This Week In Veloren 64

This week we take a look at the work put in on dungeons, the details added to towns and progress with wgpu, Iced and persistence

- Slipped, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @zesterer, @Pfau, @Songtronix, @Imbris, @Capucho, @CapsizeGlimmer, @xMAC94x, and @Shandley!

This week the grind to 0.6 release continues. @zesterer has put a lot more work into the civsim branch. Basically Veloren 2, in addition to towns the branch now contains multi-level dungeons with optional paths, loot, bosses and ranged enemies with new AI. We also have seen progress from @Shandley to add character persistence to the game, along with huge steps forward from @Imbris and @Capucho to integrate iced and wgpu!

Towns and Dungeons

Paths have seen a major step forward this week. In earlier blogs we've shown off the map of paths around the world that civilizations use to trade between each other and help themselves develop. While world simulation is still largely an invisible background process, the paths created by the formed civilizations are now able to be seen! You can find these paths anywhere around the world and use them to trace back to multiple towns.

The roads are also pretty smart in how they work. Following them you'll notice that they take you through the easiest paths between mountains, or go around them completely. They like following rivers. They'll bridge over water when they need to, and when they enter a town you can stay on them to explore the whole town itself! They also have streetlights.

Dungeons are new and already pretty complex. They have around six floors and are fully procedural with an increasing difficulty as you descend. Each one is a unique experience with a main path that you can follow to the bottom along with offshoot rooms. The new AI provides some challenges and strategy, with enemies now working with line of sight detection. Dungeons are a ton of fun so far, especially with a group. Future plans include traps, platforming, puzzles and much more!

One of the big visual changes is the new block shader, giving a 3x3 noisy texture to blocks in the world

wgpu with @Capucho

wgpu is a graphical backend that we've been eyeing for a long time, looking forward to a conversion to it as it provides access to APIs like Vulkan, DirectX and Metal. Now, I barely know anything about wgpu but I do know that converting to wgpu is very advantageous for Veloren and also a super hard task to do. I've built a compilation showcasing Capucho's heroic struggle, which started to yield visible results this week! Since wGPU is an API that covers more ground and is vastly more capable than our exist gfx pre-ll based API, moving everything to the new API is proving to be a struggle. We'll get there though.

Other work

Shandley has been working a ton on persistence this week. This is one of the main features we're targeting before 0.6 release as character saving is going to be a huge complement to some other recent features like changes to inventory, combat and the loot found in the world. More on that next week!

New music has been completed and heading into master this week from @badbbad! 6 new tracks will nearly double the game's playlist. All of them probably land on our SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/velorenofficial