FROM THE BLOG

A Mad Week, Deadline coping Plans.

We’ve been recoding a lot of the engine this week, which has been both good and bad (as illustrated by Michal earlier, haha). We’ve made a lot of hard decisions re: what will make it to the initial “release” version, and what won’t. More information once it’s all 100% finalised.

We’re having to do some harsh optimisation on the blob blocks, as on lower end machines castles made of them were quite laggy due to all the necessary physics collisions to keep the castle up. We’re having to rework the map code to allow us to “settle” placed blocks into that map after a short period of time. This means that the sprites need to be moved into the map file, which is why the map code needed rewriting.

Unfortunately this negatively impacts modding a little, as modded blocks won’t be able to settle – sadly, we don’t have time to go about performing this optimisation in a way that’s efficient for both vanilla content and modded content – however if used in conjunction with slightly modified vanilla blocks (the stats of a block are able to be modified, but any visual changes won’t make it clientside for now), most block modding goals can be achieved. We assume that the majority of modification will happen with regards to interactive elements that shouldn’t be made to settle anyway.

The core parts of Gamemode Scripting and Menu Creation have also been exposed to the scripting engine.

As a side-note – ground slopes have been added, which make natural hills much simpler and smoother to navigate.

We’ve plotted out exactly what needs to get done to the day and are on target for our deadline, which is good news for you and for us. It’s going to be rough, but we’ve left a few weeks spare in that timetable for the inevitable delays that creep in.

Feel free to join in the discussion here!

Max/Geti