The biggest 3place update so far has finally been deployed! You might have been wondering why there haven't been many updates over the last week. Well, as I was going through the list of unfixed bugs and optimizations for the game, I soon realized that if I wanted the game to run and load as quickly and smoothly as possible with minimal lag, I had to rewrite the entire game engine from scratch. When 3place was first launched, I didn't think it would gain so many players in such a short period of time, so I didn't spend too much time optimizing the game engine. Unfortunately, as more and more players joined and placed voxels, the lag started getting more and more noticeable each day, and many people were getting confused by why things were breaking.
So, over the last week, I spent all of my time rebuilding the entire game engine from scratch. There are way too many new features and improvements implemented in this update, so here's a screenshot of the changelog just to show how much time and effort went into this update. The most important things to note are:
- Voxels now load MUCH faster than before when in street view mode. And furthermore, the landing render distance has been increased over 5x, from 2,000 voxels to 10,400 voxels. This is actually insane if you think about it, because now when you enter street view mode, there are now ~25 times more voxels being loaded simultaneously, and it's STILL much faster than before. In addition, as long as voxel structures are in your view, the render distance will continue propagating until everything in your view has been loaded.
- The entire template system has been reworked and overhauled. The 100,000 voxel limit for templates has been increased to 1,000,000, and you can now have up to 1,000 different templates stored on your account.
- Your unfinished builds now autosave on your device. You can recover drafts after reloading and switch between projects, each with its own progress and undo history.
- 3place has a completely redesigned interface, with clearer menus, roomier painting controls, and improved layouts for phones.
- Movement and navigation have been reworked. WASD panning in Orbit, flying speeds up to 512 blocks per second, and no more invisible walls caused by nearby blocks still loading.
- The daily 20,000 free bits now have no end date! Claim them in the Shop every day.
- You can now listen to the first official track of the 3place OST while building, using the music controls in your account menu.
Try it for yourself and let us know how the game feels!