Welcome to the Bronze Age !

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
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Or at least it feels like steady progression in Throughout the Ages with us having progressed through Wood & Stone and currently Copper & Bronze! Marcin Sciesinski is continuing to churn out content (more ideas welcome!), aided some by great new icons & other assets by Skaldarnar - for instance, speaking of churning, have a quern:

Quern.jpg


It is available in the latest stable build, now available via Launcher, GitHub, or Jenkins. Some notes! (more in Jenkins)
  • The Wood & Stone series has been enhanced quite a bit more by Marcin and some outstanding issues from the last stable build fixed. Smelt copper and stuff!
    • Fluid module added - provides support for using fluids in systems, as opposed to liquid blocks in the world. Example: Using water as a resource in a cooking station
    • Genome moduleadded also - allows breeding plants right down to genetic letters! Try to find some corn in a Throughout the Ages world to get some related journal entries
      • This also ended up touching on the procedural flowers proof of concept glasz did, getting us some fancy icons (in-game blocks pending)
    • AlterationEffects also added to contain effects you can gain from stuff like food or potions (think "Alteration" the magic school - although that might be a ways off ...)
  • A UI issue was fixed for Macs that could break the menu, along with various other related tweaks & fixes - NUI pretty stable now! Old GUI is all gone
  • Miniions has been removed from the default line-up for now - it hasn't been (fully?) updated for NUI yet, which would probably be a lot of work, but a lot of the content is available via newer modules now anyway. It really needs an interested curator to go any further, or for overdhose to pop back up :)
  • Zones likewise has been removed for now as only Miniions dependend on it. Should be a fairly small fix to make it usable again though
  • The Signalling module has also been removed from the line-up pending a NUI rewrite - hopefully it can make a come-back within long. A new module should be coming soon that also builds on BlockNetwork and focuses on mechanics like rotating axles and windmills!
  • Sound and music nodes added to the behavior tree. Should make it doable to for instance play a certain music piece if combat begins
  • Various performance improvements, but a new issue seems to have crept in. Might help to disable "eyeAdaption" in config.cfg (in a Terasology data directory hiding somewhere in your user home dir)
  • Shaped blocks now can have display names. For instance giveBlock "brick" "stair" 5 gives you 5 "Brick Stairs" (there are also a few new shapes)
  • Physics & Math are getting some tweaks, some of it preparations for a new railroad / train module coming soon by Adeon :)
  • Lots of other behind-the-scenes tweaks like inventory management that might not be immediately visible in-game (likely along with a known issue for this release where you can't throw stacked items in singles with 'q' for a bit)
  • Players can now configure their identity some for multiplayer! Look in the options menu. So far just player name and color (for use in text, doesn't affect your monkeyhead!)
  • Basic ore distribution was put back into the "normal" worlds - nothing nearly as fancy as the options in the AnotherWorld module, but just so we have something!
  • Note: The console may not grab focus after the first time. Just click in its text bar manually for now - a fix is on the way
Beyond stuff in the stable build here are some other news - and windmills!

  • For the devs: There's a new "gradlew updateModule" command that'll auto-pull changes for all your local modules (still have to pull the root project yourself). Not well tested with local changes/commits present and it appears able to run out of memory with a lot of modules present. As of this writing it can pull the whole Wood & Stone series of modules at least!
  • We posted out 1000th thread, our 1000th issue on GitHub, and ran the 1000th unstable build in Jenkins! Yep all in the last month :D
  • SuperSnark published a book! Not Terasology related but worth a look anyway if you're a parent / might be one soon :love:
  • New friend flux brought us VoxelShop, a light-weight 3D model editor focused on - you guessed it - voxels! @mkienenb has been looking at adding support for the COLLADA 3D format to go with VoxelShop tweaks by Flux, maybe we'll get to an interesting point where advanced models can be exported straight from VoxelShop (rather than from just scary Blender) into Terasology. Or since it is a Java tool, maybe one day in the distant future you could use it in-game ... ;)
  • Vertically stacked chunks are happening, with an experimental branch being worked by Immortius - woo!
  • TeraMath and TeraBullet are seeing some action. We also noticed physics and math stuff in LibGDX that might be an interesting target since we're curious to adopt LibGDX anyway!
  • We started playing with thread prefixes in the forum, needs some more work and ideas
  • The Oculus Rift Dev Kit v2 has become available - tempting, very tempting! Especially since nh_99 has been playing with our Leap Motion library Jitter again. Those two geek toys together ... yum!
  • The quest for the ultimate Gradle magic continues, and may soon improve our dependency management well enough for us to start using serious version numbers, yay!
I think that's it for now. Just in the time it took me to get the stable build tested and released, then gathering and writing this post we've already made some progress on narrowing down the outstanding performance issues, fleshing out the graphics options some, improving metrics, and so on. Always something happening!
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
Slight correction! The player color you pick DOES affect your monkey head, to my surprise! Neat!

Terasology-140402003419-1152x700.jpg
 
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