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81
Announcements / Re: Blackvoxel V2.0 is out
« Last post by olive on April 09, 2017, 03:14:11 am »
Hi SideburnEtic,

Yes, we are back...  :P

As this release implied a lot of deep game changes, we didn't published it on Github until complete. In a sense we wanted it to be a surprise.

We wish you a good game  :)

The Blackvoxel Team
82
Announcements / Re: Blackvoxel V2.0 is out
« Last post by SideburnEtic on April 08, 2017, 04:51:41 am »
This is exciting. I was sad when I didn't see any activity on GitHub for a long time. Now I've gotta try the new plane and see how far I can mod its physics and auto-tunneling...  :P
83
Announcements / Blackvoxel V2.0 is out
« Last post by Enigma on April 02, 2017, 10:45:04 pm »
Hello Blackvoxel players,

We are proud to announce the deeply reworked release of Blackvoxel V2.0.

The months of silent work for this release bring a complete rebalanced and reworked game, the addition of a lot of new stuff and tools, various improvements and redesign, a new airplane and, finally, the introduction of the game missions(complete list of changes and improvements bellow).
In addition to this, we made a Raspberry Pi 2/3 port. Despite it's little CPU and GPU, we managed to make a full game port running with a good framerate.

If you enjoy our work, you'll be happy to hear we are working on ways for you to support the game developpement. Stay tunned for this.

Enjoy the game and don't hesitate to signal any bug or problem in the forum.

The Blackvoxel Team

 
The Complete list of changes and improvements

Completely Rebalanced Gameplay

We replayed a very long time with the game. This experience along with the community returns lead to a complete game rebalancing.
  • Easer starting, more "beginner friendly".
  • A smoothest evolution.
  • Added more affordable elements.
  • More guidance for playing : introduced the missions.
  • Added "the missing stuff" : the things that were missing to all of us.
Main changes and additions
  • Finally introduced the missions (use the RTFM cube).
  • A new airplane : the training Plane Z0. Very affordable but need runway.
  • Runway for airplanes.
  • A lot of machines are now much more affordable.
  • Rebalanced distribution of ores.
  • A new distant location with much more ores.
  • New set of "low cost" range of automations for early game phase.
  • Added 3 new mining robots and rebalanced the 3 existing one for more power.
  • Finished the Tool System and the Powers System along with several new tools.
  • Location system device for world navigation.
  • Complete universe documentation and map (in the manual).
  • New Analyser tool : can display a lot of informations on many voxels and machines. Can show what elements are now in a machine and composition of molten metals (great help for metalurgy).
  • Deeply redesigned overall look of the game.
  • Ground Analyser, let you know what's in ground here.
  • Rotation tool for conveyor belts (yes, finally).
  • Added a new kind of mid game voxel transmitter network.
  • Inventory is now preserved on death (less punitive game).
  • Worlds management improved : added the ability to use more than 16 worlds( 'N' and 'P' keys) and a(rustic) way to name a world.
  • Lots of details, bug fixes and little changes to make the game more polished, playable and user friendly (see bellow).
  • Support of new Linux distributions.
  • Published a lot of code examples for Squirrel and assembly robots in a the educational material section in the manual.
Raspberry Pi 2/3 Compatibility

Please read carefully the mandatory installation instructions in order to run on the Raspberry Pi.
  • Use the new experimental VC4 OpenGL driver.
  • Adapted texturing system to comply with the capacity of the PI's GPU(Selective resolution system).
  • Provide an hardware detection system for automatic optimal default settings for each type of Raspberry Pi.
  • Made some optimisation on RAM use.
  • Improved game physic engine schedulling in order to improve reactivity in low framerate situations.
  • Specific game tweaking : ex. Airplanes are allowed to run slower on Raspberry Pi version in order to play despite lower rendering distance.
  • Reworked World generator Scheduling for better CPU use.
  • Added a "Loading" screen during texture loading to GPU because Raspberry Pi is much slower than a regular PC.
  • Raspberry Pi specific compilation option.
  • Raspbian .deb binary Package.
Other changes, improvements, bug fixes...
  • Plane Z1 still can land anywhere, but can now break much shorter when landing on the new runway.
  • Sound volume handling finished, sound settings are now fully functionnal.
  • Fixed airplane not crashing on ground on some collision cases.
  • Lowered delay after respawn.
  • Big mountains now have ice on it.
  • Resolution dependant sized fonts support.
  • Added "Flip Mouse Y Option" (activate it in the settings_harware.dat file).
  • Disabled F4 and F8 keys (Analyser and Location System make it much better).
  • Inventory display of big block count are now much better.
  • Sequencer programming doesn't require anymore to use some true material quantities.
  • Fixed some graphic glitches : voxels doesn't appear to vanish on the entry of some machines anymore.
  • New respawn message.
  • Removed obsolete "Demo Version" compilation options.
  • Belt conveyors are now grouped to a common type when collected.
  • Base Machine now have manufacturing instructions.
  • Added a security to preserve Atomic Compressor content  : now you can't collect them if they aren't empty.
  • Improved mouse button emulation with keyboard : now, it work in all situations.
  • Fixed inventoy bug : when "dividing quanties", some rare cases was creating a "zero quantity" slot that appeared as a dummy unplaceable voxel.
  • Improved optical networks : now, an Optical Voxel Receiver can be placed directly after an Optical Deflector/Splitter for more compact design.
  • A materializer can now be placed directly after a network receiver (optical and wireless).
  • Fixed assembly robot movex.w : instruction is now assembled/disassembled correctly.
  • Fixed assembly robot rotation and multiplication buggy opcodes.
  • Fixed assembly robot y and z servo axis not working.
  • Fixed tree texture side is now in the right direction.
  • Squirell programmable robot now have a function to overclock it up to 16x faster.
  • New command to stop Squirrel programmable robot at the end of a program and prevent auto-rerun at game reload.
  • Screen Resolution under 1024x600 are not proposed anymore in the screen setting interface as it would be too small for correct interface display.
  • A lot of little fixes and change I forgoted to note...

Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
84
General Discussion / Re: Voxelarium.js
« Last post by Enigma on October 31, 2016, 04:34:46 pm »
I did some experimenting with building presorted voxels.... which seem to apply pretty fast.

This was part of the C# work; but basically I made a linear list of the closest points of sectors that are to the [upper/0/lower][left/0/right][forward/0/backward]

I just went through each point(voxel) and figured it's distance from the respective point, and then sorted the resulting indexes; so I could have an ordered list of voxel indexes for transparent things that are outside of 'here' which is the 0/0/0 center point...

And really to be more accurate any sector that is on a 0 needs to be sorted based on the slice of other coordinates... blah I'm over-complicating this.

For 'here' the sort list has to be dynamically computed; there's too many combinations to keep them all pre-set; well maybe sub-sectors could be made that could be pieced back together as 'close enough' ...

so anyway then it's just foreach( index in list ) { mesh voxel[index] based on drawinfo }   instead of just voxel based on offset... this will then add the faces to the draw list in the right order... (and maybe that's kinda what your sorter does; I just kinda wanted to implement it, because when I tried it with a bunch of semi transparent blocks it broke down because of how it serially stepped - without regard to which side the player was from the sector being meshed.

Why don't I get notifications? I end up having to just come back and read? I'm pretty sure I put in my email right?

The purpose of actual "rendering sorter" in Blackvoxel is mainly to avoid too many texture changes. Some GPU shows important performance improvements with this.

Sorting "by distance" is only made on sector rendering level... but not for each voxel in the sector.

Sorting by distance for each face in the sector would be dependant of the player's point of view. But this would implies that the work could have to be redone (at least on some sectors) each time the player's point of view will change.

In Blackvoxel, "semi transparent" rendering like "tinted glass" is made on an extra separate rendering pass. As faces aren't sorted in a sector, this could end up to rendering transparent textures in the wrong order.
It's could be surprising... but that's not a problem. As long as the textures are sufficiently transparent... it's blending correctly in any order. Of course, there is a drawback : this won't work correctly with texures with too much (or very different levels of) opacity. Sorting faces would make it better for this case. It's a matter of choice between pro and cons.

I've checked for notifications, it's active on the forum and it's working ok : we get it ourself. Yes, you have filled an email address. Check your email in your profile and also the "spam folder" at your mailbox.

The Blackvoxel Team
85
General Discussion / Re: Voxelarium.js
« Last post by d3x0r on October 28, 2016, 04:46:48 am »
I did some experimenting with building presorted voxels.... which seem to apply pretty fast.

This was part of the C# work; but basically I made a linear list of the closest points of sectors that are to the [upper/0/lower][left/0/right][forward/0/backward]

I just went through each point(voxel) and figured it's distance from the respective point, and then sorted the resulting indexes; so I could have an ordered list of voxel indexes for transparent things that are outside of 'here' which is the 0/0/0 center point...

And really to be more accurate any sector that is on a 0 needs to be sorted based on the slice of other coordinates... blah I'm over-complicating this.

For 'here' the sort list has to be dynamically computed; there's too many combinations to keep them all pre-set; well maybe sub-sectors could be made that could be pieced back together as 'close enough' ...

so anyway then it's just foreach( index in list ) { mesh voxel[index] based on drawinfo }   instead of just voxel based on offset... this will then add the faces to the draw list in the right order... (and maybe that's kinda what your sorter does; I just kinda wanted to implement it, because when I tried it with a bunch of semi transparent blocks it broke down because of how it serially stepped - without regard to which side the player was from the sector being meshed.

Why don't I get notifications? I end up having to just come back and read? I'm pretty sure I put in my email right?
86
General Discussion / Evolutionary voxel robots?
« Last post by d3x0r on October 28, 2016, 04:37:27 am »
http://www.evolvingai.org/soft-robots

I ran across this the other day; and you don't have an off topic, and really hope you don't find this too random :)
87
Troubleshooting & Bug Reports / Re: Invert mouse
« Last post by danish on October 22, 2016, 08:49:36 am »
We can understand this kind of personal preference and the fact it can be very important for some users.

So you'll be happy to hear we have decided to add a "Reverse y" setting to the next release.

In the meantime, you can modify it in the Blackvoxel source code and follow the "Compile Blackvoxel from source " tutorial.

In the file "ZActor_Player.cpp" at line 219, replace :

ViewDirection.pitch-=Delta_y/(3*MouseRatio);

...by the following code :

ViewDirection.pitch+=Delta_y/(3*MouseRatio);

We wish you a Good Game...  :)

The Blackvoxel Team

This is great. Thank you very much.
88
Troubleshooting & Bug Reports / Re: Invert mouse
« Last post by Enigma on October 22, 2016, 01:25:54 am »
I suppose you could call it a personal preference, however I put this in bug reports because of its' negative impact on gameplay. For someone used to using an inverted mouse, it makes gameplay very awkward. If you could imagine a left handed person for a hypothetical comparison, being forced to write with their right hand. This is not a hardware issue.

Current Blackvoxel airplane control conforms to every flight sim I know, I can't imagine a scenario where this would need reversing.

Thank you for your quick responses

We can understand this kind of personal preference and the fact it can be very important for some users.

So you'll be happy to hear we have decided to add a "Reverse y" setting to the next release.

In the meantime, you can modify it in the Blackvoxel source code and follow the "Compile Blackvoxel from source " tutorial.

In the file "ZActor_Player.cpp" at line 219, replace :

ViewDirection.pitch-=Delta_y/(3*MouseRatio);

...by the following code :

ViewDirection.pitch+=Delta_y/(3*MouseRatio);

We wish you a Good Game...  :)

The Blackvoxel Team
89
Suggestions / Re: Linux user data dir
« Last post by danish on October 21, 2016, 10:02:16 am »
As stated, it was just an FYI, this is fine. However, while I fully understand and respect the reasons perhaps the solution could be more elegant? A static link might be a nicer solution. That way, it's safely hidden from the user while still providing visible access that can be deleted.
"ln -s ~/.blackvoxel ~/Blackvoxel"
90
Troubleshooting & Bug Reports / Re: Invert mouse
« Last post by danish on October 21, 2016, 09:32:49 am »
Do you see the use of such "reversed" option as the cause of a personal gaming preference or because of using some specific input hardware (Mouse vs trackpad or maybe some "art pad" tablets") ?

What about airplane control ? The actual in Blackvoxel for airplane is "reversed" as in most flight simulator. Do you think a "reverse control" option should also reverse the airplane control ?

The Blackvoxel Team

I suppose you could call it a personal preference, however I put this in bug reports because of its' negative impact on gameplay. For someone used to using an inverted mouse, it makes gameplay very awkward. If you could imagine a left handed person for a hypothetical comparison, being forced to write with their right hand. This is not a hardware issue.

Current Blackvoxel airplane control conforms to every flight sim I know, I can't imagine a scenario where this would need reversing.

Thank you for your quick responses
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