Archive for July, 2010

Hello. Today is first version with fast shadows.

This mine was made by Woratiklis and Neon.

Torches have range of 16 blocks but it will be reduced to less than 10, and only some lava lamp will be 16.
When using shadows, terrain loading speed is halved, but fps stays the same – that’s because terrain loading and shadows computation use second cpu core.
Shadows work on standard minecraft servers too – gold block is a torch.

Cuboid

Monster editor – You can find it on forum. No monsters in game yet, but it’s possible to preview by replacing player.mdc file.

Other changes:

• Creative (unlimited inventory) fortress mode server – change flag in ServerConfig.xml to True.
• Trampoline block.
• In mine mode, Minecraft password can be saved for easy connecting.
• In overhead camera, just one click is enough to walk to destination.
• When unloading blocks, do not dump near any player.
• Winter, broken currently.

Update!
It’s the new overhead camera. Killing monsters will be much better with it. It’s activated by pressing F5 key second time. Camera distance is changed by using mouse wheel with LCtrl pressed.

Fixes:

• Draw progress bar and server name and motd when connecting to a multiplayer server.
• Better compression of map state – group changed blocks into chunks and compress raw chunks. (Before: 1165 KB, Now: 211 KB).
• Generate maps in fortress mode based on random seed, not just always the same.
• Switch to fullscreen using F11 key.
• Fewer crashes. Game should now run on Windows 7 without administrator account. Highest fog setting no longer crashes. Fixed random multiplayer crashes.

I tried to add shadows, but the main problem is that they slow down chunk loading to 20%-50% of current speed. I think only slowdown to around 75% is acceptable. Shadows also cause lag on multiplayer, when many players build at the same time. So, shadows implementation is around 20% complete and is disabled.

Network synchronization of simulation is added. It is similar to OpenTTD networking and should make future new features like trains, monsters, inhabitants easy to integrate with multiplayer.

Currently it is used only for:

• Making minecart visible on multiplayer, and requiring to place minecart block to ride on rails.
• Growing grass, crops, sapling.

Fixes:

• Take screenshot using F12 key.
• Draw simple shadows.
• Draw fps history graph (“.fps 2″ command).
• Load blocks from crafting table into inventory using L key, and unload from inventory on crafting table using U key.
• Stairs half block, not perfect.
• Disable key actions when typing text (q, v, c, u keys).
• Clicking buttons in escape menu.
• Do not lose rail when using combined rail pieces.
• Uncommented old lock that fixes terrain flicker.