Tyron

Fellow Vintarians! A slightly delayed news entry, not because there was no progress, but I just couldn't get around writing a new entry in the last 3 days. Players can now step on stairs blocks - this was a new challenge because a stairs block actually consists of 2 hitboxes. One of a slab and a half length one on top for the second step. Added the basics for fence gates (connecting with fences, opening/closing) The Server can now also load compiled mods, previously they had to be source files Added code obfuscation and other preperations for a game release. Personally I couldn't care less for code obfuscation, but with a standard C# decompiler you can basically read the whole source code of the game just without code comments - not much different than to release the whole game as open source - which is not the kind of business model I want to follow. Also, very significant parts of the code will remain unobfuscated, such as the mod api. It would also be thinkable for me to remove the obfuscation for certain parts of the codebase in the future if it would contribute to the modability for the game Added serveral dialogs to be able to rename and delete singleplayer worlds Did some work to allow advanced text editing: We now have a Caret (the blinking vertical line) and you can move around that caret using cursor keys and Home/End keys like you would be used to in a Text editor. Multiline editing is also more or less working. Being able to select text is missing still. Added a new feature to the block json model format: Individual cubes of a block can now be rotated in any of 3 axes together and allow any angle (not just 22.5 degree steps). This update also included the necessary updates on the model editor. Finished implementation of block materials (e.g. stairs, doors, planks are of material "wood"). Added some new tools (axe, sword, hoe, shovel) Implemented mining speed bonus when using tools on blocks (acccording to the block material - so an axe is faster with breaking wooden materials) Implemented that items can take damage. (Uhoh I Need to change the interpolation method for items in guis, they look very pixely O_O) View full record

Fellow Vintarians! This time I was forced to do 3 larger updates on the game engine to fix some annoying bugs, which cost me almost a day each. All in all some good progress has been made. Large update 1: Reworked the positioning of everything inside the game world (blocks, entities, particles and decals) to allow high precision positioning at very large coordinates. Before this update everything in the game became very shaky at large coordinates (e.g. 250.000 blocks away from 0/0/0). This update now allows for much larger worlds (from ~50.000m² up to 500.000m²), although still not at the theoretical limit of 64mil m², there seems to be some more glitches beyond 600-800k blocks which prevents the world from loading. Large update 2: I had to turn the game coordinate system by 90 degrees (north to east, east to south, ...) to be consistent with the coordinate system in the model editor, which in turn fixed some texturing errors. This threw off many calculcations which I had to correct everywhere. Large update 3: I had to do some research and fixes on a third party library (OpenTk) to fix some wrong keys being applied on my laptop (pressing Fn+F12 for Volumne up was activating the key 'B' O_O) ...and another large and really boring update: I've finalized work on an authentication server and basic authentication systems and dialogs in the game client. So in the end it will be the same system as in Minecraft - you need to buy an account which let's you log in into the game and then you can play. Offline play will also be available if you have logged in at least once. For added convenience the will be no launcher, you log in inside the game. I'm also trying to make everything correctly right from the start and threw the auth server code and database into a Amazon EC2 / DBS System which allows for very quick scaling if there were a sudden increase in traffic to that server. Added sound and music level sliders to adjust volume, but no music yet :< Made the game settings dialogs also available from the main menu Saraty made a handful of verrry nice textures for planks and logs, which is also pretty much the only noteworthy visual update to show this time Added randomized block textures! A block can now be textured by any amount of textures which are randomly chosen per coordinate. It looks really good for the planks block and we also working on using it for ores and timber (to build vintage looking log houses) The random block textures for planks is already in the game. See last picture in below gallery. Notice how some planks are shorter and some longer? Thats perfect matching of random block textures Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/fQna9 View full record

Fellow Vintarians! Here are the updates of today: Two inventory convenience updates: A /clear command now clears the inventory and the keyboard keys 1-9 let's you flip itemstacks between your hotbar and the currently hovered item. Update on the Physics system to allow stepping on half blocks without jumping Added GUI Scaling - which is necessary so the GUI can resized to fit your screen size. This is where the GUI System shines - since everypart of the GUI (buttons, text, shadows, borders, lines, sliders, ...) is drawn in code, it can be freely resized without blur. New blocks! Vintagestory now has fences, doors, stairs, slabs, glass and polished stone. Some of them still have a very rough implementation, but the placement of stairs and fence works and doors can be interacted with already. Saraty remade the rock textures and made polished stone, which looks like awesome material for some epic builds. I also published a video on my youtube channel that compares the performance of Vintagestory with Teraslogy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KMlWzlbPks View full record

Updates Added rendering of Items (like Pickaxes) in first person hand Added a underwater sounds that loops as long as you stay underwater and fades out near the water surface Added ability to set particle size, added underwater particles Plenty other fixes and tweaks not worth mentioning Video as promised \o/ View full record

Updates Added Vsync Toggle to Graphics Settings Improved Water swimming physics and added a swimming sound Added a water splash sound water particles, both appear when the player jump into the water or drops an item in the water Added FXAA (Fast Approximate Antialias) that results in smoother edges which looks nicer Mostly finished the block entity system - the game now has a working basic chest where you can right click to get/retrieve items. Next step is to add a GUI Many, many bugfixes I'm doing some more updates on water and once these are done I'll record a short video showcasing all the water updates. You can expect to see it in the next news entry! In the mean time, have a look at some neatly anti aliased terrain! Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/ASLAw View full record

Updates Refactor decal system (which is draws the block breaking animation), can now draw decals on any block model (e.g. cross damage texture on a grass block) Finished item rendering system (voxel style items) Begin work on block entities (needed for chests) Added new properties to blocks and items to modify size, position and rotation when they are displayed in the gui, the players hand or on the ground. Reworked single player dialogs. Can now create and select existing worlds from a neat menu. Also added 2 new gui elements: A toggle button and hover text. Added ability to pass custom settings when starting a single player server (like world name, etc.). Begin work of different playstyles. Added super flat world generation for creative playstyle. So now a player can choose to play a survival with normal world generation or creative with superflat worldgen. Added a very basic loading screen before the main menu appears (takes about 4 seconds) Playstyles Above GUI Screenshot reveals one essential difference from Vintagecraft - the introduction of Playstyles. I'm quite hopeful that I managed to distill some of them most interesting play styles of a voxel game into 4 distinct modes. Wilderness Survival: If you know TerraFirmaCraft or Don't Starve then you should have an idea what this means :-) This play style would alter standard gameplay in a few but significant places to shift the main focus onto survival and place a smaller focus on creative building. In the future this would be the playstyle that could include natural disasters and other game mechanics that destory the terrain. Survive and Build: The standard mode. A healthy balance between surviving and building Survive and Automate: Like 'Survive and Build' bit with larger focus on automating your farms and material refining processes. Again only a few but significant changes. Like the introduction of advanced automation, logistics and other technical blocks and perhaps some sort of jetpack like device that requires fuel? Creative Building: No survival aspect. Infinite supply of blocks. Can fly around freely. View full record

Oh that gives me an idea for a semi-serious skill (where players can put skill points into): Reduced Item spewing radius on death

I've began a complete rewrite of the player movement and collision detection system. This is necessary because the previous one was buggy in several cases and not very flexible. Working on collision detection was a slow, tedious and an unrewarding experience Therefore we now have a solid collision detection system and the player is able to walk, swim, fly, sneak and sprint without glitches. I also started working on player health, fall damage, death and respawn. We now have a sarcastic death dialog \o/ The health system is still buggy at this point but will be improved very soon. Unfortunately no other fancy pictures to show this update, but we can rest assured that some critical parts of the game received much needed progress. View full record

Added some new blocks moved over from Vintagecraft. Done with fairly little effort, thanks to similarities of the json model format. Currently only the blocks themselves are there, you can't use them for anything yet, other than for decorative purposes. Added blocks dropping from breaking blocks and everything required to make that possible. Which means a basic entity system is now in place that will also handle animals, mobs and in the future other players. Added 2 new settings to control mouse sensivity and mouse movement smoothing Did a bit if work on the tree-in-world-generator. It now spawns trees based on the climate, forest and elevation values. Recorded and edited a bunch of sounds for the game, which was a lot of fun Lots of internal updates (improved particle spawning system, begin work on making dropped items collectible) View full record

The new block renderer is now integrated into the Inventory GUIs and the World renderer, so any 3d models from a json file can be added and used inside the game. I've begun adding custom collision and selection boxes for blocks Completed one significant part of the lighting system: Block light. Block light is seperate from sunlight because the sunlight varies during a day/night cycle but block light always remains. The last missing part of the lighting system now is coloured lights. The engine already supports it, but it's untested and various places in the engine probably need some tweaking to get it working Here is a video demonstrating block light: I've begun adding custom block behavior, and it's already working for torches \o/ Now you can place torches on walls and they attach themselfes properly. In above video you can still see that feature missing. Here's a screenshot of it: And finally, here's your weekly fix of the Vintagestory Terrain Generator and various glitches Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/QksfQ View full record

Well a lootable corpse with despawning items is pretty similar to dropping all items that despawn.

Recently I was thinking about what should happen when you die. I will probably go the usual way and make the player loose all items and some exp (not all levels), but I'm still interested in other ideas. Examples: - Drop all items but inside a grave that doesn't respawn and can be reclaimed - Drop all items except the ones in the hotbar? - Don't drop any items but loose money? - All of the above depending on the game difficulty? Or something else completely?

After having already spent significant time on preparing for the universal block rendering system I was now able to complete it, this means the game can now take in a json model file and turn it into a ingame block, in fact, almost the same json model files that I made for Vintagecraft. Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/uYMer What I still have to do however is to integrate the custom block shape generation when drawing the world and when showing the players inventory. Above screenshots are made using just a quickly hacked together test renderer for a single block. Nonetheless, having this system in place is a significant milestone as it will let me add game content more quickly. View full record

Was busy with real life, so little progress since last Update. Low activity will continue for some more days. Nonetheless I began work on a universal block rendering system that can take in block models in json format (practically the same as minecrafts format) and process the file into a renderable mesh in the game. added a final render pass which can apply any kind of post processing effects to the world via shader. With that I added some slight sepia effect to the scene. As always, some screenshots of the terrain are also included in the slideshow. Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/Pnnd9 View full record

No new completed features this time, I had to fix up a lot of things and prepare the ground on which to base on the next features Continued working on implementing items (= anything that can go into an inventory and is not a block) Began implementing survivval inventory, before there was only a creative inventory A few major internal refactors and bugfixing sessions Fixed some block facing inconsistencies in preparation for a universal block tesselator from json files However since the game has gotten more stable now, I could spend more time exploring the Vintagestory terrain, have a look. Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/gtpmC Here's also a video of me taking a short hike and playing with the particle system, hope the background music is not too obnoxious. View full record