electronics, etc.

It’s update time, again. 0.2.20110410_0.

- Map generation is now asynchronous. This means that the delays in block placement, inventory and in the transfer of chunks while the world is generating are gone.
- Now the new object system is mainly used. This doesn’t affect gameplay a lot, as it is mainly a technical development which allows stuff to be done in the future. Anyway, I re-implemented the rats in the new system too, just to test it, and modified their behavior a bit. They can be found in dark places in newly created worlds. Old rats in old worlds use the old system.

EDIT: The windows version didn’t work at first at all. Now it does work.

The download page

EDIT2: I am getting glitches like this on the windows version, does anyone else? They don’t appear on my brother’s computer with Windows XP.

A small update once again, before I start studying to an exam.

I guess people already had noticed that block placement and removal caused a slight spike in framerate. This is the result of the recalculation of a mesh of a chunk being done synchronously in the main thread. It takes around 50ms or up to 200ms when the lighting changes in a long distance, which is quite noticeable especially when others are placing and removing blocks.

Well, I noticed that, in the past few days, I had completely created the framework for doing that in a separate thread. And went on to make it so. Now building with lots of people causes no spikes in framerate at all!

Also, one thing that had bugged me for a long time is that the server sent all block placements and removals in the whole world to every player, no matter how far away from each other they were. I changed those to be sent only to players that are reasonably close (100 nodes). For the others, the server just marks the changed part of the world as “unsent” and it will be re-sent when needed.

In addition to that, I changed the versioning scheme to such that the version is now 0.2.20110406_0. I will stick to this scheme from now on.

Download Section

A quick update again: http://celeron.55.lt/~celeron55/minetest/packages/win32/minetest-0.0.2-win32-110405183346.zip

What was added:
- cobblestone
- steel ingots, steel blocks, the steel pick
- shovels and axes
- the furnace is buildable and works now

I updated the version number to 0.0.2, but it doesn’t have much relevance because currently the main versioning is the date. But it does mark a certain milestone in this project.

I hope somebody can go and update the wiki. I don’t quite have the time. Anyway, things are done quite in the same way as in minecraft, so google for that if you’ve never played the “real game”. 8)

A chest

From now on, I will be posting updates about the Minetest-c55 game project in this blog. I will be posting somewhat longer texts than I did in the news section.

Last weekend I finally got away from trying to rework the terrain generator, which quite much only resulted in me getting bored and depressed.

Yesterday I added some code to make it possible to make special objects with metadata and different functions, like chests and furnaces.

Today I realized the initial format of the metadata sucked and I have now changed it to a more robust one. Items in chest won’t be preserved when you update, but I am quite sure I will manage to preserve them after this update.

Here is the package for windows.