Two Weeks in Veloren 206

These weeks, we see work on extending voxel model usage in the game and hear about asset licencing.

- Christof, TWiV Contributor

Contributor Work

Thanks to last two weeks' contributors, @James, Scott Bronson, @walpo, @floppy, and @tormod.

These changes include energy fixes, bird and Frost elemental and werewolf animations, and site placement changes.

@James added swing sound effects to the new sword abilities.

Ongoing (unmerged) work is happening on sword rework, camps (see below), sittable sprites, durability (death penalty), adlet caves, culling (display speedup), more food types, and many more.

Weekly meeting schedule change

With less people attending the weekly meeting in this year we created a poll and found that Saturday evenings works best for the respondents.

With the confusion about time zoned meetings in mind we decided for Saturday 8pm Bristol, UK time. So if you live in the northern hemisphere the time should remain mostly constant across the year, with a brief period of out-of-sync close to the switching. The later time should still make it convenient for west coast US and South American participants (sorry about the meeting time shifting two times a year).

The 'weekly' developer meeting minutes are available at 2023-02-11.

More expressive site design

@Pfau, @Sam, @zesterer and @Christof are working on getting more functionality into sites. Sites are small voxel models spread randomly across the world, you might have encountered them as witch houses, lion rocks, dwarven graves and many more.

These voxel files typically come with a RON file describing some colors as special voxel, e.g. where to place doors, the cauldron, windows and chests.

Now besides all sorts of materials (including Air and GlowingRock), trees, fruits and unoriented sprites, you can also define RotatedSprites (rotation is relative to the model and gets modified according to the random placement, the "unit" vectors), EntitySpawners (these place a NPC at this block with a specific chance) and a Keyhole. Keyholes react to items in your inventory and then destroy all (closed) doors around them.

The creators of these features had mage towers and mines in mind, but we are quite sure that this convenient way to add content to the game with minimal coding (you have to add some lines to register the site with its environmental requirements, e.g. only spawn in cold climates in nearly flat areas) will enable lots of exciting contributions in the future.

See the "camps" branch for this ongoing work.

PS: @Christof thinks that this is a perfect candidate for cool extension mods using plugin files, especially if the remaining coding gets replaced by a RON file describing the environmental constraints via an enum.

A most obscure physics bug by @Atenea

If you use the glider at a proper angle just before diving into the water, you can propel yourself. You can do it repeatedly, even crossing lakes like this.

https://imgur.com/a/I6bZN1X

Asset relicensing

It became clear, that while the intention to share content for usage on open source games was well stated with the GNU general public licence, its requirement to share all source files to re-create the content was never fully intended for non text-based files like music and graphics.

Thus we looked for a more suitable licence for game assets and contacted music and graphic contributors about their opinion. Two licenses made it to the final round, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. While the SA variant is most similar to the previous GPLv3 licence it might create legal questions for using the music and graphics while streaming game content.

Generally the consensus reached was to prefer the non-SA variant to enable free reuse in video streaming.

So, if you have contributed content to veloren and want to re-license your files to a creative commons licence, reach out to the project via matrix or discord. Already contributed files keep their licence as GPLv3, but if you contributed music you might want to re-licence to escape GPLv3's source material guarantees.

For future contributions to the game please either directly embed the licence of your choice into the file (e.g. in a file comment) or state it in a text file in the same directory.

PS: Of course the licence decision remains the sole choice of the copyright owner! If you prefer the most liberal CC0 this is fine as well, as CC0 content can be included in any game without drawbacks. A ND clause will prevent modifications to your content, so you prevent us from re-coding into more efficient or suitable file formats in the future. And a NC clause might interfere with or even prevent potential future releases on proprietary gaming platforms.

Assorted game impressions