Posts by JF91

Yesterday marked 9 months since construction started. The southern tower is now getting close to completion, including the spire at 172 blocks tall. Work on the north tower is a fair way behind, and the central crossing tower only has its base. I have been working away on small details that are hard to notice unless you climb around up close. The main focus has been getting the north face of the cathedral up to scratch. The structure is up to 56,661 construction elements. I had estimated the structure would be 60,000 elements at completion, but it looks like it will be far more than that once I finish.

My goal is to get the core of the build to resemble a completed structure by the end of the year. I will continue adding details and features afterwards, but I don't want it to look like a construction site beyond then.

Ok that makes sense as I have a high ping (Australia connecting to UK server). Thank you so much for investigating!

Not sure if anyone did anything, but I was able to log in today for the first time in 11 days

Thanks for the suggestions and info. I have sent you a report for the issue.

I have not been able to log in to the Medieval Realms server for about a week now. The game loads up to 10%, and then I drop out with the message "unable to connect to server". I can connect to every other server that I try, its only with the specific server. Other players use the server without issue so the server is not completely broken, and my internet connection is fine as I connect to other servers fine.

Any idea what to try?

Thanks!

Now that we have proper scaffolding I have started the detailing work on the exterior.

Quote from Yaromid

The column spacing is calculated from the selected positioning precision divided by 2

oh thats very cool, thanks for letting me know!

Just a couple suggestions that I have come across that would be useful for building:

- Saving texture scale between sessions. Most settings in the radial menu, like rotation angle etc, are remembered across play sessions but texture scale is not. It can be really frustrating having to tear down a bunch of stuff because you forgot to set the texture scale appropriately every time you log in. Perhaps this was an oversight?

- Element spacing gap setting. We can drag elements and use the + key to adjust the gap between elements. However it changes by 0.005 block intervals, which makes it take really really long to adjust the gap if you use large gaps. If we could set that through the radial menu, or even just using a console command, that would be great! (for example setgap 1)

- texture rotation. Most textures seem to be set to the world axes regardless of the rotation of the element orientation. If you place elements at unusual angles (building ignoring the grid), the textures of things like timber flooring can look ugly and unrealistic. I see that some textures do rotate with the element rotation instead of the world axes, for example material 169, so it must be possible. Perhaps there could be a toggle in the console to choose whether a texture locks to the world axes, or the element axes? (for example settexturemode 1 or something...)

Quote from Ricebug

Yep. You have to delete the water brush, do the rakey-rake, and add the water brush back in.

yes but this is not possible on survival servers.

space elevator vibes

It wont be as bad once we can place terrain by hand, but without it its very frustrating. For example if you accidentally rake down a bit of land on the coast, once it dips under water it is impossible to fix it.

When raking sandy/stony dirt on the coast of an island, right click raking above sea level increases the height of the terrain as expected. However as soon as you get below the water level, the same right click raking action does the opposite, it lowers the terrain. As far as I can see there is no way to raise the level of terrain of underwater dirt. You can shrink the size of an island, but you cant expand it. Is this difference intentional? It would be nice to be able to do some underwater terraforming in survival mode like we can do above ground.

Quote from Jita_La_Rotisor

Astonishing work!

I would like to learn from you.

haha well thanks, happy to answer any questions you have

Custom marble floor is mostly finished. about 7000 elements went into it.

I think red is focusing on the key features to make the game playable first. So the world, the construction system, npcs. There will be way more unique items in the future, just need to be patient. Right now the game is more of a sandbox construction game than a survival game.

In November 2022 I started my biggest project yet, a "realistic" medieval cathedral. The project is on the Medieval Realms server. This is a 100% survival build, with no blueprints allowed. This means I need to gather the resources, place each element one at a time, without the use of fly mode. It is a gradual long-term build so I have no idea when it will be completed. The cathedral is my own design, but draws inspiration from many real-world cathedrals including Cologne Cathedral, Notre Dame and Milan Cathedral. I thought I would make a post to document the construction process.

As of 12th August 2023

General metrics:

Dimensions = 208 blocks long, 106 blocks wide, 172 blocks tall

Number of construction elements = 56,661

Construction time = 410 hours

Fatal falls = 0

Broken legs = 6

Quote from red51

Hmm... a high ping (and maybe also some packet loss) results in a much lower throughput. If you have a 100 MBit/s connection, for example, a ping of 300 ms and 1% packet loss results in a remaining throughput of less than 0.5 MBit/s, for example.

You could check the packet loss by typing "networkstats" into console while you're on the server. If there is a notable packet loss, this could be the reason for the low throughput.

The Java version was actually working a bit different. It used both TCP and UDP and used multiple connections / channels, while the new version only uses a single UDP connection. The approach of the Java version was better in case of high pings, but TCP is also a bit tricky, because it requires a continuous connection (interrupts result in a disconnect). There were some cases where the ISP automatically closes TCP connections after 10 minutes, resulting in a disconnect (some RW players were suffering from this issue in the past, mostly when using cable internet)... this is also the reason why the majority of games only use UDP for networking nowadays (because it's a "connectionless" protocol) - but on the other hand, most games also have a lot less traffic than RW, so this may not be a problem there...

We have to see if we can find ways to improve the situation... Of course there is also a chance that there is still a bug in the game, so we definitely have to take a closer look at this issue

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I

ran the networkstats command a few times, see results. I also timed how long it takes me to log into a server. It took 3 minutes 55 seconds.

Quote from red51

Hmm... we ran tests with up to 1M construction elements What sort of "lag" do other people experience when you log in? Actual lags, i.e. a considerable delay when they place or break stuff, or performance issues (game stutters, freezes, low fps etc)?

The latter would be very weird, but the former could be a networking thing. If the server is busy sending you the chunk data (37K construction elements result in 4MB of data the server has to send to you, but that first gets compressed, so probably we're talking about 1-2MB), this may prevent the server from handling other world-related things. Do you have a high ping to that server? The higher the ping, the lower the bandwidth to the server (although it's still a bit weird that 37K elements [which really isn't too much] is already causing issues for 30 seconds)

I do have very high ping, usually around 300 (I live in Australia, server in the UK). I dont know exactly what their lag is like, I have just been told that its very noticeable. Because of my ping I always have bad lag no matter what. But I do notice it is far worse than it ever was in the java version, with the same connections and ping.

red51 have you done performance testing regarding the number of construction elements? My cathedral is up to 37764 elements and it causes a noticeable amount of lag to the whole server when I log in (other players tell me they know when I am logging in, because their game gets laggy for about 30 seconds). Do you have any idea how performance will be effected as that number goes up? I estimate the finished structure will be around 60,000 elements.