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Papercraft Voxatron
So, it looks like 0.2.6 will be ready next week. It features the first appearance of modifiers -- a general purpose tool at the core of Voxatron's scripting engine. I've been using them recently to create conditional monster behaviours and attacks using custom bullets and emitter patterns (these will also be available in 0.2.6). I'm really happy with the way modifiers have turned out, and I'm sure level-designing people will learn to love and hate them in equal measure. There's also another dev diary on the way which has the gory technical details.
In the meantime, here's some papercraft Voxatron by @jitterworld that is currently staring at me. Check out some of his other papery stuff here.
(Those drawers are around 25cm across -- it's not a giant life-sized thing)
Finally - if you're in Tokyo this weekend, drop by the Lexaloffle office on Saturday, because I'll be testing out some experimental 4-player Voxatron code on the unsuspecting public, along with a preview build of Towerfall and the newly released and splendid Monaco. For more information, see Pico Pico Cafe's Indie Games Night page.
Official KSP Merchandise Store now available!
Have you always wished there was a way to show the world that you manage and advanced space exploration center in your free time? Well, wish no more! SQUAD is proud to release a brand new line of KSP merchandise to satisfy your representation desires. Want a cool shirt? A space center mousepad? Just click here: http://www.cafepress.com/KerbalSpaceProgram
May Technical Status Update: Building Interiors, Workshops, Outlines, Hidden Work
Things are slowly coming together. Some new developments have occurred in programmer town, and we are delighted to finally show you what we spent the past month-and-a-half doing.
Bluntly, things are coming together at last. People can harvest resources, process them in workshops, and convert them to other resources. People have their own actions as well; if people can’t eat, for instance, they’ll die. Poets still wander the hills, trying to be inspired by things. The noble aurochs plough through the land, and so forth. Want to see a sneak peek? Read on for some new features…
Building interiors. At first, we didn’t want to show building interiors, and wanted them to appear as little black boxes. We decided that this was basically no fun (you can thank Daniel for this one) and then we set to work augmenting our building code with interior generators. This also meant adding doors which worked into buildings, which means punching holes in walls, which means… well, additional complications. So here is a building exterior:
and here is its interior:
To see what’s in a building, simply mouse over it. In this case, this is some kind of middle-class house, as you can tell by the single bed. The doors work, incidentally, and people will open them, close them, and hop up and down stairs appropriately. You will also see that buildings now have trim on their sides to make them more realistic; trim for the roof is on a TODO list, but is more complicated due to the roof geometry.
We can also support, yet again, more complicated buildings without explosions. Note how this building has a lot of interesting curved walls, modules, and holes for doors and stuff.
Workshop modules now work. Here, for instance, we see a refinery in operation. To queue jobs, simply click on the workshop, pull up the Build menu, and start queuing work:
A humble overseer will appear, with his work party. In this case, this is a refinery, which refines Foul, Unscientific Wood into Imperial Quality Charcoal (Her Majesty’s Preferred Brand).
Wood gets put into the oven…
… and charcoal emerges. People will then place it in a stockpile, or – if no stockpile is available – anywhere that they feel like. Other workshops are working for making planks out of logs, so there’s a lot of things you can do now once you chop a tree. Multiple machines can exist in the same workshop, and people will use as many machines as are available to them.
Objects now have outlines, to indicate what you’re clicking on! The glorious outlines you love from Dungeons of Dredmor are back, and just like in Dredmor they make everything better.
A grove of the Great Northern Outline Pine. Its wood is favoured for use in framing, trim, and moulding.
Here, for instance, we are outlining a tree, as overseer Darwin looks on approvingly.
One of the other things that we needed was, of course, a particle system. None of the off-the-shelf ones that we tried met with much success, so we eventually decided to write one ourselves. We’re not going to regret that at all. Hence, a particle system editor appears! (It’s not very effective.)
If art is indeed pain, you can see why the art team is so productive. (Now don’t all writhe at once, the harmonics created by synchronized suffering tends to produce cracks in the Artistic Punishment Sphere.)
Additionally, you can now tie things like particle systems and sound effects to animation frames individually via the importer.
Micah has done a lot of “hidden work” which is important, but not something that we can really show screenshots for: cleaning up our internal message handling code (read: rewriting), fixing networking issues, cleaning up the way Lua scripting works, and adding memory management for Lua objects to ensure that they actually free their memory when deleted. Also, there have been another zillion bugs fixed, et cetera, et cetera. Next up on his TODO list: the “events” scripting framework, which is all scripting for everything that isn’t a character action or an in-game object. Think of things like royal proclamations, getting technology, Selenian Moon Fungus rains, etc.
In terms of big ticket TODOs, we have a list on our whiteboard. I’m not going to show you the list, because it’s a large list full of some secret stuff we’re not talking about yet, and some of which you know from previous blog posts. The two major implementation jobs remaining right now are “citizen social features” and “combat”, as well as a number of smaller jobs (“GPU skinning”, “global world state”, “job cancellation”, “cults”, etc.) It’s starting to converge on a game, though, and once those are in maybe we’ll have something we can send to a few trusted playtesters and get some feedback on.
Test Drive your Flying Saucer today!
Guess what?
We recently added the ability to aim and fire weapons from the Flying Saucer! Awesome, right? So, anyway, I'm still trying to put together a mission or two for the new release. This time I took the Flying Saucer out for a spin on the new map, SB_Shrooms!
Fireworks, hey? You gotta love 'em.
Praise be! The PZ Desura Drought Ends!
Finally, after a long wait, Zomboid returns to the Desura Client with the much awaited (by us at least) 2.9 build.
Community Round-Up 23/05
Forged From Thunder!
To celebrate the release of the combat update introducing the lightning quick evasive dash and the thunderous shield bash, the Haven treasury is giving away unique prizes!
From now through June 2nd, 2013, we're giving away free Stormy Prize Boxes with select energy purchases!
Each Stormy Prize Box has special prizes inside. Possible prizes include unique Storm Helmets and radiant Eyes of Fury. Not only that, but a lucky few players may find the rare Wings of Fury!
KSP 0.20 released!
Strap on to your seat and strap your seat on to a rocket, 0.20 is here!
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/30553-KSP-0-20-Released
SpringFiles: Xta 9.728 xtaids update
Version: 1 Other Freeware
Brings xtaids up to date with quality from other xta units, as well as adding some more units to arm tech 3 gantry.
Also includes first beta of spiders vs. tortoises unitpack, but be wary, probably horribly unbalanced, needs testing and input. These tech 1.5 labs exaggerate the traits of arm and core.
Hopefully by xta 9.729 will have some of these updates.
3089: More exciting combat, tutorial video & polish!
3089 v0.66a is out! Combat will be much quicker & balanced. I'm also experimenting with a developer's "Let's Play" series where I show off the latest features, offer gameplay tutorials & more. Watch my first video & try the free demo!
Patch Notes - May 22, 2013
Dash and Bash through the Clockworks!
In order to help combat the ever-growing threat within the Clockworks, all Knights can now use two powerful abilities: the evasive dash and the stunning shield bash! Both abilities have default mappings in each control scheme or can be set in Custom Controls.
Dash
MCM London is this weekend!
Top ten reasons to come to MCM London this weekend:
- Meet your fellow gamers and give them hugs/indian burns, as appropriate.
- Shop for geek gear, comics, action figures, manga, trading cards, and other unique merch at the dealer stalls.
- Play DOFUS and WAKFU from the floor of the convention and lord it over your friends!
- Get special deals on Ankama artbooks, plushies, and toys without worrying about shipping costs.
- Participate in games of skill and chance (like Bilby Toss and Fight Your CCM) at the Ankama booth to win prizes both in-game and RL.
- Experience world-class cosplay at the the MCM Comic Con Theatre.
- Be one of the first people in the UK to try out the Krosmaster board game in English.
- Meet actors, authors, artists and directors from your favorite shows, animes, comics, movies, books and games.
- Play DDR and a host of retro console and arcade games at the Retro Gaming Theatre.
- Meet the DOFUS and WAKFU community team and improve your score in Six Degrees of Lichen!
So now you know what's waiting for you this weekend in London, head to the MCM site and get your tickets now!
As a reminder, any convention goes who visit our booth wearing WAKFU or DOFUS cosplay will receive a special gift from Ankama!
New In-game Screenshots of Lumino City & Release Date News
Good news, we’ve got some new screenshots of Lumino City for you. These are taken from early on in the game, and show the extra detail and sense of depth we’ve got in the game compared to Lume. Everything you see in these images was made by hand. We’re really excited about how it’s going, each scene is presenting us with a new challenge which is – mostly – fun. Take a look at the new images below.
The Photographer’s House
Cliff Town
We’ve found ourselves having to work out crazily hard stuff, like how to make Lumi realistically climb around footage of a moving ferris wheel, and how a mirrored surfaces can be made interactive. Sometimes we’re banging our heads on the desk with frustration, sometimes we’re wide-eyed and enthused when it’s gone well.
There’s a lot which needs bespoke treatment, and a lot of head scratching beforehand, then tons of care to make it actually happen.
So things have been taking longer than we estimated. We reckon we’ve probably done as much visual work on the first scene already as there was in the entire first game. But, even though that means we won’t be able to release the game this spring, it does mean it’ll be much much better when it is released.
We’re still planning on a 2013 release, and we’ll be letting you know more about our release date when we’ve done a little more work and can predict it with more accuracy.
It's the ONE-OF-A-KIND HUB-Date*!
disclaimer: HUB will not date you, and thinks you're kind of a slob. Also new guns, achievements, and all kinds of new stuff!
OS X 0.23.0 Package Released
Good news for all OS X users, the 0.23.0 release is now available on our new Downloads Page! Check the 0.23.0 release announcement for the changelog.
BTS: New Website and New Hi-Scores
SpringFiles: Iceland
Version: v1 Spring Maps Freeware
Iceland V1, for up to 8 players, by [teh]Beherith (mysterm@gmail.com)
Harmonia Classic - Download now, or play online!
Here's the link!
This link will connect you online via the Java Telnet Application. Honestly, though, it's not the best option for compatibility, so if I were you, I would download PuTTY and connect manually to the address listed below the applet. If you'd like to play the game single player, you might prefer downloading it and running your own server.
This build is far from finished, hence the v0.1, so consider this the first of many work-in-progress public builds before the "finished" version :) However, now that this is finally out publicly, we're anxious to get back to working on "real" Harmonia, so don't expect much Harmonia Classic news for a while!
Anybody who has the interest is welcome to play around with the script files located in the "scripts" folder. You are of course welcome to host your own server, as well - if you do, please send me a link ;)
Enjoy! :D
-- Simon (Synival) - simon@baroque-creations.com
Dirk Dashing 2 v1.1 is released!
Dirk Dashing 2: E.V.I.L Eye v1.1 is now available, containing a number of enhancements and bug fixes!
User Interfaces: Redesigning the Navigation Panel
In which I talk about about our UI woes in the demo, and how we're fixing them with a totally new interface.
