Hey!
Its been another month and time for an update from the developer - aka me 🤓
Be aware that I mention things in this post that are coming soon (hopefully) and some that will come in the (bigger) "New Years" update later this year. This update is typically released around beginning of December.
Firing System
Good progress on the firing system, where I'm trying to figure out how this should all work.
I'm playing around with different ideas to try and find something that is simple enough to use, so it's not annoying, but advanced enough to build sick stuff!
I won't go into too many details, as things are changing a lot, but join my live stream (see link in bottom of the post here) to see what's currently going on.
Anyway, here are some screenshots to get you through the weekend 🤓🥳
The awake player might notice a new effect in these screenshots... I give you a moment, what is the different?
Dynamic Depth of field!
Its something I wanted to add for a long time and some weeks ago took the time. A little side-quest from the main focus of the firing system. It dynamically change depending on what you look at. Most might not even notice it, but it adds a nice "depth" and niceness to the game, I think. You can disable it in settings if you don't want it.
This will be part of the "New Years" update later in the year that also contains the firing system.
Rebindable keys
... and another little side-quest - this came out from a feature needed on the firing system though.
As we talked about in the Discord and on the live stream, people wanted to be able to use the physical keys on the keyboard to fire stuff. Instead of starting to hardcode some keys again, I though that now was the time to start looking into the rebindable keys feature, as it was on the Roadmap already.
This feature however isn't isolated to only rebinding the keys, in the same go I also need/want to restructure the "action maps" in the game, which is basically how various controls are grouped together in a meaningful way. So far, all was under the same more or less, but the game outgrew that long time ago. It's an internal thing, so all you guys see are rebindable controls, but underneath, its a much bigger change. In general it works, but there are some bugs that came from this I need to have solved.
This will also be part of the "New Years" update later in the year.
Network code in mods
Yet another side-quest, however, this has a long history to it.
Fireworks Mania might look like a simple game on the surface, however, its really complex under the hood.
Without boring you with too many details, one of the parts that make it complex is the fact that it supports mods and have multiplayer.
As you know, this have worked for a while, however, there are some limitations on what modders can do, as they cannot use any of the "multiplayer/network" stuff, that they need to build real multiplayer mods.
Over 2 years I (and Guanaco and Keltusar) have been in dialog with Unity on this topic, however, this summer they said that it was too niche for them to look into right now. We were on our own to get it to work. They might come with a solution down the road, who knows, however if we wanted it to work now, we had to figure it out our self.
Again, without going into too many details - this is freaking advanced stuff - so I was kind of pushing it ahead of me. However, on the other hand I also knew how important this is for modders like Guanaco, Panini etc. that create a lot of custom scripts and logic.
About a week ago, Guanaco had made a proof of concept in a simple setup on how this in theory could work in the game and the Mod Tools. So I took his proof of concept and after a few days I have something that looks like its freaking working!
We are still testing and it's not everything we want that works yet, but the majority of it we seem to have found a solution for.
It's super technical so you don't wanna know, but Guanaco is currently looking into if he can get some of his mod working, that have never worked in the new multiplayer version.
The car mod is one of the things he is looking into - not fully working - but he get there eventually I'm sure 🕺
This update, which is an update to the game and to the Mod Tools, I plan to release as soon as we find its ready enough. So this will be out (unless we run into a real showstopper) before the "New Years" update.
That's all for now 🤓
Change log
I have pushed the following updates since last Developer News.
No public updates pushed since last Developer News.
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- Enjoy!