Let's play

[woodspeople]

We were thinking about how we might continue to be involved in TS development with only fragments of time free, and we wondered: would it be of any use to the team if we made a "let's play" video, without talking but with just screen capture, and posted links, say for half an hour once per week or two weeks? These might be useful as (a) testing, where you might see things going wrong (b) historical documents, where you see how TS has improved "since the early days" and (c) things to pull snippets from for promotional videos down the road. This would be roughly half the time with an adult and half the time with a child just running around doing all the things you can do (lots of big bada boom) and trying out any new functionalities as they appear. If this would be useful say so and we will do it; if not, say not and we will not be offended.

woodspeople (both of us)

 

[Cervator]

Yep! That would be extremely useful!

 

[woodspeople]

We will do it! I'm thinking 15 minutes each every two weeks would be best, because that way we don't over-commit, we don't burden people with too much to watch, and there should be enough changes each time to have some new things to play with. If bimonthly is too frequent let me know. We will stick all the videos on YouTube in a playlist. Look for the first "episode" soon...

 

[Cervator]

That sounds perfectly fine - looking forward to it

 

[woodspeople]

Here is our first let's play episode, in two parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0lwrrg ... e=youtu.be (kid) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7nP_fwg ... e=youtu.be (mom). We are playing for 15 minutes each. Our sound wasn't working so there is no sound in the videos. We will work that out next time. Making the screencasts was easy, but converting the files to smaller sizes and uploading them took forever. Hopefully we will figure that out better, and also we hope to eventually put in titles and little bubbles that say what we had been meaning to do and so on. We are learning as we go We thought we could do a "theme" for each "episode" based on exploring either something new we see in the TS forums or just some things we think of. For this first try we both built houses, so that was the "theme" this time. We really hope this is helpful! Please let us know how we could improve it!

BTW on one of our abandoned attempts we found a glitch: if you jump into a dark hole and fall down to MantleStone you can (sometimes?) go right throught it, then continue to fall far, far, FAR below the world. When we stopped falling we could see nothing in the sky but the sun, then as we flew up we could see the entire contents of the "world" as a square of black dots on the sky. After something like two minutes of flying up we finally arrived back in civilization. Maybe it would be good to have a place you stop (or die?) that is not quite THAT far down ...

 

[Cervator]

Hehe, very nice. Sounds like it'll be a good learning experience for both sides, if you toss in some video editing and what not

Curiously, are you not taking shortcuts like arrow up/down with F3 to change time of day or flying (double-space) on purpose? I see a lot of exact positioning (kudos! kid is obviously a pro) when flying would be such a sweet "cheat"

(Oh, actually, checking the second video you do use that! Okay. Might have missed exact console commands you used too)

If you have the latest build from develop you can also take advantage of a few recent niceties!

1) Chests! That actually work! You can indirectly reorganize your inventory and toolbar with them (use 'E' to open/close a chest, then left click an item to move it back and forward)
2) Shorter console commands, don't need cmd or ( ) anymore, examples:

giveBlock "Chest"
giveBlock "Lignite"
giveBlock "Lignite", 64

Chests are not stackable, so you can only get one at a time. No quantity parameter on other blocks gets you 16 at a time.

Other observations - I wonder if you've hit the issue about low-light torch on "ugly" settings. Videos could be shorter with some misc edited out, tho I realize that takes extra effort, but I expect more good stuff will pop up later

Thanks!

 

[metouto]

Nice video woodspeople can't wait to see more

 

[woodspeople]

We are aware that our first attempt is not that great! Hopefully that will make later attempts look even better! We may try another one very soon so as to supercede that clumsy one fast. We did use the latest build on I think it was Saturday or Sunday, must have missed the chest thing. Not sure where to look to find the latest change list, would help if we could check that each time to set up our "themes" to explore.

Yes the kid was working "legit" and I was not. One interesting (and possibly useful) distinction between us is that he has far greater abilities at mental 3D manipulation than I do. When we do Lego he can build things with them held backwards or upside-down or whatever from the picture. I need to make what I'm holding look exactly like the picture before I can add to it. I can't rotate it in my mind. The same applies in 3D software: he can place blocks from any angle, but I need to stay front-and-center. That's why I always fly, because otherwise it takes me ten times longer to build anything (and I fall off every cliff). I wonder if people who are building 3D sandbox games know about these differences and take them into account. I also have far slower reaction times and messed up wrists from using computers too much for decades...

I have IShowU and Stomp on the Mac (paid for them for work) so we are trying those. The big issue is figuring out how to streamline the process so it doesn't take forever. We have iMovie but boy is it slow, confusing and weird. We are downloading the trial version of Adobe Premiere Elements now to see if we can switch to that. It's not very expensive and this is great stuff to learn...

Talking would be a definite improvement, but after discussion with the dad that is out of the question right now because of the kid being eight. Talking bubbles would do much to improve that I think. I like the idea of recording more and editing out the boring bits. We had planned on doing a half hour with some jumping up and down in the middle to denote the change of players, but YouTube has a limit of 15 minutes unless you give them your cell phone number. We can and will do that but our cell phones don't work at home (rural). We have to drive a long ways before they start working

One bit of advice about torches and ugly mode: 99% of people never change options. I have learned this painfully in many projects. It doesn't matter how many fancy options you have, if they are not the default options. You just can't get hold of people and make them try your nice things. So you have to choose your defaults very carefully. If you want the torches to light up and the grass to wave (which I loved) you have to accept that some people will say the game is too slow. If you want everyone to say the game is fast enough you have to accept that the torches will be dark and the grass will never wave. Sad but true fact. Nobody changes anything. Even if you force people to choose by putting the options in their faces, they will find the click-past button and avoid reading whatever you put in their faces!

Thanks for the encouragement, look for improvements, and see you in the next episode!

 

[Cervator]

Very true observation on the settings, yes. I think we bumped down to ugly to let laptops that otherwise wouldn't even succeed in starting the game still play along. We've got examples still of laptops that crash at nice yet work on ugly. Catching those errors better might allow us to increase the default level, then fall back one notch if the computer outright fails to compile the shaders etc, then just highlight to those with laggy (but working!) machines that there are lower settings available

http://www.movingblocks.net:8080/jenkin ... gy/changes is the most accurate change log, but is also pretty terse and can easily go out of date (like command names tweaked by later commits that might not highlight that). The download page at http://wiki.movingblocks.net/Main/DownloadTerasology has my manually written highlights, but only updates for each "stable" build (ES is still in develop, won't get a section till it hits master)

Nice note on the legit vs flying. I honestly haven't given much thought to that area, and it may well be worthy of it. Speech bubbles ftw, I'm a big fan of text-based communication over voice. Too many muddy conference calls at work where half the time is spent just identifying who's talking or what they're actually saying.

 

[woodspeople]

That Jenkins changes page is perfect. Also we can put in titles linking the episode to the build history number thing. It will also be educational to read through the changes and discuss what they mean. What's cool is that we can click 'detail' and find out what source files were changed, then actually go and look at the code involved. Very cool for bits and pieces of learning. We are enthused

 

[Cervator]

Yep, all sorts of nifty stuff with Jenkins, Git, GitHub, and so on. Doing a project like this can be hard work sometimes, but also fun and interesting!

 

[metouto]

If you have the latest build from develop you can also take advantage of a few recent niceties!

1) Chests! That actually work! You can indirectly reorganize your inventory and toolbar with them (use 'E' to open/close a chest, then left click an item to move it back and forward)
2) Shorter console commands, don't need cmd or ( ) anymore, examples:

giveBlock "Chest"
giveBlock "Lignite"
giveBlock "Lignite", 64

Chests are not stackable, so you can only get one at a time. No quantity parameter on other blocks gets you 16 at a time.

Love those new chests and that new beginning screen is nice if you woulds like to move on to and new world while keeping the old one


Question .... where do you find out a "world seed" .... like my tree house could I bring that into the new update it was way back in update 39 (???)

You guys/gals (?) and making things look nicer each update

 

[Cervator]

The world seed is purely for terrain generation, it is an input into some fancy algorithms that create the natural world

If you want to re-play the exact same world as the one you did your tree house in you can probably just use "Blockmaina42" (yes, typo and all! I think that's how it went..) as that was the default seed for quite a while. You would only have gotten a different one had you used the UI or Console to generate a new world, and in that case it would be a random seed. It think it might also be stored in the saved worlds config file. I'd have to check.

Anyway, using that seed would give you the world, but you might spawn so far away from where you did last time you may not even recognize the world. And it wouldn't bring the old house with it anyway, alas

 

[metouto]

sounds like a time to move to a newer part of town and more update tree house .... maybe I can get running water this time

 

[woodspeople]

Episode two here: http://youtu.be/4BaHHVVzBsU

We have slightly improved the format by pulling out three two-minute sections apiece, instead of showing the whole thing. This means we only have to upload one video, and it is shorter and hopefully more interesting to watch.

Notes on this episode:
- you can briefly see the "falling out of the world" issue, though this time we didn't fall very far (usually it takes ten times longer to get back)
- when flying, the lack of a "descend" button really stops me up; I have to keep changing direction back and forth (the child wants you to know that this is only the mom's problem)
- the chest GUI is great! intuitive, simple, capacious
- we accidentally cut off the "hot bar" at the bottom, won't do that next time
- a console command that lists all possible argument to "giveBlock" would be very useful at this point (we want to try metouto's cool blocks!)

We looked at our options and sadly we are stuck with iMovie for the time being... we downloaded a trial version of Adobe Premiere Elements which we would have considered buying, but it was too invasive for comfort. (It wanted you to check in with the Adobe overlords every time you started the program... yeah right.) But iMovie is not really that bad. By "favoriting" some parts we can do the trimming/titling minimum we need. Let us know if this is less boring and more useful with the guaranteed-no-longer-than-two-minutes snippets.

 

[Cervator]

Yay more videos

Progress is good. Yeah, the two minute segments probably help. And it was indeed like I could tell who was the one actively flying around...

Seeing stuff does help - reminds me that we really do need to look at three issues:

1) Falling through the world - I figure this is because railgun-lag makes you "skip" some frames including the point in time where you'd normally collide against the world
2) Dark torches on "Ugly"
3) Water disappearing most the time now when under water. It used to blink out while you were between blocks, but much more rare than it is these days

I can concur with the Adobe hesitance, I feel the same way

 

[woodspeople]

Yes, one more note I forgot to add was that as you should be able to see in one segment, when I was making the "pillars" I had wanted them to stop just when they hit the water but I couldn't figure out where that was! There was no particular line or area of demarcation between air and water. I hadn't realized how much you need to depend on that to see where things start and end.

 

[woodspeople]

Here is episode three in our let's play series. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_mzke5rkJI

For this episode we did something different: metouto sent us his TS world, and we went for a "visit" there in our video. Before making the video we each built an addition to his luxury sports/recreation complex (which we did not record). The child built the stargazing tower and the mom built the ocean boardwalk. We also discovered "annotations" in YouTube and said a glad farewell to iMovie, which has been no end of trouble. And we found out how to include in-game sounds and music in our capture. So we are slowly getting better at making these things.... suggestions welcome, we know we have far to go.

Notes on gameplay this time:
- When we opened the world folder metouto sent us, all the torches and stairs were backwards. We fixed them all by hand, but you might want to look into how those are saved and how they might get reversed on copying.
- We still can't use any non-ugly graphics modes on our laptop. Incidentally, I tried using TS on my PowerMac desktop and it crawled at about 1 frame per second. Strange because that machine has four processors. Anyway. We are a Mac household so consider us a testing resource.
- We are increasingly loving the feature of making time move fast forward and backwards (see the stargazing sequence). Links to the idea of playing with time in other discussions...
- If you are still interested in styles of moving around... the mom did all the moving in this video except the part where the player went into the stargazing tower, and the helicopter part at the end. So you are likely to see some differences in movement.
- It was the kid's idea to have a "sliding glass door" by breaking and then putting back glass blocks in the tower. And the pickaxe in the night-sky part (meant to be a telescope). And the helicopter. And getting out books (the mom forgot to put them back at the end, and was roundly chastised for this by the child). Shows how people will come up with their own ways to use whatever you make, doesn't it? Kids even more so. I think adults sometimes forget how useful it is to kids that things remain open to become more than what we see and what is programmed.
- We had to abandon an earlier very nice run-through (made entirely by the child) because it was just too dark for the video. We have seen other similar problems in MC videos people have made. I wonder if a useful part of the base engine might be a special video-capture brightness/graphics alteration? If you know people will be making videos maybe thinking about what they need would help make the game more popular? Like, I think the people who made The Sims knew people were making movies so they added features to support that. Food for thought...

Hopefully helpful, as usual

 

[Immortius]

- When we opened the world folder metouto sent us, all the torches and stairs were backwards. We fixed them all by hand, but you might want to look into how those are saved and how they might get reversed on copying.

I changed what was considered the "front" of a block recently, and rotated torches/stairs. This probably messed up existing worlds.

 

[Cervator]

Very nice!! I love the annotations and the "spirit" of the video

And wow, just seeing a world with that much built up - may seem small when you compare to MC worlds, but this is all ours which makes it special. Kudos to Metouto for starting it and woodspeople for refining + video

Yeah I think the video recording is about spot-on by now. The world is showing its age somewhat, some of the block IDs look to have gone funny, like trees with leaves seemingly made of mineral blocks, or old-style silver ore replacing standard rock

We've got a couple items in the issue tracker for helping video capture, perhaps we can even offer it in-game. If Kai makes it back sometime or somebody else picks it up

Going to hawk this video some