Fractal Block World
Version 1.01.8
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We added a new large area: the Mylantis Caves.
This consists of The Crust, followed by 11 Layers,
followed by the Great Mylantis cavern,
followed by the Mylantis Red Caves.
Each layer has 5 different "patches"
of monsters.
There are 15 patch types total.
In Layer 4 there are Topaz Gems,
in Layer 6 there are Iolite Gems,
in Layer 8 there are Emerald Gems,
and in Layer 10 there are the
cities of Denver.
There are also Nuclear Silos in these
layers which hold many nukes for the
player to teleport to later.
We also expanded the Beta Sponge area
by making the monsters more difficult
as you go deeper.
If you go 100 levels deep you can find
Beta Sponge Towns.
Shrinking past these towns there are levels
of the sponge that should prevent
you from going deeper.
Is there any way to go deeper?
Also, when the player shrinks deep into a Ying Forest,
the monsters get more difficult
and the player will find interesting areas
(for example, the Unremembered Tower).
See the patch notes below for more
about Version 1.01.8.
Patches
Version 1.01.09:
- Date: November 2022
- There is a new area in the Mylantis Caves Layer 4: Topaz Gems.
These are areas where you enter them and are shrunk deep inside the
sponge, then you have to gradually enlarge out of them to get the treasure.
- There are also Iolite Gem Areas in the Mylantis Caves Layer 6.
These are similar to Topaz Gem areas, except you have to solve
a puzzle to enlarge out.
- Added a new quest to the game: enlarging to the top of the world.
Now in Outer Space -1 there is a way to enlarge further to
ultimately grow to see the top of the world.
This requires going through 3 challenges.
- Before this version of the game, the procedural world generation
of chunks occured in a separate thread.
Now, not only does this occur in a separate thread, but the loading
of chunk files (which store the changes made to chunks)
occurs in a seperate thread.
- Changed the way text boxes handle characters.
- Improved the saving and exiting option from the main menu.
- Changed the way out-of-bounds blocks are handled when loading chunk:
they are now just ignored.
- Now when rendering moving entities (MEnts) on a level,
they are sorted by texture first.
This reduces the number of times we need to change the current
OpenGL texture.
Version 1.01.08:
- Date: July 2022
-
There are new areas: the Mylantis Caves
and expanded Beta Menger Sponges,
and the deep parts of Ying Forests
as described at the top of this page.
- Added two new monster classes:
rats and slivers.
Rats give lots of experience points,
and slivers are meant to be frozen
with your laser so you can run past them.
- We significantly improved the performance
of the algorithm to compute the blocks that need
to be expanded into chunks and the chunks which need
to be collapsed into blocks.
Before, we recomputed these things for each level
when the player's chunk changed.
Now, we recompute these things much less often.
- There is a new algorithm for teleporting
the player from one chunk to another.
Now, we do not destroy the entire chunk tree:
instead we keep (at least) the largest common initial
segment of the source chunk path
and the target chunk path.
-
Then the player starts a new game,
the player is invulnerable while we
find the starting position.
-
Now when users create their own world,
they can choose which chunk width to use
(any integer between 2 and 16 inclusive).
The Xar package (the standard game)
uses 16 (so each chunk is 16x16x16).