Server meltage + builds #223 and #226

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
So yeah, there was this thing recently. Gronkh army arrived. You might have noticed, if you tried to get here over the last week and a half or so - since our site melted within an hour and stayed down for a week, wee! The article got a pretty nice amount of attention and as of this writing the video has 443,817 views and is hilarious - especially if you know German :rofl:

In the week we were down our Facebook page was visited by about 200,000 people. That's a few. Hello internet. So much for staying a secret just a little longer - our collective stage fright was torn off like a band-aid, no hiding anymore :)

We live on a much beefier server now and have learned the value of providing downloads off GitHub, where the builds were downloaded nearly 20,000 times. During the the vacuum of no-server land several other fan sites popped up, the main one being http://terasologyforum.de (by Philaxx here) - which itself was slammed with more traffic than our site probably had in its entire existence up to its disintegration.

New server isn't quite done yet, but getting there. We were migrating out of our old wiki software before the burniation, for instance, so we haven't installed that here. We've got the content and need to put it all in appropriate places here, which is itself a topic of discussion. We're also looking at new addons and making some get along, like XenPorta and our new fancy Donation setup (which in three days is already approaching our monthly goal, wee!)

One highly needed page is the old DevSetup that explained in more details how to get set up to code, along with its even more detailed sibling FancyGit. I've put a new DevSetup on a tab here, but have not yet formatted it and the tabs are really not places for in-depth info like that. But now at least it exists again. If somebody wants to help convert documentation and figure out what should go where please comment in this thread.

In other news - Terasology itself is still improving and never stopped during our outage tho it did slow down a bit. Just today I've merged in two very substantial pieces of work.

In build #223 we got the first batch of physics changes Immortius has been working on for a while, including the introduction of the library project TeraBullet, which we're sharing with Spout. More of a physics geek's paradise than of all that great impact to the end-user, but broken (and explodied!) blocks do now bounce around differently and you can pick them up manually!). Also some fun with targeting coming that'll help lots of other stuff. Yay!

In build #226 we substantially increased the options UI within the game although most of them don't actually work yet :D These were the changes overdhose was working on originally begun by ironchefpython with some later help from Immortius - but Overdhose has had to go into hibernation for RL issues :( We'll have to have somebody else make the buttons functional and have a couple interested volunteers already. This includes the easy toggle for reflective water, woo! Which comes with some assembly required as any new cutting edge feature.

With those two major builds likely we'll have broken some stuff and will certainly need to finish some more elements soon. They also open up a lot of space for more features, like a pending combat prototype! So do give us your feedback and bugs found, tho be sure to check the issue tracker first to see if it already got reported.

Finally, jump on IRC sometime (#terasology on Freenode) to say hi to our official mascot, Gooey! Who is learning new things every day thanks to AlbireoX and enjoys donating single Euros to the project that may or may not be coated in a thin layer of green... something.

Yay!
 

Kai Kratz

Witch Doctor
Contributor
Architecture
Logistics
Very well written report there Cervator :)
Maybe you should consider to do a write up like that as a bi-weekly progress report from now on?
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
Very well written report there Cervator :)
Maybe you should consider to do a write up like that as a bi-weekly progress report from now on?
Thanks. That's pretty much been the plan - something like that per stable build which I had hoped to make every two weeks or so. Then reality happens and massively throws off my schedule :D
 
Top