2026-10-06 · REIGN OF VALTHERIN

Counting the trees

A survey of the code and maps found only four painted tree types in the game, and a lookup table that is ignored whenever the authored art pack is present.

Four painted trees

The 5 October showcase rated two installed props below the bar set by the village houses and the Sunmeadow trees, so the numbers are now written down. The cherry blossom is 96 pixels at 16 pixels per unit, about 2,000 pixels in 96 colours. The oak beside it is painted at roughly 82 pixels per unit with over 130,000 colours. The tent is flat stripes with no folds or light. No art changed that day; the weak versions are still the ones in the game.

A survey of the code, the region maps and the design docs then asked a wider question: how many trees does the game actually have? Only four painted tree cells exist: oak, birch, pine and a bare oak.

A table that never gets read

The survey also found a bug. The per-region tree table in the code is ignored whenever the authored art pack is present, so later regions get random oaks and birches today, whatever the table says. No code changed. Any new tree art has to follow the rules that keep the season shader working: green leaves stay recolourable, and trunk and crown stay cleanly split.

A clean build

A fresh Windows build (2,929 MB, 298 seconds) came out clean. The failure seen earlier turned out to be a second launch of the build script colliding with the first.