Hello and welcome to the 35th CardLife DevBlog,
New Devblog, new patch, lots of progress - it’s been a great week and I have lots to update you on so let’s get to it:
Patch Notes 35
We have just released a new patch (35) today which contains PVP combat and Connect the Dots crafting for tools and weapons amongst other things. Here are the major changes:
- PVP combat - you can now attack other players and they can attack you. If you die you will drop everything you’re carrying on the floor for other players to pick up.
- As part of this feature we have added a new Shortsword weapon that you can craft
- You can use your hands or tools as weapons although they won’t be as effective as the Shortsword
- Additional sound and visual effects have been added for combat
- Connect the Dots has been enabled for crafting tools and weapons
- You can now draw your own version of all of the tools
- Saving is still not implemented but you will be able to load the last version of each tool that you drew (i.e. the last pickaxe, spade, sword etc) using the load menu on the CTD interface
- Several improvements have been made to the standard crafting interface
- Simple tooltips have been added for tools, weapons and materials
- An item is now always selected by default in the item crafting list
- The crafting window now remembers what tool you had selected when you drag other materials into the craft slots
- Tools that can be crafted from the current materials have now been moved to the top of the craft item list
- All stone recipes have now been merged into one so you will only see one stone version of each tool
- You can now mix and match different stones to make a stone tool
- The crafted tool will inherit the texture of the stone you used the most or the first one you put into the craft window if the stone quantities are equal
- Several CTD bugs have been fixed
- A major optimisation has been added that should improve performance for all machines
Ongoing Work: Building
Cian has now finished work on the triangle pieces which as you can see in the above image allows you to build pyramids. We have two main sets of building pieces (square pieces and triangle pieces) and they both can be seamlessly snap together to create some really interesting builds. We have hit a few road blocks with the naming convention as we have been implementing it but Cian is now onto the last rule and should be moving onto working on the user experience next such as the visual and audio feedback.
Ongoing Work: AI
Aldo has implemented the first iteration of steering on the server. While this sounds quite boring it’s actually a really exciting task as we now have wolves crudely wandering around over the network avoiding obstacles (as the above image shows).The next step for Aldo is to start work on getting the wolf to animate and align to the terrain so you can visually see them moving about.
Ongoing Work: Ores & Collision
So Ed has spent a lot of time this week improving the ore generation that I mentioned in the last DevBlog. It’s now running much faster and we didn’t have to compromise on the installation size which was great, so he has now moved onto updating the cave algorithm to use the same method. This along with Neil’s updated collision which should be finished very soon means we might be able to turn on caves in the live build. This would be really exciting as caves make digging and mining much more fun and provides the space underground for creatures to spawn. This will also mean that the game runs faster as well which is obviously a major benefit. On a separate note Mike has also begun the task of working on what the ores and refined version of the ores look like so we can replace the placeholders currently in the build.
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Cheers,