At last, a Hive Time update!

There are a couple of noteworthy bits and bobs in today's update. The biggest (for me) is an overhaul of how environmental sounds (crickets, birds, etc.) are handled. Previously these were done in 3D, positioned above the hive, and captured by the same audio listener that hears the individual bee sounds as it moves up and away from the hive.

Through past experimentation, I discovered that these were putting significant load on the Godot's audio server, and were likely the cause of stuttering, garbled audio that I've been trying to properly address for a long time. According to Godot's profiler, moving these to 2D divided audio server frame time by 10, and it allowed me to more finely control the volume/overlap of sounds (previously, I had each sound player pushing 8db of amplification, which is nuts). There's a slight overhead from having to align the camera-relative 2D space that the new sound players live in with the game's 3D space, but it's minuscule by comparison. I haven't done thorough testing yet to confirm that the garbledidooks are properly gone, but I'm feeling pretty good about the impact of these changes.

I also fixed a problem where environmental sounds were tending to be clumped at the top of the playspace. To make sure I was seeing where they were getting placed, I used the witches hat hat as a visual indicator (pictured above). It was fun to see little objects scattered across the playspace, but now that all that is fixed, they're gone. Maybe I'll add some other stuff in later ^_^

The change that's likely to be the biggest (for you) is the addition of a visual indicator to Workshop and Upgraded Workshop cells that tracks the progress of current research. It's subtle, but if you know what you're looking for, should still be visible when zoomed out. I haven't decided on the final presentation for this, but as what has probably been the single most requested feature, I'm glad to have it in :)

Enjoy!

Full changelog:

• Added research progress indicator to workshop and upgraded workshop cells
• Added progress rings to interface settings
• Added cell name to info item in radial menus
• Added proper buttons for toggling population and goal HUDs
• Added click hitbox to vignette indicator
• Added debug mode option to system settings (enables debug shortcuts)
• Added debug shortcut (Shift) for skipping the main menu at startup (must be pressed and held after window creation, but before logos appear)
• Refactored environmental sound effects to use 2D audio
• Removed vignette trigger from cell click event
• Removed old population and goal HUD toggle buttons
• Removed environmental cricket loop 3
• Updated DOF to have more consistent balance between near and far
• Updated beesitter decline warning threshold to be more generous
• Updated menu shortcut (Esc) to exit inspect mode instead of jumping straight to the menu
• Updated debug HUD toggle to only work when debug mode is enabled
• Updated camera position to default when starting a new game or loading a save
• Fixed upgraded storage cell resource height going weird when levels are updated while cell is popped in
• Fixed inspect state not being reset when loading or starting a new game
• Fixed clumped distribution of environmental audio
• Fixed config version not being saved to file and triggering a config reset to happen every time the game is run
• Fixed activity/event notification effect not appearing at default scale