This Week In Veloren 53

Happy Global Game Jam to all those who participated! This week, 0.5 released. We take a look at how it went and go over new additions to this release. We also have another Contributor Spotlight, this time with @Silentium.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @Zesterer, @xMAC94x, @Sharp, @Songtronix, @Slipped, @Shandley, @Vechro!

This week, 0.5 was released! Not only that, but we just passed 3000 commits on the repo. Not only that, but there are (nearly) the same amount of stars on both the GitLab and GitHub repos.

@AgentAl has been working on some music pieces with "cold" and "ice" themes. @Zesterer has been working on patching lots of small issues and made a game for the Global Game Jam. @Shandley has been back at work on the music system, and is looking at ways to make it more performant.

@LunarEclipse is nearly finished getting controller support to work. They are also working on updating the AUR with the stable 0.5 package. @DoNeo wrote a new article on dtf.ru about Veloren's 0.5 release. @Timo is continuing work on character state, this is needed for future combat abilities.

@Aeronic got an official Soundcloud account set up for Veloren. Be sure to check it out!

0.5 Release

Since we adopted a proper changelog structure, we can easily see what has been achieved during 0.5. The list is super long, so you should check it out for yourself. Here are some of the big items:

Include license in assets
Added dropping items
Added initial region system implementation
Added /giveitem command
Added moon
Added clouds
Added proper SFX system
Added changelog
Added Scrolling Combat Text (SCT) & Settings for it
Added a Death Screen and Hurt Screen
Added randomly selected Loading Screen background images
Added options to disable clouds and to use cheaper water rendering
Added client-side character saving
Added a localization system to provide multi-language support to voxygen
Added rivers and lakes which follow realistic physical paths.
Added a default map, which is used to speed up starting single player.
Added fullscreen and window size to settings so that they can be persisted
Added coverage based scaling for pixel art 28 new mobs
Added waypoints
Added pathfinding to NPCs
Overhauled NPC AI
Pets now attack enemies and defend their owners
Added collars to tame wild animals

Unfortunately, the launch party wasn't as big as we had hoped. At peak, we had just over 30 players online, compared to over 40 for 0.4. It also didn't help that Digital Ocean started having issues creating new droplets right as we were trying to increase our server's compute capacity. This called for a quick switch over to AWS for hosting.

Below are some more statistics from the launch party. You can compare them to the 0.4 launch party. The total server costs for this launch were around ~$12.50 USD. This includes the server and bandwidth.

Contributor Spotlight: Silentium

Hey everyone, Silentium here!

After 4 years of college, I started a career in biotechnology and currently work in a start-up pharmaceutical company in Boston. I have a love for science and learning that rivals my love for fantasy in almost any form. From D&D podcasts to Anime and Novels, I've had a real seeded connection with anything fantasy since I was young.

As such, I run a D&D campaign with some of my friends and it's been going on for over a year now, but the world it's set in hasn't stopped growing and developing since 2016, when my girlfriend and I first started world-building. The name Silentium actually comes from this world, as he is a major player in world history and current events. I've been expanding my fantasy novel reading experiences ever since I decided to create my own world for a D&D campaign, and now have an appreciation for writing that I never had as a youth.

I have loved video games all my life but my experience with them is much more limited than I would like it to be. My taste in games is limited to a few specific types, and as a result, there are many popular games that I have no interest in playing. I have always been critical of the game design choices made in any game I have ever played, and as such I have always dreamed of having a hand in the design of a game that I would personally like to play.

I was falling off the Cube World hype train after it released late last year, and was directed to Veloren from Reddit. I started my contribution to the game a few weeks earlier than November, but only in a minor way. I designed about 100 weapons in the MagicaVoxel program uses to create the assets for the game. I have many more unsubmitted weapons waiting for submission as soon as I flesh out my designs a bit more.

Since the beginning of November, I have been working with many of the very creative and talented people within the Veloren community on game design. We have started with the combat system because there was already a working group dedicated to creating and implementing that system for the game, but we definitely plan on branching out to other topics as we go.

Essentially, every week we get together and design the mechanisms and definitions of important aspects and elements of the game's core gameplay features. I create a write-up following the meeting that outlines everything we specifically designed without branching out too far into out of scope topics, and include sections for why we created things in a specific way. All of it is recorded in a single document for reference, and each complete topic has its own document as well.

The end goal is to have a master document that contains everything we design, so it can be referenced when the programmers develop these aspects of the game. In this process, I mediate the meetings, organize the discussion topics, and provide the environment for the design discussions to take place in the most inclusive and constructive way they can. As the team leader for the Game Design workgroup, I'm always looking for new contributors who have a passion for game design and a desire to help.

I've never heard of a game created by a large community of unpaid people, rather than a company. I may have been living under a rock, but this is a brand new concept for me, and the potential for a game created by such a community has my hopes very high. The art style and world generation that I saw when I first arrived had me convinced that this game could become amazing if it has the right direction.