Alpha 4 released, rescheduled test event starting in 9 hours, 5th birthday celebrations in two weeks

[Cervator]

This will be "brief" with more details added later as it is 3 am my time with the rescheduled test event from last Saturday set to begin in about 9 hours

Alpha 4 is out with a bunch of new/fixed/updated modules:

• Dialogs - added to lineup as it is now used in DynamicCities to let the player interact with NPCs (for the trading system for instance)
  
• DynamicCities - heavily updated since last as part of @Cpt. Crispy Crunchy's GSOC project, may need to run it with MedievalCities enabled too (possible crash issue without?)
  
• Economy - a basic market economy setup for DynamicCities
  
• GooeysQuests - also lots of new stuff by @Florian since last. Beginning to feel more like a dungeon, certainly more dangerous
  
• Lakes - one of Crispy's pre-GSOC experiments, makes both surface and underground lakes (even lava ones!), mixes well with the Caves module
  
• MedievalCities - first major new extension to DynamicCities, this one by @Skaldarnar inspired by his beautiful Gothic Village of ages past. Counts as a new "culture" for DC making it use the buildings defined here, developed with the help of the StructuralTemplates module. May be needed at the moment to get DC to run (but is not a hard dependency - just some crash issue getting in the way of the default setup)
  
• Potions - rewritten by @xtariq with some stuff extracted out of ThroughoutTheAges, split out to be useful alone for something like GooeysQuests. Lots of potions, with an Alchemy module waiting to be added soon to help craft them.
  
• Rails - fixed some first by @SkySom then @Michael and finally back in the lineup! Is back to working well enough to place carts on rails to play around with a bit, but certainly needs more work
  
• TutorialAssetSystem - development tutorial module put together by @oniatus some time back, related to how to use in-game assets in new modules
  
• TutorialDynamicCities - the tutorial module for DC
  
• TutorialGraphicTweaks - not quite in the lineup yet (pending an engine PR) but illustrates the new flexibility coming from @tdgunes' GSOC project, allowing a shader to be developed in a module (I even tried making one myself!)
  
• TutorialNui - goes with @Rostyslav Zatserkovnyi's GSOC project, its wiki covers his NUI editor and some of NUI itself (no actual tutorial code/assets yet, just the wiki)
  
• WeatherManager - older module that just wasn't added to the lineup for some reason. Adds a minimal blocky cloud layer to the world along with a simulation of what the weather is, which admittedly isn't illustrated much in-game yet (just in code/logs)

I'll be setting up the event server so we can use it Saturday, just about all day so long as there's interest. We'll start seriously in about 9 hours, so long as I can actually get some sleep and make it there May start with some discussion then get into play testing later. The event server may well be up early and available for those just curious to play.

In other news our project's 5th birthday (or 4th birthday? Been 5 years in any case. Off-by-one error?) is coming up in about two weeks. I'll be setting something up for Saturday the 24th of September, which will include a neat little surprise. More on that soon along with more details but for now I need sleep

 

[Cervator]

Got the event server up early just so it'll be easy to tweak at / reset / reconfigure tomorrow. Used the handy dandy new config file override setup @oniatus prepared! By simply dropping the following override.cfg into the server's root dir:

{
  "defaultModSelection": {
    "modules": [
      "JoshariasSurvival",
      "CheatsForAll",
      "ShatteredPlanes",
      "ChrisVolume1OST"
    ],
    "defaultGameplayModuleName": "JoshariasSurvival"
  },
  "worldGeneration": {
    "worldTitle": "EventServerSept10th",
    "defaultSeed": "Terasology",
    "defaultGenerator": "ShatteredPlanes:ShatteredPlanes"
  }
}

I could edit just the few things I care about and not have to scroll through or worry about the main generating config.cfg

Running the server with a simple:

java -Xms128m -Xmx4096m -jar libs/Terasology.jar -overrideDefaultConfig=override.cfg -headless -homedir=server

Initially I started with Lakes included but it started causing dying chunk generators over out of bounds exceptions Maybe from using the Shattered Planes world this time around. Disabled lakes and all was well again

Server entry is in-game: "Official Event Host" - but may not be active outside the events timeframe and may get reset or switched around from time to time (such as running Dynamic Cities or something else as well).

Use the Alpha 4 binary to connect to the server for best results. As a far warning - watch your step near spawn

 

[Cervator]

Oh boy that was a long session. Started out quietly as expected with the reschedule, but first ran with JS + ShatteredPlanes spending some time troubleshooting blueberries "crashberries" (thanks @Josharias!) then later when @Florian popped up we did a bunch of resets and restarts for GooeysQuests. Various observations and comments follow:

• The respawn crash with Hunger enabled (which is the case in JS) isn't fixed in Alpha 4 but it will be in all future builds - thanks @Rostyslav Zatserkovnyi !
• Oddly the lighting merge crash did not appear to trigger even once. Maybe it got indirectly fixed or bypassed somehow? I didn't think the work by @tdgunes and @manu3d (or even @Josharias or @Michael) over the past few months directly related to how we store or merge light values. But I won't miss it if we don't see it again! We got other new crash bugs anyway
• The aforementioned crashberries may in part be crashing due to the scheduling system not handling errors well enough, in edge cases like when a blueberry matures after a player has left/crashed out of the game leaving something in a bad state. But they also show up in other interesting crashes! @xtariq is investigating
• One such potential case brings back old issue #2361 which may be taking over from the lighting merge for most typical multiplayer crash. Two ways we could somewhat reliably cause crashes involving errors listed in that issue were by breaking blueberry bush blocks (after picking the berries?) or using @Florian's structural template tools in a particular fashion (could you add the steps to the issue please Flo?)
• A completely different crash was reported a few times that might relate to duplicate chunk loading which is an area that IIRC could use some more work anyway
  
• Submitted new feature requests for choosing a player avatar and triggering animations for the player instead of just NPCs. Also wondering about @kaen's suggestion to support MineTest skins in connection to that and remembering @glasz's dwarves

Even though this session thanks to the reschedule wasn't quite the sort of monthly family reunion we've finally gotten into the habit of doing it still is a good reminder of how hugely useful this kind of testing is, so many thanks to those who participated, hope to see more next time

It also helped me get back up to speed and pushed me to finally release Alpha 4 even if I had to stay up past 4 am to make it happen. I found and fixed a couple issues during that as well, for instance TTA was broken (couldn't break leaves again) and the Tasks + QuestExamples modules were set up inconsistently in Jenkins and hasn't actually rebuilt, so trying to run the game with them caused an immediate ClassNotFound crash, whoops. There is still a (likely easy) issue needing a fix for Tasks which is really a more useful module than we've had the chance to highlight. Anybody up for writing some more examples / a small tutorial? We might want to rename QuestExamples to TutorialQuests / TutorialTasks.

 

[Cervator]

Quick update: still behind on all the things, tomorrow would be the next play session but I won't be able to have what I'd like prepared in time to let it count as the birthday event. I should actually be around, and hope to spend the time doing said catching up with forum and code reviews, then hopefully the entire next weekend (October 8th and 9th) would be dedicated for some more fun and actual discussion.

I did manage to post a few initial threads:

• A constructed language for Terasology is coming
• A registered non-profit org as well - but what name?
• Thoughts on adding more focus and game identity

A really cool build video was also posted: