Week 11 - Engine Changes & City Timesteps

A Change to Serialization & Health

This week two major changes have occured in the Terasology codebase. In the engine, a new serialization system was merged into master, which reads and writes all the assets & save files more efficiently.
The number of changes in the serialization pull request.... oh my!

This update required many changes to multiple modules in my workspace, which took up more time than expected. If you recall from three weeks ago, I had some troubles with pathfinding serialization, where the game would throw errors when a path is saved to a character. With this new system, the errors have reoccured again.... Except this time, the game doesn't only throw errors, it crashes entirely with a NullPointerException. The current cause of this is unknown, and must be fixed as soon as possible.

In addition to this change, vital changes have been made to the Terasology/Health module as part of another GSOC project, which changes the way that events are used in regards to health events. This change also required lots of workspace updates, and also took up a lot of time this week to resolve.

A City which runs on (world) time

Last week, a change was made to city building generation which ensures that buildings will not spawn when the game is paused. This has been improved upon this week, with the building cycle changing again from a constant delta update, to using WorldTimeEvents. This ensures that the building speed is constantly based on the current world status, and not the updates of the local client.

World time in the debug menu

Over the Next Week

  • Continuing factions, and determining overlap with CombatSystem.
  • Continuing player needs, with thirst, rest, etc. Specifically with thirst, determining a good way to naturally integrate with Terasology/Thirst.
  • Fixing the newly determined problems with pathfinding + new serialization.

PRs & Issues

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GSOC 2019 Final Report

Image
Summary After more than 12 weeks of development, it is time to close this summer of code 2019 project! Over 30 total pull requests have been made over the course of the project, with 58 commits & approximately 8000 lines of code added to the Metal Renegades repository alone! It has been an incredibly busy few months. This project involved taking a new gameplay module proposal posted on the forum  here , and implement the technical backbone of the world, so that the core gameplay can be built on top of it. This ended up primarily consisting of AI characters, but also included other aspects, such as player needs, and getting rid of some underlying technical issues. This repository has been worked on in collaboration with Wabadump in their GSOC project. We both happened to make proposals in the same area, so we cut out as much overlap as possible & both worked on different sections of the module. In some areas the proposal tasks were slightly altered due to it alre...
Read more

GSOC 2020 Final Report

Image
Summary At the end of 12 weeks of development, my GSOC 2020 project Metal Renegades: Refining Gameplay is finally complete. Over the course of this summer, over 40 pull requests have been made against 13 different modules in Terasology. These merged pull requests together contain more than 5000 line changes. The original goal of this project was to improve the gameplay of the Metal Renegades module based on top of the technical backbone work done last year. This goal was achieved over the summer by adding new gameplay features to the module, refining already existing features, and fixing bugs that negatively impact the core experience. Major Project Achievements City Water Wells Last year, thirst was added to the module. If the player doesn't keep their thirst bar above zero, they will slowly lose health and eventually die. This thirst was previously fulfilled by using wells inside the city, which would in...
Read more