next »

[vitalash]

I did minor bug fixing and system simplification today.

I looked at music I could license for the game. Nothing looked really good.
This is maybe cool? https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/5TkTFF4RvR/
I'm kind of sick of platforms with 50,000 songs that expect you to find the golden gem.

The ground comes in prettily here; this fog is nice


Membership icon

Free-to-players get logged out for AFKing for 10 minutes to make room for members; members can AFK just fine.

I present, Cube de Lune
https://i.imgur.com/8MgsFKH.mp4

[vitalash]

I audited the code for bugs and fixed a few.
There's now two music tracks of recordings by Debussy in the game; one plays at night, one at day. They aren't always on; they come on every once in a while as a nice break.

There's now quest data stored per player per quest as a u64.

So each quest can use 8 bytes of information to do whatever it wants to do. Then bit flags will determine whether a quest is "completed"

I wrote more of the deserted coconut island quest I hinted at a few days ago.
Here's a hint for the best outcome: Don't allow Flundir to go insane; be pre-emptive.


I keep magic to the world by not having any indicator of "quests" on the client.


P.S. Steam is SLOW to review. The download for the pre-alpha will be on the website in a few days
on August 30th https://worldofsquares.org/

[vitalash]

I concluded the magic coconut island storyline for now...

I added the flower crown model. There's now a teleport network you can access wearing a mana flower crown and 8 coconuts. This will teleport you to the gateway.



I considered a lot today about how I can do quests. Flundir needs to *leave* his hut in the deserted island during the quest. I can make entity load rules that apply per player, and make collision rules respond to that as well. But that would be a very complicated system and I don't even know if I want it to work that way, so it may not be worth that at all. I hadn't designed anything to work this way; the program is assumed to keep you in sync with a global state, not per player, end of story.

I did something simple; the true solution will reveal itself later to me. NPCs are just transparent if they aren't currently *there*. The client overwrites their cube-head slot with a flower crown based on quest state. You can see Flundir at the top of this screenshot; transparent.



This is totally going to be strange legacy content and the game will work better with things like this later

[vitalash]

It's 1 am and I'm not at my computer, so no gifs;

A lovely person offered to write a short story for Flundir's manuscript; now there is an awesome gothic story in the game, and this story may manifest as a future quest.

The game updater works better now.

Lots of looking at old code, simplifying, fixing bugs or possible future bugs.

I had energy later today. At midnight, I animated on paper, it was fun! I'm used to digital hand drawn animation.

Pre alpha releases tomorrow!

in the far future (octobor?) I plan to do graphical updates.
Going to keep up the content and bug fixing after pre alpha release. Plans can easily change

[vitalash]

YOU CAN NOW PLAY WORLD OF SQUARES pre-alpha
https://worldofsquares.org/


Today I completed a 10,000 line audit of the server file.
I changed a bunch of things, accelerated entity lookups by id via hashtable.
And I got the game ready for a pre-alpha release.

Still lots to do, but it's now playable by you and your friends on Windows 10+!

[vitalash]

Play the latest update! https://worldofsquares.org/

Wagons, to carry your items across the world! Other players cannot steal the items (but if left unguarded, they may steal the horse they're attached to and run off with them! )



Feedback from players had me consider a mouse control for the camera. I'm wary of player feedback, but I had a good idea for this, and it did turn out well.

The camera is also snappier when using arrow keys.

The violin playing is smoother. I was interpreting seconds as milliseconds, which meant 0 delay, so any minor ping spikes ruined the playing. This should no longer be the case.

[vitalash]

I present to you: the fastest transportation method west of the mississippi. It turns out, riding a Wyrm, it would think you were riding each tail segment and then head segment on the same tick, and take you right up to the front.


Now it uses a generational-index kind of thing. If your last tick moved by riding is the server tick, it doesn't move. So only the first riding entity works.

Your fox could die and lose its carrying item due to a bad rule-set. Now it does not die when falling out of the world, such as this lava. It will simply fall until it gets too far away, then teleport back to you.


There's currently a bug that you can't complete the laser dungeon right now because of an erroneous movement rule. (The red laser fragment is uncollectable because you can't walk onto the trapped floor)

Today's full changelog
- Items now despawn after 30 minutes
- Wyrm boss now works
- Fox can't die from falling through lava
- Horses now faster
- The game starts with debussy in the login menu

[alvarop]

I tried it and while it was cool I found it a bit hard to control. Also, I got very quickly stuck under the sand (picked up an item that spawned sand infinitely).

[vitalash]

The blue laser crystal is now a randomly generated maze


The horses are cute and pettable (you can't hear it, but I'm petting them to the tune of Clair De Lune)


This comes from modifying the fox tail code and changing the angles and size around.


I modeled it in Goxel and typed out the drawing code layer by layer.


The code is a copy-paste from the fox code


Maybe I'll update the game to the latest codebase weekly to give changes more time to sit. Right now, I don't need to update often because there's not many players. With more players, I wouldn't want to update often because frequent scheduled restarts can be annoying.

I tried it and while it was cool I found it a bit hard to control. Also, I got very quickly stuck under the sand (picked up an item that spawned sand infinitely).

Fun, thanks for trying it out
The cursed bucket of sand is such a troll; I love it. There is an unstuck teleport in the menu (it takes time to charge), and sand disappears after a few minutes.
I understand your feelings about the controls; I just really find it worth the learning curve to behave this way, long-term. At least right now.
...
This game actually came from a dream. Having the camera diagonal and the movement orthogonal was such a strong aesthetic to me in that dream. I was moving rightwards by a smoldering volcanic crack in the world not unlike what we have in-game (though in the dream it was so deep, it bottomed out in fog, whereas this one has cool lava.

At the very least, I made sure to be consistent across camera rotations for what WASD map to, so the learning curve is rewarding.

[vitalash]

I started by adding bunnies

Well, here's how they actually turned out. They're cute. And weather update: they're everywhere.


Then I touched on the renderer and got some cool stuff






At the end of the day I now have (most of) the game running through a post-process shader that simply forwards color; I can do more stuff with it later.


The latest version is playable so go pet some bunnies at https://worldofsquares.org/ 

[vitalash]

Bunnies everywhere! I made a mistake and they reproduce at a rate of about 300 per 12 hours (this is fixed in in the DEVELOPMENT version of the game, not in production yet)


I did work on the renderer today. I'm not too fast; this is my first time implementing certain effects and making a deferred renderer. I want the game to look a bit better even though it's pre-alpha, so it's easier to adopt.








Needs tweaking, fixing, and work tomorrow. What kind of AO is visible in direct sunlight! 

[Rogod]

Bunnies everywhere! I made a mistake and they reproduce at a rate of about 300 per 12 hours

So one might say, they're breeding like rabbits

[vitalash]

I didn't realize it, but the renderer I thought i'd do in a few months is coming sooner than expected. The game has gotta be adoptable.
Still working on it, tweaking things, going to add more things, then I'll optimize it.
Right now at 866x479, the game looks like this (more pixelated than at 1920x1080 to exaggerate the effect)

Some WIP stuff you can see in render doc


Right now the lighting of solid objects is deferred, while transparent objects are forward-rendered in their separate sorted pass.
They all render at the window resolution then get downscaled 4x, so I can have my own faux multisampling.
Ambient occlusoin only appears in shadows now, and it's really tuned down (maybe too much, but I'll see once i get directional light source shadows in here.)

See a video of the game (the gifs yesterday didn't really show the pixelatedness well)
https://i.imgur.com/blD9asl.mp4

Bunnies everywhere! I made a mistake and they reproduce at a rate of about 300 per 12 hours

So one might say, they're breeding like rabbits

hilarious coincidence! i have to restart the server every night because they breed so much, until the next update is releasable.

[vitalash]

You can play the latest update here! https://worldofsquares.org/
- Shadows/ambient occlusuion.
- Fix aether king glitching out of arena.
- Fix bunny overpopulation.

Graphical updates Stage 1 is now released.



Here's a cool painting I drew; it's currently the communal painting in the town square. Feel free to paint over it with your own things.



Here's a cool debug thing I did

[vitalash]

Today I worked on the renderer. At some point I was doing R&D for a few hours which is out of my scope to do for an extended period of time as a lot of the things that bootstrap this pre-alpha are already known, and all the R&D stuff can be done once the project is for-sure as good as it can be.
This renderer is incomplete but it's time to give other ares of the game love soon.
Firefly lights, and a firefly jar item. (Talk to old man Yord on the mountain for more information on making firefly jars)





I'll push the changes to the server very soon tonight.
It is playable here https://worldofsquares.org/