Since the last update, 0.9, Masterbrain Bytes has been working hard on migrating Tombstone, the engine that powers Cattle and Crops. The development team announces, via its blog, that this migration work is coming to an end and that a version went into testing at the end of February.
Almost all functionality has been transferred from the old C4 engine to the new one, except for the new font rendering (Slug) and the new audio format. Cattle and Crops is able to load with items from both game engines since Tombstone is an update to C2. Graphically, the renderer still works with OpenGL. The generation of OpenGL shaders has been heavily reworked, but a lot of home-made development needs to be rewritten. This is the case, for example, with terrain tessellation for dynamic terrain effects.
On the performance side, all the multithreaded optimizations of the Tombstone engine have been integrated. This particularly concerns light / geometry interactions. Thus, the calculation performed to see if a geometry should cast a shadow will spread over as many cores as possible. If the tests go well and no major issues occur, the 0.9.5 update could arrive next week.
Finally to make the game more accessible, the developers are working on a new tutorial system which should make it easier for beginner players to get started by providing advice and information. The player will in particular be able to interrupt a game to follow a tutorial on a very specific function.