Pre-alpha 61 - last one I swear! :D

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
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Checkpoint! And one more "final" pre-alpha release before we go alpha. Expecting we'll release engine v1.0.0 first weekend in January, so we had about 6 weeks of changes piled up, both in the engine and modules. Made sense to get some updates out to play with over the holidays, especially the shiny new caves!


Download it via launcher or from GitHub releases.

Engine changes in Jenkins
- issues closed on GitHub.

Module changes:
  • New caves woo! Old ones were essentially "air veins" from CustomOreGen by @JRoush. @Josharias made a fancy new independent version that makes bigger and more random cavities complete with a bunch of configuration options. You can enable Caves with an existing world, like Perlin, it doesn't come with its own world generator (it is a world generator plugin - attaches to other world gens)
  • JoshariasSurvival added a bunch more content like power tools. Break and place blocks in multiples (if you cram enough gears and batteries in your tools). And more steam power!
  • Cities got fancier, new special structures, city wall towers with stairs, nicely placed trees and flora, and so on. Also: Barrels! Now we need to make them explode. Cities video and Polyworld video for bonus.
  • There are a few more sands and minerals to play with (since we totally don't have enough already!)
  • Honorable mention: SkySom is working on resurrecting the Rails module (yay!)
  • Honorable mention: sergiomieic (@skit) and other students from Porto have done lots of little things as a student project including a new DamagingBlocks module (not yet in the lineup) so lava will finally hurt you! (yay! but ow!)
Engine changes:
  • A couple key Gradle tasks have been renamed and a new one added - important to note if you used the old ones
    • gradlew game is now how to run the game from source, rather than gradlew run
    • gradlew server gets you a headless server, rather than gradlew start
    • gradlew editor launches TeraEd (which still needs more work and doesn't close right)
  • Simpler detection of Windows' system folders for storing stuff in
  • TeraEd is its own facade now, for editing shader config. Likely will expand into a developer/modder way of running the game with extra options to tweak technical things.
  • Tweaks to trees and some other basic world gen
  • Math updates, almost entirely using our own math lib at this point
  • Some block shapes were fixed (in some positions you'd be able to see through a few shaped blocks), although not the trimmedLoweredCube that's also used for water.
  • Better tooltip support
  • Swimming out of the side of water no longer leaves you swimming forever (yay!)
  • Lots of code style, warnings, formatting, removal of javadoc author comments, etc
  • Lots of translations
  • Various refactoring to make cleaner code
  • Enhanced key binding - can now unbind a key, assign anything including esc, and confirm a change before it is saved
  • More usage of the Noto font in various places, helps support translation better
  • Module dependencies are now listed in the description area for a module
Other stuff:
  • Our primary test server hosted by minnesotags has been updated to this release and is running JoshariasSurvival + the new Caves! Just run from this release and find his server entry in the multiplayer "listed" section and join up.
  • A small launcher release has been done to fix a freeze bug in some cases. Requires Java 8u40 now. Ended up getting tagged v3.0.0 from the Java requirement, but the original goal with v3 (bundled JRE) stalled some time ago. I've left the milestone alone hoping we can get back to it. We may want to renumber future stuff (and merge master to develop) but the launcher is slightly different set up at the moment and I don't want to do a pointless 3.0.1 build just for the version bump that'll then show up each time as a new available update. If that actually happens. Been a while :)
  • Our splash site got some assorted updates, as did some other things. @msteiger has been all over the map!
  • We had a fun-loving troll report a couple of our YouTube videos, which were immediately blocked pending appeal that took days with no other recourse, yay! So to see where that's going I published another small older video with what we can do with in-game items now:

Edit: Bonus! Dominog video by @glasz:
 
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Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
As a quick little addendum:
 
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