Two Weeks in Veloren 227

These weeks, we finally thank the many weblate translators, announce 0.16 release schedule and look into the cave rework.

- Christof, TWiV editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to last two weeks' contributors @xMAC94x, @brons_glb, @juliancoffee, @naddl, @crabman and @uniior, @Isse, @laundmo, @zesterer, @Christof, @imbris, @fvasco, @evgenkot, @y.hfahmy, @floppy, @james.

The merged work includes a Rust tool-chain update, weapon crafting hints, a chat display fix, server command extensions, many dependency updates, SRV DNS lookup, critical chance RON cleanups, separate event busses, wind affect on gliders, aiming tweaks, WIT based plugins using wasmtime, removing debug output, a metal shader fix, Italian translation updates, loot localization, entity deletion fixes, more signals for shutdown, beginner balancing, terracotta ruins, shader optimizations, contagious burning, and Phoenix tweaks.

Ongoing (unmerged) work is happening on character gender change, bank storage, shader improvements (horizon, cloud, LoD), loading plugins over the network, ore damage count, network connection improvements, civilization simulation, sword balancing, snakes, and a server GUI.

This developer blog is based on information collected in #blog-content, where game contributors are always invited to communicate their updates or simply post a link to a different channel.

Miscellaneous

@juliancoffee proposed an onboarding documentation at https://gitlab.com/veloren/veloren/-/issues/1944 and is looking for feed-back.

@xMAC94x modernized the Rust compiler version and many dependencies, therefore merge request should rebase on master before push to reduce the load on CI servers.

An update on steel drum design

A 3D modelled Veloren character

New treeant sapling attack

Psychedelic colors by @ThatOneMonkey369, see this discord thread for explanation and code

Bug report: Floating houses

Updates by @juliancoffee

We now have /into_npc command, which is similar to /make_npc, but instead lets you transform into the required NPC which may be useful when adding one … or just for fun!

It doesn't support alignment and group manipulation, but it can be added later. The following picture shows this functionality in action:

And … grandiose update to our gliding mechanics, we now have wind simulation, and your glider will behave differently depending on some conditions. We already did post about in devblog-212, and now it's finally going live.

We did tune it to our usual gliding capabilities, yet don't worry, we didn't nerf it too much, and you can still get the wind which will even lift you upwards if you're lucky :). See also the video in the previous issue.

Oh, and Admin Glider sneak-peek, which may or may not be actually live when people will see this post.

New airshipper by @Isse

I published the newest Airshipper version on crates.io. Which means that doing cargo install airshipper is now possible to do. I will also be maintaining this with newer versions of airshipper in the future.

One issue I ran into while doing this was that the max compressed package size on crates.io is 10 MB. But trying to publish Airshipper it was 14 MB. Most of this size, 11MB, was from a font we used for the server browser where we need to support most unicode symbols. What I ended up doing is using the system font for the crates.io package instead, meaning that on some systems it might look a bit different from the Airshipper builds we produce.

Translation updates by @walpo

The translation team has updated the documentation for translators, featuring Weblate as the recommended method to translate the game. https://book.veloren.net/contributors/translators/index.html

The translation workflow is defined better. The current workflow is attached.

Car racing event by @Vagabond and @necti

0.16 release on March 30th by @xMAC94x

The 0.16 release is on Saturday, 2024-03-30 18:00 UTC

As usual, there will be a feature freeze starting from 2024-03-23 18:00 UTC. We recommend submitting critical and large MRs for review now, before the feature freeze.

This release will also have a stress test event between the feature freeze and the release. We will be sharing further details of this later.

Getting your large MR merged before feature freeze

Please mention @xMAC94x in the ⁠0.16 release MRs thread with a short summary with the following details (the more, the better):

• What is complete
• What needs to be done
• Can your feature be partially introduced to master in its current state (as multiple MRs)?
• Do you foresee any issues with your MR and if so, which ones?
• Why should this feature be in 0.16?

This is required to align our testing and review strategies to ensure a smooth release.

Schedule

2024-03-23 18:00:00 UTC Feature freeze — No new feature MRs will be merged.
2024-03-25 18:00:00 UTC Stress test event.
2024-03-29 10:00:00 UTC Total freeze — no new merges will be introduced unless they're critical.
2024-03-29 16:00:00 UTC Release build will be compiled.
2024-03-30 18:00:00 UTC Release party!

Cave rework by @Synis

ContentDeliveryNetwork switch

Previously we used direct links to the images posted in Discord from the devblog. Now the links got an expiry date and people saw long delays in loading them we switched to Wasabi.

A huge shoutout to @walpo for driving this transition and fixing all the links after uploading the material.

Translation attribution

I had trouble find a proper way to attribute the countless contributors to our translations in weblate, @walpo helped out with a proper link: https://translate.codeberg.org/projects/veloren/#reports.

I am still looking for a good way to present this, but here are the contributions from the past 14 months. Thank you! To all people involved!

• Arabic (Saudi Arabia): walpo (22)
• Basque: walpo (38)
• Belarusian: walpo (38)
• Bulgarian: walpo (7)
• Catalan: walpo (37)
• Chinese (Simplified): walpo (38), mozz (10), jiangyi (5), zerocraft (4)
• Chinese (Traditional): walpo (22)
• Czech: walpo (38), 5Litt (1)
• Dutch: walpo (34)
• English: walpo (20), fnetX (4)
• Esperanto: walpo (36), jadedctrl (1)

• French: Nifou (51), walpo (40), fnetX (30), DominicF96 (11), ezamux (8), Timm (4), Vallley (1)
• German: fnetX (183), walpo (39), Vuizur (3)
• Hungarian: walpo (38), zoli111 (3)
• Italian: walpo (37)
• Japanese: walpo (36)
• Korean: walpo (39), l3nemy (1)
• Norwegian Bokmål: walpo (34)
• Polish: walpo (39)
• Portuguese: walpo (22), loglizzy (3)
• Portuguese (Brazil): walpo (38), RyanOrigins (4)

• Romanian: walpo (38), alextecplayz (12)
• Russian: tdehtyar (46), walpo (39), DiXiao (33), Paw (15), GeroinEX (15), Ixniyevonn (6), Sovenok-Hacker (4), aleeo (3), leca (2), Axegaik (1), mapemka (1), evgenkot (1)
• Serbian: walpo (38)
• Spanish: walpo (50), macintosh (27), TestVelorenAccount (2), alexjhr (1)
• Spanish (Latin America): walpo (39), marcelodemonn (24), guillermytho (3)
• Swedish: walpo (39)
• Thai: walpo (39), tidare (4)
• Turkish: walpo (37)
• Ukrainian: walpo (38), SomeTr (23), Renkal (11), juliancoffee (7)
• Vietnamese: walpo (38)