This Week In Veloren 153

New week, new year! We hear about upcoming fixes to daggers, and hear the audio changes that are being made to rivers.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @Sam, @DaforLynx, @imbris, @XVar, @tygyh, @UncomfySilence, @xMAC94x, @Ubruntu, @AngelOnFira, and @flo!

This week, @AngelOnFira worked on fixing the GitHub mirror of the project. It turns out that there was a bug in the most recent version of git-lfs. On the game server-side, the entity_sync system was reworked to become parallel! This was a large issue that came up during the last release party. Once 150+ players were on the server, it started taking more time each tick than any other system. Hopefully, we get to test the improvements at the next release!

Lunar New Year by @AngelOnFira

With the Christmas holiday event just ending, we're looking forward to the next event, Lunar New Year 2022. However, our dev team doesn't have many people who celebrate this holiday. Because of this, we'd like to get more help on this!

If you'd like to help us get this event ready, feel free to join the effort in the #aesthetics channel on our Discord server. This can include music, decorations, information, and any other ideas. Give me a ping if you want to get involved!

Dagger animations by @Ubruntu

This week, I worked on dagger animations.

I started with some experimentation using the live reloading feature cargo run --features "hot-anim". I did some investigation into why daggers had such a different orientation on character models compared to all other weapons. I couldn't find a reason in the animation code itself, so I opened the dagger .vox models in MagicaVoxel and found that they were horizontal whereas all other weapon models were positioned vertically.

This was my first time using MagicaVoxel but I managed to rotate the models to the same orientation as other weapons, and after that, it was a matter of playing with orientations in the animation files to make them look naturally positioned on the character model. I took some artistic liberty and positioned the daggers at the hip instead of across the back like other weapons and that received some positive feedback. I also tied the "tempbasic" dagger attack skill to a basic swing animation that one-handed swords use, just for the time being.

Daggers still aren't acquirable normally in the game and still aren't as polished as other weapons but now they definitely don't feel as "under construction" as they were before. At this point, however, players can spawn them with commands in singleplayer and try them out. We can now start to think of making new dagger VOX models and NPCs that use daggers as weapons, as well as work on animations for attacks that will use these cool weapons.

@DaforLynx

This week, I worked on re-implementing sounds of flowing water for rivers. Before this feature was removed a while ago, it sounded very sparse and rather un-riverlike. I took a different approach this time, making small bubbling sounds emit from a single random water block every tick. The result is that rivers sound a bit like a babbling brook now, and it gets appropriately louder as you get closer.

Also, new town music by @phoenix13032005 and @Thy-SFX-[Velorian]- was added.