
Blog #28
On 19 January, 2018 by RedbeetA big hello to all you people interested in reading about Raft! It’s good to have you back! (Or simply welcome if you’re new to the blog!)
We hope you have been doing well since we last talked! Here at the Raft workshop everyone’s been tapping away at their keyboard or waving their pen across their graphics tablet to make new stuff and improve old stuff! Let’s get into what’s happened!
More plants and a crop plot!
First of all, the small crop plot you’re used to has always been just that, the small crop plot. It’s time to introduce its bigger brother… The medium crop plot.
This doesn’t hold more of each plant. It actually holds fewer, but it’s big enough to grow watermelon and pineapple!
The watermelon and pineapple can be found on islands and are a great way to get some food and water in one go. The last plant that’s been added is the mango tree, which provides a bit of wood, thatch and, you guessed it, mango.
New tools
A wooden fishing rod is a great way to get started, but it breaks easily, and might be too weak for bigger fish. So if you get your hands on some better materials, you might want to craft yourself a metal fishing rod. Much better durability and stands a better chance withstanding the strength of a catfish!
Another new addition to your crafting arsenal is the binoculars. As with most binoculars, they let you see further!
Code and Optimization
On this blog, we talk a lot about content that we add to the game. Features like the weather system or a re-designed building system. However what’s equally important is that all the feature work as they should, of course. A game is only as good as the features that work, a philosopher might say (I don’t know…). A big challenge for us, and for many developers according to my experience, is to make the game run smoothly with as few hiccups as possible and reducing the amount of computing power necessary to do this. This is something we’ve kept in mind during the whole development period, but during recent weeks we’ve put extra effort into finding and amending issues that contribute to bugs and unnecessary use of processing and rendering power. There are several parts that has been tweaked the past weeks. By looking at which features require the most processing power our programmer has been able to re-write the code to make it do what it should, but in a more efficient way. However, this mostly relieves the processor of work, which might leave the graphics card bottle-necking the frame-rate. To battle this, one of the most efficient things is to change settings that affect the whole game. Examples of this are to tweak the range where shadows are rendered at a lower resolution and adjusting distances where objects are culled(removed) from the view. The tricky thing is get these numbers as low as possible without affecting the look of the game too much. An extension of this is to give the player more freedom when adjusting graphic settings. We’ve added a lot of settings that can be tweaked to help you reach your desired FPS, such as shadow distance and quality, shadows cascades and texture resolution.
After addressing the more overarching settings we’ve ventured into changing smaller, more individual assets that could be better optimized. For example, things that are very commonly used should be looked over to see if they can be done in a more efficient way. An example of this is the foundation, which is one of the most built parts in the game. We redesigned it in order to make it more optimized. The new version of the foundations is made up of roughly a fourth of the polygons compared to the old one, which results in massive savings on bigger rafts.

New foundation left, old foundation right
In addition to this, a lot of effort has been put into optimize the multiplayer networking code to fix issues related to slower or long distance internet connections(AKA bad ping). For example, making sure two players can’t build a foundation in the same place if they press build at the same time.
This last part was a bit more technical than usual, but we hope you still found it interesting.
We hope you’ll have a great weekend and that you come back for the next blog! 🙂
Bye from the Raft HQ.
When raft come to steam ?
2020
never. it will be abandoned
Says the anonymous expert. I highly doubt this game will be abandoned, the devs are extremely active and always posting new updates
Seems you were way off.
i can’t wait for this to come out ive been playing the prototype for a long while now
It’s inspiring to see how much effort you put into this game, and the constant communication you maintain with the community. Can’t wait for early access, keep up the AWESOME work.
Please make the game(when released on steam) free because i want to play with my friends aand not anyone have money to spend on game ,but you still can put a donate system.So please make it free on steam . 🙂
I don’t think asking that is fair, to be honest. Everyone deserves to get paid for their work and no-one should put the fruit of their labor up for free. The game isn’t out yet and you can start saving up if you want to play it when it comes out. It shouldn’t be too difficult to save up a few bucks in a couple of months.
not if youre in bills to pays….
Well, I have bills to pay, too. But it is still possible to save 15 bucks in a couple of months, don’t you think?
It won’t be free, they are working so hard on it.
The amount of time that it takes to even fix a tiny ass bug somethings is ridiculous. They already put more work in it than a lot developpers of paid games on steam.
And I rather pay for a cool decent game that has all features instead of a game working with ridiculous amounts of DLCs.
I can’t wait for this game to come out, it looks awesome! I’ll buy it on the second it will be released no matter how much it will cost.
bagai mana caranya buat permainan ini
indo
love to beta test
Love the game, some ideas I have are fix the issue where the shark can swim through your raft, catch the shark, and it like jumps up out of the depths, and bites you for like half health, and ladders for sure this would be so great I love you guys and Wish all the best!
can u please tell me when this game is going to be releast i simply can not wait any more
When will the early access version be available to the public? I’d love to play it even in its current state
any chance you could incorporate some sort of “exterior” edging that may take 2-3 trips from the shark to be destroyed? Unless there is an alternate system you are moving too. But I know as far as the prototype goes, those buggers can get in quick and with the expansions planned for the official release, it seems it would be appropriate to have a way for us to be able to venture out for a longer period of time without worrying about our rafts all being eaten.
Also, super stoked for this release. Definitely a fresh venue and interesting take on survivals.
-Bandit
quando sai o beta?
you can add a bow and arrow
When it comes on steam?
There are lots of stuff. But the 1.05b version no have these.
Spela med mig ufoxm
wow
Is the new raft contains islands?
Can you drive your raft?
this was written in a previous blog
and yes there are islands and you can steer your raft
we’re in 2018 u know and the game isn’t release
WHEN THE FUCK? WE WANT FUCKING MORE.
btw keep up the good work, amazing gameplay with 120mb demo 😉
Hi guys. I’ve streamed the demo/free version in the past and would love to do the same again as the Steam version develops. I’m not sure if you are planning any developer streams at some point, but if not I’d love the opportunity to show the game on my channel as it develops. I could do some bug testing and there would be video recordings to evidence what was found.
I play a lot of early access games so it’s something my viewers are used to.
Will this game go on consol? If so I’ll buy!
could a deadline to get ready
INFO http://www.raftturkiye.com