This Week In Veloren 79

As 0.7 is wrapping up, we see some bigger systems getting ready to be merged. We hear from @Slipped about progress on animations. @Songtronix also gives us an update on Airshipper 0.4.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @xMAC94x, @JudgeGriesa, @imbris, @Songtronix, @BottledByte, @Sharp, @StansTec, @Shandley, @Sam, @Slipped, @Snowram, and @VZIKL!

This week, the inaugural episode of the Rust Gamedev podcast aired. It was an interview with the Veloren team! Be sure to check it out here. We're on the final stretch to the 0.7 release, which will come out on the 15th. Veloren also recently passed 1000 merge requests, big milestones this week! @Du has been continuing work on the concept of a Veloren wiki. Contributions to it are welcome to help speed up its development.

@Felixader has been hard at work on the Lore Bible, it has reached over 61 pages! Be warned, it has spoilers that are eventually supposed to be discovered throughout the game. @BottledByte worked to remove hardcoded weapons, so that adding new content doesn't require recompiling. @JudgeGriesa is working on the translation to Latin American Spanish. @w3yden added item names displaying if they are in pickup range.

@Zesterer has been hard at work with a few different tasks. He's added stalactites to caves and improved castles significantly. He also is working on an "outcome" system so the client can listen to world events and produce particle effects or sound effects when certain things happen. @Zesterer also worked on a bunch of minor pathfinding improvements. NPCs won't tend to jump off things now, and they're also more reliable at navigating complex structures.

Airshipper 0.4 Progress by @Songtronix

In my recent sprint, I've added a ton of small tweaks to Airshipper which will be released with 0.4 and can be viewed here. One thing to mention is that it will allow you to retry in case of an error instead of having to restart the launcher. Furthermore, it will now place everything into the profile folder including screenshots, logs, game saves to avoid the deal of playing hide and seek and guess where a file has gone.

While these are great quality of life improvements this isn't the main feature 0.4 will introduce. In the next few weeks (hopefully before 0.7 release but no promises) I'll try to add profile support, both server and client side.

This will involve quite a lot of work as the server will need to expose an improved API which is aware of the difference between stable (0.7, 0.6, 0.5) and nightly releases. It will also need a way for me to add a new release as currently, I can't automatically detect it. On the interface front, thanks to ongoing work for a different project I've gained enough knowledge to quickly set up a fancy but moderate UI to create/edit/delete profiles. Though wiring it up to make it work will be a different story.

Animation and Movement Updates by @Slipped

Hi all!

Wanted to give a short update on where I've put some of my focus going into 0.7 release. I'm trying to focus on cleaning up a few areas and making some improvements that should really compliment a lot of the other recent work that has gone into the game. First, Snowram, Gemu, and I were able to merge another quadruped rewrite this week, this time focused on the quadruped_small body. This was similar to a rewrite we did earlier for the two larger quadruped bodies. There is some pretty great stuff in it, including new models, reimaginings of the old models, rewrites of the run and idle animations, and the addition of some of the more fancy techniques like orientation tilt.

One other neat addition specifically to this body is a variable called spring, which is species-specific (we can customize for any animal that uses the quadruped_small skeleton). This variable allows for a bounce factor in the run animation. That enabled us to add rabbits and frogs, which hop as they run, and it's a pretty convincing result!

This MR also added new mobs to other bodies that aren't exposed to the player yet, including a wendigo and troll addition to the biped_large body. We're working towards making the biped_large body suitable for Veloren's first real bosses (outside of placeholder bosses that are scaled-up versions of existing enemies). More on that in the next week or so as we try to progress on boss preparation, including custom attacks and animations.

Finally, I'm hoping to improve some of the movement in Veloren in an upcoming MR. The work I've done so far includes a better climb mechanic that allows you to slide down quickly, along with improved swimming so you can dive down properly rather than waiting for gravity. We definitely want to make exploring the depths a big theme of Veloren and this is one of the steps to get there.