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Goanna v0.8.0-alpha

Goanna 0.8.0 is about what a block looks like from a metre away. Surfaces have depth, the Mineclonia pack is hand authored rather than baked, and a block being mined is carved instead of cracked.

Changes

  • Normal maps the right way up. The mesher wrote the binormal sign opposite to Godot's, so every normal map in play was flipped along V. Relief now sits on the art it was derived from.
  • Parallax occlusion with self shadow in the node shader, with depth set per material class. On the ramp, one material filling a 1600 by 900 frame on an RTX 3090 costs under a millisecond. Its cost across a whole scene in play is not measured.
  • The authored Mineclonia pack. 177 stems built by tools/pbr/pbr_author/ from the game's own 16 px art replace the bake in the shipped pack. Ores are metal, gems reflect, redstone and the lit blocks glow. Judged on the close-up ramp under sun and lamp and in the maintainer's own play. No other game has an authored pack; Minetest Game still uses its bake.
  • Mining carves the block. Damage is cut out of the block, the neighbours' exposed faces are drawn, and the stroke, sound, chips and carve volume follow one contact cycle tied to block damage. Carved faces keep the tile's PBR material instead of falling back to a crack tile. Carving is visual only: selection and collision still use the whole cube.
  • Water lit once. The bed seen through water was lit a second time and read as a painted floor. Measured on the water fixture; no server run.
  • Distant forests and the fine scheduler. Fine blocks stream alongside predicted forests, and the candidate scan is spread across frames. On copies of a Mineclonia world at the saved position, Godot 4.5.1, RTX 3090, that took one scene from 1.7 fps to 66 fps. Loading hitches during fast travel remain.
  • Worlds and games. The six Terrain Diffusion worlds are republished as worlds-2026.09.2 with their rivers recomputed, previews draw the rivers, and games are named by their game.conf title, so VoxeLibre no longer appears as mineclone2.

Still alpha

Linux, Godot 4.5, Vulkan. Mineclonia is the most tested game. A Windows package is exported beside the Linux one, but no Windows export has ever been launched by anyone; a report either way would be useful. macOS is not built.