This Week In Veloren 38

Small blog this week. With the team still recovering from the 0.4 release, bigger changes are starting to come along. @Sharp talks about some of the future work with rivers and undertow. @DoNeo and @RonVal4 have started a Russian Veloren community.

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @Songtronix, @Zesterer, @lawtonfogle, @shandley, @Sharp, and @Pfau!

@Felixader has been continuing work on Veloren lore. They finished the undead protectorate lore and based on this, added a better reason why the Orc tribes are split in two. @Songtronix is almost ready to release Airshipper! In the way Airshipper is currently implemented, you will be able to create profiles where you can set a name, a channel (release, nightly) with their own voxygen config. This will be useful when mod support comes up, so that you can easily switch between enabled mods.

@DoNeo and @RonVal4 have been working on setting up a Russian community for Veloren. You can check it out here. They are working to translate the blog and bridge the language gap for the purely Russian community. They have also been working on creating some models for the game.

Rivers update by @Sharp

Lakes, rivers, and erosion were merged! World generation is now dramatically different from before, with much more terrain variety, and consequently more memorable locations. It also has large-scale geographic features, such as plains, lakes, and mountains that extend for many square kilometers, as well as rivers that span more than half the map.

Note that this makes worldgen take much longer as it is simulating 12.5 million years of erosion. So if singleplayer seems not to be working after you click the button, just wait for it to finish. It usually takes a minute or two. We will soon be adding a loading screen and the ability to cancel singleplayer early to make this more obvious to players.

I've been working on adding somewhat physically realistic river undertow so river flow properly affects characters and items when submerged. This also requires solving river self-intersections, to give the rivers an impact on gameplay beyond their effect on world generation. On my branch, we are already properly transferring over river velocities and having them push around a player, so the remaining work is mostly little tweaks to make the velocities nicer and apply the drag equations more effectively (I will probably not add lift yet, but we'll see!). Once these are solved, the next step will be modifying the river renderer to also reflect the flow direction at each point (I might also work on this concurrently).