Seclevs, Blocks and Physics Headaches

This week, things have happened!

Tom has been working on Security Level code, which will allow server owners to build their own tiers of moderators, with a very fine level of control over exactly what each level of user can do. Join in the discussion here

Ryan has moved house, driven for many, many hours and almost yelled at his cats. He's got some more API security work to do but naturally has had more limited time than usual to work on KAG. Hopefully moving the rest of his stuff goes smoothly.

I'm over in NZ with my family for a few weeks, which means I'll have even worse ping than usual if I see you ingame. I've been accused of being a hacker ingame already, please look for the purple name and hair before you start pointing fingers ;)

In actual development news:

Michal and I have been working primarily on physics rewrites for this and last week, and it's been exhausting, especially for Michal, who has had to bear the brunt of the programming work, especially recently.

The majority of the kinks have been hammered out though, and now things like this are possible:



Note the lack of lighting on the constructed blocks - that's still work in progress.

They're also not settling to the grid yet because the support mechanic isn't 100% finalised - we're pretty set in the implementation though, and it should be done this weekend.

Most of the block behaviours will be defined in common scripts that can be used as examples, and to quickly add functionality to modded blocks and the like.

Behind the scenes of the above image is the new (also work in progress) inventory system. Here's a sneak peek:



(Apologies for the strange pixel warping, shot taken on a years-old laptop)

We're going to have to play with how this affects game balance because a builder with a full inventory is holding a fairly gigantic number of blocks.

We're likely going to split off classic at the point of this next release so that it doesn't get any of the changes to the underlying structure, as they affect movement and game balance a lot - we'd like to be able to move forward drastically without destroying what we've already got, so classic will stay preserved as a separate game (kind of like what Mojang were doing with minecraft a few years ago with classic/creative, survival and survival multiplayer, not sure what the deal there is now).

The movement behind the game is now more physically designed, which means that you keep your momentum in the air and that there is no kind of velocity cap. This is very important for things like jumping on trampolines.

We're excited for what ramps, trampolines, building momentum and so on will do for race/jump maps - I'll be looking into coding an actual race gamemode so that a competitive gamemode that doesn't necessarily involve killing each other can exist.

We'll keep you posted with more developments as they happen, no date for you guys yet though I'm afraid :)

Max/Geti

 

Probably a pulley, I didn't get to test this, it's just a screen geti showed me on irc.

 

Ah damnit rayne, after I took all the time to get the blocks nice and aligned in the public shot, haha.

@Leif: I'm originally from Aus but my family moved to NZ when I was in high school and stayed, I went back to Aus for university and live there. They're based in Auckland so no, they weren't affected by the quakes, but I've got a few friends who were, so thanks for the well wishing anyway.

Not sure if I want to include that hat, but probably should just so people can hum the theme to themselves as they try to dodge boulders, then take the hat off in shame as they're run down by the inescapable traps :)

@Ej: Thats a generic inventory, not just a block selection screen.

 

Looking good! Hopefully once I get my machine working again there will be tastiness available for testing... :)

inb4theoff-topic

I swear, I will end the first person who posts about things not relevant to the OP. If you include an off-topic comment in an on-topic post, that's fine; but be forewarned that if your off-topic side note leads to a fully off-topic post in reply... heaven help you!

 

See Attached. This was around the time I killed a man in Russia.

More recent (at GDC)


Re: "why arent you on aus servers": I am, just generally at horrible times of night and very often under alts. I played under my Geti account just yesterday, and as always spent about 80% of the game playing tech support :) I prefer to actually play the game when I'm playing it.

If you must off topic about any this please start a new thread. //Or else...

As for slopes purpose, you can use steep ones to keep enemies out and it lets you get up and down hills without jumping the whole time, and build more player-friendly internal structures (think "stairs")