Tyron

Dedicated Vintarians! The polishing continues Probably the best news of the month is that we now a (so far) glitch free colored lighting system. We also worked heavily on terrain generation again. Updates I have finally fixed the last known lighting glitches related to the colored light system. As mentioned in an earlier article I was unable to make it work in certain cases which was super frustrating, so now I'm all the more happier to finally see it working and no longer something that I have to touch until release. You can see it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0_M4b9_1TQ Block Updates New block: Added 10 Paintings that you can hang on walls and which depict Saratys Art \o/ New mushroom variant: Bolete mushroom New flower variants: We've added Wild Daisys and Cornflowers New config: Any Block can now be individually be configured to be randomly offseted when placed in the world (currently used for tall grass, flowers, saplings and mushrooms). This now also affects the blocks selection box. New config: Individual elements of a block can now be tinted by climate. This is used to climate color the flowers stems, but not their petals. Looks massively better \o/ WorldGen Updates New Subsystem: Shrub Generator. Generates small shrubby trees only composed of leaves. Uses it's own shrub layer independent from the forest layer. New Subsystem: Vines Generator. Generates columns of vines on trees in wet climates Added several new tree generators for greater variety Added several new kinds of block patches to the 'Block Patch Generator': Now places single cornflowers and wild daisys, mushrooms in very small groups and heathers, western gorse flower and horsetails rarely in very large groups Some more balancing on the individual landforms Tweaked block layer generator some more, I could finally see something sandy and desert like appear Inventory Convenience Update: Can now use left shift + mouse click to move items between inventories (e.g. from creative inventory to hotbar) Half broken blocks now slowly repair themselves (with a backwards running breaking animation) In the create world screen you can now enter a world seed I've begun work on a 'Game Account Platform' - a website where you will be able to log in with your game account, change your player name or password as well as assisting you when you forgot your password. Another dozen bugfixes as always Screenshots All these screenshots are from procedurally generated terrain, no hand placed blocks (except the first 2 pics obviously) View full record

Most patient Vintarians! Game dev is like a roller coaster No video just yet Everytime I want to get recording I notice a gazillion imperfections that I want to fix, so I did those first >.< Until next time hopefully. Saraty and me had our very first usable multiplayer experience and built a small house together (picture below). Still more bugs to squash but that felt totally awesome <3 Alright, let's dig into the git commit log to see what has changed. Updates So I did a lot of polishing, well mostly bugfixes. I usually don't share these, but this time I'll give you a behind the scenes look: Fixed chunks generating twice under certain conditions Fixed a water wave rendering glitch at chunk borders Fixed 2 bugs preventing the standalone server to start Fixed particles wrongly colored from block light and fixed transparent overlapping particles getting very dark. Fixed player characters not illuminated by block light and also fixed precision errors when rendering the character at large coordiantes Fixed Chunk frustum culling being disabled -.- Fixed FXAA not working Fixed /help (cmd) command not recognizing mod commands. .help commands now also sorted alphabetically. Fixed worldgen mod not reloading landforms on server restart Fixed memory not being freed after leaving a multiplayer game Fixed snow layer replacing leaves during world generation Fixed snow layer not rendering if a solid block is above Fixed changing game mode in multiplayer not correctly interpreted by the connected clients Chests and Ladders now have correct collision and selection boxes and are orientable (n e s w) Fixed chunk loader suddenly stopping to generate new chunks after some time. Added another debug command to track such kinds of bugs. Refactored Multilanguage support Fixed not being able to climb out of 2 block deep water Added red mushroom block Worldgen Updates Added a block patch generator that can produce patches of flowers, different grass, mushroom rings, and later hopefully some smaller patches of sand and gravel near lakes. Tweaked climate tinting textures to be a bit more pretty Continued work on block layer generation: Works a bit better again, tweaked the grass layer, still not seeing any sandy deserts for some reason. Tweaked landform generator: Mountains and Grasslands probably look better now Sound and sound engine updates: Refactored the sound engine. The old code was super frustrating for me so I finally went ahead and refactored it. The code is now way cleaner and shorter too. Changing the sound level in the settings now also adjusts all currently running sounds. Blocks can now have randomized breaking, placing and stepping-on sounds again freely configurable by anyone. I've spent a day collecting and editing various sounds for the most common blocks. Added about 50 new sounds to the game. Most of them are decent, some need improvement still Small fun features Each time you you open the "new world" screen, a world name is randomly generated (e.g. "Gloomy Kingdom Worlds") Breaking blocks in creative mode also spawns particles All block sounds now also have a slightly randomized pitch, which sounds super funky. Maybe too funky for our theme Gallery This time with some random terrain screenshots, maybe you'll notice the improvements. View full record

Mighty Vintarians The Progress never stops. Boring text is boring I'll try to record a video or two this weekend to give ya' all an overview on how the game looks like now. That should hopefully be a bit more exhilerating than my constant walls of text Updates The building blocks in the game received some extra love Doors, the carpenters table and the sign block can now be placed in any 4 directions. All the torches properly attach to walls, emit colored particles, and they can no longer be attached to non-solid block sides Added upside down slabs We've added brick blocks and improved the textures for Sand, Gravel, and Shingles All the stair blocks (planks, shingles, cobble) are now correctly, which means they have correct collision boxes and can be placed in 4 directions each up and down side. We now have "wildvine ends" that give a nice looking end to the vines. Also fixed wildvines being wrongly shaded and wrongly biome colored. Did I already mention we can now generate 2x2 thick trees (all trees are made by the same generator)? Finalized the flower pot, which now can hold any flower or sapling. It's my second favorite block after the lantern *_* Saraty still plans to make separate potted flower graphics to they fit nice and neat into the pot. I've failed hard on trying to fix a lighting glitch when using coloured lights. I will have to refactor to a slightly simpler system. I'm currently using the HSV color space which seems impossible to get right, so probably will use RGB lights. RGB lights have a small glitch on their own, but a much less noticable one. The particle system got 2 new properties: OpacityEvolve and SizeEvolve. With those I could make some quite nice smoke particles for the fire pit that increase in size and fade out over time. Freely configurable in each block as always. Spent 3 hours finding a flipped -/+ sign that was causing block side shading glitches Many bugfixes and minor tweaks and additions (/help alphabetically sorted, .clearchat clears the chat history, reloading shaders ingame now tells if an error happened, block particle colors now in HSV space). Multiplayer should work a bunch better again. Some weird new issues appeared with trying to start the server on linux which I'm trying to solve next. View full record

Exquisite Vintarians! We've tackled more challenges Updates 64 bit Architecture: It was tough to set up but the game can now run as 64 bit application. When you start the game it will automatically choose the right architecture (32bit or 64bit) and thus on 64bit systems the game is no longer limited to around 1.2gb of memory. That should allow massive view distances as long as the graphics card can handle it and make it run more stable overally. Block id remapper: Another boring, but important update. Every game world now remembers what blocks were loaded since last time played and dynamically changes the ids of blocks to match the game world. In simpler terms: If you add or remove a mod or block, the blocks in your old world will not get all mixed up because the blockids have changed. Added per Block Particle Emitting Configuration: Making blocks emit particles is now just a matter of a few lines of json code. No programming skills required. Made Multiplayer work again and managed to run a first server on a Linux Machine, but the multiplayer experience is fairly buggy right now and needs fixing. Lot of progress in the complete block lineup that we want to have for the first release. We now have an absolutely awesome Lantern, Brick blocks, Shingles for Roofs, Doors that can be placed in any direction, upside down slabs, improved gravel and sand textures, 6 random textures for each plank type, and more. View full record

Splendid Vintarians! That was an exciting and very productive 4 days Updates A fantastic fellow going by the Nickname sitatop has joined our cause and has been mass producing high quality block models and textures from dawn to dusk. Saraty has been drawing textures as well, which means I also spent a significant amount of time gathering all the assets and putting them into the game. Added 2 new client commands to test out how far cloud rendering can go without lagging. As it turns out up the game can render up to 5 kilometers of clouds in every direction without lagging noticably. Admittedly I only tested it on in empty flat world. But then again, a normal world would only increase the load on the GPU and I have a pretty weak one (GT630M). This is how it looks like: Added a FoV Slider that lets you set the Field of View between 20 and 160 degrees. The customized Block Model Creator received some more attention Added block side shading, to give a much better preview of how the block will look like ingame. This one was a hard nut to crack due to boxes being freely rotatable. It now remembers the texture and file save/load path It is now open source and freely available for download at: https://github.com/tyronx/vsmodelcreator/releases I've automated the build process of the game and added a game installer. Both important steps for the relase of the game. My current build process steps: Clear output folder, copy binaries and assets together, obfuscate the binaries, copy some more libraries and finally create installer Added some cheap print-to-console .help and /help commands to display a list of client and server commands. I want to display those in a seperate dialog someday, to improve readability. When switching between hotbar slots you new get to see an info box with the name of the block for 2 seconds Added the infrastructure to set any player picking range, that is from how far away a player can break, place or use blocks. Cleaned up the server modding api and seperated the vintage story game content mods from the world edit mod. The latter I will probably release as open source example for server mods. Many tweaks and fixes, one of them is being able to use the full 65k blocktype range the game supports. View full record

Grand Vintarians! There is news to report! Website Added a features page which will give you a glance on what is complete and what I'm currently spending most my time on. Rewrote vision page in the hopes of boiling it down to the essentials Game Update since last news entry Colored lights, just finished minutes ago and super happy to have it completed and it's good looking too. It can seamlessly blend 16k colors in any combination. Through block json configuration files you can add/remove whatever color light source you like, if modding is your thing ;-) => More pictures Saraty made some great looking flowers and tallgrass, some of them have multiple variants. They all serve a particular purpose during world generation. Orange mallow, a flower which will appear in dry climates Heather and Western Gorse: Will appear in low fertility areas in temperate to cold climates Edelweiss: A uncommon sight in temperate mountains Horsetail: Common in temperate forests and wet areas View full record

Exalted Vintarians! Your next breaking news for Vintagestory. Early Release I've decided I will release a "Creative Mode Edition" within the following 2 months, before the planned release in 2017. This edition will not contain a playable survival mode but offer all of the elements to allow multiplayer creative building with some extras such as server modding support, a nice worldgen, massive configuration options and hopefully some decent camera tools to be able to make nice recordings of in-game creations. Pricing The very first version will probably cost only 8 eur which will get you: The full game as it is with all available features which is yours forever. No DLCs you would need to pay for extra. No DRM, you can copy and download the game freely. However you will need a game account and log in at least once to be able to play Obviously no restrictions in monetizations from uploaded videos of the game (e.g. on Youtube) Any subsequent updates for 3 years for free. Once that expires you can get a renewal license for a quarter of the price for another 3 years upgrades. A purchaser only forum area Updates Since Last Week Added a number of new blocks and a few updates to the rendering engine to be able to draw them. The blocks are Snow, Snow layer, Ice and Vines Dedicated a few days on improving worldgen again, in particular tree and block layer generation. Several trees look a lot better now and there's a first version of snow covered areas. Deserty and jungly areas will follow soon too now. Finished implementation of random textures, this was missing for json models and could only applied to the whole block. Now you could have a pillar block with only 1 kind of texture for the top and bottom and any quantity of randomly chosen texture for the horizontal sides. More work towards multiplayer (added a disconnected screen that displays the disconnect reason, made authentication of players via auth server work) Saraty (and Devon) did some more work on the planks and logs texture and began redrawing all the tallgrass variants. View full record

Oh fellow Vintarians! Let's look what I've done since last update Preparations for an upgrade on the tree generator, which will allow for greater flexibility in the types of trees generated. Tried out a few variants to allow 2 and 3 thick tree trunks. Settled with a multi-trunk-per-tree generation system. Upgraded tree generator to allow different style sub branches Added a very basic WorldEdit mod that allows clearing and placing any size cubes of blocks. Available commands: /we ms Marks a start position /we me Marks an end position /we fillm Fills the marked cube with the currently held block /we clearm Clears the marked cube from any blocks /we clear w h Clears a cube with w length and h height around the player Any suggestions for other useful WorldEdit commands? Added bulk-block-update capabilities to the server and client which gives a massive performance boost when clearing/placing many blocks at once. (Perfect for huge explosions \o/) Added ability for the lake generator to generate any depth lakes (previously they could only be 1 deep) Controls Setting: Refactor of all existing key combination features to an event driven system, allowing one central component of the client to manage all key kombinations. The Settings dialog now displays all available game controls and they can be set to any key combination of your liking (want to walk forward using CTRL + ALT + W? Uhm ok, sure..) Was forced to refactor significant portions of the GUI system which threw off alignments of gui elements in many places And the best for last: Making use of the gui refactor, the new key combination system and additional work on text editing I've designed a macro editor from scratch that let's use assign any amount of chat commands to a key combination. Example: Map the command "/time set day" to CTRL+Z It made designing new trees so much faster and I never want to go back <3 It also opens up a huge amount of possibilities of things I can do with it in the future. The editor currently allows you to assign 14 macros, but it can be easily extended for an infinite amount. Each macro gets it's own procedurally generated icon. This is there because at a later point I want to have a skill bar e.g. on the right side of the screen and simply click on a macro with my mouse cursor. This would also go well together with any special skills the player has (e.g. healing spell? powerup spell?) The commands textarea is basically a fully functioning text editor coded from scratch as well. The only missing feature is selecting text, anything else is working the same as in a windows notepad. Many many bugfixes and tweaks all over the place View full record

My fellow Vintarians! Here are todays updates. Delayed due to two days occupying most of my IRL time and a massive update on the existing codebase, the largest one in recent weeks. Added client side block ticking, which, in simple terms allows blocks to emit particles, like torch particles. I still need to make proper smoke particles. Did some more work and fixes to make connecting to multiplayer servers work again. There is still some components that I have to fix up again for multiplayer to work properly (e.g. other players being visible and moving around) Massive overhaul of the chat system client side and serverside as well as large cleanup/rewrite of all server commands. Vintagestory is now supports the basics for player groups and separate "chat rooms" for each player group. This has inifinite possibilities. Just a few ideas what this can be used for: Guilds! Player partys going adventuring together Team chats for Creative Build Teams, or any Team vs Team game (i.e. UHC?) Private conversations Scripting console Server console Damage Log The new chat system also includes Nearly 1000 Lines of code for managing player groups (create group, disband group, rename group, invite player, kick player, leave group, accept group invite, op player, deop player, etc). The owner has all the privileges over a player group and can grant operators ("op") status to players which then in turn can invite and kick normal members. An upgraded chat dialog that shows several clickable tabs, one for each "chat room", has a scroll bar and benefits from the upgraded text editing system and modular gui elements. All elements work the same way you are used to from your favorite operating system, so they feel immediately intuitive and natural to use. View full record

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