This Week In Veloren 98

This week, lots of work is being done on many systems. We hear from @Christof about some economic simulation debugging. Work on a modding system has also kicked off.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @Pfau, @ccgauch, @zesterer, @Snowram, @Yusdacra, @Sam, @xMAC94x, @nahua, @Entropy, @DaforLynx, @TheJackiMonster, @VincentFoulon, @XVar, @lboklin, @Slipped, and @HiggsTardigradeTau!

The yearly Rust survey results are out for 2020! @Snowram changed model offsets to be editable from RON files so that they can changed in real-time in the game. @Scott created a range of gems that will replace the shiny gem. @Moschopper got their first MR merged. It changes the way delta time is calculated so characters don't teleport after brief lags.

@lboklin converted the Nix files to use "flakes" (which is an experimental Nix feature). This can allow people to install Veloren Voxygen by running nix profile install gitlab:veloren/veloren, which uses the latest commit to the master branch (more instructions in nix/README.md in the Veloren repository). Note that we have kept backwards compatibility, so even if you can't enable the feature (I recommend you to enable it and use it!) you will still be able to use "legacy" Nix commands with the Nix files.

@Entropy has been preparing a crafting overhaul, starting by defining a whole bunch of items. @Sam made skill trees persist in the database. He also completed the sword skill tree. @Pfau has been working on many items, including skill trees, bag UI, a prompt dialog, and group member position indicators. @zesterer spent some time this week setting up water reflections for LoD water. This makes mountains off in the distance look much more realistic!

@zesterer and @ccgauche spent a few days working on the initial implementation of a plugin system that would allow modding Veloren through both server-side and client-side mods. Mods would be written in a variety of languages (Rust probably being the only officially supported one for a long time) and then compiled to Wasm, executing in a sandbox. This means that mods can be automatically sent over the network when you connect to a server without risk. The plugin API is still in its infancy and will no doubt go through many, many changes and refactors until we're ready to announce it as being ready for use, but before then we hope to encourage discussion about modding and get people excited about writing plugins for Veloren!

Economic Simulation Update by @Christof

This week, I debugged infinite prices (and material costs) in the economic simulation. I found that it came down to hyperinflation caused by high costs on natural resources. This caused increased food prices, which in turn caused increased labor costs to secure natural resources, and it repeats. I masked natural resources from the production of Guards (securing them) once an increase in controlled area will no longer provide more of this good. Then I changed the produced amount of natural resources (by Guards) to reflect the annual replenishment instead of a minimal placeholder and the prices got stable.

This is quite understandable as the labor and material cost of guards gets distributed among more resources. I see that the overall economic system needs rebalancing of material input and production output, to get a better overview I plan to add economic values to the tooltip in the map window. Thus I am currently working on getting dynamic tooltips on settlements into the map window - to quickly check the economic situation in different sites (with different access to natural resources).