Screw my grandkids playing it halflife 106 is going to be out before this. if i were you guys i stop working bells and whistles and make it FUCTIONAL.
Actually I spent most of my waking hours this past week teaching a receipt printer how to draw Arabic script. I wish I were just working on bells and whistles.
On the other hand, if you happened to need a receipt printer that could print Arabic script, today's your lucky day.
Not dead, but heavily hampered by my IRL responsibilities. Somehow, it's managed to get worse in the past 3 months.
The project will continue, but it might be your grandkids who end up playing it.
The vehicles will be modular constructions. Some of those modules could be bipedal.
Some armors will have secondary abilities, but I'm not sure how that will work. It's lower priority.
That mostly relies on exploiting heightmaps and projected surfaces for the meat of its operations. If you are going to be doing things like calculating lighting for giant caverns and floating islands, a more general solution is needed.
That said, I still think tiered LOD is the only way to reliably pull it off.
Maybe similar to the starmade ship saving and spawning mechanics. Have a place where you can upload and download ships online. Then download them to you minecraft folder and to some thingy-ma-bobs that put it in game and done. That simple!������������������������������
Thanks! One other question, have you considered making a modpack for Futurecraft? If one server had a bunch of mods that another didn't, then that might cause some problems. I would definitely be able to help with that.
The engine will be open sourced, and I would hope mods would come out of that, but Futurecraft itself needs to be monolithic to work across servers.
And back on the subject of ships, would a group of players be able to take over an NPC ship? Also, there's a game for the iPod/iPad called Galaxy on Fire 2, where the main systems have the equivalent of a supergate. Might you add that to the inner worlds?
I looked briefly at this, and it just looked the the sort of jump gates you see in every space game.
Ours will be 1-1 endpoints, and rendered Portal-style where you can see through to the other side and waltz across like they are part of the same space. They'll also be two-sided, so vessels can enter and exit from either end.
Just a reminder I have a trade show coming up, so I can't really do anything with the mod this month, even on the weekends.
Also I am strongly favoring spherical projected planets these days, since this Peirce Quncuncial projection seems pretty manageable.
We've talked about having an in-game market for buying and selling schematics, but not in too much detail. There will be some way to save ship models to simplify replication.
That reminded me, is the original Robintons CC not so optimized compared to this new one?
Well of course in someway because these days minecraft is more optimized and the mods for it are going to be more optimized.
But is the older one going to raise or lower my fps/chunk loading or is it going to be much faster?
And that would be awesome if you could put the 1.7.3 Beta version on FTB
keep up the awesome work guys!
Last I heard, Barteks was saying the lighting updates were the biggest offender in the current build and was going to try a new approach. I don't know what that new approach actually entails, though.
However, note that for rendering larger distances there are no such simple short-cuts as a heightmap to quickly see which minichunks are in the line of sight (for each player at any/every position they can be). It is basically down to coarse ray-tracing of pre-categorized minichunks (i.e. fully empty, fully opaque, something in between, etc.), or some optimized variant of that (like pre-calculating various helping data structures).
Heightmaps, or more accurately, above ground/below ground dividers are actually a pretty good idea for distance viewing, at least in regards to non-amplified terrain.
Aside from trees and artificial structures, the only surfaces exposed on the overworld which don't follow the heightmap are overhangs and caves. In both cases, the transition from one to the other is unambiguous because it deviates from the heightmap. And if we track where these transition regions are, we can easily divide the world into overworld, below-ground, and transition points. In caves, coarse raytracing is really efficient. The overworld has broad occlusion zones caused by hills, which can be subdivided by following the countours of the heightmap. These approximations are far from optimal but it would be dirt cheap for a server to track, even over long distances.
On the client-side, I've had good luck with an LOD heightmap-based overworld, again disregarding trees and artificial structures, and when that is in place, there is more than enough memory and pipeline left over for special cases like volumetric structures. At least that's what I've found so far. Still working out the finer points...
Basically, partial solutions are perfectly acceptable if they can take the weight off the more thorough techniques.
@Khlorghaal
The manufacturing and research points are more or less in the direction we want to go with that. Higher levels don't mean better, but instead more specialized. Where at low level you might make "sensors", at high levels you might have optical and thermal sensor arrays, radar, and subspace doppler, each of which have different strengths and weaknesses and different effectiveness in various environments.
Machines should be big. No more of these magic do-everything cubes, we're talking whole industrial plants. This is one of the big advantages to keeping the component layer separated from the block layer; things can take any shape and scale and should even work while the chunk is unloaded, baring any required external interaction. In this case, low tier tech could be made with simpler means and with resources available to players starting out and those not spec'ed for manufacturing.
Futurecraft is by nature intended to work as an MMO, so you'll want to have things rewarding long-term investment.
So...... Could someone answer the Three Forbidden Questions™ please.
WHAT PART OF THREE FORBIDDEN QUESTIONS™ WAS NOT SELF EXPLANATORY???
Okay, fine
1. I have heard somewhere that Frostbyte was working on some project that took up most of his time. Is it done?
Project codename Demon Baby is still underway and it refuses to die. The next deadline is coming coming up, which is why I haven't been doing much development this past month. This coming month is not going to be much better. If we're lucky, after Thanksgiving there will be less pressure.
2. Everybody hates it when people asks when Futurecraft will be done.... but I want to know what has been done.
Lots of partial implementations and notebooks full of experimental theory and code, but the trunk of the development starts and ends with the far view system. The parameters that ends up using cascade down to every other facet of the game. Until then, everything else is necessarily a proof of concept.
3. Where did Mackeroth disappear to, I haven't seen any posts for a while.
According to Minecrack he met an untimely end at the hands of an Italian crime syndicate. But someone using his screen name still frequents the ship building threads, though he isn't very involved in active development these days. Not that there is much he could do; I'm the one holding up the show.
Would that work, though? I mean by itself it seems like the only reason you would team up officially would be to get your ass kicked by stronger people. Maybe if there were incentives like fleet tactics and gameplay unavailable to smaller squads, but the players who are going to suck the fun out of the game are also the ones who will avoid a fair match-up if they can.
2
Wait, you're telling people are supposed to read that? I feel sorry for their schoolchildren.
I spend the first 20 minutes of every day glaring at it in hopes that it will eventually feel bad for what it made me do.
4
Actually I spent most of my waking hours this past week teaching a receipt printer how to draw Arabic script. I wish I were just working on bells and whistles.
On the other hand, if you happened to need a receipt printer that could print Arabic script, today's your lucky day.
2
Not dead, but heavily hampered by my IRL responsibilities. Somehow, it's managed to get worse in the past 3 months.
The project will continue, but it might be your grandkids who end up playing it.
0
Some armors will have secondary abilities, but I'm not sure how that will work. It's lower priority.
1
Last year Capcom had this pirate theme going. That was nice...
1
Just bear with it for now.
0
0
That said, I still think tiered LOD is the only way to reliably pull it off.
0
You'd still have to be able to construct them.
The engine will be open sourced, and I would hope mods would come out of that, but Futurecraft itself needs to be monolithic to work across servers.
I looked briefly at this, and it just looked the the sort of jump gates you see in every space game.
Ours will be 1-1 endpoints, and rendered Portal-style where you can see through to the other side and waltz across like they are part of the same space. They'll also be two-sided, so vessels can enter and exit from either end.
Just a reminder I have a trade show coming up, so I can't really do anything with the mod this month, even on the weekends.
Also I am strongly favoring spherical projected planets these days, since this Peirce Quncuncial projection seems pretty manageable.
0
0
Last I heard, Barteks was saying the lighting updates were the biggest offender in the current build and was going to try a new approach. I don't know what that new approach actually entails, though.
1
Heightmaps, or more accurately, above ground/below ground dividers are actually a pretty good idea for distance viewing, at least in regards to non-amplified terrain.
Aside from trees and artificial structures, the only surfaces exposed on the overworld which don't follow the heightmap are overhangs and caves. In both cases, the transition from one to the other is unambiguous because it deviates from the heightmap. And if we track where these transition regions are, we can easily divide the world into overworld, below-ground, and transition points. In caves, coarse raytracing is really efficient. The overworld has broad occlusion zones caused by hills, which can be subdivided by following the countours of the heightmap. These approximations are far from optimal but it would be dirt cheap for a server to track, even over long distances.
On the client-side, I've had good luck with an LOD heightmap-based overworld, again disregarding trees and artificial structures, and when that is in place, there is more than enough memory and pipeline left over for special cases like volumetric structures. At least that's what I've found so far. Still working out the finer points...
Basically, partial solutions are perfectly acceptable if they can take the weight off the more thorough techniques.
1
Some day. When it's ready.
@Khlorghaal
The manufacturing and research points are more or less in the direction we want to go with that. Higher levels don't mean better, but instead more specialized. Where at low level you might make "sensors", at high levels you might have optical and thermal sensor arrays, radar, and subspace doppler, each of which have different strengths and weaknesses and different effectiveness in various environments.
Machines should be big. No more of these magic do-everything cubes, we're talking whole industrial plants. This is one of the big advantages to keeping the component layer separated from the block layer; things can take any shape and scale and should even work while the chunk is unloaded, baring any required external interaction. In this case, low tier tech could be made with simpler means and with resources available to players starting out and those not spec'ed for manufacturing.
Futurecraft is by nature intended to work as an MMO, so you'll want to have things rewarding long-term investment.
1
WHAT PART OF THREE FORBIDDEN QUESTIONS™ WAS NOT SELF EXPLANATORY???
Okay, fine
1. I have heard somewhere that Frostbyte was working on some project that took up most of his time. Is it done?
Project codename Demon Baby is still underway and it refuses to die. The next deadline is coming coming up, which is why I haven't been doing much development this past month. This coming month is not going to be much better. If we're lucky, after Thanksgiving there will be less pressure.
2. Everybody hates it when people asks when Futurecraft will be done.... but I want to know what has been done.
Lots of partial implementations and notebooks full of experimental theory and code, but the trunk of the development starts and ends with the far view system. The parameters that ends up using cascade down to every other facet of the game. Until then, everything else is necessarily a proof of concept.
3. Where did Mackeroth disappear to, I haven't seen any posts for a while.
According to Minecrack he met an untimely end at the hands of an Italian crime syndicate. But someone using his screen name still frequents the ship building threads, though he isn't very involved in active development these days. Not that there is much he could do; I'm the one holding up the show.
0