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Greetings, citizens ~
We’ve added some exciting features this week, including a fill and line tool, and new rails. There’s also a new Advanced Build Mode GUI! Everything should be cleaner and much easier to access now. However, keep in mind that the layout and content is still a work in progress, and so may change significantly between builds. Over the next few days, we’ll tweak what each group contains and adjust how the tools work in order to streamline the experience.
New dev build!
This first dev build contains the core functionality of two new tools: the Fill Tool and the Line Tool. Both are available under the Shape Tools group.
Fill Tool
The fill tool allows you to incrementally fill (or replace) areas with your desired block. It’s quite simple to use: you can freely select your starting point with the camera (similar to ‘create docking’), and press the [Do Fill]* button with a block selected on your hotbar.
* We are absolutely going to rename this later.
The fill tool allows both space-filling and block-replacing, depending on what the starting point is. If it’s empty space, the tool will flood-fill; if it’s a block, only that block type will be replaced. Also: this is a step-based system, meaning undo and redo work, allowing you to easily fix any mistakes.
For now, the filling process is done in a single step, and uses a fixed amount of blocks. We will change this over the next few builds to allow you to specify how many blocks to place at once, as well as allowing servers to impose their own limits to reduce server strain.
We’ll be adding some optimizations to this in later builds.
Screenshots below:
Hollow torus made of crystal armor
Filling the torus starting from the bottom
![[IMG]](http://i.imgur.com/lHiCqbF.png)
Filling the shell of the torus with blue...
We’ve added some exciting features this week, including a fill and line tool, and new rails. There’s also a new Advanced Build Mode GUI! Everything should be cleaner and much easier to access now. However, keep in mind that the layout and content is still a work in progress, and so may change significantly between builds. Over the next few days, we’ll tweak what each group contains and adjust how the tools work in order to streamline the experience.
New dev build!
This first dev build contains the core functionality of two new tools: the Fill Tool and the Line Tool. Both are available under the Shape Tools group.
Fill Tool
The fill tool allows you to incrementally fill (or replace) areas with your desired block. It’s quite simple to use: you can freely select your starting point with the camera (similar to ‘create docking’), and press the [Do Fill]* button with a block selected on your hotbar.
* We are absolutely going to rename this later.
The fill tool allows both space-filling and block-replacing, depending on what the starting point is. If it’s empty space, the tool will flood-fill; if it’s a block, only that block type will be replaced. Also: this is a step-based system, meaning undo and redo work, allowing you to easily fix any mistakes.
For now, the filling process is done in a single step, and uses a fixed amount of blocks. We will change this over the next few builds to allow you to specify how many blocks to place at once, as well as allowing servers to impose their own limits to reduce server strain.
We’ll be adding some optimizations to this in later builds.
Screenshots below:
Hollow torus made of crystal armor
Filling the torus starting from the bottom
Filling the shell of the torus with blue...
Greetings, citizens ~
News
It’s with a heavy heart that we announce, Auburn is leaving the Schine team for new opportunities. He completed his project here and we are extremely proud of his work. We are currently working on its integration into the universe update coming later on.
What are we working on right now?
News
It’s with a heavy heart that we announce, Auburn is leaving the Schine team for new opportunities. He completed his project here and we are extremely proud of his work. We are currently working on its integration into the universe update coming later on.
We are currently completely reworking the advanced build mode and other GUI functionality to work with a planned GUI scaling update in the future.
Advanced Build Mode
We’d like to go in-depth for one specific build tool that we are going to add. The Fill Tool.
The fill tool is one of the tools we are most excited about. It fulfils quite a few purposes that the community has been asking for and will help you update your ships in the future power update.
Once you engage the tool, it uses the camera position to determine where the fill area starts. When the user confirms the fill location, the game will use the highlighted block type to flood fill up to a number of blocks set by the user.
Each click on “fill” will then add a set amount of blocks (maximum amount per step determined by the server). It will keep track of the blocks already placed so it will reach even into the farthest ends of your ship. Alternatively, it can be used to make some cool spherical shapes on your ships.
The great thing about this tool is it isn’t only for filling empty blocks. It can also be used to fill over existing blocks. One way this will be useful as a “Paint” tool. You can select which block type to replace when filling. The default is the “Empty” type and it would work like described before as a normal fill tool. But you can also select “Grey Hull”, which would replace groups of touching grey hull blocks on your ship. It, of course, would replace special shapes like wedges or slabs with the right shape...
Advanced Build Mode
We’d like to go in-depth for one specific build tool that we are going to add. The Fill Tool.
The fill tool is one of the tools we are most excited about. It fulfils quite a few purposes that the community has been asking for and will help you update your ships in the future power update.
Once you engage the tool, it uses the camera position to determine where the fill area starts. When the user confirms the fill location, the game will use the highlighted block type to flood fill up to a number of blocks set by the user.
Each click on “fill” will then add a set amount of blocks (maximum amount per step determined by the server). It will keep track of the blocks already placed so it will reach even into the farthest ends of your ship. Alternatively, it can be used to make some cool spherical shapes on your ships.
The great thing about this tool is it isn’t only for filling empty blocks. It can also be used to fill over existing blocks. One way this will be useful as a “Paint” tool. You can select which block type to replace when filling. The default is the “Empty” type and it would work like described before as a normal fill tool. But you can also select “Grey Hull”, which would replace groups of touching grey hull blocks on your ship. It, of course, would replace special shapes like wedges or slabs with the right shape...
Hello citizens, ~
The dev blog for this week features something more on the technical side. It covers a nice feature that will be very important in going forward.
Optimized Meshes
With the preview of last week, which is being able to draw any subset of blocks on any structure, we want to share another reason why we implemented this now. Not only is it already extremely useful for making existing GUI elements better and as said, adding new systems like active scanning, it also will be our basis for a new Level-of-Detail system. This system will increase drawing performance by drastically reducing the amounts of polygons at a distance.
For that, the meshes we had last week needed to be improved and optimized. Since these are one colored representations of a set of blocks, polygon reduction is extremely viable.
First of all, however, it needs to be explained why this method is not viable for all the mesh drawing, especially close. Reducing polygons means giving up information that is stored in those vertices. In our case that is texture information, the baked lighting, material, and a lot of other graphical meta information. Some of that can be compensated with techniques like deferred lighting, which would work yet does not scale well most of the time, and will force a lot of other optimizations to be removed. Also, the more detailed the mesh is with additional shapes, the less advantage the polygon reduction will provide.
The dev blog for this week features something more on the technical side. It covers a nice feature that will be very important in going forward.
Optimized Meshes
With the preview of last week, which is being able to draw any subset of blocks on any structure, we want to share another reason why we implemented this now. Not only is it already extremely useful for making existing GUI elements better and as said, adding new systems like active scanning, it also will be our basis for a new Level-of-Detail system. This system will increase drawing performance by drastically reducing the amounts of polygons at a distance.
For that, the meshes we had last week needed to be improved and optimized. Since these are one colored representations of a set of blocks, polygon reduction is extremely viable.
First of all, however, it needs to be explained why this method is not viable for all the mesh drawing, especially close. Reducing polygons means giving up information that is stored in those vertices. In our case that is texture information, the baked lighting, material, and a lot of other graphical meta information. Some of that can be compensated with techniques like deferred lighting, which would work yet does not scale well most of the time, and will force a lot of other optimizations to be removed. Also, the more detailed the mesh is with additional shapes, the less advantage the polygon reduction will provide.
That’s why combining both techniques will give us the best result. At a distance we can draw a minimal mesh that will speed up things dramatically. We can even make that multicolored with mixing multiple meshes on a fixed map of colors. Best of all, for close up, this still gives us the option of using deferred lighting eventually, but mixing it with existing lighting...
Greetings, citizens ~
Here’s another weekly dev blog!
What are we working on right now?
In the wake of the power update, we’ve identified a few features that overlap nicely with the new power system and other ideas we’ve had for quite some time.
One of these features is the ability to draw groups of blocks separately and apply various graphical effects to them. Among other uses, this will allow us to display the inner workings of ships quite nicely, e.g. highlighting a specific salvager/weapon array, a circuit, damaged blocks, etc. There are several existing uses for this, but it will be especially useful on future features, such as: scanning other ships, getting an overview of your reactors, highlighting potential issues therewith, etc. We’re aiming to do a release with this feature implemented in quite a few areas.
Power Update
Here’s another weekly dev blog!
What are we working on right now?
In the wake of the power update, we’ve identified a few features that overlap nicely with the new power system and other ideas we’ve had for quite some time.
One of these features is the ability to draw groups of blocks separately and apply various graphical effects to them. Among other uses, this will allow us to display the inner workings of ships quite nicely, e.g. highlighting a specific salvager/weapon array, a circuit, damaged blocks, etc. There are several existing uses for this, but it will be especially useful on future features, such as: scanning other ships, getting an overview of your reactors, highlighting potential issues therewith, etc. We’re aiming to do a release with this feature implemented in quite a few areas.
We will be updating Advanced Build Mode with increased functionality. This will include the above highlighting, as well as new tools. This update will not only make reactor design much easier (and allow integration of their features), but it will also give players better building tools in general. Among these planned features is a fill tool, which will allow you to progressively fill any area, as well as tools to draw lines and possibly arcs.
Power Update
Thank you again for additional feedback. We went through most it, and we will be addressing more of your concerns later on where needed.
Major concerns
After reading all of the concerns and debates over the new power system, we can address two of our major concerns players had with the mechanics. The first is that players are limited to a single active reactor per...
Major concerns
After reading all of the concerns and debates over the new power system, we can address two of our major concerns players had with the mechanics. The first is that players are limited to a single active reactor per...
Greetings, citizens ~
Here’s another weekly devblog.
What are we working on right now?
We are currently finishing off a redesign of the chunk request system which will make requesting chunks over multiple entities a lot more controllable. This means that chunks close to the player can be requested a lot faster resulting in a much better overall experience with loading times for objects (as e.g. asteroids that are far in the back get less priority over closer objects). Prioritisation did exist in the previous system, but it was more local to the entity.
Also, a few prototypes to test out if our plans for the reactors are viable implementation wise have been implemented. One example is a system which can create a convex hull (Convex hull - Wikipedia) of an arbitrary amount of blocks has been implemented. This system’s focus is to be as fast as possible and to provide a variable amount of precision to simplify complex structures. This is then not only usable to make the distance between stabilizers and main rector actually viable, it can also be used graphically to outline ship systems.
Furthermore, Terra has been working on a rather significant launcher update. See below for details!
Launcher Update
While most of the work is done, the UI isn’t quite finished yet, so you’ll have to rely on imagination instead of screenshots for now. (Sorry about that!)
This update consists of two major changes:
Firstly, we’ve merged all of the settings popups into a single dialog. This both drastically improves ease-of-use, and gives us unlimited space to add more settings later, for example logging. (Implementing this required extensive changes throughout the codebase, so the thorough QA required for this will delay release somewhat.) We’ve retained the settings gear icons, but instead of opening their respective popups, they now act as shortcuts into the new settings...
Here’s another weekly devblog.
What are we working on right now?
We are currently finishing off a redesign of the chunk request system which will make requesting chunks over multiple entities a lot more controllable. This means that chunks close to the player can be requested a lot faster resulting in a much better overall experience with loading times for objects (as e.g. asteroids that are far in the back get less priority over closer objects). Prioritisation did exist in the previous system, but it was more local to the entity.
Also, a few prototypes to test out if our plans for the reactors are viable implementation wise have been implemented. One example is a system which can create a convex hull (Convex hull - Wikipedia) of an arbitrary amount of blocks has been implemented. This system’s focus is to be as fast as possible and to provide a variable amount of precision to simplify complex structures. This is then not only usable to make the distance between stabilizers and main rector actually viable, it can also be used graphically to outline ship systems.
Furthermore, Terra has been working on a rather significant launcher update. See below for details!
Launcher Update
While most of the work is done, the UI isn’t quite finished yet, so you’ll have to rely on imagination instead of screenshots for now. (Sorry about that!)
This update consists of two major changes:
Firstly, we’ve merged all of the settings popups into a single dialog. This both drastically improves ease-of-use, and gives us unlimited space to add more settings later, for example logging. (Implementing this required extensive changes throughout the codebase, so the thorough QA required for this will delay release somewhat.) We’ve retained the settings gear icons, but instead of opening their respective popups, they now act as shortcuts into the new settings...
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