This Week In Veloren 129

This week, we see improvements to AI, new SFX, and some new icons.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @imbris, @xMAC94x, @KnightressPaladin, @juliancoffee, @Snowram, @tygyh, @zesterer, @AngelOnFira, @aweinstock, @Sam, @Pfau, @Yurimomo, @Aylana, @Savalige, @XVar, and @holychowders!

Veloren recently hit 300k lines of code in the project! @Dr.Dystopia has been trying to resolve all clippy error suppressions. You can read this week's meeting notes here.

New SFX by @Princess-Lana

I added SFX to the Asp Animal (Creature) in game. It's the first animal to have SFX for all three states (to my knowledge), angry, calm, and hurt. The clips are Royalty-Free, and have been edited to fit in as needed. Some are recordings from other open source projects. I measured them against a few other in-game creature/animal sounds, and found that they sound about right at -5db.

It is my first contribution towards the development of Veloren and being part of a team on GitLab. A lot of gratitude goes out to the people who have guided and helped me, thank you. I am looking forward to adding my next SFX contribution soon.

Wgpu work by @Sharp

I've been working for a while now on this, but just to let you know I haven't disappeared! I'm doing a bunch of work directly in wgpu to improve its performance and API for native applications (including Veloren, of course!). I'm also removing pretty much all of the locking (except for locks that are held very briefly for things like allocation, and locks that appear to be hard to eliminate due to the native drivers demanding synchronization). I will probably have a bigger post to talk about this when I'm done as it's a fairly substantial change.

Fixes by @aweinstock

I rebased some MRs by @holychowders and @Savalige that were finished, and got them merged. The former makes guards respond when villagers shout for help, and the latter causes melee enemies (most noticeably husks) to spread out, resulting in swarming behavior that reduces the number that can get hit by a single fireball, and causes them to surround you.

I adjusted spawning behavior to place players aboveground when logging in, which should eliminate the need to manually use /home to get unstuck. I also improved the PID controllers used for airships and re-tuned them (previously, the integral term was incorrectly discarding old samples instead of accumulating total error).

Additionally, I've added support for hats. No hats are currently accessible without /give_item, but the support for them being added is there.

Icons by @Pfau

I worked on two icons this week:

I also continued the concept for the crafting window overhaul. The new crafting window will hopefully show things like:

• Crafting trees (with ingredients for ingredients)
• More info about ingredients ("what can I craft with this?" or "where do I get it?")
• More user-friendly representation of armour tiers and sets
• More filters

AI fixes by @juliancoffee

This week I worked on small AI fixes. AI now knows how to interact in this evil world and doesn't get stuck within three seconds waiting to be killed. Travelers don't hunt their target forever, and get calm after one kill. Merchants don't get stuck in battle trying to eat curry. Cultists target their leaps better and not just by flying to the other end of the room. AI also now uses gliders better which reduces their chance to die from falling.

Charge animals (wolves, mammoths, etc) and spear warriors don't double-hit while dashing. Wildlife spawn rules were moved to .ron configs, which opens possibilities for easier balancing and testing.