Release Notes

v0.3.4   BETA

Terrain rendering improvements:

New dynamic level of detail algorithm, draws larger chunks in distance, resulting in less draw calls and better performance.

You can see how this works by toggling Debug Tab -> Debug Shader -> Land

Sea bed uses the same shader as island, so they blend together better

Extra detail is rendered into the terrain fragment shader

You can see how this works by toggling GFX Tab -> Terrain Fragment Shader

Morphing between islands now uses 33% VRAM

New camera mode: Walk Camera

Known issues:

Crabs sometimes get stuck

This is the current beta version. Run it in your browser now

v0.3.3   STABLE

Crab AI:

Crabs have swarm intelligence, they tend to follow each other and form groups

Crabs pre-emptively turn to avoid cliffs and other crabs

Added new debug modes to visualize the crab AI

Tree generation performance:

Tree generation is 10x faster, achieving real-time results

Try adjusting the climate paramters and watch the trees change in real-time

Tree generation features:

On Edit Tab, Props section there are two new buttons

The Redistribute button randomizes the layout of the trees

The Redecorate button randomizes the paramters of each tree

Bug fixes:

Trees wait until the land has finished morphing to spawn, so they don't appear in mid-air

Known issues:

Crabs sometimes get stuck

The World Size option has been removed

This is the current stable version. Run it in your browser now

v0.3.2

Improved performance on weak devices:

Floor texture tiles are now cached in VRAM and reused, rather than being regenerated every frame

On the default overview camera, this optimisation quadruples the frame rate on mobile/laptop

Bug fixes:

Fixed a long standing crash when spamming the regenerate button

Fix compatibility issues with being hosted within a frame, now Crab Island works on itch.io

Known Issues:

Setting a non-default the World Size causes incorrect floor texture generation

v0.3.1

Improved crab behaviour

Crabs now spawn in shallow water near the island

Crabs will not jump up impossible cliff faces

Crabs will sometimes stop and change direction when stuck

Crabs will now despawn when they get too far away from the island

Added real time crab counter to main viewport

Added button to respawn all crabs on the Sim tab

Optimsations:

Reduced texture sampling on distant land - this especially helps mobile GPUs

GPU shader code download size reduced from ~150KB to ~50KB

Bug fixes:

Geometry LOD was broken during Free Camera. Now it is fixed such that nearer land uses more detailed geometry

Known Issues:

The crabs can still walk through each other and also through trees

v0.3.0

The crabs are here!

New"Sim" tab page of the UI for controlling the crabs

Can change number of crabs spawned

Can change the simulation speed

Improved the sea renderering

Objects become deeper blue as they submerge into deeper water

The distant sea blends better with the island

The distant sea bed now has a texture

New debug option: Can toggle drawing of various objects

Bug fixes:

The free camera no longer gets stuck on the landscape, instead it will scoot along the floor

Known Issues

The crabs ignore most laws of physics

The crabs can jump up cliffs, walk up steep hills, walk through each other and also through trees

v0.2.5

In case this performance is still not good enough, there is a new Gfx tab:

Can select Render Resolution and Texture Resolution

These should enable mobile / low end devices to acheive playable frame rates

v0.2.4

Graphical improvements:

Use multisampling to improve the appearance trees

Render at maximum pixel resolution on mobile devices

Support for fullscreen rendering

Support for hiding the GUI controls to allow the 3D viewport to use the whole screen

The sea and seabed now extends out further into the distance

New features:

Added "free" camera mode

Added Reset Camera button to Debug tab

Info tab now shows the screen resolution

Bug fixes:

Inverted the pinch to zoom controls on mobile so that it works the same way as most other mobile apps

Rendering resolution will now adjust when resizing the browser window

Fixed the non-random distribution of cliffs and beaches in demo mode

v0.2.3

Many optimisiations:

Improved Level of Detail algorithm enabling worlds to be 16x bigger than in the previous version

The old "VLarge" world is actually smaller than the new "Small" world setting

Much improved frame rate on all types of GPU

New profiling options - click the frame rate counter to choose between different CPU & GPU timing measurements

Faster texture loading

Reduced VRAM usage

Updated to WGPU v0.20.0

Streamlined GUI:

Merged the old Demo and Design Tabs into one new tab named Edit

Select the camera mode by clicking on the name of the camera

New features:

Can now edit a demo world, rather than having to start from scratch before editing

Demo mode can now run in large world sizes

Can choose the world morph animation - instant, fast or phased

Demo mode has more variety, and occasionally throws in a round island

Bug fixes:

Fixed small cracks in the ground at the seams between chunks at different LOD levels

The camera now properly collides with the ground, so that you can't view underneath

Properly report error if the WebGPU adapter couldn't be initialized

Known issues:

On weak / mobile devices, larger worlds may run out of VRAM and freeze rather than reporting the error

Trees instantly move into position, rather than morphing

v0.2.2

Better trees

Tree use different sprites per biome

Trees now have directional lighting

Slight tweak to spawn distribution for more interesting layouts

Trees fade out in distance

Tweaked biome distribution for more deserts

Performance optimisations

Trees use less VRAM

Trees generate quicker, and use smaller slices of GPU time

This makes for smoother scrolling of the climate controls

The sky is now blue

Updated to WGPU v0.19.3

v0.2.1

New biome generation algorithm:

Biomes spawn based upon temperature and humidity

New climate controls:

New sliders to control temperature and humidity

Added new biome types and textures:

Including shallow water, cold beach, snow, burnt meadow, forest and red sand.

More variety in demo mode:

Demo mode selects a random climate on each run

New debug modes:

On debug tab: show height, temperature, humidity, biome

Optimsations:

Reuse VRAM when cycling world maps

Bug fixes:

Regenerate props when sea level changes, so tree's aren't left underwater

v0.2.0

Trees will now spawn

Trees respect biomes and will update in real time as the biomes are updated

v0.1.6   

Fixed poor texture seams at biome boundaries - now they blend together smoothly

Performance Improvements:

Don't use render pipeline to compute heightmaps - use compute pipeline instead

Reuse memory if the next heightmap is the same size as the previous

Cache intermediate stages of heightmap computation

Upgrade wgpu version from 0.18.0 to 0.19.1

v0.1.5

Implemented texture mipmapping

Improves the quality of the rendered image by reducing noise when viewing at a medium distance

Improves performance by reducing the size of textures in the GPU cache and using less bandwidth

v0.1.4

Fixed demo continuing to run after moving to the design tab

v0.1.3

New tabbed GUI

Designed to fit on an Android mobile phone

Performance improvements

Render terrian with flat colour while textures are still loading

Textures now use lossy compression reducing the total size from 200MB down to 50MB

Texture loading progress percentage now shown on the GUI

v0.1.2

Added keyboard support

Press the W key to zoom in or the S key to zoom out

This is use for laptop users who could not zoom because their touch pad did not support using two fingers to do the pinch gesture

v0.1.1

You can now pan and zoom the camera

Click and drag to pan

With a mouse: Use mouse wheel to zoom

With a touch screen: Pinch to zoom

With a touch pad: I've not tested this, who knows what happens 🤷🏻‍♂️

Added textures on the terrain

Try zooming in to see the detail

You can now toggle the grid overlay on and off

Known Issues:

On first run, it might take a long time for your web browser to download the 200MB of textures

Textures blend vertically but not laterally, so there's rough edges

It's possible to move the camera to bad positions

The touring camera controls don't make sense

v0.1.0

Added biomes and a page to edit them in real time

You can animate the biomes in either camera angle

Added coastal erosion from the sea to form cliffs around the edge of the land

You can edit the sea level and cliffs in real time

Improved variety of height distribution

You can get smooth hills, jagged mountains, cliffs vs beaches, inland lakes and small satellite islands

Reduced VRAM usage

v0.0.9

Performance has been improved by the following 2 changes:

• Land is now rendered in chunks which change level of detail depending on distance from camera
• Chunks are rendered from front to back to reduce overdraw

Thanks to performance increases, the size and detail settings have been increased, allowing for much larger landscapes.

Lighting now looks better and is more consistent over varying size and detail settings.

v0.0.7

First version to support WebGPU. WebGL support dropped.

v0.0.6

Last version to support WebGL

v0.0.1

First version. Generates a random height map, using WebGL