Hello and welcome to my development blog. I thought it would be nice to show you more of the development process.
In the last months we added a new UI, shapes, a canyon generator, a new font renderer, texture compression, a system which prevents data lose in case of crash, dynamic lights, glass, grids and a lot of minor improvements. We also created a changelog.
Here are some screenshots of the new gui:
On wednesday I choose to merge the 1.2.3 and the 1.3.0 development branch. Originally we only planned to release the version 1.2.3. But I think my graphics designer wants to see his wolf model as soon as possible in the game and blender loading support is only in the 1.3.0. So I merged it. This was a lot of work. I thought it would be easier to merge different branches. But now we have a working version with both of the features of 1.2.3 and 1.3.0. The status of the Blender importer is that everything works with normal models except for the animations. I say normal because my graphics designer used some crazy fancy stuff in Blender to animate this model (inverse kinematics). We will see how we will get this into the game.
Yesterday I did a lot of bug testing and changed minor things. We got good reviews for the 0.1.1 release and now bad reviews for the new version. We thought that one reason could be that a lot of functions are not available any more instantly when you start a new game. The most important feature of the game are the small voxel. So to emphasize this I added to the selection box a grid so that everyone can see that the voxels are in fact very small:
And you now also have instant access to all shapes when you start a new game. We originally changed this because a lot of Youtubers changed the pen setting in the first version of the game and then did not realised how to set it back. So they created very strange things in game :-).If you select now a shape you can change the size by right clicking. What costed me a lot of time yesterday was the selection of the shape. Ok this game has a system which allows the player to use an item. This can be for example a block or a tool. Until now only one item could be equipped at one time. But the current shape is just another entity which can be equipped. So to use a tool with a certain shape it is necessary that the player can select both. This already worked in the 1.3.0 version but it was broken by the merge. But now it works again. Ahh, look at the new big shapes:
And I synthesized a new texture for the camp fire. Here is a screenshot from within our own 3D editor:
Before we published this project I implemented a texture synthesis algorithm for the creation of textures. It takes a photo as input and then creates a seamless texture as the result. I know that gimp also has such a plugin but by making our own we can add new things to the algorithm when we need it.And then we also created the icons for the shapes in blender.
Here is a screenshot:
And yes the next version will feature ramps. We already have a cylinder but it is a little buggy. The new shapes in fact use a CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) algorithm which combines and merges the polygons of the different blocks. This was also a problem when we started the project. We wanted to keep the poly count as low as possible as we knew that our game would see a lot of them. So we merged them whenever possible. For blocks this is relative easy. This can be done in the world matrix. But for complex shapes like ramps or cylinder a general merging algorithm is necessary (which works on the polygons and not on the world matrix). So when you create a ramp of 1 meter in the game it first consists of a lot of polygons. When the CSG algorithm is finished only 4 polygons will be left which of course improves the rendering speed.
Today I digged in a lot of mathematical algorithms. I have a certain problem in the game which can be solved by data mining. But most of these algorithms need to have input parameters from the user which is not possible in a game. We well see. It could be possible to start the algorithm with a lot of different input parameters and choose the best result. But the speed? We will see!
And the MAC port. It is working with one exception: The configuration dialog. For this we used wxWidget and for the rest of the game SDL. This means when you start the game a normal wxWidget window is created and when you click start wxWidget is completely disabled and SDL is started. This works fine on Windows and on Linux. But not on Mac! And we don't know why. And should we even try to repair it or should we instead create an ingame configuration window? This are the things which we have to discuss.
And I changed the health system of the blocks. You can now dig faster when the amount of material you intend to dig is not very much. For example if you dig only one voxel it will now go almost instandly. But if you dig one 1 m block it will take as usual.
And Steam has answered: They really can't change the game back to EA.
So that's it for today. Enjoy the screenshots!