recent features.

Snapshots are typically less stable than the larger updates, which means they are generally going to be much more buggy. Snapshots are much less polished than regular updates, and any feature that's included in a snapshot build is not guaranteed to be a part of the final update.

That being said, it's a lot easier to fix an issue with the game while it is still being worked on. When a new feature is included in a snapshot build, it will get a lot more attention than if it were only released in a larger update with a ton of other new features. Snapshots basically allow changes to the game to get the attention they need, which will allow you to give useful feedback more quickly.

I don't know how this idea never crossed my mind. I feel like the overwhelming majority of you will agree that more frequent snapshot releases are better than exclusively posting larger updates less frequently.

Making snapshot releases is better for everyone in my opinion. Before I released the previous update, it became a chore to remember all of the random improvements that I added. If I can't even remember all of the major changes in each update, how can I make sure that all of these features get the attention they need?

I've made a few incremental progress posts here, but I feel like your feedback would be a lot more helpful if you actually had the ability to experience all of the progress first-hand.

What's New

The majority of the new features I brought up in my previous post are in the latest snapshot build. This includes butterflies, colored lenses, and the new crafting recipe for the 4D glasses.

There are also a ton of new features in the snapshot that haven't even been mentioned until now!

I'll briefly go over the butterflies here, but you can find more info about them in my previous post.

Butterflies

There are currently four different butterfly types: red, green, blue, and a rare cyan/magenta variant.

The first three types of butterflies will drop the corresponding colored lenses when killed. You need to collect all three - red, green, and blue - in order to craft a pair of 4D glasses.

It's much more difficult to make a pair of 4D glasses now, which I think is an improvement. Chasing down three different butterfly types can be very challenging with their quick and random movements, especially since you can't use 4D glasses to find them until after you've already collected all three lens types.

You can significantly speed up the collection process if you're able to kill one of the special cyan and magenta butterflies, which are much less common than the other three variants. These special butterflies will drop one of each lens type, which means you can make your first pair of glasses without having to kill any more innocent butterflies!

Plants

Plants have been requested several times, and I think they are necessary to make the 4D terrain look more alive.

The new plants are a lot like dead bushes or tall grass in Minecraft.

They are actually the first transparent blocks to be added to 4D Miner. You can walk through them, and you can destroy them without any tools.

Bushes and Midnight Bushes drop sticks when destroyed without a tool, just like tree leaves.

There are currently seven types of plants (besides the trees that have always been in the game), and three of them (cactus, snowy bush, and midnight bush) are biome-specific.

Because the new plants are transparent blocks, I had to make some modifications to the game's lighting system, but I went a little overboard and ended up with another massive lighting overhaul, which I will explain more about in this post.

New Biomes

Two new biomes are now available in the most-recent snapshot!

These new biomes have their own unique blocks, and one of them introduces a highly sought-after crafting recipe to the game!

Not all biomes will generate next to each other. For example, a cold biome will never generate right next to a desert.

Desert Biome

The desert is the most flat out of all of the game's biomes.

There are no trees, but there are cacti.

You can also find bushes and flowers in the desert, but they are less common.

The new desert biome introduces sand, sandstone, and cactus blocks to 4D Miner!

Sand can be crafted into a very useful block, which I will get to after I go over the next biome.

Snow Biome

The snow biome is similar to the desert biome, ignoring the climate difference. It's a snowy tundra, also without trees. I will definitely add a snow biome with trees soon though!

The new snow biome introduces snow (unsurprisingly), ice, and snowy bush blocks to the game!

Glass

Glass is a must-have for these types of sandbox games.

You can craft it with one block of sand and one block of wood, because wood can be used to cook things I guess, and there's no cooking mechanic in the game yet, so it's the best I can do for now.

Equipable Items

This might be the most requested feature, and I've finally added it. You can now have two items equipped at a time!

Currently, this slot is only really useful for 4D Glasses and the Compass.

Colored Lights and Shadows

The lighting has been improved so much further in this update. A lot of the changes were built on top of the lighting features from the previous update, however.

4D Miner already kind of had shadows when I introduced ambient occlusion, but now all non-transparent blocks can cast vertical shadows.

The new shadows make the world a lot more immersive. Caves are now darker, and trees actually give shade. The new shadows, combined with the smooth lighting from the previous update, make the game look SO much better.

Since I added shadows, I thought I might as well add colored lights as well. Certain blocks now glow different colors.

Flowers and midnight bushes, for example, now each glow their own color, which can look really neat when you see them in the shadow of a tree.

Deadly ore and lava also glow when colored lights are enabled. This makes it much easier to locate deadly ore, because even if the ore itself isn't in your 3D slice of the world, you might still be able to see its glow effect.

The smooth lighting from the previous update made the game slower, so I made it optional. I also made the new shadows and colored lights optional, but I am working on some optimizations to make this less of an issue.

Optimizations

Optimizing a game like 4D Miner is no simple task. Most of the lag comes from generating chunk meshes. 3D games like Minecraft only have to process a fraction of the data that 4D Miner needs to generate a 4D mesh.

The game is already heavily optimized for what it is, but I was still able to make a few huge improvements.

The main performance improvement is with 4D Miner's multithreading performance. Now chunks and their meshes are less likely to overload the CPU and cause the game to lag, but this does come at a cost.

Chunks and their meshes now generate much more slowly, which means you will probably be able to play at higher render distances with max graphical settings without your framerate dropping nearly as much, but game will take longer to update the world as you scroll, so you will likely encounter many visual artifacts while chunks are still regenerating their meshes.

Overall, I still think this is a massive improvement, since it significantly reduces the lag. I have a pretty good PC, and I can now play at max render distance with all of the lighting features enabled, and the framerate will still be reasonable. This was not possible up until very recently.

Please give the latest snapshot a try and see if it runs any better than previous versions of the game!

Feel free to leave constructive feedback on the latest snapshot, but keep in mind that shapshot builds are not meant to be as polished or as stable as normal releases, so you can expect a multitude of bugs.

Thank you all so much for continuing to believe in and support this project! Your humbling support is what makes all of this possible!

Mashpoe