Tyron

Almost Smithing Vintarians Version 1.3.5 is now available for download in the account manager Despite our efforts, the smithing system has not just yet emerged from the complex networks of game mechanics needed to make it work. We made a few major advancements though There's now a Forge which lets you reheat metals and work items. Shift + right click with coal or lignite to refill fuel Right click with a torch to ignite Shift + right click with ingots or plates to place for heating The current work item can now be picked up, reheated and placed back on the anvil using right mouse click and shift+right mouse click Working an item on the anvil with the hammer is now mapped to the left mouse button instead of the right one. Any item now may override the left mouse button default behavior. Added some fancy particle effects when working a hot piece of metal I've started implementing smithing recipes and a (currently useless) dialog for selecting the desired smithing recipe. Hot blocks/items now also glow in the gui, in the players hands or when dropped on the ground I'll also make a tutorial video once the smithing system is complete. Updates Feature: New Block: Forge. Can be used to heat ingots and plates to working temperature for (incomplete) smithing on the anvil. Requires coal as fuel and a torch for igniting the coal. Feature: Added blocks basalt and obisidian. Added new behavior where mixing lava and water creates these 2 blocks. Feature: Added ability to change any client configuration at runtime through the command .clientconfig Feature: Variable Sampling Pixel Rate. Enables two things: 0.5x Sampling rate: 50% performance gain at the cost of reduced graphics quality for ultra low end hardware. Set via .clientconfig set ssaa 0.5 2-4x Sampling rate: Very laggy but allows making massive screenshots (e.g. 7680x4320 pixels). Set via .clientconfig set ssaa 2 .clientconfig set scaleScreenshot 0 Feature: "Rock Quarrying" Mining all the blocks around a Rock block will now drop the rock itself. Feature: Reworked world generation component responsible for spawning patches of plants/blocks/stuff. The world generator should now spawn many plants/flowers/crops more commonly again. Also patches of blocks now also spawn more likely together with forests, shrubs or other patches. Feature: Performance Improvements Improved speed of Terrain Collision detection by 15%: Gives a nice FPS boost when 300+ Entities are loaded Improved chunk tesselation speed by 4%: Makes chunks load a bit faster Feature: New API Method IBlockAccessor.GetBlocks() - retrieve blocks from within an area. Runs faster than when calling .GetBlock() many times OnBeginAttack/OnAttacking/etc.: A collectible may now also override the block breaking action via left mouse click. Tweak: Hitting Enter in the Chat Window now unfocuses it immediately. Previously you had to hit enter twice which was unintuitive. Tweak: The Sky is now less white in creative mode by setting the correct sea level. Tweak: Hitting the F1/F2 keys in creative mode now decreases/increase the speed by 1 instead of setting it to a fixed value of 1 or 5. Holding the Ctrl-Key changes the speed in steps of 0.1 Tweak: Players now start with 8 bread until there is enough survival content that prevents starving Tweak: Added Luma render pass. Improves anti-aliasing quality done by FXAA Fixed: Badly randomized topsoil grass transitions Fixed: Gold and Silver ore not smeltable Fixed: Gold and Silver ore deposits now spawning anywhere. Now spawn as subdeposits in quartz Fixed: Right Ingot on a double mold block not retrievable with right click Fixed: Crash when calling /bir remap Fixed: Bloom shader effect affected by blocklight/sunlight Fixed: Metalplate missing blockside shading Fixed: Coopers Reed in water having only 1 visible diagonal side. Now renders as a full cross again. Fixed: Either Water flowing too slow or lava flowing too fast Fixed: Some behavior and graphical glitches with water/lava Pictures Forge block and hot ingot on an anvil More richly decorated worlds due to improved block patch generator Fixed badly randomized grass tinting View full record

It might be that we will add several new techniques and so you would a metric ton of tools filling your hotbar, we were concerned this might be a bit overkill. For now I added a tool mode dialog that you can open when hitting the 'F' key.

I envision a "Customize Playstyle" Screen that you can reach through the create world screen with a bunch of settings such as Torch burnout Being in the Darkness kills you Loose inventory contents on death etc. In other words the 4 default playstyles are merely default selections in that configuration list. That way we could keep the difficulty level seperate from game mechanic details such as dropping items on death - and in fact i personally would somewhat prefer if we could avoid a difficulty setting altogether, there's some good arguments against it. We could even game-ify that custom playstyle screen. I always loved this screen in Master of Orion 2: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/File:Moo2_RaceDesignScreen.png It gives you a fixed amount of points for postive or negative perks. Positive perks cost you points while negative perks give you more points. Unused points give you a score multiplier. This way might give the player a way more rewarding feeling when they choose their custom playstyle.

We have Updates. Shaderific. Tweaked sky horizon, now takes on the fog color, making fog actually foggy. Tweaked Bloom and Godray shaders. Particularly the godray shader has a less overexposed sky now. Tweaked berry bushes and crops to appear in warmer climates as well, should be a bit more common now. Fixes or at least reduces the occurence of the server crashing Fixes player no longer able to die View full record

Sandy Vintarians Version 1.3.4 is now available for download in the account manager. [Update 23.4.2017] There's currently a fairly common server crash occurring, I'm working on a fix While I did make some more progress on the smithing system and animals, I decided against waiting any longer for these features to be ready and release an inbetween version. Since last update I added the ability for tools to have tool modes that the player can select from. This enables you to properly shape your work item on the anvil. Still missing is a forge to heat the ingot, a recipe matching system and some pretty effects. Beyond that, we've now closed the suggestions tracker and moved all the suggestions either to the new suggestions reddit at /r/VSSuggestions or our internal tracker. Updates Feature: Added falling block physics for sand and gravel Feature: Added Skull Cow block to deserts Feature: Added Max FPS Slider for manually syncing monitor refresh rate with game refresh rate for reduced stutter (38 FPS works best for me) Feature: Added metal plate and plate piles Feature: Lava now flows like water, albeit slower and emits light also when generated during worldgen Feature: Improved Game Performance Moved block and sun relighting computations into a seperate thread. This causes light sources to appear fractionally after placing them therefore however cause no more lag. This is particularly helpful while loading newly generated chunks as these can cause many updates from settling rivers. Fixed random heavy frame stutter while chunks are loading (due to lock contention) Tweak: Tools now have a higher attack power than using bare hands Tweak: Gravel Step sounds a bit smoother Tweak: Some API methods in Collectible.cs and Block.cs now marked virtual Fixed: Sky darkening every day at 12:00 Fixed: Sun shine halo cut off Fixed: Drifters not despawning, causing them to be a pretty rare find Fixed: API method entitypos.GetViewVector().Z inverted Fixed: Game crashing when it fails to load a mapchunk, now logs an error instead Fixed: Stuttering problem when teleporting very far away Fixed: Hovering items over items in the creative inventory + hotbar key created only ghost items Fixed: Mipmap level now at 4 by default Fixed: Hunger level going down in creative mode Fixed: Controls Dialog getting oversized when the window is resized or the gui scale changes Fixed: Stove Block disappearing on world reload View full record

Just tried it, it works \o/ What would be pretty cool is when horizontally attached blocks would also break.

Patient Vintarians Yet again, I could not bring out a new release within the time frame that I hoped for. One of the causes includes my whole family catching a pretty severe cold for the second time this year, though luckily I have been spared so far. But I digress, here's some game related updates! Game Festival So I just got the news today that in all likelihood I will be attending the A.MAZE Game Festival Berlin to show off Vintage Story at one of their open screen booths. They accepted my submission, so I guess I should be going ;-) Community Since the previous game update the forums and chat have become very active, which is awesome! It's getting hard to track all the ideas floating around, so we'll probably try and find a better solution to tracking these, ideally a single place for where people can vote and sort the suggestions in various ways. The old Chat service will be discontinued by the developers of this forum software, so I had to switch over to an alternative. Discord seemed to be a nice choice, so I hope to see you all there! Model Creator I've done a lot of work on the Model Creator and uploaded 7 new releases this month. The updates were mostly to improve the stability, consistency and ease-of-use when creating creature models and animations. After all, the better we can work with this tool, the faster we can churn out high quality models and animations for the game. Beyond that I also implemented the ability to export animations as animated gifs, because communication is key! Here's the first ever gif export: By the way, if there's anyone that thinks he can do way better animations than that: I NEED YOU! PLEASE CONTACT ME! (serious) The model and texturing was done by saraty, which is a great first milestone for her to be able to do that. The other new feature is automatic texture reloading. Combined with a PS Action to automatically export the current image as png through hotkey, you have near instant texture reload, this should greatly speed up the texturing process since you get quick feedback on how it looks. Game Smithing I've got a half finished implementation for a smithing system which hit a minor road block that I have to solve first: Selecting from a list of smithing techniques. Probaby will be some special form of gui dialog. Here's a short video that demonstrates some of the ideas behind the smithing concept. It's inspired by redrams suggestions in the forums. Animations I probably spent another 10 hours or more fixing the remaining bugs in the animation code, which was the last roadblock that prevent me from adding new creatures. This component was probably the hardest one to implement into the game so far, so this calls for a celebration that it's in a usable state now! Max FPS For anyone experiencing stutter, this new graphics setting could fix it, by manually syncing the FPS to your Monitors refresh rate. For me the game ran smoothest when limited to 38 FPS Joshes Updates Josh has been actively working on the ever growing list of smallish tasks. Since the last update he fixed that lava lakes are dark during initial world generation, that lava can spread like water and added the long planned cow skull block to deserts. That's all folks! I hope to finish the new smithing system soon and make a release with it. Until then, stay classy. View full record

Perhaps. But not yet implemented

Thanks for the praise, we're glad you appreciate our efforts! :-) I don't think it would be a useful game mechanic to make ingots break or have bad batches. The vessel only starts smelting if you have a valid mixture in it (which the firepit gui tells you textually as you seen in the video), so you can't make a failed alloy, I find that more fair to players. \o/

Not quite. There's a few things you could do with that but it doesn't let you control the players physics. Examples: - A laser block that destroys whats in front of it - A mob that damages whatever entity it is currently looking at - Test if there is a direct line of sight between two entities Permanently turning off collision boxes on certain blocks during runtime you could quite easily do through another way - modify the collision boxes of the block instances (aquired either by world.GetBlock(code) or iterating over world.Blocks)

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 View full record

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! View full record

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 View full record

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! View full record

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) View full record

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 View full record