Devlog #9 – Water Temperature, Caching, and UI Improvements

Hey everyone!

This week brought technical improvements and performance optimizations to Wildborn. Here's a quick overview of what’s new!

🌊 Water System: Temperature and Performance

I’ve introduced a new water temperature system: each water tile now updates its temperature based on ambient temperature, solar radiation, and wind. This paves the way for exciting new mechanics, like:

• Cooling off by swimming in hot weather

• Water eventually freezing if it gets too cold

💡 Bonus: Thermal exchanges now take into account the actual water depth in millimeters — deep water cools the body more than shallow puddles!

To keep performance smooth, I implemented batch updates and fixed visual bugs where river tiles showed incorrect border sprites during chunk loading.

🔥 Huge Optimization: Data Caching

One of the biggest improvements this week was adding a caching system for:

• Tile altitude

• Average temperature

• Average humidity

🎯 The result: these values are used in many systems (biomes, weather, thermal exchanges, etc.) and are no longer recalculated every time. I likely reduced total computation by over 80%, and the game now feels way smoother, especially during water flow or world generation.

🧊 Realistic Indoor Temperature

The body temperature system now uses the room’s temperature when the player is indoors, rather than the outdoor environment. This adds a new layer of realism and introduces the idea of thermal shelter comfort, which will be critical for long-term survival.

☠️ Proper Player Death

I added a dedicated sprite to show that the character has died

🧰 UI Improvements and Visual Feedback

• Added a simple visual inventory showing collected items using their actual prefab sprites.

• Designed 7 new 16×16 pixel icons for player needs: hunger, thirst, body temperature, fatigue, sleep, hypothermia, and hyperthermia.

• Improved the construction blueprint UI:

  • Dynamic progress bar

  • Blueprint sprite updates in real-time based on work and materials

• Added keyboard shortcuts to speed up time.

🧱 Bug Fixes and Polish

• Fixed Y-sorting for items and blueprints to improve visual layering in the top-down view.

• Prevented objects from spawning in river tiles.

• Refactored large scripts (WaterManager, BodyTemperatureSystem) into smaller, cleaner components (WaterFlowSystem, BodyHeatCalculator).

🎯 Summary

Performance is significantly better, and the game feels more immersive with the new thermal effects and improved visual feedback.

Thanks for following the development of Wildborn.