4th September - And in today's news...
Evening folks!
I returned to my efforts on the lunar base today, as I’ve begun my detailing pass to make it all look nice and fill it with loot. There’s still a couple of elements I’m going to need before I can totally wrap up on the mission, like scripted NPC events (among other things). The good news is that we will have Metadept officially joining us in the office next week so we should see some really big progress on this front soon! I’m quite looking forward to having him in the office for the long haul, since he does a lot of stellar work and is a great guy to collaborate with.
George has continued working on his own mission and has been making excellent progress, with very little support required from yours truly. He’s already got a solid foundation down to build upon, and even though it’s rough around the edges it’s already looking great, I fear I may soon be eclipsed by his talent! That said, the fun bit will be when I get to teach him how to configure NPCs.
I’m afraid I don’t personally have much more to report, again for the wish to keep missions relatively spoiler-free. The programmers have continued to toil away on their respective tasks, which continue to sail over my non-programmer head, but what I was able to grasp is that they’re intensely focused on crushing a number of insidious bugs that crept their way in some time ago. Kyren in particular seems to be gearing up to assist Metadept when he arrives by tackling the systems he’ll need to work with.
Lastly, just in case you missed the announcement; the Chucklefish Blog has just gone live and Tiy kicked it off with a fairly comprehensive post on our plans for what will feature in Starbound’s 1.0 release. I wouldn’t advise reading it if you want a spoiler-free experience, but for those of you who absolutely must know what’s coming next you can read it . On this new blog we’ll be posting Chucklefish-related news, along with updates from the developers of games that we’re publishing, so you guys should definitely check it out from time to time!
Good night everybody!
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5th September - Nightlies weren't updating, here's why edition
I'm just going to link you to this post, because it's super long and technical and there's a character limit here. :D
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8th September, 2014
Hello again, since I spoke last, I’ve been working on a couple of different things.
First, there was the new status system for players, npcs, and monsters which has been written and integrated into Player, but for right now it sits in its own branch awaiting a couple more things. The new system is basically ready, but there is a lot to the old status system which is needs conceptual reworking because it just wasn’t working out or wasn’t fun. The biggest example of this is the heat / warmth system, which will probably be replaced by something much simpler. The system is ready, but merging it to master is going to happen once metadept arrives in the UK and we can sit down together and make some design decisions and implement the scripts to drive them. In any case, the system is cool, it works very much like tech that you don’t actively control (player effects that involve movement == tech, player effects that don’t involve movement == status).
Oh and by the way! Metadept is moving to the UK to work with us in our physical actual corporeal office, and be a real life employee. He arrives on thursday and I am super thrilled, because you just can’t beat working together in person. Right now starbound programmers in the UK are pretty thin on the ground (me alone) so having me + metadept will be amazin’.
Other than status, I think you heard a little about the whole Star::Root threading debacle.. the important bit is that it’s fixed, and the atomic_store / atomic_load thing with shared_ptrs turned out not to even be needed. Now *every* database in Star::Root is updated through Read Copy Update, not just the few with the problems, and Root locking is avoided entirely. This fixes the problem without causing rendering slowdown, and actually speeds things up in a lot of places.
Other than THAT, I’m working on a few items in the starbound 1.0 todo, mission things and some boring technical ones involving Drawables and Particles. When I’m done, rain will NOT slow down your game to a crawl, which is nice. Next week, once metadept and I are both in the office, we’re going to start focusing very very hard on getting a new stable patch out, with all the save file compatibility fun that will go along with that.
Aaaaand in case you haven’t heard, Chucklefish is making a new game! It’s called Wayward Tide and, you should check out the Chucklefish blog post about it here. Development on Wayward Tide is *entirely* parallel with Starbound, a whole separate team in fact with Palf as the programmer.
In a technical sense, Wayward Tide is kind of cool for Chucklefish, because it represents a radical departure from the way starbound was developed, and if it works out it may very well be the way that Chucklefish makes games from now on. It’s entirely written in Haskell, primarily based on Functional Reactive Programming, and it’s really really cool. I would tell you more about it but I’m sure Palf will want to tell everyone more about it at some point in the near future.
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9th September - Pulse like you mean it!
Howdy guys!
Since I”m waiting on Metadept’s arrival at the office later this week before proceeding further on the missions, I spent my time today continuing one of my side tasks, which is to convert all existing lights over to the new flickering light code I discussed a few weeks ago. There’s a lot of lights that used the old flickering code, but I’m almost done with the conversion, and many lights (particularly fire-based ones) are being adjusted to look a bit more natural.
Working on this stuff isn’t terribly exciting in and of itself, but it makes for a welcome change of pace from all the mission work, and really it’s so gosh-darn nice to be able to make the lights pulse in time with their object’s animations!
That's all for now! Goodnight!
