Tyron

Metallurgic Vintarians You can now finally progress to the next metal tier - bronze \o/ Took way way longer than I hoped, but now it's done at least. For the next version I will try to add some basic animal life to attain food from so starving is less of an issue. Here's a tutorial video on how smelting works now Updates Feature: New Smelting System All smeltable blocks or items now have a new property "Temperature" that increase when being heated and drops when being cooled Smelting of ores now must happen inside a Vessel that is placed in the fire pit. This expands the firepit inventory by 4 cooking/smelting slots. Can now mix and match ores and ingots to create pure or alloyed metals. Currently available: Tin bronze: 88-92% copper, 8-12% tin. Double durability than copper and quite strong Bismuth bronze: 50-70% copper, 20-30% zinc and 10-20% bismuth. Slightly higher durability than tin bronze but somewhat weaker (slightly less damage on swords, slightly less mining speeds) Black bronze: 70-90% copper, 8-16% gold, 8-16% silver. Highest durability and strength of all bronze alloys. Added ingot molds to pour in molten metal Added bronze tools for bismuth bronze, black bronze and tin bronze as well as their respective crafting recipes. Feature: 5 new blocks: Skull Cobblestone, new Barrel with variants, Straw Bed, Crate and Bone-y Soil Feature: 2 new survival music tracks "Building" and "Creating" Feature: Eating food is no longer instant and plays an animation while eating Feature: Modding Updates Added ability to perform a ray trace from any position to detects collisions with blocks or entities Can now have custom, non-instant and animated uses for items/blocks New Event for Blocks/Items while being held by the player New Event for Blocks when the player collides with them Tweak: Changed Intro Track to use "Night To Day" again Fixed: Lava glowlevel and light values missing Fixed: Items not in general tab in creative inventory Fixed: Chest contents dropping while opened and the player dies Fixed: Crash when mods register their own blocks/items Fixed: Some weirdness related to loading/unloading entities resulting in odd behaviors with dropped items or drifters

Inactive Vintarians As mentioned 2 posts ago I've been inactive for 2 weeks, hence the lack of updates. For the last 2 days I've continued my work on implementing the bronze age, which turned out to be a lot more time consuming than I originally thought, as it requires more than just 2 new features, such as item temperature, held item animations, ore-in-container smelting, alloying as well as a new block with a custom renderer. A big part of it is now complete however, so you can probably expect a new version in 2-4 days. In the coming update there will also be at least 2 new blocks and 2 new tracks from Hayden. Looking forward to work on the next thing already!

Folksly Vintarians! Version 1.3.2 is now available for download in the account manager. At long last, a new game version. It was supposed to include the new entity animation system. It's all implemented but one last glitch remained that will require some more work to fix, but after two months fiddling with animations I wanted to work on something else again. So now with the help of Josh and Hayden we have creative tabs and ambient cave music. I actually forgot to fix that weird texture bug with torches, so enjoy creepy torch textures with our brand new creep cave sounds! >:D Updates Feature: New music track "To Dawn, from a Very Rainy Night" Feature: Ambient Cave music 33 ambient track pieces that are dynamically composed together when being in places devoid of sunlight (i.e. caves) Dynamically blends tracks when moving between overground and underground Improved music system that will allow more kinds of dynamically composed tracks in the future Feature: Added tabs for the creative inventory Feature: New blocks: Paper Lantern, Chair and Table Feature: New server config to enable disable spawning of creatures Feature: New server command /serverconfig Allows setting various sever settings while the server is running. Currently available: maxchunkradius: Set max view distance maxclients: Set max allowed players that can join antiabuse: Enable/Diable anticheat mode onlywhitelist: Toggle whitliste mode (=only allow players to join that are on a whitelist) entityspawning: Disable/Enable spawning of creatures (=drifters) Feature: Mod API updates Refactored API namespaces to follow a cleaner design pattern Added IBlockEntityContainer interface to access block entity inventories Added GetLightLevel() method for convenient access to a positions light leves Added getters for sunlight and blocklight levels in the world accessor Added ability to load hierarchical shapes for blocks, items and entities Added ability to render entities from a shape, added support to load and run animations Improved documentation in various places Tweak: Drifters no longer target player in creative or spectator mode Tweak: Placing stairs now are placed upside down depending on whether targeting the upper or lower half of a block Tweak: Increased max configurable mouse sensitivy from 150 to 200 Fixed: Played picking up items after death Fixed: Game instance not fully stopped after leaving a world, causing increased memory usage and potentially other weird behavior Fixed: Create NPC command not working Fixed: A crash the sometimes occured when loading a world

Silent Vintarians Nobody likes delays. A series of inconveniences and other responsibilities prevented me from doing much programming on the game. And then, last week, my family including me caught quite a cold, sigh. Due to this there's no new release as of right now. We were not inactive however: CreativeMD continously adds new articles to our mod documentation and took a first dive in the engine code. Luke has been writing several pages on the game story Hayden made several great cave sounds as well as a new track that will be in the next release Josh joined the team as game programmer Ivan continued his work on building dungeon sections And I, Tyron, wrote a new About us page that replaces the previous Team and Vision pages implemented the basics for animations in the game engine added a few features related to animations to our model creator tool been on the lookout for an Animator to make us animations. Contact me if you are interested! For the coming 10 days I should have more time to work on the game, interupted by a 2 week period of low activity, beyond which my availability should be back to normal again. Overally my lifes situation has not changed greatly and we still have the same dedication to push the game forward as always, so hopefully in the comming week we'll have something nice to release again!

Hunted Vintarians Version 1.3.1 is now available for download in the account manager. After a long and ardous journey through the depths of the engine a working creature system has come alive. Please note that this is just the very beginning of the creature/combat system that we actually have in mind. There was just so many new components and refactors required that I wanted to have them done first before I go ahead with a "version 0.0.2" of these components. The next step is probably to add support for models and animation made from the VS Model Creator. Nonetheless I hope that it will spice up your survival experience! Updates Feature: First hostile creature: Drifter. Includes: Basic but modular AI System: Wandering around, seeking players, attacking the nearest player Basic path traversing: Walk from point a to point b in a direct line. Ability to step on 1 high blocks. Powerful creature configuration: A creature is merely a json file. Creatures and can added, removed or modified by touching only those files (custom models not implemented just yet). Basic movement interpolation on the client. Creatures and other Players now should move smoothly New server command: /entity [spawn|count|removeall] [entityname] Custom texture as well as idle, hurt and death sounds 0.5 second red tinting when being attacked. Spawn particles on death. Basic spawning and despawning mechanic. Drifters (for) now spawn in dark areas where the light level is below 8. Feature: Very Basic combat system Ability to punch other players and creatures. Added attack power property to items. Swords, Knifes and Axes now have extra attack power (visible in the items tooltip) Durability reduction on items with durability when attacking Feature: Engine/Mod API Updates Able to register entities, ai tasks, entity renderers and particle property providers Able to spawn particles server side (=> broadcasted to clients) Tweak: In multiplayer a joining player is now regarded as spectator until the client sends a ready signal. This should prevent getting killed while still joining. Fixed: Item texture overlays property not working Fixed: Crash when trying to craft something Fixed: Not able to start a singleplayer world if in serverconfig.json whitelisting is turned on Fixed: A client crashing in a certain situations when joining a multiplayer world Demonstration Video (Something seems to have gone awry with the encoding. I'll upload a better quality clip tomorrow)

Filmic Vintarians Version 1.3.0 is now ready for download at https://account.vintagestory.at. This updates comes fairly late and does not contain many new features. My body seemed slightly fed up from the intense amount of desk work so I was forced to take a longer break. Furthermore I did some major refactorings in preparation for adding creatures into the game, without any progress that I could show off. I did add a long planned method of compression videos captured by the ingame recorder which is now done. It is pretty slow though, so I probably have to do some major optimizations there. Audio is also still not captured yet. And finally, on Request by UmbraCreations I improved the world edit tools to offer better copy&mirror operations for creating large builds. I've made. Please note that I had to make a backwards compabtility breaking change this version. If you load an old savegame you will get thrown back to the spawn point with full health and hunger, but everything else should work fine. Updates Feature: World Edit Updates (all documented on the How to use page) Ability to grow/shrink the selection, Added ability to mirror or repeat a selection. Coordinate Hud now shows the horizontal orientation Feature: Video recorder tools. Added .vrec tool to do ingame video recording, also offering video compression. .vrec start - Starts recording .vrec stop - Stops recording .vrec toggle - Starts/Stops recording (usefull for mapping onto a keyboad key using the Macro Manager) vrec fps [number] - sets the video framerate of the recording .vrec tickfps [number] - sets the game framerate (should ideally cause lagfree recording if set but I'm having minor troubles with it syncing up perfectly with the video frames. Setting it to the same as the video framerate will probably help with lag though). .vrec codec - lists all available encoders that compresses your video (install x264vfw for an mpeg4 encoder). Most encoders seem very laggy unfortunately, I probably have to optimize some more here. .resolution width height - Sets the game window size to given width height Mod API Updates Entity and ItemStack class now part of the API, allowing a bunch of things that weren't possible before Extended the Render API so that the rendering of entity items, entity players and other entities can now be rendered using the render api alone Tweak: Reduced sound range of all sounds Fixed: Hay block not blocking light Fixed: Some Stairs blocks causing neighbouring block sides to be come transparent Fixed: Rare client crash when exploring the world

A bunch of bugs justify a quick fix, so here's 1.2.9.2 for you. Get it at https://account.vintagestory.at as always Updates Feature: Added an API call to look at all registered world gen handlers. Should allow completely custom world generation by clearing all handlers. Tweak: Some API Methods now are getters instead of methods Fixed: Keymapping lost after every update Fixed: Ores not getting consumed after being smelted in the firepit Fixed: Client Crash when breaking blocks in certain situations Fixed: Client Crash when opening the chest inventory in certain situations (cause not yet known, so might still produce wonky behavior) Fixed: Client Crash when trying to connect to a server in certain situations (related to ingot piles)

[No Title Here] Version 1.2.9 is now available for download in the account manager, I've begun some work on metal alloying as well as a second farming mechanic: Herbalism. I've also started the first few bits of code for loading animations created with the modelcreator. A lot of time also went into improving the model creator to make the creation of animals easier. Beyond that, I felt like adding various planned small-ish features in no particular order, so here you go! Game Updates Feature: Stackable Ingots and Firewood: Shift + Right click on the ground with ingots or fire wood to make pretty piles Feature: Tool racks: For neatly organizing your tools. Crafted from 6 sticks (3 top, 3 bottom) Feature: Beginner bag: 2 Slot baskets crafted from 15 cattails (fill 5 slots with 3 items each in the crafting grid) Feature: Block ambient sound system. Each block may now emit forever looping ambient sounds.The first 2 blocks using this mechanic is water and lava. Feature: Firepits now emit an ambient fire sound when lit Feature: First person item rendering improvements Now lags behind the players camera rotation, giving a more immersive feel Moves out of sight when looking straight up Feature: Item/Entity boyancy. Light items now float on the water surface instead of going under Feature: Mod API Additions Added soundByType blocktype property Added client side mesher api to allow for injection of custom meshdata into the terrain tesselator (used by the ingot piles and tool racks). Unified Block/Item properties into a common Collectible class. Gives some additional properties to blocks. Tweak: Addd geartwos updated server.sh script Tweak: Made water yet again more transparent Tweak: High fertility soil deposits now only 1 ever block thick Tweak: Allow early low-yield harvest of pre mature crops (but only one stage before completion) Tweak: 4 times lower chance of getting a second seed from a mature crop Fixed: Snow layers not generating on top of tree leaves Fixed: Bunch of bugs with firepit inventory Fixed: Correct sound system attenuation Fixed: Server crash related to farmland Fixed: Players loosing privileges/roles on a smp server after every version update Fixed: Creative inventory scrollbar not updating to right size after searching something VS Modelcreator Updates Feature: Improved Saving/Loading Mechanic. Now behavors more like a classic image/text editor Feature: Added ability to move and delete keyframes Feature: Added undo/redo capability Feature: Added crude version of single texture mode that is more suited for creature creation Feature: Added attachment points manager. Let's you define attachment points for later use in game (e.g. where the held sword goes) Game Screenshots

Animated Vintarians Version 1.2.8 is now available for download in the account manager, Last friday I managed to complete the first major milestone for having creatures in the game - which is being able to create animations in the model creator. It was a tedious task. To celebrate, I "allowed" myself a break in the form of minor non-essential updates on the game. I also fixed a lot of major bugs however. I'm quite glad I finally got the major performance hit fixed for users of certain radeon graphics cards. Updates: Feature: VS Model Creator Animation Features Completed. Can now build basic animations with keyframes that will be later support by the game engine. Downloadable at https://github.com/tyronx/vsmodelcreator/releases Feature: Added Cooper's Reed. The perfect lake prettifier. Naturally generates nearby and inside water. This work also opened the door to more water based plants and blocks in the future. In fact, any block now may be configured to be inside water. Feature: Added Saguaro Fruit. On rare occasion, saguaro cacti are generated with harvestable fruits. They do not regrow at this point in time though. Feature: Server Whitelisting: Can now put a standalone server into whitelist-only mode and /whitelist or /unwhitelist specific players Feature: Players now drop all their items on death Feature: The /op and /privgrp commands no longer require the player to be online Feature: Added crafting recipe for raw blue/firebricks which can then be burned into burned bricks, which can then be crafted into brick blocks Feature: Added ability to burn 8 clay piles into hardened clay in the fire pit Feature: A rough mechanic for fall damage reduction when landing in water. Should no longer take damage when slowed to a near halt and then touching ground. Feature: Cinematic camera now allows to create endlessly looping paths using the commands .cam close - to close a path .cam loop [num] - to loop num times. Or indefinitely if no number is supplied Feature: Debug screen now also displays the game version and the graphics card info on the left side Tweak: Added a low chance for very wet and temperate climates, tweaked tint map to have very dark grass in such areas. Fixed a few oddities in world generaiton. Tweak: Signs now only require 1 plank and 1 stick to craft Tweak: Cinematic camera paths are now white/blue checked to show the individual steps Tweak: Cinematic camera recordings should now actually be lag free, independent of the current ingame FPS Tweak: More block info for farmland and growing grops, e.g. Now shows the current growth stage. Fixed: Very bad FPS (1-20 instead of 100-200) on certain radeon cards. Fixed: Cinematic camera now moving correctly or in the correct speed in certain situations Fixed: Saplings not growing at all. Sigh. Fixed: Player unable to rejoin a multiplayer server in certain situations Fixed: Players teleporting around in multiplayer after opening a dialog while moving. Fixed: Game crashing when it doesn't find a block shape Fixed: Player standing inside farmland after exiting/loading the game and gltiching weirdness in multiplayer when standing on farmland Fixed: Some Bread texture too large and overly pixelated Fixed: Standalone server not using a supplied world seed through serverconfig.json Fixed: Backpacks disappearing when picked up in creative mode Fixed: Server disconnect messages not arriving on the client, which instead showed some connection lost error Fixed: Several bugs related to kicking/banning players, especially as admin Fixed: Firepit smelting progress hardly visible, now in green instead of black. Corrected dialog title. Fixed: Shift+Left click in the crafting output window consuming ingredients but not crafting enough output items, effectively destroying items. Fixed: Player picking up items that instantly end up in a currently opened container when the players inventory is full.

Renowned Vintarians Since I've been all over the place with no clear milestone reached there won't be a release this week. Not to say we were inactive though: The Story Excerpt page is finally done. Took us over a month to decide which art style we want to go for. This should give you a small peek of what is to come some day. I wrote up another page that summarizes an age old question: What makes Vintagestory different from Minecraft? Model Creator: The tool we use to design the games block received some convenience updates, code refactoring and is now underway of becoming also an animation editor that should allow everyone to add animated creatures to the game. It's the first important step in allowing us to implement animals/mobs. Game I ended up spending one day fixing up the cinematic camera. It should now finally work bug-free and will have 2 new features. Fixed the ingame recorder to actually record lag free videos. Might have finally found the cause of very bad overall performance for certain Radeon graphics cards Added some more useful information to the debug screen Video: With above fixes in place I was able to do some pretty recording again, check below Next week should there will probably be a 1.2.8 ready for download. Until then, sayonara!

Spacious Vintarians Version 1.2.7 is now available for download in the account manager, 3 Feature Release in one Week? Because we can! Very happy with having survival inventory working now, it was one of those features I never was sure on how to implement in the best way. The same goes for sapling growth, since the tree generation system is actually a seperate mod. Updates Basic Bag/Backpack Inventory Added all remaining code to make survival inventory work as planned. The idea is that your default inventory only consists of the 10 slots in your hotbar and you can further expand that space with bags. Well, now we have the first bag! Can now craft Linen Sack from 8 Linen Cloth which expands your inventory by 4 slots for each sack. Can now craft linen cloth from 4 flax twines. Feature: Very Basic Sapling Growth: Planted saplings now will grow a tree after 5-8 ingame days. Feature: Added new crop: Soybean Feature: Added small, rare deposits of high fertility soil. These are very valuable for growing crops. Feature: Berry bushes now also regrow based on the internal game calendar, which means they grow even if the chunks are not loaded Feature: Tool breaking sound whenever a tool runs out of durability Tweak: Shift+Left click on the crafting output slot now crafts as many items as it can Tweak: Shift+Left click on a creative inventory slot now creates whole stacks Tweak: All the crops generated during worldgen should now have a higher chance of being mature Tweak: Worldgen should generate more mushrooms Fixed: Random crash caused by farmland. (NullReference Exception) Fixed: Crops never growing if they were planted on dry farmland that was later given access to water Fixed: Crash when using the API to register custom block entities or blocks. Fixed: Added missing API access to registering items, block behaviors and entities