Weekly Dev Update: 2017 July 21st, 28th, August 4th - Slope Chisel, Square Chisel, and maybe Bevel Chisel and more!

[duomaxwell007]

Well let me help you solve the puzzle. Yes late and working is better than on time and unfinished. No objections there. The issue is then however is stop annoucing target timeframes youre not gonna hit. Wait til you KNOW its gonna hapoen before making an announcement and getting people hopes up. OR at the very least dont waot til uts painfully obvious by everyone that you wont make the date before telling us you wont. Let us know about the delay or vhange of plans the second you know its gonna happen. Great examples being Bloodstained and Shenmue 3 both annouced their target lauch delays more than 6 months before the original date so we never had to get the chance to wonder “is this game coming out when they said it would” as for the target timeframes only being announced as PC release and not console.

Ok so what will you say if I provide links to an article this very company posted on the PS Plog in 2015 near the Paris Convention that said this was coming to PC AND PS4 in 2016? Then what will you say when I post aryicles from gaming journalists site like IGN and Gamespot that say its coming to PS4 in 2017?

Even if the ones by journalists hold no credibility, the one posted on th ps blog by this very company in 2015 is 100% credible as it came straight from the horses mouth.

[Pseudonym84]

They postponed the release date.

What do you think to accomplish?

I believe you haven’t answered his question. I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m wondering this myself. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you simply want to vent your frustration concerning the altered release window, due to a far more ambitious final product?

[Havok40k]

He knows this, but chooses instead to make the same tired complaint. I’ll just flag these posts as off-topic and cease to reply to them in the future.

[the-moebius]

about the name question
i like my name name i dont want other moebiusses around
and ban names like moebius1235 let them choose family names
or
3 name combo
moebius herculius the heroic ( example lol )
moebius adacemos the inteligent
moebius fastious the swift

[duomaxwell007]

What do I hope to acomplish. Well the concept of Minecraft interest me but I have zero desire to play that game due to its ugly art style and lack of direcrion. Whereas Boundless seems to add things to the minecraft formula that makes me want to play it (its a living persistent open world with other players running around outside of those you in ite and it has direction.) Its basically Minecraft the MMO. Thus Im dying to play the game, bit at this rate Im quite convinced that dying me literalky come before playing. So yes I am here to vent my frustration as you said

[Chonps]

About Characters

1. Should Character names be unique? Or can many players create characters with the same name?

2. When you see a Character in the game, should we also display the user name?

3. Should we show Character names in the forum?

4. When a player deletes a Character what do you expect should happen to their beacons in the game?

2. I think should display after adding as friend or after some type of “meeting”.

3. Sure! But please be optional, otherwise UI information will be crazy.

4. To be deleted (just plots, not the blocks on it). Or passed to someone on the beacon permisson list.

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About Chiseling

1. Should we add a basic Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time - so easy to make steps, walls and slabs) and a precision Square Chisel (which removed 1 corner at a time)?

2. Or should we add a single Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time), and allow players to learn a “Precision Chiseling Skill”. Which would upgrade their basic chiseling skill to be equivalent to the precision Square Chisel. This would make Building more skill based.

3. Does anyone have a better names than Slope Chisel, Square Chisel and Bevel Chisel?

1. and 2. Solid one corner remove for intuitivity sake.

I think @Nibuls idea would be excelent (tho might be dificult for long distances):

2 - block on which you look with a chisel in your hand are get texture with regions which shows you where to click.

@james I’d like to know if you guys plan to add more of the Teal Chiseling options (since there’s not all combinations on the image you showed), and if there will be mesh variations of some with same “corner configuration” like:

[lucadeltodecso]

In the case of teal / green, we have to make choices on what shape to use for a given configuration of corners, and we choose the one which ‘works best’ in most circumstances, especcially in the case of green. Also noting we don’t want to add any new ‘normals’ to the physics geometry, eg in the case of the green with just two opposing tiny corners (near top left of green), I highlighted with lines an alternative shape for that corner configuration which would require ‘new’ normals to achieve. In your image case, the top one (our saddle) I originally did use the right configuration instead, which arguably works better sometmes… but in natural terrain looked horrible as it produced lts of weird rotated square dimples instead of nice diagonal trenches.

We can’t then also have every possible variation of a shape missing those same corners (it’s how the shapes are defined, and it’s how the worldbuilder/lodgen makes use of them, and how chiselling works to get to them), especcialy for green which already requires the full 8bit of shape-metadata we can store in the chunk data to even define the existing set.

The image isn’t missing any for teal though? All the possible corner configurations are there, the ‘low-corner’ (very top) and ‘half-pyramid’ (bottom left of teal) are the end-points where cutting off any more corners would produce just a flat polygon with no depth, and all the others are represented (if you include all rotations/mirrorings which we have)

(Correction: there is indeed 2 more viable teals. Nooooo, I hate implementing teals, missing: take the saddle, and remove one or both of the bottom left/rights)

[Chonps]

I feel your pain haha. I’m developing a “voxel editor” and I’m at the point I not sure if I covered all vertex/meshes configurations.

For configurations in the picture plus those you mentioned, I think, there’s no more besides this one:

If you want to spend some more time with the teal chinsel , you can add the one, on the picture bellow, for configurations with 4 vertices which form any face of the cube. (It would use already known vectors as normals)

[lucadeltodecso]

urgh, yes that one too (pyramid with under back vertex removed).

“maybe” that last one, but doesn’t feel like it matches very well with the rest as none of the others use the “half” vertex positions.

The pain with the teal ones, is we support the texture blending for the teal shapes, and texture blending is “very” complicated in terms of the data input to get it to work correctly in all situations, whereas we decided to just not try to support it for crafted/bevelled which makes those ones very fast to add (All of the crafted/bevelled basicly took 2 days to add not including any refactoring work to aid the process / refactoring of the other systems involved, but just purely in terms of defining the shapes), whereas each teal shape can easily take 3 hours to add including getting the texture blending right.

[TechStomper]

What do I hope to acomplish. Well the concept of Minecraft interest me but I have zero desire to play that game due to its ugly art style and lack of direcrion.

first off ever heard of a resource pack? and also lack of direction? the main objective is to beat the ender dragon and the wither

[Chonps]

Ok, you got me, I have never implemented texture blending. (Are you talking about blending between voxels, right?)

Btw, thanks for sharing this kind of information, I love to know things work and why. Helps to understand the engine and it’s bounds ^^

[Seleiance]

I hope one of the chisel updates allows for multiple chisel types to apply to the same block (like for instance, using a slope chisel on a wall to create a steep sloped block). I am hoping to incorporate Gothic architecture into a settlement on Nasharil, but the 45 degree slopes don’t seem like they’d be quite steep enough for the roofs. Maybe it’s already covered in a way I am unaware of but the bottom line is I would like to see more drastic slopes for all directions.

[lucadeltodecso]

That is 99.99% not going to happen, at least not for 1.0. It would require a momentous amount of work to have steeper/shallow slope shapes and be a performance hit on the way the physics in the game works too. Being able to “mix” chisel types like one corner being “bevelled off” and one corner “cubed off” would also absolutely explode the amount of shapes that would be possible, and that someone (me likely) would have to go and define and make work. there are already now with square/bevel/slope chiselling 660’ish shapes, being able to mix the chiselling would make it millions.

[whereyoubeen]

“When a player deletes a Character what do you expect should happen to their beacons in the game?”

I think there should be a decay of objects around the beacon. Like an old ruin with parts of whatever they created falling out and slowly decaying. After a time it would vanish into the sand, dirt or snow.

However, I think someone should be able to claim the lost beacons for some sort of price, work or effort. Maybe an auction type reclamation, once a reclaim is in place the highest bidder wins control after a period of time. And then can rebuild or claim the existing structures.

[iBelt]

Please consider that displaying login name in the world is a possible security risk. There is no reason for other players to know my login name at all, especially in a way that lets them immediately know if I have anything valuable.

[Seleiance]

Would it make more sense to just have the chisel and squarepunch (my attempt at naming the square chisel), and for slopes and bevels to be operated by the chisel? Both the squarepunch and chisel could have a charge up action by holding the button down in order to increase the area affected by them. The charged squarepunch could take two blocks (similar to the idea pitched about the square chisel) and the charged chisel could apply the current regular chisel effect (but it could also be achieved through chiseling the same vertex twice).

[Zina]

Oldie but Goodie thread to post this question on.

Are there any more shapes coming to boundless after 1.0?

I was thinking of a slope half of the angles from the ones we have now.
for longer drops that are not so extreme. Would make beautiful slides, and roads and ramps.

[ctrl-64]

I’d refer you to Luca’s last post.
That would bring the variations of blocks into the millions. They are already at over 600 as it is.
Pretty sure its not going to happen…

[Odeon]

Something like this @Zina;
That would be nice

[Spoygg]

I don’t think so. @lucadeltodecso mentioned several times that what we already have is giving crazy number of permutation which all need to be handled, so, adding more shapes would again make even more complexity to handle. I guess I should let Luca talk since my explanation is from what I remember not coming from knowledge Don’t want to add some false info.