Friday Devblog 12

Work has progressed with the building system. I decided to laser focus on one building block (the foundation) this week, and get everything programmed that we want. Here's the bullet points.

• Craft or obtain a foundation plan item in your inventory
• Drag it to the belt bar and equip it
• Can place foundation frame in world + snap on'd
• Can place an unlimited amount of frames with a single plan (no need to craft each one)
• Get placed as a frame (costs 10 wood)
• Bash with the hammer to become real (needs total 500 wood)
• Once built can be damaged and destroyed (for up to +500 wood)
• Damaged blocks can be fixed (up to +500 wood)
• Frames can have multi-models reflecting build state
• Blocks can have multi-models reflecting damage state
• Blocks can have unlimited sets of models (to avoid tiling)

So all the groundwork is done on this. The benefits over the old system should be obvious. It's a much more social way to build. Here's a few videos of it working, keep in mind that this is all just programmer art while we're still playing around with dimensions.

Building

Some placeholder UI is appearing. People were confused that they couldn't move when they first entered a server. So we have a spawn screen. We'll probably show some stats on here in the future, like how long you were asleep and your health or something.

We've been thinking about this for a while, and this week we made the change. I mentioned earlier that it costs 500 wood to build a foundation. In the old system that probably seems like a lot. But you now get 1000 wood from a single tree. This is a change that we're going to be applying to pretty much all the resources. This allows us to be more granular with things like resource gathering. So we can make it so that hitting a tree with a Rock will get 10 wood at a time, or hitting with an Axe will get 50 wood at a time. Or when demolishing a frame that cost 10 wood to erect, you might get 9 wood back. This kind of stuff is obviously unworkable if a frame cost 1 wood to erect. Basically don't worry about the big numbers, everything balances out. You can imagine it as being the same with decimal points.

Bill did the menu screen. How do you like this? Don't worry - the rust guy is just asleep.

Petur has been working on 'Forest type 4'

Dan has been making some models !

Goosey has been animating again

Some solid advances this week. It feels good to get on top of the building system. It's something that has bugged us for a while. It's something that we've had long discussions about, always ending in not agreeing, not being totally happy with the solution. Sometimes it's better to just make a decision rather than dithering doing nothing. If it's shit, it can always be changed later on. A reminder, everything we commit is live tweeted to this twitter account. Then those commits are automatically built by our build servers and made live instantly on the experimental branch on Steam. Everything we're posting about here is available right now on Steam.

Comments, feedback, advice, suggestions regarding this post are welcome in this thread.

X has been drawing his tits off

Meg has been drawing her balls off