Block Color Conversion and Lighting changes (Release 195)

I don’t think it would be so bad to have multiple planets with the same block colors if we get the 50+ worlds it looks like we are expecting. Some colors (home world) tend to be in higher demand, and having many times more supply helps meet that demand without forcing everybody to mine a single planet.

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i guess so, but to be honest, there is a LOT of rock on each planet. and with regeneration and the variety of planets… that shouldn’t be a problem either =\

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I thought I saw in a note. by @james that the current live worlds will not be affected by this change and that only the new planets will be the only ones having this color situation.

Is this true or not true?

I think everyone is really wanting to know about this and how it affects our current worlds.

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Well, afaik the change is created by the overhaul in colour IDs etc, which would apply to all worlds, similarly to on testing. However, there was some mention that the difference on testing was exacerbated by some lighting differences too.

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We shall see; But i think w’ll get al lot more colours to work with very soon :+1:
And i hope more natural colours too.

There wont be new colours per say, existing colours will just change a bit. This is not a re-paletting of the worlds, it’s an internal change to how we colour blocks so that every block has a consistent 255 colour set across the whole universe of current and future worlds. All existing worlds and inventories migrate to ‘whatever new colour is closest’.

Old way, we generated a set of 3 colours of wood, 3 colours of grass, 3 colours of rock, and other blocks colours, for a single world, and those got appended onto the limited set of colours in the palettes. But there was no re-use, and nothing to stop various colours accross worlds looking almost identical, so lots of wasted space in the colour spectrums and non-uniformities, and confusion. And because we have 3 rock per world etc in the same palette, it basicly meant we could only have 85 unique world palettes before the system would fail. It would be infeasible to give all the colours names, and because we would never have worlds with natural rocks that are super vibrant pink (for example), we’d end up with 255 rock colours that only have a limited colour range and lots of duplicates/confusion. Even worse, palettes like gleam, there is only 1 per world, so there wouldn’t even be 255 gleam colours, only 85! Urgh!

Now, we have a 255 set of colours across the entire color space in a uniform* way, that every block uses, and worlds pick out of those colours instead of adding new ones. So no duplicates or bunching up wasting spaces etc, and colorindex 5 is always the same colour on any block effectively and we will be able to give all the 255 colours sensible names too, and even support tinting/painting blocks as a game feature in future since they all will use the same colour sets.

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nevermind :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

These screenshots really show how dull the colours are in testing 193.
It was the first thing I noticed. Especially gleam is kinda meh.

Really liked the colourfulness of the Boundless world… now it’s too realistic with the new weather and light system.

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Hopefully this will explain where we are with the live worlds :

We are currently iterating lighting and block palettes for the release 1.0 worlds and we are aware there have been knock-ons with the worlds on live.

The block colours on live were picked to work with lighting of lower intensity which had a strong colour at midday. For example the standard midday light on the home worlds Therka, Solum etc is orange with a blue ambient light.

We’ve made the new lighting considerably brighter and whiter than previously and this has caused the live block colours including gleam to look washed out.

The advantages of the brighter lighting is it provides us with a wider tonal range from light to dark so the worlds will feel richer.

The light sources/and torches also now behave correctly in the daytime. E.g the very low intensity lightcube used to light up the ground even in full midday sun.

If you saw any of the ‘hunting’ branch worlds you would see that blocks had a full range of colour saturation levels from dull to extremely colourful. (Whether any of the colour combinations were pleasing is another question. We are still experimenting with palettes!).

Rest assured we are taking your feedback on board and Boundless will definitely be colourful.

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That’s brilliant! No pun intended. Well maybe a little. I live in the desert, so in midday it is realistic that colors are washed out. The sun is frikin bright.

Kudo’s for deepening immersion of Boundless. @jsouthworth

May I ask how many worlds are there going to be for 1.0? I’m not sure if that’s been definitive mentioned yet.

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I believe the answer, at least when I last heard anything, was that the amount of worlds can be unlimited and will be adjusted depending on the size of the playerbase.

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Yep that’s what I heard to. Just curious how many they plan on having for launch. Or are they only wiping what we have now, and updating them so they work in the new universe?

James mentioned a new universe. So I am not sure if the worlds now will be part of that. The legacy worlds are no more.

Read somewhere it will be a complete new universe so no more solum, therka vulpto etc. Can they be the same planets asset but different names maybe. Heard some time ago they were planning for around 50 planets for launch but it might be just speculation.

The universe for launch will be completely different, I’m pretty sure.

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I’m really looking forward to a completely new universe to explore… and a using all the colours in some fresh new builds!

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I’m hoping that the starter world’s aren’t too alien, I like that Therka is pretty earth like with the different biomes. It makes it that much more exciting and interesting when you finally do go off world to somewhere that is actually alien and unknown and potentially very dangerous.

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The number of worlds will scale depending on the number of active players. We need to make sure there is sufficient capacity for player’s bases and more important sufficient concurrency for the number of players who want to be online simultaneously.

So the number of worlds at launch will be small, but we hope it will scale quickly as players enter the universe.

The spawn worlds will be quite earth-like and gradually become more other worldly as you venture into the harder worlds.

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Good to hear, thank you :blush:

Nice; thanx for the update James :smile:

Thank you sir