Hello and welcome to the 52nd CardLife DevBlog,
It’s been another crazy week as we’re still settling down after the Freejam announcement. We have just about got the servers semi-stable but we’re now able to start getting back into a more regular development workflow. Anyway, here’s what we have been up to:
Patch 44
- Storage has now been added to the Simple Crate so you can transfer items into the crate to remove them from your inventory
- Just interact (press E) with the crate once you have placed it in the world and it will bring up your inventory
- Currently this has been implemented similar to the doors so only the creator of the crate can interact with it
- This will be changing in a future update to allow for crates that anyone can access and lockable chests that you can lock
- You can now craft multiple items using the + and - signs on the crafting window
- Blocker zones have been added to several house decoration items
- This is to prevent you from accidentally blocking your own spawn point over a bed
- It has also been added to all lights so they can’t be put on top of each other
- Crafting recipes have now been re-ordered in the crafting window with the order being tools, weapons, structures and then decorations
- A memory optimisation has been added to the game that should lower the overall memory footprint
- We still have a memory leak which I discuss below that we are working on
- Several miscellaneous bug fixes
Ongoing Work: Memory Leak
While we have done some memory optimisations to the server and reduced our overall memory footprint - we still haven’t fixed the main memory leak on the client. We are actively working on this and as soon as we have a fix we will push this live.
Ongoing Work: New Ore Texture
As many of you will know, the textures that we have used for the ores are very much placeholder. These textures are also currently used to texture all the things you craft. This is soon going to change as we have now pretty much completed the work on all of the ore textures and their refined versions. We will release the new ore textures hopefully in the next patch and the refined versions will be added once we add the Furnace and Forge - which will allow you to refine the raw ore into ingots.
Changes Coming - Building
Now that we have started to see lots of people building - I wanted to take this opportunity to let everyone know some of the plans we have for building. I have talked about some of these in the past but I wanted to bring everyone up to date. Currently you can cut holes in the building pieces, similar to how you can cut holes in the character. You have probably noticed though that the collision of that piece is never changed - meaning that even if you cut the biggest hole you can - you would never be able to walk through it. This is for three main reasons: performance, creativity and online protection. Let me break each one down.
In terms of performance, having to update and maintain a totally unique collision for each individual piece would be very costly and not really viable with the amount of customisation we allow. This leads to a strange scenario though - as when players have access to ranged weapons or base raiding mechanics - it will look and feel strange if they can’t shoot through the holes that you create. So let me take you back to an early decision point we had when we designed the CTD system.
We wanted players to be able to customise their characters, tools and weapons without having to worry how that affected gameplay. It was designed to be a purely cosmetic addition to the game - to promote creativity. With this aim in mind - we decided that when players made a custom creation it would always retain the original’s collision so that it wouldn’t affect gameplay at all. For example a sword that has been drawn longer than the original wouldn’t have a further reach, or a character with a bigger head than the default wouldn’t be punished with a bigger collision hitbox. This meant on pvp servers people wouldn’t be forced to have to make the smallest character possible made up of the tiniest pieces of card they could draw to be effective in pvp.
This brings me back to the building though - as in it’s current form - it fits the bill in terms of there is no gameplay difference as the collision doesn’t change, but it’s not very intuitive as I described above. For this reason we always planned that when you cut out a hole in a building piece, you would be prompted to add a secondary material such as glass or another ore. This would allow everyone to still draw their custom shapes but make sense in terms of the gameplay i.e. in the case of someone shooting at the building it would hit something solid rather than an actual hole.
Lastly this system also allows us to implement a form of online protection. As the CTD system has no impact on the gameplay as I mentioned - it means that we can provide an option in the settings for people to turn off seeing other people’s customisations. This would mean that they would just see the default versions instead without affecting the gameplay at all. This allows anyone (i.e. guardians or parents) to be able to use it as a form of parental control - as we want the game to be accessible to everyone.
Anyway that turned into a marathon explanation but I wanted to let everyone know what our plans where - so they weren’t too surprised when we actually implemented this system. This will also probably be combined with our trim system that will allow you to colour different parts of each creation a different material - but more on that in a future devblog :)
Community, Bugs & Modding
The bug reports and suggestions have been coming in thick and fast - and it’s great to see so many people getting involved in the development of the game. It really makes it all worthwhile. I also wanted to bring everyone’s attention to the fact we have set up an official discord server and have also created an official reddit. We try to be active in as many places as possible - so please feel free to contact us.
We have also created a Modding and Support forum for people to start discussing those topics. We had our very first mod shared this week and that was fantastic to see - you can check out Xan’s video here. It’s very cool if you want to just play around with the building system.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
As always if you have any feedback, questions or comments please feel free to contact us at any of our social portals: Facebook, Twitter and our very own Forums.
Cheers,