Greetings

[XanHou]

Greetings terasology dev team.
Here is my info:

• Name: XanHou/Rednax (both nicknames)
• Social: GitHub name: XanHou I'm not any social media, so not much to mention here.
• From: Netherlands
• Skills / Tools: Java, OpenGL, C++ (a little), LWJGL.
• Found via: Google I think. Just looking for voxel games.
• Interests: I like programming, and would like to program a game. I know that I would not be able to program a decent game all by myself, but taking terasology as base would mean I actually have a chance of ever finishing without losing interest after a while. If I want to use the code of terasology the best way to get to know it, is to help with its development.
• Extra: -

Since I want to get to know most of the code base, it is likely I will write javadoc for large parts of the code (since javadoc is missing nearly everywhere).
I will upload these changes to my git fork. If people approve of them I will make a pull request every time a batch of them is finished.
I'm not gonna make any promisses on the amount of work though.

 

[Cervator]

Welcome! Tons of Javadoc would be absolutely awesome, and no obligation to do more than you want to

Are you interested in any particular sorts of gameplay or parts of the game/engine/content? If you have a solid game concept we might be able to implement it as a "game mode" at some point. With the launcher and the game engine itself it is likely we can get to a point where we can support something similar to the FTB launcher with wildly different game variants by different authors

 

[XanHou]

Since Jagex screwed up ace of spades, I wondered if it could be done better.
So basically, a shooter in a voxelworld.
This is also the main reason why I was looking into the performance of explosions

The biggest change would be that everything resolves around matches, rather than a single persistant map.
Whether it is easier to create a mod or create a stand alone game is something I'm not sure of.

The most important issue would be the cheat safeness of the multiplayer part.
All the other things are mainly a lot of straight forward work.
For example: wall hacks would kill the game.
I know of only two ways to counter this:
1. Not send player/object data that should not be visible to a player. This is bad for people with lag and bad for server performance. It is good for people with a crappy pc.
2. Check if the client has wallhacks. For example: take small screenshots and check those, do a hash check on the game files, etc. The good thing is that these can be implemented without performance issues and after the game is finished. The problem is that they can always be countered.

 

[Immortius]

The most important issue would be the cheat safeness of the multiplayer part.
All the other things are mainly a lot of straight forward work.
For example: wall hacks would kill the game.
I know of only two ways to counter this:
1. Not send player/object data that should not be visible to a player. This is bad for people with lag and bad for server performance. It is good for people with a crappy pc.

The multiplayer system has a notion of relevance (what is relevant to a player), but it hasn't been implemented fully. Probably the trickier bit is block relevance - hiding parts of the world that haven't been explored yet - I haven't decided if it is worth it yet.

2. Check if the client has wallhacks. For example: take small screenshots and check those, do a hash check on the game files, etc. The good thing is that these can be implemented without performance issues and after the game is finished. The problem is that they can always be countered.

Particularly hard to prevent for an open source game, obviously. But even given a black box security module I'm sure it could be circumvented pretty easily. So yeah, not sending data is the way to go... or designing your gameplay around information being known (which is how GW1 did it - having the radar built into the game).

 

[Cervator]

XanHou - curiously, could you expand on your experiences with Ace of Spades? It is near the top of my list of interesting voxel games to check out, especially as that sort of "seek and destroy" plus base building seems high potential, with us somehow involving NPCs more

I haven't tried it though so my actual knowledge of how it works and what's good vs. bad is pretty minimal