Aetherius is a voxel based game experiment being written in Java with LWJGL. It provides a procedural universe that runs infinitely in every direction across infinite worlds, with thousands of materials. All the non-procedural content is made with a suite of software that ships as part of the game. Aside from the pre-baked content and the modder, the game also procedurally generates content from mixing and matching an abundance of components that the player has the ability to add to or remove from. This content includes NPCs, Quests, Machinery and Materials. Aetherius is a true sandbox. The player can toggle every single aspect of vanilla gameplay, and construct their own game rules to suit themselves. It is fast approaching a viable alpha test phase.
This video shows the new materials added to Aetherius this week, and the first iteration of iventory management. On the left you have the hotbar, currently with 7 entries. This will be the default, but will be upgradeable to 14. When you pick up items, they will first fill your hotbar, before starting on the inventory.
In the centre is your main inventory. Starting with 32 spaces, and upgradeable to much larger sizes. We're toying with the concept of inventories as equipment. The centre pane is scrollable when there are more entries than fit in the space provided. Alternatively, you can zoom it to fit more entries in the area.
Hovering the mouse over any item in your inventory will populate the reference panel on the right. This tells you everything there is to know about the item. Long entries will auto scroll after a few seconds.
You can manually modify the layout of your hotbar, and have items in any slot. The inventory on the other hand will fill from the top left onwards. This is to minimise "losing" items if they were below the scroll edge (that is, they're still there - you just forget about them). Auto sorting the inventory will also provide a layer of familiarity when quickly viewing it.
Also shown in the video, is a debug night time toggle. When I hold down the Z-key, the lighting and ambient sound switch immediately to night time mode. We're extremely proud of the frogs and crickets heard at night time. :-)
Of course in natural gameplay, night time will come on gradually over time.
At the moment, the sound effects for digging and walking on different materials are all the same. We're working on this and will have more diverse sounds by the time Aetherius ships.