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Errant Biomes 1.0.0-rc

· 4 min read

We are happy to announce Errant Biomes 1.0.0-rc, hopefully the last release in the Beta and one that will soon be released to the public. This release addresses a lot of the feedback we got from our Beta testers. We significantly improved performance, fixed all the reported bugs and polished the UI.

caution

We introduced many changes to how runtime generation works. We strongly recommend performing these steps after the update:

  • clear the generated content
  • clear the cache
  • removing all the Biomes' spawners from the Level (via the Outliner).
  • regenerate the entire world

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Performance improvements​

  • Greatly improved performance for runtime spawned instances​

We managed to track down various reasons for hitches which were occuring when the camera was moving over densly populated areas covered by runtime-spawned species. We optimised our code, split the work into smaller chunks and worked around engine bottlenecks.

  • Greatly improved performance while in the Editor mode (debug overlay, mask painting)​

Our debug/mask overlay was slow to render and was taking a lot of memory. This was leading to crashes for some users. We optimised the overlay and now it's using a fraction of that memory and renders time.

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New features​

  • Settings for tools are remembered between editor and editor mode exits
  • Added Undo/Redo for mask painting. For both biomes and hand painted masks.
  • Added control for visualizations (opacity, preview height, rendered in unlit mode)

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  • Added UI notification when updates are available
  • New material nodes which help to map landscape area to a regular texture

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  • Added support for scaled landscape

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UI Improvements​

  • Re-entering a mode selects the tool which was being used last time
  • Improved editor mode UI
  • Added missing tooltips for properties
  • Added keyboard shortcuts and missing icons

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  • Added scrollbar to biomes list which was needed on worlds with many Biomes.
  • Fixed overly long button labels as they were too long for the new UE 5.0 toolbar
  • Renamed "Texture Data" to "Hand Painted Mask" in the material parameters to make it less confusing.

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  • Improved visibility of debug overlays by using unlit mode for their rendering

 

Bug fixes​

  • Fixed masks not renaming properly on duplication of species and sub-biomes.
  • Cleaner BiomesWorldSettings properties in UE 5.1. Removed Physics category that wasn't necessary.
  • Added missing initialization to struct properties. That fixed warnings in cooking.
  • Replaced all raw pointer properties with TObjectPtrs. This was needed to compile on UE5.1
  • Fixed problem where sometimes changes in landscape wouldn't register for Biomes.
  • Fixed compilation on clang and Linux server and Linux game configurations.
  • Fixed UI problems when the user added a null asset as a Biome.
  • Fixed bug where higher InstanceGroupSizeMultiplier for runtime instances resulted with invalid culling.
  • Improved DefaultGrass template by choosing settings with better performance for densely spawned grass
  • Fixed invalid spacing on worlds with scaled landscape
  • Landscape alignement - Fixed visual “spikes” when using bounding box align strategy in species.
  • Fixed occasional stall when generating due to invalid bounds calculations
  • Fixed small offset in results when using landscape alignment
  • Fixed occasional crash when serializing runtime spawners
  • Fixed problem where clearing selected components with auto-update enabled was reselecting everything again.
  • Fixed endless loop with species that depended on landscape weightmaps with auto-update enabled.