Initial impression and feedback

[chapp007]

This is the first voxel game since Minecraft that I've actually found myself immersed and enjoying discovering the world. Here are the things that I think are done really well:

1. Colored torches look awesome. I like the particle effects as well
2. World generation is just great. I've been playing with my own code for world generation for a while and I realize how much work it is to get it looking that good. Caves are awesome and I'd love to know how you are generating them if you feel like sharing :-)
3. The block textures seem really polished and nice. 
4. Music is nice and fits well into the game.

Obviously this is pre-alpha and I've seen the roadmap so I'm not about to list all the things that I wish were in here. Here are the things that brought me out of the immersion of the game that I think should be fixed soon.

1. Blue torch doesn't seem to light the ground as much as other torches. (Screenshot below)
2. There are some spots where light isn't propagating into. Not sure why but I've included a screenshot because it's hard to describe in words. 
3. I had a weird bug that caused me to lose my house that I built. I left my computer for a bit, did a ALT-TAB to switch to another program and then walked away. When I came back I noticed that I couldn't toggle fly modes any more and /help didn't work. The command window in general wasn't working. When I stopped the game and re-loaded the world my fence was still there but my house wasn't. It seemed to me like it may have happened when my computer hibernated. I checked the logs but there were no errors.

Minor "knit picky" subjective issues:

1. The door is hard to work with. The orientation seems off when it is placed. I expect the door to be closed when I place it and to be on the block face nearest to the camera. It just doesn't seem to work as expected. 
2. The bounding box on the fence seems off when you try to place a fence on top of another fence. The texture extends higher than the bounding box. It took me a second to figure out why I couldn't place the fence. I was pointing at the top of the fence then realized I needed to point to the bounding box wire frame.
3. Fire pit design doesn't look good in my opinion. I wouldn't be able to tell what it is if it didn't have a description. Plus there is too much smoke and not enough fire in the particle effects. 
4. Sometimes when breaking a block you see a hole in the adjacent block. I have this problem in my game on chunk borders. However, this seems to happen even within a single chunk. Maybe the chunk updater isn't prioritizing the updates correctly?

In summary, great work you all! This is the most fun voxel game I've played since minecraft. Especially considering it's pre-alpha. Please keep up the good work. Thanks again for the game key and I'll try to give periodic feedback when I can.

 

 

[Tyron]

Thanks for the feedback and happy to hear that we have a decent level of immersion \o/

@bugs

1. I've also noticed that blue is kinda weak, though the game doesn't handle it any different from the other light sources. Perhaps it's simply because our human eyes don't perceive blue as bright as the other colors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#/media/File:Eyesensitivity.svg
   Perhaps boosting blue and red colors in the last shader pass would help. Hm.
    
2. Is there a way how I can reproduce that bug? 
    
3. Sounds like the server crashed, was there a small wifi-connection-quality icon on the top right corner of the screen? If it happens again, please don't reload the world just yet and copy aside all the log files. Your logs didn't show anything because they get cleared everytime you restart (client logs are cleared on client restart, server logs are cleared on server restart)
   [Edit:] Actually i can see that icon on your last screenshot.

@issues

1. True, the door is placed wrongly at the moment. I'll fix it for next release
2. Hm that dreaded fence We'll think about how we can do it best
3. We still want to add textured fire particles and we'll probably change the texture of the 3 logs to look more like logs
4. Are you sure thats not on a chunk border? you can type .chunk to see the borders.

You also seem to have a fairly low framerate, whats your graphics card? (the client-main.txt shows which gfx card it uses)
Hm, still need to add cave culling, that would help a lot.

[chapp007]

@bugs

1. Yea I figured that was the case. It seemed to light up trees pretty well when close to one, just not the grass. Regardless of the why, it is a perception problem. It doesn't look right when put next to other torches.
2. I just went into a cave and started placing torches. I really had fun with the torches because to me that's one of the main things that sets it apart from minecraft so far. It's really awesome and that's why I'm harping so much about torches. :-)  I'll try to reproduce and see if I can get you some more detailed steps.
3. Ok. I'll be sure to grab the logs if it happens again.

@issues

4. I'll double check if it was a chunk boundary. But I'm pretty sure I broke a few blocks around that area and they did that. I suppose I could have been on a corner and every time I broke one I was hitting a border on one side or the other. 

My laptop is not really a good gaming laptop so don't worry too much about the frame rate. I'll be honest I didn't even notice. Relative to other games it ran fine. But since you asked, here is a snipped of the log when the game I'm developing starts up.

INFO: OpenGL Renderer Information
 * Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
 * Renderer: Quadro 1000M/PCIe/SSE2
 * OpenGL Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 353.62
 * GLSL Version: 4.50 NVIDIA
 * Profile: Compatibility