Two Weeks in Veloren 220

These weeks, we enjoy colorful trees and spooky monsters.

- Christof, TWiV editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to last two weeks' contributors @crabman, @Christof, @xMAC94x, @floppy, @Isse, @Hannibal.

The merged work includes less frequent Dullahan during Halloween, plugin fixes, CI fixes, items in plugins, NPC spawn fixes, snow glitter shaders, an extended roadmap section and a new section on plugins in the book.

Ongoing (unmerged) work is happening on precision, preventing buff stacking, balancing, various worldgen improvements, starter glider, phoenix, WGPU 0.18 testing, torvus, single player worldgen parameters, and taverns.

Meanwhile, @imbris is making progress on an automated scene recording and replay mechanism to investigate rendering performance and bugs.

Worldgen meeting by @Isse

Last Saturday we had a worldgen meeting discussing how to move forward when it comes to plots. Right now plots decide their own shape and style, this is something we want to separate. This way we can more easily define similar buildings but have different styles. For example a blacksmith in a desert town and a mountain town might have similar shape and function, but very different styles in colors and details.

We also want a concept of rooms in buildings, which would make buildings be able to have multiple purposes. Like a merchant having a shop on the lower floor, and a bedroom on the top floor. This would also make it easier to make buildings advertise what functions it has, by looking at what each room can do.

Hierarchical plots were also discussed, and how it related to rooms. Hierarchical plots would allow plots to include other plots, like a castle being able to have houses within its walls.

We reached a few conclusions:

• Rooms can be plots. With hierarchical plots, we can just say that rooms are sub-plots of the house.
• We need a way to map connections between plots, and rooms because of the first conclusion. This would make it much easier for rtsim NPC to navigate sites. This can be done by keeping track of walls and what plots they connect to.
• We need plots to be able to be 3d. For example a giant tree could have a house on one branch above another house, these shouldn't affect each other because of plots being allocated on a 2d grid.
• We need to fully rework how plot allocation works, especially when it comes to hierarchical plots.

@zesterer wrote an example of what this could look like in code here.

We also talked about using more premade assets in site generation. One example of how to do this is using tiles, similar to how you'd use a tilegrid in 2d games, you can do the same in Veloren. But with voxel models.

Veloren worldgen/worldsim terms:

• Site: A place with buildings, could be a town, a dungeon or even a giant tree.
• Plots: An allocation of space in a site.
• rtsim NPC: An NPC which is always simulated, even in chunks that aren't currently loaded by a player.

Halloween season impressions