Two Weeks in Veloren 207

These weeks, we see work on creating visual guides for people new to Veloren, progress on rtsim2, and a poll for a skill tree overhaul.

- Sam, TWiV Contributor

Contributor Work

Thanks to last two weeks' contributors, @Pfau, @catb0t, @imbris, @floppy, @zesterer, and @Sam.

These changes include culling of underground terrain for rendering, more spots such as campsites, the ability to lock camera zoom, and optimizations related to buffs and auras.

Ongoing (unmerged) work is happening on sword rework, durability (death penalty), adlet caves, more food types, unlockable recipes, quests, arches, and many more.

New Core Developers

We recently added two new core developers. Welcome @Isse and @aweinstock to the core dev team.

Visual Guides by @Atenea

Atenea has created some visual guides to help new players to Veloren.

Work on rtsim2 by @Isse

This week I've been doing some work on rtsim2, in hopes of getting a version that's not a regression from master merged soon.

More specifically I worked on rtsim birds, such as phoenixes and rocks, currently the implementation is very similar to master, except they have a home dungeon they will fly back to. In the future I hope the home can be a nest on top of a mountain or something similar.

The second part I worked on was repopulation. One problem with the current rtsim is that players eradicate the population of both NPCs and phoenixes. Which is also the reason why merchants are currently immortal. That will be removed in rtsim2 as NPCs and birds will now be replenished. In the current implementation (might be changed before it gets merged) the population will always stay the same, as when one NPC dies, another one will spawn in another place.

Buff and Aura Optimizations by @Sam

Buffs have been using much more network bandwidth than they should need to. The reason for this is that they kept track of their remaining duration by a counter that decreased every tick by the delta time. Because this modifies the Buffs component on an entity, it then is marked as needing to be resent over the network to each client, when obviously nothing has changed that the client should not be able to predict.

Instead of tracking how much time each buff has remaining before it expires, I changed buffs to instead calculate what time they will end at. This has the added benefit that buffs do not need to be mutated every tick, which allowed for an additional optimization: the buff system would no longer require mutable access to buffs (which means it can parallelize with other systems that also need to access buffs).

This change was also extended to auras as the implementation were similar enough to make doing so easy.

Release Party Map by @Hannibal

Hannibal has created the past few maps that we've had for release parties, and is working on the next one.

Axe Skill Tree Overhaul by @Sam

Now that the second sword skill tree overhaul is effectively done, we can begin the skill tree rework for axes. As with the sword rework, we plan to shift away from passive skills instead to unlocking active abilities. The axe is intended to be a weapon that is focused on maintaining a high amount of combo for more powerful attacks, with a berserker-theme. The ideas will primarily be used as a source of inspiration when designing the axe abilities. Some things to note, being specific in your ideas can be helpful, as it allows us to have a better idea of what your idea would actually entail, but if your idea contains numbers it will be ignored and discarded (by an auto-filter).

Axe Skill Tree Suggestion Form

Unlockable Recipes by @James

James has been working on unlockable crafting recipes. Pfau and Gemu have provided some models.

Recent Player Growth

We recently saw a large influx of players that have pushed both the official server and community servers to the limits. Because of this, there has been some recent focus on optimizations as well as a decrease to the max player limit on the official server.

Assorted game impressions