This Week In Veloren 92

This week we hear from @ubruntu about being a first-time contributor. We also have a community spotlight with @Kalculate.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @Pfau, @Fausk, @Sam, @ubruntu, @imbris, @Bbenton91, @zesterer, @YuriMomo, @Tadabito, @Adam, and @BottledByte!

Veloren was just accepted to speak at MiniDebConf in late November! This week, @ubruntu implemented applying buffs on projectiles. Now bow attacks cause the bleed debuff just like melee weapons. @zesterer made some subtle improvements to clouds. @Fausk rewrote some item descriptions. @Sam worked on some backend combat improvements.

@Slipped worked with @Snowram to continue the long-overdue process of purging a huge chunk of the animation codebase. @TBG has been working on some small issues with the help of @Sam. @Snowram added the ability for consumables to cause buffs and effects.

@XVar is starting some early work on inventory upgrades. This will ditch the "bag space as a stat" concept and instead base it on equippable loadout items providing slots. A backpack could give you a large number of inventory slots, while a toolbelt would give a small number. But when you drop or store the bag, all the things that were in its slots would stay inside it.

First Time Contributing by @ubruntu

Hello! My name is Bryant, and my nickname in Discord is @ubruntu. A few days ago I made my first code contribution to Veloren, which added the bleed debuff to bow attacks. I’m not going to pretend I jumped in the code by myself and opened a merge request in a day. The hardest part was getting started.

Three months ago I joined the Discord channel after reading about the project on Reddit. At first, I wasn’t thinking about contributing at all. I just wanted to experience the game, and follow in Discord about what it will become. It’s almost embarrassing, but my character on the official server is level 96. Like, why am I enjoying a pre-alpha game so much?

So one day @Sam, the combat team lead, mentioned in #general how it would be an easy task to improve bows by adding a bleed debuff to their attacks, and he listed a couple of files where the change to add a bleed debuff would be. He offered to help anyone that wanted to take on the work so I said I was interested in trying it out. It took me a few tries to get my coding set up right for the project. There were some steps to setting up my IDE and GitLab fork but in hindsight, that stuff wasn’t too difficult.

I can’t say enough how helpful @Sam was. I sent him an empty code block from a match expression and said I had no idea what to do. He told me what was needed and how to do it, and for the rest of the night he was immediately responsive when I had questions. By noon the next day the code was reviewed, merged, and deployed on the official server.

Now is a great time to contribute to the project. There are plenty of opportunities for addressing issues, moving the game forward on the roadmap, and rethinking how we do what’s already there. I think everything I’ve coded so far requires only the first 8 chapters of the Rust book, so anyone looking to contribute code shouldn’t feel like they have to become code masters first.

Community Spotlight: @Kalculate

Hi, @Kalculate here! I'm a Software Engineer by trade, a league axe thrower, and I've always wanted to build games. I honestly spend more time thinking about the design and systems inside of games than I actually spend playing them. To me, games have an incredible capacity to inspire and propel people to follow their own progression in life and being a part of something like that is a deep personal dream. I originally found out about Veloren on Reddit. So far, I've worked on NPCs and combat implementations.

I bought Cube World when it became available years ago and saw so much potential in it. I thought it was insane that 2 people were working on it and one guy built the absolutely gorgeous map that generates in a way that had me enraptured. Veloren is the promise of a new, endless adventure where we could see engaging gameplay on top of the deceptively simple (and charming) voxel graphics.

I want to be able to help the core maintainers build out the design of the game by being a part of the design team. I'm also very excited to be working in Rust and building a game with other passionate people, so I intend on contributing code as often as I can, on top of answering questions and being active in the Discord channel. On top of that, I also think I could help by documenting design changes along to way to keep a good image of what kind of game Veloren could be at the end of the tunnel.