Next week's video update on YouTube

[begla]

First things first: it's great to see the game evolving. :!:

Even if I rarely find the time at the moment to dig deeper into all the changes that are coming in, I would love to post another video on YouTube showing off the latest changes and additions. Maybe a bit more technical in respect to Woodspeople's Let's Play with subtitles explaining what currently being shown in the video. Some sort of... Video change list or video update maybe. It would be nice to do this in a weekly fashion.

So I need a script to make the movie. Maybe we could get a list with all the stuff, that has changed over the past couple of weeks, together? Maybe putting it in some sort of order?

• Main menu
• Chests
• Dynamite
• Minion prototype
• All those fancy new blocks

 

[Cervator]

Good timing, since I'm about to push to master and do a blog info dump about everything that's new - that might be the perfect list of features to then show off

And no matter the content demonstrated - need to highlight the tall terrain. I still occasionally just fly up and down a huge cliff when I end up in a world with some tasty mountain formation for the joy of it (bonus: railgun blast from the top of the world into a plateau and fall down it). Maybe in connection with demonstrating Bi0hax's new speed potion

 

[begla]

Good timing, since I'm about to push to master and do a blog info dump about everything that's new - that might be the perfect list of features to then show off

And no matter the content demonstrated - need to highlight the tall terrain. I still occasionally just fly up and down a huge cliff when I end up in a world with some tasty mountain formation for the joy of it (bonus: railgun blast from the top of the world into a plateau and fall down it). Maybe in connection with demonstrating Bi0hax's new speed potion

Nice - can't wait to read it and get to work.

 

[woodspeople]

The child and I would like to know, in light of this, whether you want us to keep doing our let's play series.

We have had three reasons for making it.

One, any software development project needs play testing with real users. It is easy to get so involved with code that you can't see it anymore, and having someone blunder around doing all the wrong things is essential if you want to write user-friendly software. (I could tell a dozen stories about that but will not.) We hope that showing you what a kid and a parent do in TS can help you see what sorts of issues come up that would never come up when those more familiar use it.

Two, we saw very few videos about TS on YouTube, and MC has been made popular in part by all the people playing it there, so we thought why not help to popularize it by showing it off? Admittedly our first few "episodes" have been kind of boring as we learn how to do this, but we hope to improve. If we could talk that would improve things, but the dad part of our family is pretty strongly set against the eight year old talking on YouTube, for I suppose good reasons.

Three, we just have these little snippets of time to contribute, half an hour every few days, as part of learning things. We have been learning a lot by making the let's play series, and probably we could keep going on that. The child is very interested in how people do things like make tutorials and presentations and things, so we are exploring that.

What we should do going forward depends on what you all think about goals one and two. These are the ways the first two goals could play out:
- Play testing is important, spreading the word isn't (or we are doing it too badly): we should continue the series but not make it public on YouTube, just linked from here.
- Play testing isn't important, spreading the word is: we should continue the series but either try to make it more interesting or let somebody else do it who can do it better. (We know our video editing skills are sub-par)
- Both play testing and spreading the word are important: we should keep doing what we have been doing, because even if somebody else could make better videos, I know a lot about software testing and play testing and can help with that.
- Neither are important: we should stop making this series and learn about this stuff in other ways (of which there are many).

Please tell us what you actually want, especially begla and Cervator. We don't want to waste our time on things not useful to the project, but we are also happy to continue IF it is useful. And we are open to suggestions about ways to make it more useful (including not doing it).

 

[metouto]

My 2 cents here is (but it counts for little) .....

- Both play testing and spreading the word are important: we should keep doing what we have been doing .....

enough said in that quote from woodspeople post for me

 

[begla]

Please keep creating those videos Woodpeople. I really enjoyed watching them... In my opinion it is very important to demonstrate that the game can actually be played in its current stage and that people are actually building stuff in it and are enjoying it. There are more and more videos popping up on YouTube showing gameplay footage from Terasology, but there mostly about people flying around, staring into the sun and placing the companion two to three times on the ground while talking random stuff.

So it is good to put out some more "staged" experience with the game by someone who actually knows in which stage of development the game is and which features are currently available.

And for my part... I can come up with videos updates showing off some of the latest changes in order. Not me actually playing and enjoying the game for what it is.

 

[overdhose]

A fun idea now that you can assign multiple patrol points to multiple minions is a synchronised dance contest of monkey heads ...

I'd make if myself if I had better / ready tools to do so

what do you use for the capturing / editing? and is it free?

 

[Cervator]

Woodspeople - this is just a separate video line and all of them can happily co-exist! Don't stop doing great things

Your line is pretty unique as mentioned above, as it actually demonstrates the game - most the others just showcases tech

 

[woodspeople]

Okay, so I think we understand our "mandate": keep making the videos, and keep making them be about real people playing the game and having fun with it as real people should. Just checking ... thanks, that does help us understand our focus.

what do you use for the capturing / editing? and is it free?

The child prefers to use Quicktime Player which comes free with Macs. I prefer to use IShowU, which I bought for work and which provides many nice features like the ability to record system audio, pause the capture, capture part of the screen etc. It was not very expensive. I am slowly attempting to bring the child over to my point of view, with mixed success (correction: the child says that line should have read "no success").

For adding speech bubbles we had been using iMovie, but it was an endless gauntlet of pain: slow, confusing, crashing, etc. We recently discovered that we can do "annotations" with YouTube itself far faster and with much less pain (not none, but far less).

 

[Cervator]

Alright, finally found a good time for the master build!

http://www.movingblocks.net:8080/jenkin ... yStable/7/

111 commits, about 1300ish affected files (tho some of those are moves). Loads of new stuff. The commit list might be a good start on what changed since last, I'll write up a new blog entry soon with more exact details and user friendly "try these commands!"

Applet also built, and gasp, worked! Tho admittedly I didn't have the right artifact capture pattern first try, so missed the new dirs. One build later you can run the applet right out of Jenkins again

You can't, however, run it out of the blog for some reason. I suspect maybe file permissions on zip files in the new mods directory - Begla, everything is owned by Jenkins, but served by the blog under a different user, think something needs to be set on the files for that to work?

 

[begla]

You can't, however, run it out of the blog for some reason. I suspect maybe file permissions on zip files in the new mods directory - Begla, everything is owned by Jenkins, but served by the blog under a different user, think something needs to be set on the files for that to work?

Will look into that!

 

[begla]

I could not figure out the problem with the permissions (yet). Seems not to be just related to file permissions sadly but the overall Java security and permissions system. Will have to dig through the code to find the issue.

What's the status on my video script? Posting new videos leads new users to our forum and my blog. Sadly the total amount of visitors is decreasing from day to day which can be strongly influenced by posting a new video. The "Flight 3" video has almost 30k views now. Impressive!

 

[Cervator]

Yeah I've seen the numbers slowly climb. Madness!

Going to give the forum one more pass tonight then finally write up the milestone stable build post

 

[Cervator]

Phiew. Nearly 10ish am. Work early tomorrow (later today..) - Woot!

Blog post up summarizing the recent changes: http://forum.movingblocks.net/threads/first-milestone-4-stable-build-out.341/

Includes sample console commands and minion bar instructions

For a video script - I'm not much of a director, but the content bits from the post would be what to hit

1) Bookcases - just to show that you can put a book in there (and open books) but not other items
2) Potions (green poison hurts, orange cures if you drink it fast, red refills, purple can make you run very fast)
3) Minions! Set a patrol route, direct a couple to gather blocks, show that their inventory fills up and the player can grab stuff, etc
4) Tons of new blocks, tho I lose track of which are in the latest build. Would take a bit of effort for setup going through all the console commands. Need a simple getBlock "GoodyChest" that's prepopulated with fun stuff sometime
5) Railgun! Not new, but still popular, everybody loves explosions!
6) Sheer cliffs and the height they can attain. Bonus for flying up and down them, partially after blowing clearings via railgun. Double bonus with purple potion active

 

[begla]

Okay, I've actually tried to record a video today. But it's too obvious that block collecting is not working as it should and I keep breaking blocks over and over again. Maybe someone could look into this issue? Seems to be related to the new minion system.

Otherwise... Lots of cool stuff to show! Got a small script ready and some really cool world seeds to show off.

 

[Cervator]

All fixed and ready! What was wrong with the collection, anyway? I've noticed some fun quirks possible now, like mini-blocks being stuck to the bottom of a block with the "owning" minion standing on top of it

Now we just need to paint block selections on the world again to have minions gather them all

 

[begla]

Ah - where did this feature go? It was so horribly implemented!

 

[Cervator]

The ES bulldozer came through and it hasn't been reimplemented yet, i've still got a partial reimplementation of some of that stuff sitting in one of my workspaces, heh

 

[overdhose]

might have been working on it if I didn't start on the inventory revamp... but short on time anyway now. Seems all the fun stuff started once i disappeared
Let me know if you start on the reimplementation Cervator...