Three Weeks in Veloren 217

These weeks, we look at map experiments and the treasure hunt event.

- Christof, TWiV editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to last three weeks' contributors @vasco, @imbris, @Haijo7, @xMAC94x, @christof, @james, @Isse, @crabman, @lle-bout, and @floppy.

The merged work includes translation updates, cursor locking on wayland, item quality fixes, updating uuid, authentication fixes, location name fixes, updating to a new major version of specs🏆, the singleplayer map GUI🗺️, removing unwrap, non-hostile NPCs ignore loot, removing unused dependencies, localization of server command responses, the arena building in desert cities🏟️, fixing windowsills, and fixing airship de-synchronization (which caused duplication of captains)👩🏿‍✈️.

Ongoing (unmerged) work is happening on Frost Giga buffing, numerical error reduction in shaders, toolchain update, vampire castle, barns, loading progress text, loot export, phoenix, bird travel, terracotta ruins, dwarven mines, heightmap loading, tethering, plugins, bank storage, localize commands, sword balancing, specs refactoring, windmills, and vox file names.

Some small (up to five people) developer meetings took place, but I wrote down no minutes.

Singleplayer map selection

@Isse created a map selection UI for singleplayer mode:

This has led to many experiments by players:

Treasure hunt event by @Vaga and @Hrom

The puzzle starts with a riddle:

With this you're led to the capture the flag tower by Werograd. Here you find a man playing the flute named Kokopelli, he gives you a string of letters and numbers, "BlzgI0yg87Y". This is the ending of a YouTube link, that has a flute playing in Morse code, along with some other random gibberish to distract you. The Morse code gives you the word "Pralis", which happens to be a town.

In this town you meet character called Portunus . He also gives you a string: "Fnzw Uzfx ov Xhtrsbacbh <r oelch tye kwif> occ lwlc pvdzx". This is a vigenere cipher and to solve this you need a key. In the town there are 4 more characters scattered around houses, each representing a relic weapon: Thor (Mjolnir), Loki (Laevateinn), Hermes (Caduceus), and Vidyudabhi (Parashu). Portunus also hints at needing keys, and that "United gods are unstoppable".

In order to get the key, you needed to combine all the relic names into one and for the right order of the names, look at the armor the characters were wearing, which went from none all the way up to tier 4.

Once you had the key, you could reveal the cipher's true text, and the answer that must be sent, "x marks the spot".

Thanks for participating, there were some big brain ideas, congrats to: Luminas, Kotty, Dimlbur and do-no-van for reaching the end!!!

Toolchain update and WGPU

Updating the Rust compiler to a newer version crashes the Vulkan driver on @christof's computer. Updating WGPU fixes this problem.

This led to a discussion of finally updating WGPU, with no solution for directX11 support. Perhaps a fork using the old WGPU for Windows builds is an option, or magically a DX11 backend for WGPU 0.10+ materializes with enough demand.

Specs refactor

@imbris fixed the ECS system specs (and its data manager shred) to be MIRI compliant. This is one of the most significant changes to specs since 2020. @imbris also changed Veloren to use this corrected ECS crate.

Frost giga testing

New moderator

Please welcome @crabman as a newly nominated moderator.

Upcoming Discord changes

Discord adds new extensions to shared content which will likely restrict the time you can download a file from a link in the future. We are working on a new content system to deliver the images and videos included in this blog.