PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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bloodmoth13 said:
I thought of adding water as a property instead of a block so that change is pretty exciting. Hope it all goes well putting that together, i cant imagine that water is ever an easy mechanic to add, especially in a voxel game.

If your taking a look at meshes at the moment, any chance to make dirt mesh well with blocks? there is always that goofy dip at the end where they meet, i can guess why its done that way (less polygons for that spare side that might never be seen?) but it has always been something that irked me.

If im going to push even further with dirt block meshes, could the minimum size for a dirt block be a little bigger? sometimes they get so small you can barely see them but they still get in the way of things like block placement or pathing.
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No time for playing in the dirt for a20.

 
faatal said:
No time for playing in the dirt for a20.
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Shovels are getting removed. Confirmed for A20. 😛

But seriously though, will this change to watch physics affect POI's that have water in them already, like water towers and the water treatment plant POI? I assume nothing drastic, but just curious.

 
Blake_ said:
Well, I think that making water chunk-based won't really be a problem for water towers. It's just a tiny area. A "tiny chunk" if you will. 

Visual fidelity can be a problem........ or not, if you correctly use shaders/particles to hide the rendering slices. Honestly, it takes quite a bit of time to get it right, but in the end it pays off both in realism and performance.
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Water is still stored in the chunks we already have. It will just not be as blocks.

mr.devolver said:
Water overhaul will most likely consume the whole development time they have until the next Alpha release, I wouldn't expect any major changes besides that.
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Vehicle tinting and mods have already been worked on and should be in a20. Three of the mods need code support, but it is not major work.

MechanicalLens said:
Shovels are getting removed. Confirmed for A20. 😛

But seriously though, will this change to watch physics affect POI's that have water in them already, like water towers and the water treatment plant POI? I assume nothing drastic, but just curious.
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Not sure, but currently water blocks just convert to the new water data format.

 
faatal said:
Water is still stored in the chunks we already have. It will just not be as blocks.
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I see. You make it sound so easy. 

Faatal: Ey guys, A20 update. Imma create a launch propulsion interface system for this tomato plant using only notepad and a snickers bar.

Forums: #like#like#like#thanks#thanks#poop#knucklerub#like

 
faatal said:
A20 NEWS!!!!!!!  ;)

Started on the water overhaul this week. I'm working on the water chunk data and another programmer will be doing simulation/mesh changes.

My plan is water will not be a block, but additional chunk data, which is a pretty big change. It makes more sense, since any block could have water in it while still being whatever block it is.
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Utterly fantastic!  We've been waiting for a decent overhaul since the water physics were crippled to prevent base flooding exploits, speaking of which...

Are you aiming for volumetric water, in the sense that I can carve a canal from a lake at the top of a hill and drain some of the water into a moat around my base?

 
@faatal a question about water, is it going to flow?

say you dig a hole and you make a trench to a pond with the water travel and fill up that hole while lowering the water level in the pond?

just curious to see what you guys are aiming to do, even tho the water development just started

 
@faatal Regarding water, can you share the list of requirements and/or desired behaviors that you will be trying to meet?

I'm genuinely curious, and also can't resist the upcoming... wait for it... WATERGATE!  Haha, history has come full circle!

faatal.jpg

 
@Fatal  Will this water update pave the way for boats and how does this affect the game, as in what is the benefit of doing it as a mesh vs block?  Will the CM menu still have water as placeable?

 
The Gronk said:
Utterly fantastic!  We've been waiting for a decent overhaul since the water physics were crippled to prevent base flooding exploits, speaking of which...

Are you aiming for volumetric water, in the sense that I can carve a canal from a lake at the top of a hill and drain some of the water into a moat around my base?
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We are aiming for performant water that does not have holes in it. Beyond that, it will depend on how slow the simulations run and how much time we have.

Spectral Force said:
@Fatal  Will this water update pave the way for boats and how does this affect the game, as in what is the benefit of doing it as a mesh vs block?  Will the CM menu still
have water as placeable?
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Boats could be done at any time if we wanted to, with old or new water.

Water is still block based, but it is not a block. Meaning it is the size of a block and shares the space of a block, but any block could have water in it.

There may still be water block(s) for placement or other reasons, but when placed it would become water data.

 
faatal said:
No, since our current list is subject to change. Top goal is water that does not suck.
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1.How hard are you finding the implementation of the new water design in terms of code?

2.Does the Unity framework help at all or is it a system that needs to be made entirely from scratch ?

3.I don't recall seing much on the subject. Is it lighter on the CPU than the current one?

 
faatal said:
Meaning it is the size of a block and shares the space of a block, but any block could have water in it.
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Since blocks and water can share space, I wonder whether the POI design guys are cooking up  any submerged dungeons for us.

A submerged ship off the coast of Arizona would be so immersive. ;)

 
faatal said:
No, since our current list is subject to change. Top goal is water that does not suck.
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Can we hope that water will work like in Minecraft, being distributed between blocks when the amount of water in one of the blocks decreases?
Will water be able to flow from one water area to another, located below the level?
I dream a lot ... probably 😃

 
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Orsey said:
Can we hope that water will work like in Minecraft, being distributed between blocks when the amount of water in one of the blocks decreases?
Will water be able to flow from one water area to another, located below the level?
I dream a lot ... probably 😃
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I just hope its better then it is now! Becauses its KAKA!

 
Orsey said:
Can we hope that water will work like in Minecraft, being distributed between blocks when the amount of water in one of the blocks decreases?
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We can always hope, but I think that would be difficult, computationally, unless we want the infinite water trick that Minecraft has. Minecraft only has two water types, source block and flowing block (with a 'direction' tag on the flowing blocks). It doesn't really redistribute the remaining water when you remove a block (from a pond let's say), it just calculates whether there ought to be a flowing block where you took the water or whether it should create a new source block (the infinite water trick). A single source block will power a waterfall forever; it never drains out. And you can't take water from a flowing block (to fill a bucket).

Trying to calculate 120 glass jars' worth of water out of a lake and then redistributing the water in the entire lake would be...a challenge, even if the entire lake was contained in loaded chunks. If they greatly simplify it by having, say, only 10 possible water levels in a block, the visual of seeing the pond drop down visibly after X jars/buckets have been removed would result in much wailing and gnashing of teeth in these forums.

I'm no expert so grain of salt and all that, but I think of how computationally expensive it is to calculate SI (i.e. lag you see when a medium or large building is collapsing) and then think about a 4,000 block lake of water and needing to compute new water levels when the player takes a stack of murky water jars from it. Or builds a trench leading out of it in an attempt to drain it into a moat around his base. Maybe they'll find a neat shortcut for all of that which works well.

 
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