Posts by zfoxfire

  • Update 0.5: World generation

    Thankyou Red.


    This is beginning to look exactly like the final version which I pictured in my mind several years ago when i first discovered this game. The new biomes look fantastic and I could spend a lot of time walking the rocky beaches. I look forward to more sandy beaches in the future. There seems to be only an occasional sandy beach. Overall the landscape is diverse and the transitions are smooth. Sadly no caves yet but implementing those as well as (i hope still) underground biomes will be a pleasurable experience to explore.


    The pseudo-dynamic water seems good so far. I dug straight down in the ocean and dug out a little cave and it handled the water additions very well.

  • Update 0.4.8: Vegetation, farming and volumetric clouds

    Quote from red51

    Hmm... is there maybe a log file? It should be in /home/username/.config/unity3d/JIW-Games/Rising World/

    I found the problem. The free driver that's bundled with Linux for nvidia is not the best. Fedora has a better nvidia drivers in its non-free repository. I just grabbed it and rebooted and i'm up and running with high draw distance and 60 fps :)

    sudo dnf update -y
    sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
    sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

  • Rising World's Biomes & Forests

    The new biomes are really going to be nice. The older biome images on Trello look fantastic. But this latest forest picture just really invites me in. I'm going to be happy to get back into the game and expore the world after the world generator hits.

  • Update 0.4: Crafting, Smelting and lots of new Items

    Wow! the workbench proximity approach is similar to like in Terraria. I really really like thisapproach! maybe in the future uncraftable recipes will be hidden in this new unified crafting menu. I like this a lot! I still hope that like with the furnace we retain the feel of other more "interacting" workstations like for making thread or grinding stone. those are really nice still.


    Also... I found a typo under graphics settings under quality, shadow quality reads "schadow quality"


    I also dont know how but i triggered something where I now walk very very slow. If I go into the menu then return then the walk speed returns to normal


    Also when crafting lumber from logs, I click "max" and it defaults to 99 which exceeds what i can with the resources on hand.


    Also, i think when crafting lumber the max i could craft was based on the first stack of hickory logs found in my inventory, not the full amount. there was a second stack in my inventory at the time.


    BTW I love the heat up and glowing of the ores in the furnace followed by the cooldown effect. It adds to the immersion. Little details like this are what make Rising World so fun to get into. :)

  • Update 0.2: Building Update

    Wow! Deirdre posted some nice looking builds. I guess we'll see how far the real builders in this game can push this new stystem


    red51 The scroll bar still works fine on the material screen. Regarding the creative mode painting issue, I was specifically putting grass material down. I'm paying closer attention now.



    Ok, this is weird, i just reproduced the issue then exited the game and restarted and could not.


    Correct behavior: selection shows selected material, click or hold LMB or RMB, material stays selected while mouse button down


    Yesterday's observed bug: grass material selected, click RMB to place grass. Grass is placed then material changes after releasing mouse button


    Today's observed bug: selection shows dirt material, click or hold LMB or RMB, material switches back to (i forget which one) while mouse button held down. Release mouse button and material returns to grass


    After restart: Unable to reproduce above behavior


    I guess it's a linux thing.

  • Update 0.2: Building Update

    This looks very very nice. I see that by setting rotation precision to 90 degrees I can get the same effect of rotating blocks. I'm not ready to move on to "planks and beams" which I guess don't exist anymore. I see however that you can save preset rotation and size configurations. May I suggest adding a default preset for the default plank and beam shape just for us simple builders? I'd also suggest additional block shapes like a half slab and 1/4 size block just for those of us who are rarely going to dig into the advanced mechanics of the game like in the Java version.


    I noticed one bug.. When I enter creative mode and try to paint the ground, I select my material with the scroll wheel (despite it showing F1 in the material window). Left-clicking once places the material then resets the material back to the initial setting. It seems like it should stay set to what I selected.


    Also I noticed in the material selection screen, the scroll wheel causes the screen to flash as its redreawn and scrolls incredibly slow. Basically one pixel per up or down movement of the scroll wheel.

  • (Gaming Voids) - Gaming Development Missing Features

    It's worth noting that audio hardware is better than it used to be or atleast due to CPUs being so powerful these days there's no reliance on wave samples for making music.


    For added historical perspective here's a popular Amiga computer demo from 1991. The disk image size for this is 471 KB (much larger than the executable for Mercury) but the music was not procedurally generated and relied on wav samples that a sampler program would play back. the samples take up a lot of space. The tune in the below is a favorite of mine. the music component is a tracker file containing wav samples of each instrument and the sheet music to play it all. That file is 181 KB in size so that leaves the graphical component of the compressed executable to under 200KB. Modern CPUs and GPUs have hardware-based APIs of sort (basically what assembly language interfaces with). Old computers could not natively produce 3D graphics so much of the bloat in this compared to modern demos was simply implenenting 2D approaches to generating 3D graphics. Now there's so much 3D stuff baked into the GPUs that makes the assembly code smaller.


    By relying on modern hardware where even the sound samples are procedurally generated as well as modern compression algorithms its easy to get a modern demo like above into 64KB executable file. Again, demos show off hardware capabilities. The point i was making above is that diversity of hardware makes programming for multi-platforms more complicated. hardware APIs help with this but that combined with cheap modern hardware allow for developers to take the easy route and not worry so much about efficiency of code. This causes game bloat. And that combined with the Online gaming era makes for rapid but buggy development cycles and that (unlike the Rising World updates) which seems to be what more gamers are used to nowadays and expect: quantity over quality.


  • (Gaming Voids) - Gaming Development Missing Features

    I will say there's a special breed of developers who develop creatively in limited hardware available at the time. Hardware has become powerful and relatively inexpensive. As a result big development studios can get away with grabbing off-shelf assets that are bloated but they assume their audience will upgrade their hardware accordingly. This is probably why console developers are still a respectable crowd since they are given limited hardware specs to work with. To develop for specific lower end hardware code can be written in assembly language and this may still be done today since compared to PC games, they are working with specific hardware. Programming on modern engines for PC gaming involve trying to be compatible with a variety of hardware which means programming against the hardware API, not the hardware directly.


    Also online gaming has made it less critical to get the code perfect on the first time. Before online gaming it was very expensive to get a game to retail where the game was written to cartridge. Nowadays developers can merely patch a game at any time and distribute it to players. This is probably the main reason AAA games nowadays cost the same as they did in the 1990s. Premium Super Nintendo games cost around $50 to $60. Adjust that for inflation would double that sticker price.


    So there is less demand for perfection. This is why I have a lot of respect for Red51 since he behaves like an old time developer who stresses quality work while still taking advantage of modern amenities.


    Regarding that special breed, they are very much alive today and still do 64 kb demos (meaning the entire presentation is a compressed into a 64KB executable). All graphics are procedurally generated by algorithms instead of bitmaps made in a graphics department that add up to several GB (lets say 8 for comparison) in size


    64,000 bytes vs

    8,000,000,000 bytes


    64 KB is a special number as its the same amount of memory in the Commodore 64 computer that was popular in the 1980s. Assembly programmers have been doing demos for that hardware and still continue to do so today. Others have moved on to PC hardware.


    Now bear in mind this is a non interactive demo. designing a game interface on top of this would add to complexity but shows you what the pure hardware is capable of producing without massive graphical and audio assets.