This Week in Veloren 202

This week, we marvel at improved clouds and bird animations.

- Christof, TWiV Contributor

Contributor Work

Thanks to last week's contributors, @mentos1386, @jgayfer, Benoît du Garreau, @muphblu, @xMAC94x and @zesterer.

Fixing the attack distance for Llamas, and other hoof animals like antelopes, alpacas or donkeys, is @mentos1386 first contribution, it got merged only 75 hours after they joined the Discord server. This feels like record time.

For the owners of the currently 67 open merge requests, who contributed a fix and are still waiting for a review or merge decision this might sound outrageous, but please bear with the review team and keep reminding us of contributions to work on. You might simply have come at a less fortunate time or provided a much more complex patch.

This week's minutes are here. The meeting was mostly about the creation of this devblog and preparation for the Christmas event.

New clouds by @zesterer

Prettier and faster, as promised. Although not as much faster as I'd liked. Turns out that I'd actually already done the 'big' optimisation I thought about earlier but had forgotten about it. Still, substantially faster than before.

It's actually faster to just make the noise texture larger and more detailed instead of trying to do lots of samples of the same low resolution texture and composite them.

Veloren's got a lot more inputs to work with for clouds than OpenMW, so I can make it do nicer stuff.

Morrowind was 2003, OpenMW is an open-source rewrite of the engine. And it recently got support for post-processing shaders. So, naturally, I added clouds.

Looking down at a town on a river from an airship. You forget how large Veloren's world is until you see each tree from above.

Finance updates by @AngelOnFira

I've updated the last several months of finances in the Google Sheets found here.

Of interest, here is the revenue of our Open Collective over time

This also included me creating an expense for server costs of the last several months for Hetzner and Wasabi. The total of this invoice is $1,521.71, and can be viewed here.

Bird animations by @floppy

In the past months, I have been adding a bunch of @Gemu's creature models to the game. He sent me a zip to work on something "on the side", and I soon realized that I had no idea what I got myself into. But @Slipped gave me the essential info how to best add creatures to the game. The wyverns' wings were most challenging to add because of their size and shape. Sometimes people say, you have to learn the tried and tested ways properly, to stray from them, and the wings did that for me, in a way. I had to really understand and practice first, what @Slipped taught me, to then adjust that process a little, to get the wyvern wings right.

Another favorite creature of mine is the Dodarock, which annoyed many players when it was first added, much too strong. I like its grumpy but friendly face, and I'm always amazed how @Gemu's models seem to have actual personality.