Posts by paulevs

  • Ray tracing

    Example of same scene without and with screen-space rays:



    It actually cost a lot of FPS without too much benefits. It is sad that Unity still didn't implement any GI system, many other engines (even Godot) have different realtime GI solutions.


    A long time ago there was a suggestion about voxel-based GI SEGI, but it was not compatible with HDRP and M1. Now someone made a similar solution for modern Unity and HDRP - Lumina, probably it can be used as alternative to SEGI?

  • Console Text Colour

    That depends on what console you are using. Looks like RW uses custom console for game logging, and in-game menu uses something similar to Unity console. There is a way to colorize messages, at least there is a part of API for that, so you can try this for color output.


    Windows console itself don't properly support colors, and in different windows versions that support is also different. That's why most games uses custom consoles for their debug, and these consoles can have or not have color text depending on specific realization.

  • So who's excited for the new update? 🥳

    I'm excited to see the new update, and the most desirable thing that I want to see is an API improvements and extensions. I want to see it probably even more then actual new content - with API you can make as much content as you need to :) (New content will be also interesting to see. There should be a lot of worldgen stuff)

  • Volcanic Biome

    Quote from Ash_lee

    I guess obsidian would be considered the best tool material

    Obsidian is a glass, if you make a tool from it it will almost instantly break if you will try to mine with it anything.

    But it can be a good building material

  • Mojang's (And Microsoft's) Growing Failure [Minecraft]

    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    This is one of the more fruitful responses so I thank you kindly for this! If, and when I play next I'll bind it to this. I genuinely 100% thank you on this part. :thumbup:

    Addition - in the latest versions (5.x.x) this is V, F6 is now a debug menu. There is also a config file where you can define custom key, it should be also available in the GUI. You also need permissions to use it, not all games provide it by default. The command for permission is /grantme all


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    prematurely released game results in forever garbage and a delayed game stays forever good

    There are many examples of delayed games that were bad after release - Cube World, Blockscape, 7DtD and so on. There are also many examples of games that were released fast and they became legends, like Minecraft itself (only a week between dev start and first public demo)


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    They however constantly show signs of being fearful and afraid, or simply refuse all together to then have their games die off into nothingness.

    There is a huge difference between company with almost infinity budget and with two-dev indie studio with one game. When you are a company you can afford fails, when you are indie - not. Companies like Bethesda can make 3-4 "Starfield-like" games at once and stay fine, while any mistake for indie dev will result with game death. Look what happened to Stellar Overload - wrong decisions just finished with bankrupt company. Red and the team just can't allow themselves to make mistakes in development, or at least not major mistakes

  • Mojang's (And Microsoft's) Growing Failure [Minecraft]

    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Games like HoloCure, HoloParade, or Titan Quest managed to drain the batteries of my Steam Deck in a couple hours (or less); Mintest managed to keep running from roughly 8 pm till 11:30 PM until I was eventually forced to jump onto VRChat for New Years

    Games that uses more assets and require more operations to work will use more energy than simple games. If you will run Tetris I think that you can play it for several days without any issues. That's not very good argument for the game to be good or not. Advanced games require more resources, that's a consequences of being advanced game.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    I tried loosely seeking anything about it instead finding why people prefer Minetest instead. People have only good things to say about it

    Looks like you never looked into their Discord server (especially into not main channels, even in the last two days one was banned when he tried to tell that another admin was trolling him, another one was banned when he mentioned his opinion about LGBT stuff (negative)), or into their Reddit (well, most of such posts were deleted), into their GitHub tracker (especially into some closed issues), or their forum (such posts actually are also frequently deleted, like in Reddit). That behaviour was also noticed in topics related to MT, for example in game jam (in 2021 there were 26 games, in 2023 only 12), the drop is related to "aggressive" critique from admins side.


    image.png


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Maybe Minetest isn't a "game" anymore, it still is a game regardless in that I was building a home and a road, as I normally would in both Minecraft and Rising World. I had basic "fun" rediscovering something which was now lost in time. The magic of "rediscovery".

    On the video preview this is not default game, this is a custom game build with Minetest engine. Default game (which, well, is not included anymore) looks like this:


    7876932941612201644gol1.png


    The games that works fine are the games that:
    - Uses only cube nodes. Advanced meshes/nodeboxes will cause FPS drops
    - Don't have entities. You can try Mineclone 2 or 5 and see the consequences of having many entities on screen. Rollback will be the smallest bug that you will see

    Otherwise game will be playable only in singleplayer and on very low distances


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    I'm still trying to sort my way through this trying to figure out how to obtain the mini-map radar display

    It is F6 on the PS, probably you can somehow execute its binding on the Steam Deck


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Horses's hooves were changed for no reason, other than "change". Why?

    To align with other entities style. All entities have solid boxes for their legs, unlike horses which were directly ported from Mo Creatures mod "as is". Now all entities have same style.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Beacons - was cooler in the snapshot than it was in the final release. The community revolted, yet was still kept the same boring way. If we could revert to its initial snapshot appearance it would be cooler.

    Beacons were changed far more than only in 1.4. This is good when devs try to find balance in game mechanics and align it with others. At this moment beacons are popular as decorative and functional block.

    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    I'm amused you had to disclaimer "not all these games are good".



    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Pumpkin pie still isn't placable as cake, or so I'm aware.

    Yes, it is not placeable. To be honest 99.9% of players never used pie placement at all. Only as decoration stuff, rarely. It is not worth to add another placeable pie.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Cargo Boats took YEARS to be added into the game. I'm 100% Mojang saw my Tweets, they still ignored me

    You should not think that Mojang will read/listen to single person or tweet (only if you will be their CEO). They can listen only the major part of the community (major part, not any part). Cargo boats were announced as a part of biome enhancements (swamps), and were added same as other swamp-related content during world update.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Mojang/Microsoft now bans you upon being blackmailed

    I never saw any such bans at all, only people complaining that "I can be banned". Since that feature is disabled on server with single config line then you probably should just use normal servers.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Millenaire mod

    It is not comparable to vanilla, Millenaire is a colony sim, vanilla is a village sim. They are completely different in their core and mechanics. And, to be hinest, vanilla approach fits much better into the game then Millenaire.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    I'm amused you had to disclaimer "not all these games are good".

    My original statement was "they created new games since they not to be afraid of experimenting", while Mojang on its own were stagnating. Yes, not all these games are good, but also they are not all bad. Enhanced fighting mechanics combined with MC aesthetics formed a nice diabloid game, while combining it with RTS resulted as a speculative one.

  • Mojang's (And Microsoft's) Growing Failure [Minecraft]

    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    It ran smoothly on my Steam Deck

    If you will run default "Minetest Game" or other simple games on Minetest - it will be almost fine, but that will not work for any complex game.


    First of all rendering system of MT Engine is very bad:

    - It separates each texture as individual submesh in the chunk instead of using texture atlases or texture arrays. That means that each chunk will require from 1 to several hundreds of drawcalls (people who know rendering will quickly understand what that will mean for performance). In comparison MC uses 1-2 drawcalls per chunk (if there are transparent blocks or not). That means that same amount of chunks on the screen will require up to 10-20k of draw calls (if there are many textures). Each draw call require CPU-GPU data sending, which is the bottleneck.

    - All animations are done with mesh UV switching, any animated texture will require recalculation of thousands vertices in each chunk where it exists, and sending result to the GPU. And that will happen on each animation frame. In comparison MC just changes pixels of the texture. Sending 256 ints is much faster than some hundred thousands of floats to the GPU
    - Light system uses several storages - artificial light, sun light and moon light. Some devs don't even know how it works, but in general it will require much more complicated and massive calculations. And it will require rebuild meshes on day/night cycle changes. In comparison - MC uses lightmaps and have only 2 light types - from blocks and from sky.

    - Entities code is very inefficient. Default game (and most others) don't have any entities except player and items. There are many weak points - finding other entities will ask all entities in the world instead of neighbour regions (same for physics), and so on. If you have more than 20 entities on the screen - you will get lag

    - Server code is also inefficient, servers with more than 3 players and with complex game than default will have lag (freezing animations, rollbacks, physics glitches. Your FPS will be stable, but gameplay - not)


    Physics is also not very good - it works more like physics in liquid than in air. Acceleration for entities and player is frequently incorrect, when player don't hit the node the engine will slowly push player down during a second, entities inside nodes starts glitching (especially items). The last one was partially fixed from LUA side in default game.

    Basically MT engine is worse than MC engine during beta period (which was in 2010-2011). Even Modern MC with its runtime object creation and other specific things runs much faster with much more complex calculations than MT by default. RW engine (Unity) is also nice in terms of performance (that's also related to RW dev team code optimizations too)


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Maybe the developer is corrupt, maybe not. I have yet to find that out. What matters is how well it runs on a very basic level while adding the very basic core fun and entertainment to the table.

    Minetest is not a game anymore (since 0.4.0), it is a game engine now. Since 5.8.0 default MInetest game was finally dropped from default installation, now user should select game manually. All features that devs will add are code/API only, all games for the engine are developed by the community. The problem is that devs of the engine don't actually implement what community ask, in most cases they have their own vision of how it should work. For example they dropped all renderers support except OpenGL, even if they don't need to maintain them since they are using Irrlicht as rendering engine (for some reason they made their own fork and remove all rendering code except OpenGL. That can be understand if they will update its OpenGL version or at least enhance engine to support texture arrays, vertex attributes and so on, but they are not doing this). As a result Minetest Raytracing is no longer possible, instead we will have effects like in 2010 games like bloom that looks like vaseline on screen and very questionable godrays. Some PRs made by the community can stay open for years without review (even if they are important), others can be closed due to different random reasons


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Microsoft is ruining everything they touch

    Like any capitalist Microsoft is earning money, and looks like they are good at that. Actually without Microsoft MC will probably just become stagnating in 2012-2014 and slowly die (that was an update crysis when MC hit the bottom of its popularity since 2011). Yes, the game lost most of its original identity, but it also get many new things to work with. Yes, we don't have simplified villagers that can only walk and open a randomized trade menu, now we have complete village mechanics with jobs, necessary beds and houses, complex trading, village sieges, wandering traders and so on. We don't have only one world to work with two additional barren places, now we have 3 complete dimensions with their own resources, benefits and experiences. We don't have programmers art textures anymore (well, you still can enable them), instead we have a complex set of textures that are connected with each other, when you can finally build not only from stone and netherrack bricks. We also get many other things that were originally promised by Noth, but not implemented at all - cave biomes, ocean content, advanced End boss fight, complex customizable worldgen, advanced rendering system, multithreading and many others. And Mojang finally clarified their EULA (which was not clear since 2013), now all rules about user-made content are finally clear.


    Additionally Microsoft expanded Minecraft universe, now we have Minecraft Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Legends. Yes, not all these games are good, but without Microsoft Mojang will never experiment with creation of something except Minecraft. Minecraft Dungeons actually looks like a Minecraft that we all want to see - with nice graphics, animations, textures, models, story and combat. It also has much better environment than original game. Without Microsoft that will be just impossible

  • Mojang's (And Microsoft's) Growing Failure [Minecraft]

    I can agree that Rising World is better than modern Minecraft (in my opinion) - it brings your creativity, exploration and atmosphere feeling to new levels. But I can't agree with some statements:


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Open source code, updating things in real time (menu wise), and all the lovely jazz.

    That still don't make Minetest great game. Minetest engine is very weak in terms of performance (if you are interested why I can explain that in details), very limited in terms of graphics, and suffering from specific development vector when opened pull requests are not reviewed during years, same for issues or suggestions. As a result there are no really good developers in its community - most of them left during early development stages due to aggressive behaviour or ignorance from core dev side.


    Open source doesn't always mean "many new content/mods", Minetest is a good example of that. Yes, it is Open Source, but there are no large active forks of it (some old devs that I know labeled its code as a junkyard which is too hard to work with, especially network and light calculation). On the other hand modding is LUA-based, which means that you can create only things that are allowed by the API, not anything else. As a modder I can say that current Minecraft modding ecosystem brings so large freedom that non of other games have, and Minetest is far, far away from it. It is more like official Bedrock addons system - just some scripts and assets, no more.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    purging any political garbage found in the game, such as singleplayer banning, etc

    They don't have such things in the game (that's true), but they have that thing in the community and on forums. And yes - you can be banned if you don't agree with moderator position or if your opinion don't fit their ideals. Personally I was not banned, but I saw how several people were (even people who were active contributors to the game).


    Basically Minetest is a sort of "Minecraft at home". It has same problems, just in smaller scale. Not from large megacorporation, but from its developers. At this moment 12 years of development made Minetest close to early alpha Minecraft. There are people that will like that approach (for same reasons as people play in Legacy Minecraft and make mods for it)


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    make it more RPG-like

    This is more about Hytale, for me situation looks like Mojang tries to add as little content as possible to simulate development (or they just can't, after all if you have ~5 java coders in ~800 employe company that is possible). And also looks like most decisions are directly forced by Microsoft (and like any capitalist Microsoft want to earn money with less effort, which means slow development, and protect itself from lawsuits, which is why banes were introduced)


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Everything has to be strangely "logical" taking the fun out of everything

    There is much more important thing in games than fun - game balance. Games in survival genre (like RW) follows some specific rules (specific for each game) to keep it. If developers start to add things just for fun the game will become not fun in general since it will just break balance. There are games made specifically for fun (like Besiege, DRG), or the whole genres (arcades, for example). Each feature should be analyzed from balance prism, and if necessary - removed/denied entirely, or heavily changed from the original concept.


    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    RTS, various RPGs and other various "thinking" games have been on a decline thanks to lower attention span in people

    Baldur's Gate can't community can't agree with you. Each game genre is popular, but only in its audience. If you will ask Need for Speed players about Minecraft they most likely will say "no, I don't like that game", while if you ask the same in Terraria or Core Keeper community than you will get "yes, definitely, best game of my childhood". Any person want to play games that he like, don't judge them for that

  • Dependency Declaration [Suggestion]

    At this moment all plugins are loaded alphabetically. That means that if one plugin depends on another one as a library or content source - it should have specific name to load after that plugin. That will cause problems if there will be several plugins that depends on each other, and it will cause issues in case of mod.io integration when user will be forced to manually fix appearing conflicts.


    My suggestion is to define a small addition into plugin.yml that specifies dependencies and optional dependencies. These lines will be optional (so compatibility with already created plugins will not broke), but if they are defined the game will load these plugins only after target plugins were loaded. If plugin defined in dependencies is missing the game should show user error message about that, if optional dependency is missing plugin should just load normally.


    Clearly specified dependencies should help a lot in plugin development, and that also removes any problems for user in plugin installation since the load order is defined by plugins themselves

  • Material Ambient Light

    I'm not sure, but this bug can be related to missing scripts in objects. Unity HDRP uses small scripts attached to objects as guidelines for shading engine, and in my experiments I noticed that all scripts attached to objects are not exported. Probably objects don't receive environment information due to missing HDRP scripts? If this is true then fix will be just adding these scripts to assets programmatically (from API side or from plugin side)

  • Material Ambient Light

    Hi, looks like material that are assigned to prefabs in bundle are not affected by scene ambient light.


    In editor:


    In game:


    That happens only with material that were assigned to assets by default in bundle, if material was created with code it will be fine:


    Is it possible to fix/avoid this?