The first video of the new release
Hi all, as you may be well aware by now, tomorrow is going to be next-update/patch/release-day! It's going to end of a long period of relatively uninteresting work and long waits; both me and you, readers, deserve the quick and fun stuff for some time now :). Anyway, here's a video by Deadpepper5 (to whom I sent a prerelease), who shows off some new stuff. The most visual new stuff for players is the new lighting, visible at 11:40:
A thing Deadpepper correctly notices is that the game is much slower than we're used to. I noticed this too right after I sent the prerelease, and did some effort to optimize Glux (the graphics engine) a bit. And believe it or not, this was super-succesful! It turned out I had to move exactly one line of code to a smarter place (calculate the colors only once instead of every frame), and the game now runs faster than ever. Woohoo!
Sweaty game development
A thrilling adventure last week, at least for me, was when I tried to compile the Olvand scripts into a standalone game. I had done this thousands of times with the old SDL-game, but I quickly discovered things were very different for my new OpenGL approach. My compilation tools gave all kinds of errors I'd had never seen before, and I had literally no idea what to do with them. The normal solutions to problems like this is to copypaste the error message to Google, and follow the instructions... but good friend Google didn't know what to do with the error either. A terrible feeling of anxiety came over me: apparently, nobody had ever tried to compile this specific code library with this specific tool. Uh oh :(. Hours and hours of heated Googling followed, with trembling hands; did this really mean months and months of work on the new graphics engine were down the drain? Fortunately, after some time, with some hints on old message boards here and there, I managed to get some errors out of the way... only to see them replaced with new errors. At some point the error messages dissappeared and the game simply froze. What now? Fortunately, finally I found someone on the internet describing the same freezing problem, and how to fix it (copying some dlls), and then, suddenly, I heard the Olvand main music play. Nothing ever sounded so beautiful :).
The changelog
Oh right, and of course, the changelog:
ADDED The possibility to demolish houses
ADDED The server now sends 'I quit' to clients when it quits
ADDED An icon to the game window
ADDED A brand new lighting system
ADDED The recipe for the shovel now also works upside down
ADDED There now are tooltips in all inventories
ADDED You can now also use dark softstones to build roads
CHANGED The whole game now uses OpenGL for graphics, which adds lots of new possibilities
CHANGED The achievement 'The fool wanders, the wise man travels' is now called 'There and back again'
CHANGED The game window is now 8 pixels wider
CHANGED If you move an item from one inventory to another, you automatically switch back to the source inventory once you release the mouse button
CHANGED Temporarily turned off timelapses and fullscreen
CHANGED Scrolling the mousewheel no longer selects a 'main' slot in the gun
FIXED Roof color is now stored correctly by the server
FIXED The buttons corresponding to the items in the drawer in you house are now positioned correctly
FIXED Putting stuff in chests or on construction sites no longer makes other people's games crash
FIXED The game no longer crashes when you wear undyed clothes on a scooter
FIXED The bird sounds now stop when you stop playing
FIXED The game no longer crashes for all overworld players if another player underground mines Lieron
FIXED You only get a 'Good citizen' achievement when you actually join a town
FIXED You can no longer build roads on top of roads
FIXED You now ALWAYS get a colored results if dye clothes
FIXED The game no longer forgets to check the achievements for crafting stuff sometimes
If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].
I can´t wait for the update
oh my god... it looks so familiarly similar to Fantasy Online... it brings back memories.
I'd never heard of Fantasy Online, but you're right! I see the similarities too. There are a lot of differences as well, though.
Woo update day :}
Do the people who had access to the previous release get this one too? or is it a different batch of players?
Everyone who already had access to the game keeps that access, and gets all future updates as well. In fact, 'older' testers are encouraged to join in again :).
Thanks for telling me, I'll see you in Olvand!
Gotta say, I really look forward playing your game, your work looks so promissing!
Contragulations, once again,
Thanks man!