Other Announcements
Update on the builder because I know so many of you are looking forward to it: Engineer Justin has added in most of Nikki’s new UI. We’ve also ironed out a bunch of bugs but before we turn it over to you to find more bugs, we should implement the template functionality so that you can help us figure out whether issues you discover come from the build itself, or from the CPU load of the game as a whole.
Streams: This week’s stream will be with Engineer Max, so come with all your modding, AI, and performance related questions. Max has also been working on some really cool campaigns and encounters; ask him for a sneak peek at the new face of friendship, for example.
I felt the same, I feel it would be ok to sparkle in build mode, but should be hidden in non build mode lol, or the entire block hidden completely when you’re not in build mode?
Yeah… I think I wouldn’t mind the stones being sparkly in a water fountain or in decorative channels, it kinda looks cute and magical but if you’re trying to create a natural looking waterfall or lake, it becomes rather distracting.
@malley, there’s some feedback about the effects. ^^^
They might? be in the stable branch too, haven’t checked it.
I should warn you that the alias is going to change a little in future builds, so if you save a game that has them, you might get errors when you load that savefile after updating the game, hopefully they can be ignored safely and you’ll just have to spawn the new ones. There’s a bunch of fixes for them in our internal branch.
The particle effects help to visualize when they are activated (deployed) since they have the same model for the iconic and for the placed version. They have glowing parts too, besides the particles.
For lakes, you could try to hide them in the terrain somehow.
The Atlantis from Disney used to be one of my favorite movies growing up and my most favorite scenes were when they touched the cold stones and they began shining! Or rather, the energy flowed through the runes in them, emitting a soft, mysterious glow.
cough how about having the stones softly shine instead of being dark to show they are activated? :3
Edit: Oh, they are shining already. I guess it wasn’t enough?
Will the new building system be backwards compatible with previous saves? Really looking forward to the new version but I have a town with about a year of work into it that would be cool to continue.
Without the ability to replace earth-textured voxels, we can’t really dig out a spot, place the item and then fill it mostly back in again without it being visually obvious.
I have to agree here. I think the time for checking the functionality of these items would be in build mode. I do like the idea of choosing when and where their effects are displayed… so for intentionally decorative cases like fountains and other deliberate water features, be able to toggle them on. But for natural lakes and geographic water, be able to hide them entirely when not in build mode.
This is a case where UX parity with Minecraft’s Barrier block feels appropriate.
@malley promised that there wouldn’t be any rivers in the game. And while that is actually true (world gen has no rivers), it doesn’t seem technically true (I see a working river in the video.) So my question: how much and what stands in the way of making full blown rivers. (curiosity)
Oop, sorry, I didn’t intend to promise ‘no rivers’, just that we weren’t creating a replacement river system to overwrite Bruno’s mod. The “river” in the video is a hand-made river created by Stephanie (not created at world-spawn). To actually make a “river” would be something like Bruno’s river mod, except it would always start with a wetstone and end with a drystone.
Sorry if my way of saying that made it sound differently than I meant. I understood that the river was made by a player, I just noticed that it was technically possible to create a river (as a player showed, in this instance), so I wondered whether doing so in terrain had other difficulties associated with it.
You guys have some interesting points, I’ll mention it to the team and see what they think. I actually didn’t realize this was already out on unstable - I have adjusted their vfx slightly so they project outward less than 1 voxel (so they are easier to hide in buildings/terrain).
could also mute the vfx somewhat when they are submerged in water… perhaps even making them semi-transparent so they aren’t so visually apparent at a distance.
I was just about to say that the stones should be like zones, and are only visible when you have a tool selected.
They’re also glowing. Instead of sparkling, why not make their glow off when they’re iconic?
This is going to be hard. Dry stones can be placed in the ground and still work with water flowing over them. If you put a wet stone in a hole though, it’s hitbox prevents it from filling the hole to fill the lake.
Then I understand that I, as a player, would want to see that an underwater wetstone was working or not. It would mean that I can easily deduce the mistake if something didn’t go as I intended. But then again, if it’s just the iconic, then how much does that even matter. As in, how often are you going to find an unplaced wetstone in the water, without the ghost of where it needs to be placed nearby. (I actually don’t know the answer to that question.)
Another question, will this functionality forever be tied to the magically themed wet- and drystones, or will we (maybe depending on whether it’s spawned in world gen, or crafted, or bought/found) see other items with different themes have the same functionality, like natural-looking sources and siphons to ground water (nature), or pumps and sinks (crafted)?
hopefuilly … otherwise, great minds think alike.
