Week In Review - 11.9.16 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

We'd like to apologize for the radio silence around here, as we've been incredibly busy with development as well as getting those builds out to everyone!

Our plan is to start this "Week In Review" series to keep everyone up to date on our progress. So from now on, we're going to do our best to  keep you updated week-by-week!

Indev Release

Written by JellySquid

You probably noticed our launch of Indev builds a few days ago! I've spent the last week getting Indev builds out to our supportive patrons, making all the server-side stuff tick. It's been a long process, but we're finally able to get indev builds out to our supporters.

Public indev builds were released November 4th for everyone. Hope you had a chance to test it out by now!

Launcher Improvements

Written by JellySquid

The launcher has also seen a handful of general improvements, the most notable being some new animations. Fortunately, even with the new eye candy, performance has only been improved!

The news view has received a small facelift

Scrollbars are now properly styled, and lists now have scrollbars

Large assets are now loaded in the background, speeding up startup

The titlebar's buttons are now better spaced and give feedback when pressed

Animated indeterminate spinners have been added to progress views

We've got lots planned for the launcher, with changelogs and a console view coming soon.

Terrain Generation

Written by Brandon Pearce

The changes to Terrain Generation in the Aether probably deserve an entire post of their own, but here's a quick rundown of what I've been doing thus far!

First of all, islands in the Aether are now controlled "objects" that we can reference in code.

This means we can develop gameplay mechanics that directly interact with islands (such as their location)

One of my favorite examples of what we can do with this change is NPCs that can transport you to a nearby island, perhaps through a flying carriage.

Another thing to note - we now have Quicksoil Coasts! These line the edges of islands.

Currently, islands are all the same size, and are distributed into "sectors" in the world which resemble in many ways a "grid". This is VERY temporary, and I will be developing a new distribution algorithm very soon!

Schematic Generation

Written by Brandon Pearce

One of the cool things we've been focusing on with the rewrite for the mod is transitioning a large majority of our generation features to schematic files. Now, of course the first concern many people might have is that many of our features (such as trees) will look too static without any variation. This is a very valid concern!

Thankfully, however, I have developed a little developer-only block called "Wildcards". These Wildcard blocks can be used to randomly distribute one block type out of a group and place it upon generation. This means we can do things like randomly grow moss on holystone walls, and have more random/natural trees - all while keeping these features under the schematic format!

This is great for many reasons:

One, we keep our game data out of the code, which is always great,

Two, this allows us to give the artists of the team more freedom with designing new biomes!

Finally, they will be able to hand-craft the new structures and trees you'll find in future biomes.

Wrapup

And that's all for this week! Tune in next week for more insight into our development progress.