Pre-alpha release 58 - tweaking some content

[Cervator]

This release for once probably has more changes in our modules than in the engine, which should become more typical as the engine stabilizes

Our 4th birthday is coming up, officially September 26th, and the tentative plan is to go with a multiplayer event running JoshariasSurvival. @Josharias has been working on some fine-tuning so it should work well for this purpose. It won't happen quite on the date as RL is as always a cruel mistress and I for one am in crunch time with work but it'll be within the next few weeks!

I'd also like to start some discussion on possibly taking the engine to v1.0.0 / game to alpha sometime soon, even if we aren't quite ready. We really need to call it rather than keep moving the goal posts then support it as stable for other devs and modders. Maybe a discussion around the birthday party although I'll kick it off sooner via forum (dang time zones!)

Release download on GitHub | Full engine changelog in engine | Completed engine issues on GitHub

Main changes

• Cities works again and its world gen has been overhauled to be more based on our facet system. There are also some hidden features that should grow up in the near future - if you ran the right dev build you might have noticed big floating question marks on roads along with other floating text to liven the world up and lead to quests and other interesting things
• JoshariasSurvival has had some play testing to firm up recipes, its help system, various bugs and support for multiplayer. It has pretty much overtaken TTA as our primary content module as well as tutorial and over time has added a lot of stuff to what you can construct in-game.
  
  • Note that in one help quirk the very first entry about making your first tool needs to be done in an assembly station not in the inventory-based crafting (it needs two input items, inventory only offers one slot)
• First round of internationalization in the engine, starting with various menu labels. Still some more work to do so in-game assets can also be translated but for now the menu items are in our Weblate
  
• Our math library TeraMath is growing further and some more bits have been extracted out of the engine. We're also looking at options with JOML and even talking to jMonkeyEngine a bit - math libs unite!
• Various tweaks and fixes to the UI, general bug fixes, and oh a neat tweak to the splash screen - square is so a decade or two ago!

Other notable stuff and coming soon

• The server @minnesotags has been hosting from time to time is back online running this new release. Connect info is in the server browser in-game Be sure to use the exact Omega release to connect with though!
  • Note that it may take a few moments on a headless server before any initial chunks are made visible. This seems to vary from server to server. There is also a known issue being alone on a headless server with the "legally blind" view distance - it is so short the client may not request enough chunks from the server to make any world visible Just increase view distance for a bit or have another player around with a higher one
  • This or another server may run JoshariasSurvival for testing - if you find any bugs please let us know so we can get it more polished before the birthday party! Servers may also crash or even reset, so keep that in mind.
• The minimap module has been overhauled by @msteiger and is available in the current dev build. It seems to be all-black for some players, we need more info on who it works / doesn't work for!
  
• A bunch of work has been done on asset disposal by @Immortius that may fix some assorted issues including a rare repeat of #1855 (need to test - but it happens so rarely)
  
• There is a new package for Ubuntu available. There are a few third party packages like this, such as the one for Arch Linux. Just double check that they're up to date before use and don't use something you don't feel like trusting. We're happy to hawk third party packages and would like to go further there eventually, like a docker and/or bitnami server package one day. Just need time and people!

Video showcasing JoshariasSurvival's help system listed above:

 

[chessandgo]

Might be just mean, but it seems ever so slightly faster. Also, good job on Josharias Survival! Its really reaching a game stage, just needs to become feature complete and we can ship it as the Terasology:Game.

Based on some freedback, i'll be splitting the info graphic into just Dev stuff, until we can have enough "game" to make a player one.


You talked about this before, but I don't remember the answere: We need dimension support for version 1.0

I think you said that'd come later, but if 1.0 is going to be the version where everything settles down and we start showing it off, we definitally need dimension support. More so that many content creators like making dimensions.

 

[Cervator]

Thanks for the kind words, but no IMHO we don't need dimension support for v1.0.0 - in particular since if you really want to make the world look different just teleport the player to a very distant part of the "overworld" and make that part look however you want That would just take a few simple hacks and maybe some skysphere work if you want the sky to look different. If you wanted a Nether just teleport the player deep into the ground and generate some large caves with lots of lava. I figure the current facet system would support wildly different looking parts of the same world through some basic conditions.

Proper multi-world should be more architectural in nature, probably mixing in server-side optimizations (could host one world on a different server node for better performance) and various enhancements to the world saves to maybe make them easier to edit or use in some other alternative fashion. Maybe also optimizations on what should be active for different worlds - could perhaps even have different modules active in different worlds. That's a lot of work though for little gain over the hack if somebody really wants to make a vastly different looking world right now.

I've backed off on trying to go v1.0.0 (for engine) when we're architecturally complete. If we keep aiming for that we'll never get there. Release early and often - about time we try that out instead