Merry Christmas to you all. This has been quite a turbulent year. Sometimes I was afraid that I would have to play Fallout in the real world. This has also affected the direction of Synthetic World's development. I am currently working on a hard survival game mode that is as close to Bush Craft (surviving in the forest) as possible. I have watched quite a few videos and have been in the forest myself. And don't worry the normal game mode remains. Hard Survival Features:

• Simulation of poisoning and diseases. Injuries do not heal immediately, but have to be bandaged. If they are not bandaged the player bleeds to death. Balanced diet is necessary to keep the body at 100%.
• Campfires consume wood. They must first be lit with embers.
  
• Sleeping is necessary. To sleep well you need a shelter. There are several available for this purpose
  
• Camps can be built piece by piece in one place. To do this, the player must collect wood and leaves.
  
  
  
  
• Fruits, vines grow on the trees and can be harvested by the player. This is how the player gets ropes
  
• Traps for animals
  
• Revised fire simulation
• Food decays
• Food can be cooked by placing it near a fire. Cooking takes time
• New tools that can be made: Axe, spear, ... :
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• These tools will be getting older when you use them. They have to be repaired or replaced.

But I also added other improvements:

• Less rendering commands: To render the same scene the engine now needs 3 times less commands. This makes the rendering much faster.
• Post processing effects (Flare, Bloom)
• Custom Shader Support
• Improved Mesh LOD
• Improved Mod Support. I want to support C# as an additional plugin language because many other engines do. Also, Lua bugs me because it doesn't have runtime type checking.

Artificial Intelligence:

• Economic simulation: I have developed a complex economic simulation for the game (similar to city simulator) that runs in the background.
• Planning algorithm: I have also developed a planning algorithm that is powerful enough to build cities/states that are economically plausible in this economic simulation.
• I am currently improving the performance of the planning algorithm with the help of neural networks. Then it will be put into the game.

I am currently still testing the features to be able to release a bug-free version. And some more experiments ...

[ 2022-12-25 21:51:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello, I fixed some small bugs:

• Damage of cross bow is increased
• Added impact impulse when object is hit by cross bow bolt
• Sheeps try to avoid water
• Enemies stop moving when dead
• Enemy may no hurt sound, when dead

[ 2021-04-07 19:34:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy Easter, I have uploaded a new version of my game. This time included are many bug fixes that previously crashed the game.

New features

• New Tree Textures + Higher Resolution
• Better Tree Rendering
• New Landscape Renderer
• Improvements regarding the cross bow
• Better Grass Texture
• Better Grass Rendering
• Updated "Start World"

Screenshots

The new forest. We fixed the bug of the "flying trees" (thanks to V.).
In the back you can the new forest with a building.
This is how the forest looks like in a flat landscape.

Upcoming Features

• Completely new rendering engine that supports Vulkan, OpenGL ES, DirectX 12, OpenGL and Metal.
• Ambient Occlusion + Procedural Materials (when this is done, I will rework all 3D models)
• Spherical Harmonics for Light Probes
• Radiosity (2 variants)
• AI: In a very small level 2 AIs could make war with each other (attack cities, destroy them, found settlements). That it works on a large scale will be a challenge.
• Improved memory management for framebuffers (will make Screen Space Reflections possible)

In the next month I will also tune the AI so that it can work on bigger landscapes.

[ 2021-04-05 18:56:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Dear friends of Synthetic World, I wish you all a happy and blessed holiday season. In view of the corona pandemic, I hope you are all healthy. An eventful year lies behind us: In the Synthetic World new cities were created and a new game mode was introduced in which you have to free the world from robots. I have also laid the foundations for many other innovations. For example, next year all 3D models will be revised. I want to bring more exciting buildings, which are waiting to be discovered, into the landscape. Likewise, in the new year there will be the new crossbow, which of course you can make again yourself. I have also made progress in AI, the algorithm that brings cities to life is now designed. The volcano renderer is also 50% finished. It is already working in low end mode. This will further increase the rendering speed. And then as a special experiment I started with a VR port. I can't wait myself to stand in the landscape in "real" someday. Also I have now got another support, for my project. She will take care that the hunting and nature will be even more realistic. In the coming weeks there will be a new release. I am currently in the process of eliminating all bugs. Well then, good health to all of you, best wishes and thanks for your support! Michael
Christmas vector created by freepik - www.freepik.com

[ 2020-12-24 21:12:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update finally brings cities, settlements and buildings. The individual settlements are connected with roads. The buildings contain beds, tables, chairs, lamps and zombies. Updates:

• Automatically generated cities (big city, small city, single settlement)
• New Building Prefab system that allows you to create buildings in the 3D editor, which can then be used by the world generator.
• New Building Editor
• Better roads
• "EvalAI" mode where robots dominate the landscape. They can be defeated by destroying the computers in the fortresses.
• Street crossings
• Sleeping bag
• Many new furniture (stove, cupboards, lamps, bathtub, beds)
• Land generation
• Better HUD that displays nearby enemies
• Bugfixes

Actually I wanted to add a quest system, but currently I didn't want to do that because I might have created new bugs. Will be in the next update.

[ 2020-09-15 18:55:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Robots have invaded the landscape. They monitor every square inch with their surveillance drones.
Don't get caught, or you'll have their fighter units on you.

And don't try to attack their strongholds where the control computers are.
They are protected by dangerous self firing devices.
So keep your eye on the sky! ----------- As you can see, I've devised a new spawn system. Instead of just randomly appearing monsters, this only happens when you get caught by a threat. This also applies to zombies and skeletons (the control computers have transformed people with a virus and use them as soldiers). New Features: - Better effects (for the laser of the Battle Drone) - New monsters: surveillance drone, observation drone, automatic cannon, combat drone, control computer - Better castles - 3D models that are individually animated. - Bug fixes during level generation. - Improved audio system I will upload the new version soon. There are still some bugs. The zombies do not want to guard the castles!

[ 2020-06-21 19:22:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello guys, that took a little bit longer than expected. I uploaded a new version to Steam. The player and other entities can now start to burn and can also die of burn wounds. Then I updated the dynamite. The resulting damage on the voxel does now look much better. And as I also like big explosions I added the "Mega Explosive" entity. You need a 3D Printer, Coal, Petrolum and Sulfur. Then you can craft it. Or you can use the cheat (press F2 to go to the console): addItem('Voxel_MegaExplosive', 10) Here is a screenshot:
Just for fun, I used multiple explosives to make a hole in the ground. Next time I will update the spawn system and add new monsters!

[ 2020-06-02 18:55:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

So todays update is all about fire: - Placed entities like the construction set can now burn. - The new trees can burn - The muzzle flash on the weapons is repaired. - Now the fire emits light when it burns:
Additionally the trees now drop seeds and can grow! It is in the unstable branch!

[ 2020-05-17 07:48:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

I uploaded a small bug fix: - Rendering of particle effects is restored - Drag and Drop is now working again

[ 2020-05-10 19:29:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

I uploaded a small patch:

• The wood blocks are now floating on the water.
• The pregenerated Start_World is now updated to the latest version of the world generator
• Engine Logging: If you have an AMD graphics card you might perhaps know that the shadow map does not look "very nice". I am trying to find this bug, so I added logging to the 3D engine.

[ 2020-05-07 07:42:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey guys, I increased the speed of the 3D engine. Now a much more detailed landscape is possible:

I also updated the world generator:
Just for fun I added an ocean:
And I connected all caves with each other! The world generation speed is now 5 times faster! Note that in order to see the higher view range you need to increase the "View Distance" in the game settings. Along with this I added a lot of bug fixes regarding the trees, player movement, GUI, plants, textures and so on. The new version is in the unstable branch.

[ 2020-05-05 21:16:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello and welcome back, before we start with the development update, I want to wish you all a good health. These are hard times during the Coronavirus crisis. I hope we all get better soon.

Assets

In the last weeks I had the flu, so I had a lot of time to create new assets: New houses for the city generator: Till now I used random generated houses. This looked not very good, so I started to make hand made buildings. Along with the exterior, all these buildings have furniture and waypoints for the NPCs







Forests: I created 5 new tree types and made the forests more dense. This is possible because of the new tree rendering system.

I created over hundred new models that can be used in the game. I created furniture for the kitchen, food, city elements, windows, doors. Just for fun I also created adventure game assets.

I also updated the engine:

The low end rendering engine is now a high performance forward rendering system, with bump mapping, radiosity and so on. Now I only need to create lightmaps during runtime and then I can use the new renderer. This will greatly improve the performance.
Faster shadow rendering: I created a new shadow rendering system:
Improved tree rendering: I found some bugs in the renderer that prevent the correct rendering of the trees.
Far Rendering: The quality of the far rendering is also improved. I found some bugs in the lod system. LOD rendering for trees: Trees are now automatically rendered to textures when they are far away. Then only the textures are displayed. World generation: I changed the world generator to create more flat terrain. This is necessary so that there is more space to place buildings.

The editor was also improved:

Instanced Meshes (voxel and normal): This can be used to speed up the creation of maps for the game. A lot of bug fixes and improved usability. The editor now can use to created games. And the biggest thing: I have finally found a solution to the city generator problem. I think it is pretty cool. But I do not want to tease it now :-) When I am finished with bug fixing I will upload a new version!

[ 2020-04-03 09:25:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Yes! The first village generated by the AI!
This is only a debug view. When it is finished these buildings will actually be placed in the landscape! We will improve the performance in the next weeks so that we can create bigger cities. And we are testing other AI algorithms.

[ 2020-01-20 21:38:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey, I just uploaded a new version to the unstable build with the new trees. You need to create a new map with the generator to see them (so do not use the predefined map with the seed 0). Be aware: This is only a testing release. It could be that a map create with this version can't be loaded in a later version.

[ 2020-01-12 21:58:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now most of the visual bugs in the trees are resolved:

I will upload an unstable release as soon as possible. And I implemented several AI algorithms that will drive the city generation: - A* Planning - Alpha-Beta Adversary Search - Monte Carlo Tree Search Except for the first one these algorithms are normally used in Chess AI / Go. I am excited to see how they work out. The first tests will be on a small landscape of several hundred meters.

[ 2020-01-10 22:01:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

First screenshot of the new trees in the game!

There is still much to do. The trees currently create holes in the ground and some trees do not have leafs.

[ 2020-01-05 21:46:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

The new trees are now connected to the world generator. So exited to see them in the world! When they are cut down they will collapse to the ground and fall into pieces.

[ 2020-01-02 20:13:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

The basic castle generator is now working. Every castle has it's own dungeon.
Happy new year! The AI language compiler (C to PDDL) is finished and the shadow rendering for the low end render system makes progress.

[ 2019-12-31 21:54:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

I threw away a lot of dependency in order to port the game to other platforms like android, ps4, ... Now only Bullet, OpenGL, SDL2 and a C++ compiler is needed to compile the game.

[ 2019-12-28 21:37:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

So I finally found the place where the castle generator puts the castles! And added an Uber Shader to the rendering system!
The castle still needs a little bit calibration :-) Merry Christmas (it is a bit late, I know :-) )!

[ 2019-12-26 08:57:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Stairs are now in dungeons. They are now fully walkable. I also activated the castle generator. Unfortunately I do not find the generated castles in the word :-).

[ 2019-12-23 20:31:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

I enabled the new grass. Another new version is already uploaded!

[ 2019-12-22 19:27:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

For the first time we take part in the winter sale. So if you are interested in our game you can buy it now.
And I uploaded a new version. Here is the change log: Faster low end renderer for older computers (faster model rendering):
Much faster renderer overall. Performance rarely drops below 30 fps. Complete new cave generator. They are now much more playable

Cavern generator at the bottom of the world. Better resource distribution New plants (Leaf pad, sugar cane, hanging vine) Better Plant Generator in the 3D Editor New Plant LOD in the 3D Editor Plugin interface is complete (tested it with 2 little games) Lua and Java can be used as scripting languages Android GUI finished New font in the GUI Lava Generator Bug fixes Other things we did that are not yet in the game: Speech synthesizer, Talk system Painted new grass (lots of different type) Created new trees


Painting on the ground: This means the engine can change the height of the landscape in a similar fashion how it is done in 3D landscape editors. This is used to make the boundary of a building fitting to the environment New tree system is finished but not active in the world generator. This version will be the last with the old trees system. Car lanes on street: As you might know if you followed the development, I added streets in the game which the engine can place. Now I added car lanes to the segments.
Traffic lights, traffic lights logic Navigation network for cars and NPC Reflections (via Cube Mapping and Screen Based Reflection) Streets are now connected
NPCs can have jobs: For example they can work in this warehouse
Daily routine adapts to job and home. NPCs can have a home Erosion system for the world generator: I read a paper about artificial erosion, so I implemented it. Currently, I am thinking about how to integrate it in the world generator, because the speed is not fast enough. Cell based city simulation system (will be used in the city generator): This system can simulate ware transport in a city and so measure if the city is functional. Logic based reasoning system for the city generator Countries AI controlled ware transport system AI language nearly finished NPC simulation in the foreign landscape: This also took very long. I can now walk with an NPC out of the simulated landscape and it still works. Future: The cities work when someone places the buildings. So the next step is to finish the AI which does this. And of course I want to integrate the new plants.

[ 2019-12-21 12:25:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

We had here a lot of discussions if it is ok to replace stolen keys. What are you thinking? Is it unfair towards the gamers which bought the game on Steam? My main argument was that the gamers who bought stolen keys did knew it. On the other side I never received any money and if I would need the earnings to finance my company I would be bankrupt now (this is not the case as I also create non gaming products).

[ 2019-12-04 10:23:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

A lot of keys of this game were stolen. I suppose this happens after the shutdown from IndieGameStand. I now disabled all non-redeemed keys. There were also a number of keys which I never put for sale. They were completely disabled. If you bought an illegal key from a reseller and you cannot play the game now, just contact me personally I will give you a valid key. You can send me a friend request and then a message via Steam. Or you can simply send me an e-mail to: info@staudsoft.com Please be aware that it can take up to 24h until you get a new key. So do not worry! [Update]: I only have a limited number of keys left. And as Steam does not want to give me more as my last keys have been stolen, this is fixed.

[ 2019-12-03 11:11:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

We did a lot of bug fixing and added new features to the engine. Here is an overview of our achievements of the last two months: Train physic The train physic is now working. We had some problems with trains which did not behave correctly when a collision occured, but this is now solved. Car physic Car physic is completely working and we already have one test car which can drive remotely controlled through the landscape. That the player can enter the car and control it from within is the next step. For this we made a model of a basic 3D car which we will use in the game. Particle System The particle system got an update. There is no rain under water any more and we have now particles in the water.
More stuff will follow! Better and more stable dungeons There was a bug in the dungeons which create holes in the world. This is now corrected. AI Planner We finally have a working planner, which is really cool, because we can now give our NPC goals (for example: buy item xy) and it will automatically create a plan and execute it. We will also use this system in the quest generation system. Navigation System There were a lot of bugs in the navigation system. This is now corrected. We also improved it, so that NPC's can evade each other, that it can control cars and other complex vehicles like air planes. Skeleton Yes, the skeleton is finished and it shoots arrows. And it really looks scary.
Plugin System The plugin system is also massively improved. It is now even possible to make total conversions. Plant Rendering We can now place plants and objects on every surface of the game. As an example we added small plants when dirt appears.
3D Editor - Plant Generation We create a custom plant system which allows us to model plants down each leave and the use them in the game. Other Stuff So these were the features which you can see in the next release. Here are other stuff which is currently invisible: - Better entrances for the caves (we created a complete castle set which we will use to create castles in the landscape). - New tree system is implemented. We only need to create models - Save / Load of AI Memory is working - Improved Dungeon Designing System: We can now create complex levels which can be included in the game - Improved Animation System - Tested Reinforcement Learning for Game AI - Memory Compression was successfully tested. This could reduce the memory consumption by the factor 10, which will also improve the game speed. - Vulkan Support: 2D Rendering is working. - Android Conversion is also started. - Object Instancing is fully working in the game and editor: Faster Rendering! City Generation: - Lame AI: This is a simple AI which can deliver goods from one building to another - Street Generation and street connections are working - City Designer: This is a special game mode which currently allows the creation of streets and buildings via one click. In this way big cities can be created by hand - Military AI: This is a simple AI which can control NPC's when they are in a war - Metaballs: The editor now supports meta balls which we will use in the creation of NPC's What is next? The next step is to complete the plugin system and do again bug fixing regarding the city generation. Our goal is to create a stable community. And then there is still the problem with the driving cars. What should happen when one car leaves the simulated area or even worse when the player leaves the area within a car. Then I want to add a locomotive which can push or pull other waggons. When all bugs are fixed I will upload a new version.

[ 2019-07-03 22:53:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

The connection of a carriage is now working, the collision too and most of the new icons are in the game! I am currently working on some new entities (mostly traps) which I will put soon online.

[ 2019-04-17 05:33:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added a new savanna tree. Additionally there is now different grass / vegetation in the tundra, tropics, ... There are also new paintings in the current unstable release!
And finally we added the first test version of rails / trains to the game. The minecart is the first example. Next we will add a small locomotive and wagons!

[ 2019-04-02 08:53:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey, unfortunately I was sick, so I could not do so much. But I added a laser sensor and a synthesizer. Both will be updated in further version. Especially I plan to add more sounds to the synthesizer. The new version is in the unstable branch.

[ 2019-03-19 21:07:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Sand can now fall if you remove blocks under it. But be aware that you can die if you are buried under it. New version is in the unstable branch.

[ 2019-03-07 19:29:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

I added lava and made some save/load bug fixes. You need to generate a new world to see the lava at the bottom of the map. The new release is in the unstable branch. And the lava flows!

[ 2019-03-04 09:38:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

There is a new unstable release with a new oven, a pressure plate and a top-down door. All this was completely implemented in the in game programming language. I could improve the AI system (not in the game yet). What originally took 1 hour takes now 2 ms to compute. But I will improve it further.

[ 2019-02-25 20:02:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

I uploaded a new version to the unstable branch. Most of the c++ libraries which are used by the game are updated:

• As physic engine we now use bullet 2.86.7 (I wanted to update to bullet 2.88 but it crashed)
• We now use SDL 2.0.9 (this means better hardware support)
• We use the newest version of FreeImage, FreeType, Ogg, OpenAL
• The game does not come with a Java Virtual Machine any more as we dumped java as modding language.
• There is no loader any more. The game is now completely 64bit (but I can change this if anyone is using 32bit windows. But of course you should not use Windows XP as it is a security risk. Use Linux Mint instead if you have an old computer. This game likes wine!)

We also changed the config file. So your game settings (not your levels, of course) will be reseted once you start the game. But the biggest change is that this version was completely made with Linux and this means better compiler support, faster build time and a faster game! We also did updates to the gameplay:

• Tools will degrade when used
• Damageable construction sets, chairs and so on
• Performance improvements in the rendering system
• Better Lua Support for Modding (it is now possible for a modder to change the source code of the game while it is running)
• Improvements regarding the rails (but I still need to test these)
• Special GUIs for entities (we think here about chests which can be lock picked and other stuff)
• Bug fixes regarding stability

And regarding AI we added a lot of features which you can not see at the moment as the AI is not activated:

• Streets can now be created and placed into the world by the AI
• Buildings are now generated with complete furniture (even during gameplay, so the AI can place a building and you can see how it is build).
• The navigation system for the NPCs is working
• Implemented management of non-active NPCs
• Basic economy of the states is implemented, including good transport.
• NPC AI / game interface is implemented

NPC AI Regarding the AI we are currently working on the system which can automatically control the NPCs. It can already solve simple problems (like transport of wares via airplanes). The next step is to be able to solve more complex problems, like going to a store, buy things, craft something and then use it. When this works every NPC will be able to create complex plans in order to achieve its goals. State AI / War AI We are also working on using Deep Learning and Neural Networks to improve the overall performance of the system. This will be especially useful when several states in the virtual world will fight wars. The next steps Apart from the AI I am also working on a new memory compression method. It could compress the voxel data by a factor of 100 which would be quite impressive. But I do not know if the compression / uncompression takes to much CPU power. We will see... And I will also make the dialog system for the NPCs. And just for testing I will let them run through the map :-) Have fun!

[ 2019-02-01 22:55:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello guys, there is a new bug fix release in the unstable channel. It will correct the cloud rendering and some bugs with the weapons.

[ 2019-01-07 08:54:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Merry Christmas! I upload a new release to the unstable branch. It contains bug fixes regarding the multiplayer, weather, snow, water rendering, ... And I am finished with my development plan. As this is a unstable release I kept the log activated which I find a little bit annoying after I tested it. I will upload a new release with disabled log in the next week.

[ 2018-12-24 22:09:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Planning the future development

I thought in the last weeks about why the project is not already finished and I came to the conclusion that I need to plan the development better. My goal is now till christmas to create a complete plan of all data structures and functions which need to be implemented in order for the NPC's and cities to be able to work. After this I will code them. That also means that I will be able to better tell when one feature is implemented. I already made blueprints for the NPC behavior, automatic quest generation, car navigation, car driving, transportation of goods, traders, teachers and so on. Currently I am working on the logic of the warehouse.

Environmental Effects

And I finally fixed the rain and snow effect. And improved the water and fog renderer.

[ 2018-12-09 20:54:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added to the lua system a just-in-time compiler. So the scripts will be executed much faster. Currently working on speeding up path finding and general AI stuff with mathematics. If it works the zombies will attack you more efficiently! And just for fun I implemented a water simulation. Still need to do the tesselation shader for this to work...

[ 2018-11-29 20:56:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Implemented runtime code exchange via Lua. So I can now change the code of the game while playing the game. Made a new grenade as an example (will be in the next version).

[ 2018-11-19 22:30:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Multiplayer is debugged and hunger is implemented. Also finished Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and started with Screen Space Reflection. When hunger is debugged I will upload a new version.

[ 2018-11-14 20:52:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

The player now needs to consume food in order to be abled to perform actions in the world. And I am using the same tests which were used to find the load / save bug to make the multiplayer mode stable.

[ 2018-11-07 22:27:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

So I just uploaded a new bug fix which will resolve the load and save bug. We did 400 hours of intensive playtesting and the last 200 hours were without a crash. I also disabled asynchrone saving because this was the reason for the bug. The water for example kept to be simulated while the map was saved to the disk and this corrupted the maps. If you have a corrupted map file just write me when you want that I repair it. Unfortunately the game cannot do this automatically. I also added a glitch prevention system which will prevent you from falling through the ground. If there are problems with it please report this. Along with this a lot of bugs in the monsters, items, hud and the rendering system where resolved. Puh, the last days where very stressful. I hope the new version is ok. Have fun!

[ 2018-11-02 21:17:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Found a trace of the load and save bug. There seems to be an error in the synchronisation of the threads / processors. Will make more tests in the next week in order to find a bug fix. And by the way found 50 more bugs and corrected them.

[ 2018-10-28 22:07:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added more tests to the stress test: All entities are tested, fighting and weapons too (including respawning) I have a question for you guys who had problems saving and loading the world: Did you add electronics (LED, Wires) to the world? Because I found there a bug regarding save / load.

[ 2018-10-25 20:35:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

As some of you had problems with the load and saving of worlds I started now a stress test. This means that I let the game load and save worlds thousands of times automatically. And then we will see if we can find the bugs... And there are also some bugs which I will correct: - The glass is not rendered correctly - Falling through the ground - And I will look into the problem of holes in the landscape

[ 2018-10-21 19:00:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Uploaded a new release which resolves the HDR bug. And the game now works on ATI/AMD graphics cards. Sadly I had to disable asynchrone texture loading when such a graphics card is detected.

[ 2018-10-18 19:16:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey, I uploaded a new version! And it is not an unstable release any more. Here is a partial change log: - Anti-Aliasing:
- Along with Anti-Aliasing comes a complete new post processing effect pipeline. - Detail Textures - High Resolution Textures (Completely new ones):
- Smooth Texture Blending in the Landscape:
- Lot's of bug fixes - And the new far landscape is now working correctly. You need to create a new map in order to use it. - Birch Tree - Fixed Coral Reef bugs. - Removed most lags (under Linux, under Windows there are still some, will investigate this!) Important: I use now textures which are up to 16384x8192 pixels. If your graphics card cannot handle this it is usually detected. Else you can change it via the "World Texture Resolution" under "Graphics" in the settings menu. Hint: This is a windows only released as I have broken the Linux and MacOS compile pipeline. I will repair this. The release is uploaded to all branches As always backup the worlds before you try out a new release.

[ 2018-10-16 19:35:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

The online building is working. That means that NPC's can build buildings during gameplay (for testing proposes the barack was built into the air!): The start:
In the middle:
Only the roof and the furniture is missing (still need to implement this):
C Mod Interface: We also exposed all Lua Plugin functions via a C interface. So it is possible to make plugins via C++. Smooth Far Landscape Renderer: I also improved the far landscape renderer to support smooth surfaces and plants and trees. Here is a non (!) voxel example of a landscape:

Now I only need to finish the new trees so that they can be send to the rendering system. Support for High Resolution Textures on Intel Graphics Cards: A low resolution texture is loaded if now hardware support is detected. But it still looks good because of the detail map! Archive Support: That was only some fun thing. I found a good library which can read zip/7zip files. Now I can put all game files into one archive. And I also changed the grass rendering so that small dirt blocks are not visible any more.

[ 2018-10-04 10:34:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Here are 2 screenshot of high resolution textures+detail textures. At the highest resolution we have 1 Texel per 0,4 mm.
Look on the ground to see the detail texture:

[ 2018-09-26 08:26:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Improved the texture resolution by the factor 4 (now 1024x1024). With detail textures the surface are now so sharp so that the single texels are not visible.

[ 2018-09-24 20:22:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Puh! My day: Start the game, go to the room with the ai test monkeys, push one monkey into the attack range of the other one, watch the game crash :-( #gamedevelopment #voxels From a technically view point I am testing the range attack and the destruction of entities (the normal AI planning algorithms do not seem to support the destruction of objects).

[ 2018-09-22 19:34:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today I connected the gui system to the entity editor. The gui can now be designed graphically. And the entity editor is connected to the lua interface. So the mod support makes progress. And I improved the speed of the city AI. In the test field the AI can now collect resources, built buildings and fight with sticks (ranges attacks will come soon).
This is an image of the test field (not the real game, do not worry). As I was in a funny mood I used apes instead of humans. The red text indicates that the monkey "thought". The monkey in front collects resources, the barracks where build by the monkey in the background. When the AI works the buildings will be created in the voxel world (and of course the humans (not monkeys) will then collect resources, build cities, ...) And of course I also did a lot of other stuff. All lags are removed and the engine is 3 times faster (and the loading time of a map is now about 3s if there is no world generation). Then I improved the far landscape, added a antialias shader, created the foundation for volume rendering, screen space ambient occlusion is implemented (but not tested), the level editor can be used to create mods, the far voxel landscape is bug free, .. The next step is to test the AI and then connect it to the voxel world, ...

[ 2018-09-21 20:47:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Found a new profiler which is really good for profiling games: https://github.com/yse/easy_profiler Already found all bugs which produce lags. But I have to add an asynchrone loading mechanism to resolve them. Apart from this I did a lot of stuff: - Support for Detail Textures and Normal Maps - Light sources can have a mask throught which the light goes - Physic Engine: Vehicle (but still need to add car models and player control) - Physic Engine: Soft Body (Rope, Patches, TriMeshes) -> again here I still need to make the code which sends the rope to the GPU - Mod Support: Better Entity System in the Editor (will allow to add entities in the level editor). - Mod Support: Instanced Meshes - Mod Support: Commen Data Format between the Game and the Editor - The "house building" modul makes progress. Will allow the creation of new houses and streets during game play. - Batch geometry buffer for far houses (sounds really fances but is in fact really easy: We pack one city block in one draw call so that it can be rendered faster). - Global Illumination: Connected the Global Illumination Rendering System to the normal engine. Theoretically I could now bake lightmaps. But still need to test it. And AI stuff: -AI language for the city generator is finished. But still needs debugging. So exited to define the rules which will create streets, houses, usw. This sounds so harmless but it nearly broke my brain :-). Hey a part of this software can solve basic school math problems (or could find a problem in an electronic circuit). For the interested I implemented a CHR constraint solver. This is for example used in the control of the cars so that they follow the traffic laws. And I am working on a planning algorithm, which will allow NPC's to have their own goals and follow them. But this is still very theoretical. What's next? This month I plan to add a lot of new features mainly in the engine so that we are on a similar level as Unity, usw. I am thinking here of Screen Space Reflection, Screen Space Ambient Occlussion, Mask effects on the screen, camera to texture, a renderer for the soft body elements and make them accessable via the editor. The second goal is to test the AI language and improve the city generator. Then after this month I will start a big debugging phase, where I will test the new features and make use of them. For example a detail texture could improve the visual quality of the trees, ground, usw.

[ 2018-08-10 20:14:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

New version with massive speed improvements uploaded. Check it out! The terrain is now also smoother! Additional there are a lot of bug fixes. Sadly the far landscape does not work in combination infinite landscape. But this bug will also found soon! And we added a new version to the world generator. There are now more underwater plants and coral reefs.

[ 2018-07-08 19:30:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Yes! I managed to speed up world generation and world changing by a factor of 5. It is now a real joy to explore the landscape. When the conversion of the map files works I will upload a new release. A side effect is that the surface of the landscape is now completely smooth. And I also see now further improvements in the world generation..

[ 2018-06-24 21:08:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Perhaps you saw that I upload a new release: - It contains bug fixes regarding the virtual CPU which make it work - The LCD and the keyboard are now also working - Game Controller Support I added the first game controller support. You cannot do everything yet, especially when you go to the inventory. And I had problems in accessing all game controller buttons. You need to press the "Reset" button in the "Movement" and "Action" configure dialog (because the new default settings are not loaded automatically). Or you can config the game controller by yourself. Regarding the CPU and the LCD, I will write some documentation. It uses a pascal dialect as programming language!

[ 2018-06-07 20:36:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

New Homepage Hey guys, perhaps you live in europe or you know what is going on here: The new data protection ordinance law becomes law this friday (DSGVO). As I had to update the homepage anyway I create a complete new one which contains now a reference of all available game entities. I also updated the presentation, the links, the modding informationl and the gallery. Instead of WordPress I now use a software which I developed for my master thesis in mathematics to create the homepage. Check it out: www.staudsoft.com And regarding the DSGVO: I do not collect any data of you. So I had not much work with the new data protection ordinance law! New Version As demand I uploaded the current development release to the "developer_build" branch. So you need to switch the branch to test it. The reason for this is simple:

• This is not an official build.
• There are still many bugs which need to be resolved
• It could damage your maps! (read below why this is not a problem)

Because of the last point it will NOT use the default map folder. Instead it will create a new one. So you will NOT see your normal maps in the loading window. In order to load them you need to manually copy them from the "maps" folder to the "unstable_maps" folder. Or you can create a new map! So this version is only for you if want to test out my current development version. I plan to update it more often as the release version. Change log:

• Switched from 32bit float to 64bit floating point (this will allow much larger landscapes). It will still work on 32bit systems!
• Smooth fade-in/fade-out of the landscape
• New lighting rendering system (which is much faster and improves the visual appearance)
• New far landscape (You need to generate a new map in order to be able to see this)
• Lots of bug fixes regarding modding support! The youtube tutorials will now work
• CPU, Keyboard, LCD (but they are contain bugs)
• Really cool new dungeons (with dirt, chests, furniture, monster, plants, better layout, new automatically generated rooms ...)
• Improved navigation system of the monsters
• Improved multiplayer mode
• Improved speed of the animation system
• There are traps, new doors, new crafting objects, rail roads ... and so on but the recipes are not implemented yet!
• Improved the visual programming language
• Switch from Java to Lua as scripting language (but still need to test it)
• It should rain!
• And a lot of other stuff!

So you if you are interested you can test the version. Else simply wait for the next release!

[ 2018-05-23 20:31:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

So all main features for the next release are implemented. Next step is to debug the stuff: Debugging: The compile pipeline is updated. Create first windows exefile based on C++11 Debugging: The virtual cpu does not crash any more. The first "Hello World" program was successfully executed. Debugging: The update of the far voxel landscape does not crash any more :-). The only bug which is left creates cracks in the ground :-( Debugging (Lua script integration): New entity successfully created! Release: I plan to make new releases of the development version. For this I will introduce a new Steam branch which will contain these versions. These release will use a different map folder so that your maps are not accidentally damaged by bugs! This was in fact the main reason, why I did not made new releases. I did not want to damage your worlds, because I really changed a lot in the engine.

[ 2018-05-17 17:44:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

I got a new e-book reader. So I read a lot of books about game development. Now I had the idea to make the mod interface more userfriendly: Keep it small is the new goal! I added now Lua support (Java is such a mess!) and make now special functions for the mod developers in the engine. And the cool thing about Lua is that it is embedded. There is no extra dependency! Originally I exported 10000 functions and over 400 classes. Now I plan to export 1 class and 60 functions. Keep it simple!

[ 2018-05-12 07:52:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Implementation: The keyboard and the LCD code is finished. The 3D models also are and the IO library is loaded into the virtual CPU. Next is debugging the stuff.. Implementation: Digged out an old real time raytracing library of mine. We will see what I can make out of it (perhaps real-time global illumination). But this will take some time. Debugging: Corrected bugs in the old non-voxel part of the engine. I will use this to debug the AI once it is implemented. Planning: I am nearly finished with the design and the scientific paper about the new AI language. The only thing I still need to do is to write the introduction (this is a part of a paper where you write about people who have done similar things).

[ 2018-04-30 07:34:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Implementation: LCD is finished. It will use a simple text mode interface which can be controlled via a program. Implementation: Added a special client component which directly reads out the keyboard.

[ 2018-04-26 21:01:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Implementation: Made the GUI for the CPU where you can add source code Implementation: Started to work on LCD‘s and keyboards

[ 2018-04-23 19:21:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

To make it more clear what I do I will add to every tweet: Planning, Implementation, Debugging. Planning means that I am creating a plan how to implement something. Implementation means that I create the actual code. Debugging means that I test the code and try to find the errors. Usually this takes the longest. Implementation: Connected now the compiler to the CPU modul. The next step is now to add a window in which the player can enter the code and then let it compile. Planning: I thought of a new way to store trees and also buildings, so that they can be displayed in the background landscape.

[ 2018-04-20 19:32:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Wrote all the code for the new tree system. Will test it in the next days! Today I also worked on the CPU modul. When placed in the landscape it can execute programs and so control lamps, doors, ...

[ 2018-04-18 18:53:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Ok, I had the plan to make one big post per month, but that did not work out. Everytime I wanted to create an article I decided it is a better idea to code. So I will continue with my regular tweets. I did a lot of stuff in the last months. The design for a new game description language is finished. I hope that I can code faster with it once it is implemented! Here are some screenshot of the new voxel background landscape. In the last version the creation of one segment took 10s. Now it takes 0,1s!

And voila the new dungeons are finished. Only the zombie is a little bit too peaceful (he does not want to attack the player).

I changed the internal data structure of the game engine in order to be abled to create much larger landscapes. I need to debug this intensively before I can make a new release (or else it could destroy your save games).

[ 2018-04-17 18:22:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

AI I told you that we plan to use AI algorithms from the AI research. But this is not so easy as I thought as I have the impression that every AI papers describes the same thing with different word. In some of these papers they even call normal variables „functions“. And structures („struct“ in C) are called „atoms“ and their declarations „predicates“. In other papers the same thing is called „literals“ or „assertions“. Why are they do this? Nevertheless I implemented a new language to control the AI. And I already have an idea how the AI will be abled to plan in the world and so create cities. 3D Models I create over 100 new 3D models. Especially for streets (signs, traffic lights, ..), stores, interiors. And of course for traps and doors!
And I even made waste containers! High Resolution Textures For the models are increased the texture resolution to 1024x1024. Physic Engine We completely replaced the physic joint system with a new one. Will allow support for better doors, cars and trains. Caves Mostly finished, but I still need to tune it. There are too much cave entrances on the top of the landscape! Placement of entities will be the next step:
Mod Support Instead of using Java for mods we are working on a visual programming language (but of course you will still be abled to use Java)!

• We again resolved lots of bugs in the mod system.
• Debuging tools are added.
• Debug preview of entities

We already made some examples plugins (drop-down door, moveable block and traps). Videos will follow.
Railways Railways are implemented. The train for the railways is the next step!
Dungeongenerator The new room generator for the dungeons is successfully integrated. It is working correctly. Will be in the next release. Bugs corrected

• Instabilies: We resolved a hard to find bug in the world generation which was the cause for instabilies.
• Clipping errors on flat surfaces: When placing voxel blocks, there were lot‘s of clipping errors. They are gone now.

When does the next release come? I wanted to make a new release, but I do not find a bug in the world generation system. When this bug is found I will upload a new version.

[ 2018-02-13 09:03:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

So here are the new cave rooms in action! The rooms aren't hand crafted, instead they were made by a generator.

[ 2017-12-30 21:43:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Originally I made 3D models for the rails. But as the rails need to be abled to adapt to the ground dynamically this was not flexible enough. Today I made a dynamic rail generator.

[ 2017-12-27 19:34:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

I wish everyone a Merry Christmas! Be nice to each other!

[ 2017-12-24 15:41:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

First experiment of the new minecart system. Still better than the old one, where the minecart derailed all the time!

[ 2017-12-23 20:36:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Perhaps you noticed that it was a little bit quite in the last months. The reason for this was that we did a relocation of the company. We are now based in Ulm instead of Ravensburg (both cities are in germany) Research Project The game is now my research project at the University of Ulm. The topic of my PhD thesis will be the improvement of the AI for the game. Upcoming Stuff A lot of things are in development which will be in the upcoming releases:

• We already improved the experimental caves. Currently we are working on the growing of mushrooms and others plants in the caves.
• New dungeon room generator: Till now the rooms in the dungeons were mostly made by hand or they were very simple. We created a new algorithm which creates randomly and good looking rooms. I am also very excited to play the game when this is finished, because then I do not know how the dungeons look like.
• Railways and Minecart: After several non working approaches regarding railways we now found a solution. Currently we are working on the railway switch. The models for the railways are also finished
• Buildings for the cities: We already made a collection of houses for the cities. They will be used by the city generation algorithm.
• Roads: Part of this is also implemented
• Better LOD: In the future we plan to use several new level of detail mechanisms in order to increase the realisms and the world generation speed. For example the railways and the streets will be visible several kilometers. Same will be with buildings.
• And a lot of currently secret AI stuff :-)
• Rain bug corrected
• Snow in the cold regions

So, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

[ 2017-12-22 21:02:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Working on a new cave generation algorithm, which will make the caves more game like! And for the city generation we created about 20 different buildings. And new furniture, items are also on the way. Mainly for the interior of cities. And we uploaded new tutorials regarding modding: How to create a mod and change the world texture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaLCHQ0z_hU Change model texture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spjrt5E-38E Change model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3UANcYGspc Add new material to model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk2PMgE1u4U I need to update the game in order for these tutorial to work which I will do in the next days!

[ 2017-11-23 21:40:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

We upload a new version of the SDK: - Fixed FloodFill crash bug in Rapid Painter - Added ConvertModel Menu Item in the 3D Editor for easy import of models from blender - Translated menu items from german to english And we uploaded a bunch of basic tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d-C1qzW1s0&list=PLpGxTY26RrmTplw0Pk7jqr41nCL6ddQe5 Here you can also learn how to import models. And we also made 2 tutorials regarding the rapid painter: Basic Introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xt090ifgUQ How to change the world textures in the game (part1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUUhnGsjij0 Our wiki and the homepage got hacked. The wiki is currently down. We are working on a solution!

[ 2017-10-29 13:02:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

So the first version of the SDK is finished and uploaded into the unstable branch. It comes with the following:

• A model converter: Can convert nearly every model format to our own uti3d format. You can use Blender in order to create models for the game. As an example we provided the sheep model in it's original format + a converter xml+batch file.
• 3D Editor: We made most of the models for the game with this self developed editor. It can create models and animated models. What is perhaps important for you it can be used to create "voxel levels" which can then be imported into the game. If the editor confuses you, that is no problem, we will make tutorials for everything.
• Rapid Painter: This is our texture editor. It can used to create procedural texture. It is a combination of Inkscape and GIMP. With this you can modify the textures of the game (in the "example" directory are all the source which we used to create our textures for the game. This could be starting point for you if you want to change the textures).
• XUtiEdit: We developed our own XML file format. Use this editor to load these files!
• An updated version of the game which included better mod support.

The applications can be started from Steam or from the SynSDK directory (can be found in the install dir of the game. There are also the examples) Next step is that we will make tutorials and a complete example modification with new textures, entities, ... Here is our wiki regarding game modification (it will also grow): http://www.staudsoft.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page And by the way, I broke, again, in the last minutes something (I am so stupid!). This time it is the capturing of the mouse in the game. An update will follow in the next days.

[ 2017-10-18 16:55:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

The texture editor for the mod sdk is finished. That means that the textures of the game can be modded in the next version.

[ 2017-10-10 19:33:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

We started with the creation of a mod SDK. The model importer is already working. The 3D editor is also finished we only need to pack it.

[ 2017-10-07 08:04:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added new shapes and the possibility to place ramp corners on walls.

[ 2017-10-02 20:57:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added tool tips to the inventory and changed the background for a better visibility.

[ 2017-10-01 18:58:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

AI research is really interesting. I learned in the last a lot of stuff in order to be able to use it in our game. I even know now how the mars rover AI system works. I think we can use a simplified model for our game. And some other guys even used logic formulars in order to create dungeons. That is really cool! The goal is to create NPC's which manage their own daily routine based on their needs and the player behavior. Ah, I should not forget that we now have a 2D street generator. It only needs to be ported to 3D. The street generator is based on german streets and will use similar signs, road markings, street lamps, ...

[ 2017-09-27 20:37:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Test of the house generator: One house with different designs!

[ 2017-09-14 07:22:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

The first CTF map is finished. Here is a screenshot of the map in editor (which we will also release so that you can make your own maps):
The game automatically creates the vegetation (plants, trees, stones, caves) once the map is loaded. So where the dirt like ground is there will be forest once the map is loaded.

[ 2017-09-07 19:23:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is the first experiment of an automatic generated house with the new roof:

[ 2017-09-05 20:21:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added a new world generator for a flat world made out of concrete! Useful if you do not want to build in a landscape.
I use it to develop the new houses!

[ 2017-09-04 20:44:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

I published a new update which contains the beta version of the multiplayer mode. It is not finished yet, but you can test it. The main problem is the lag correction, which means that the player on the server and on the client sometimes have different positions. So it can be hard to place things or shoot someone (you will miss the other guy). So the following new features are available:

• Multiplayer mode
• Ruins in the landscape
• New big laser scanned stones
• Furniture and chests are generated in the ruins with content
• New multithreaded memory manager
• Fixed a bug which can crash the game when using signs
• Fixed bugs regarding recipes
• Fixed again the bug where the empty hand was holding a weapon

In order to be able to see the ruins and the new stones you need to create a new map without (!) using the default seed. We will update the default seed once we are finished with the development of the ruins. Originally I wanted to post this update last week, but there where problems regarding the content of the chests. Currently we are working on better dungeons and buildings. We already have a test dungeon complete with monsters, chests, graves, torches, ... we only need to polish it a little bit.

[ 2017-08-29 07:48:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

So I screwed up all the old buildings patterns (they had the wrong size), so I created new ones. Now the test room looks better!

The buildings patterns are the elements out of which the houses are created. This can for example be a wall, a ceiling or a ground model.

[ 2017-08-10 21:17:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

So the scanned stones are working now. Perhaps I will put some of these more under ground.

Now there are also chests in the ruins (with treasures?)
With the same algorithm we will put chests, furniture, monsters in the dungeon. And I tried to improve the house generator. But there is still much work to do:

I had the idea that I could use the house generator which we will use for the generation of the cities to generate ruins too. If this works we could create much more artwork.

[ 2017-08-09 11:45:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hmm, that seems to be to much destruction. This was once a nice little house.
A sunken boat under water! Where did it come from?

The algorithms we develop here will also be used when creating multiplayer maps! Hint: If you give me downvotes, write me a little hint what you did not like. Else I can only guess!

[ 2017-07-25 16:13:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Ruin placement system is working. Here are the first screenshots:

Unfortunately some ruins were placed under water. This is already corrected:

The new stones have still problems (hint: the stone pillar should be a rock).

[ 2017-07-22 20:57:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Made 26 new stones, coded the algorithm in the world generator which inserts the new stones, and made new ruins. We even have stones which where scanned via a 3D scanner.

[ 2017-07-20 20:33:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Made new ruins for the game (yes I know the expression "new ruins is not logical"). Will be used in the world generator!
We are also working on new stones which do not look so boring. And we upload a quick fix yesterday (which solved the "sun too bright" bug).

[ 2017-07-19 20:32:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey I posted an update which will mostly fix bugs: - Cracks in the landscape reduced - Weapons bugs resolved - The memory footprint is reduced - Speed improvements - The algorithm which creates the rivers is updated (new world generator) - The placement of the animals is updated (they now spawn in specific regions) - We can now generate patches for the game faster. - Fade in / fade out of the plants on the landscape - "Allow Undead" switch is corrected Hmm, I seem to have introduced some rendering bug in the last days (it is a little bit too bright). I will try to find a solution and then post a new update next weekend.

[ 2017-07-17 19:08:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

Here is a picture of our new background landscape out of voxels! Only the trees are still missing.
If everything works fine the background landscape will be kept in sync with what you build. So you will see your buildings in the distance! We also did other stuff: - New level editor (for us, so that we can build levels faster) - Capture the flag mode (basic gameplay) - The new background landscape can be disabled on old computers. - We worked on new building shapes - We debugged multiplayer And we implement a new feature in our engine which will allow us to smoothly fade in the landscape!

[ 2017-07-09 19:12:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

First test of the new (full voxel) background landscape. Currently it is only stone but the overhangs are clearly visible.

Next step is that I put this thing in a seperate thread (currently it is in the main thread which is not so good).

[ 2017-06-22 20:50:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

So the world generator now creates the voxels for the far landscape. A 256 x 256 m segment takes about 5 seconds to generate. The next step is that the far voxels are visualised. Started with this today.

[ 2017-06-18 21:02:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Worked on the last days on a new idea. If it works the bad looking far landscape will be gone. Instead you will see voxels till the sky. This will also close the last cracks and holes in the dungeons.

[ 2017-06-15 17:46:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Yes! One reason for cracks in the landscape is resolved. A player found these and sended me screenshots. Thanks for this! Next we will improve the rendering of the world, so that when you are in caves you will not see the sky.

[ 2017-06-05 05:22:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

The red flag for CTF multiplayer:
The multiplayer map editor with a loaded landscape ready for editing:
By the way: I saw that someone did not like the tweet about the CTF mode. This mode is totally optional. You will always have the option to load any map and just build something together. I add it because I myself like CTF multiplayer.

[ 2017-05-29 07:35:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Seems that the first multiplayer mode we will implement is CTF.

[ 2017-05-27 22:05:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Created the foundation for different types of multiplayer modes. Thinking about CTF, Team Deathmatch, Conquest, ...

[ 2017-05-26 08:02:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

We uploaded the new release 1080 to Steam! Except of the multiplayer mode all features are activated! Here is the change log:

• Updated start screen
• Added weather system (cloud simulation)
• Added rain
• Navigation system for monsters
• Speed improvements in nearly every part of the engine
• Automatic LOD system (improves speed)
• New "hand" tool
• Stone axe, stone pickaxe, stone shovel
• Crafting of iron out of iron ore (old method of smelting is still available)
• Bear, wolf, sheep, red deer
• Monkey which throws stones
• Lot of new items and stuff which you can loot
• Changed recipes for cloths so that you can use animal skins to craft them
• Zombie
• Chat system
• Asynchron loading and saving
• Lot of icons for the items
• New sense system: You can hide in bushes
• New AI and behaviour system
• Lots of new weapons: grenade launcher, sniper, ak47, shotgun, machine gun, pistole, revolver
• Damage of the normal tools updated (you can kill a sheep with a shovel)
• Updated effect system (for weapon effects)
• Improved explosive damage
• New complex weapon logic (you can zoom, use different ammo).
• Improvements in the physic system: Monsters adapt more to the ground
• Jump and throw prediction (used for the wolf and ape)
• Over 100 new monster sounds
• Bug in the world generator which expanded the dungeons is resolved
• Sun not rising bug resolved
• New thread synchronisation system implemented which is much faster!
• Automatic monster spawn system

You now start only with your hands. Additional tools can be crafted (stone axe with planks and stone). You should also create a shelter and a stick to defend yourself at night. Most monsters only attack at night. The monster will not spawn near light sources. This is now similar to other games of this genre! If you want a peaceful gameplay you can change it in the options menu in the main menu. This will change all to peaceful for all maps! You can of course remove the setting later if you want to have monsters again. There are still some small issues:

• We are not sure if the animation system is fast enough when there are too many monsters on the screen. There could be a performance drop.
• On some models the lighting is not correctly rendered (especially on the pistole and on the red deer. This looks ugly, but we will correct it).

There is also a new demo version out and we also uploaded new versions for Linux and Mac! Have fun!

[ 2017-04-30 17:54:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Singleplayer is finished for the next release. We now debug Multiplayer and already found some bugs.

[ 2017-04-19 19:39:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

The demo version is repaired. One navigation problem solved, new recipes added: http://www.staudsoft.com/?page_id=753

[ 2017-04-14 19:42:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

We put now on our homepage a list of the things which need to be done till the next release www.staudsoft.com The elements which are stroken through were resolved today.

[ 2017-04-13 22:00:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

The player has now hands which can be used to dig if no tools are available.

[ 2017-04-12 21:52:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Debugging, debugging, debbugging, ... I simply don't know what to tweet else.

[ 2017-04-11 19:59:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

I know I should debug but today I added a lot of new models. Mostly food and different types of food. Adding new features is more fun as finding bugs. We nevertheless debugged a lot in the last weeks. The single player is working, except of the spawning system. This should work in the next days. Then we will again test all functions in multiplayer!

[ 2017-04-05 20:16:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Debugging: The red deer is now working. I only need to shoot it for a last test.

[ 2017-03-16 22:22:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

So we made the view screen for the dedicated server. Seems that everything is fine but nevertheless we will debug it. #SyntheticWorld This is now the end of the implementation phase. We won't add any additional features for the next release. In the next weeks we will debug our code and when it is finished we will upload a new release.

[ 2017-03-12 21:28:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

The movement client prediction is now working, but I do not have any clue why :-( This means you can walk smoothly on the client when you are connected to a server. The first test of the dedicated server was also successful (but we need to polish a little bit the screen which is display when a dedicated server is loaded).

[ 2017-03-09 20:05:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

We made icons and models for the next release (ammo, flag for ctf, spawn-point, ...)

[ 2017-03-04 21:55:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

In order to support more players on a server we finished the polygon reduction algorithm for models. This means 10 times less polygons! This will however not change the quality of the models. We will use the lower resolution models when they are further away!

[ 2017-03-02 19:10:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Multiplayer: Successfully logged in and out several times on a server without crash. But I still need to tune the speed... The player status is now saved when they logout. They will respawn at the same position if the area was not changed!

[ 2017-02-28 22:51:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oh no, I installed the wrong graphics driver which made my game terrible slow. Debugged the whole day until I realised my error. Nevertheless, we improved the speed of the game which is always good!

[ 2017-02-26 21:55:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Debugging multiplayer is hard :-(. So much possibility for unreproduceable errors!

[ 2017-02-25 20:51:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Multiplayer: So client prediction is now fully implemented. Next thing is debugging and then lag compensation. Lag compensation will help you to hit the guys you are shooting at when the lag/ping is big.

[ 2017-02-18 20:58:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Smooth player movement in multiplayer: Worked on the basic implementation, hoping to reach the same quality as Counter-Strike.

[ 2017-02-16 22:05:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

The far landscape is now also transmitted in multiplayer. And the searching of the player start point is working too.

[ 2017-02-15 21:11:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

Cool: The server now transmits the landscape to the client in multiplayer. I could even dig into the ground, place torches and it was synced. Created a lot of icons for the new weapons. Will be in the next release. Now I only need to arrange them correctly for the aiming animation. Resolved a bug which prevented the usage of the inventory on the client in multiplayer. Read a book about game design. Planning what kind of multiplayer modes we could add.

[ 2017-02-14 22:46:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Physic objects are now working in multiplayer mode. Lifted a box and threw it around.

[ 2017-02-07 22:16:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Asynchronous loading and saving: The player will not notice any more when new parts of the world are loaded!

[ 2017-02-07 06:58:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

The GUI for the chat system is finished. And we also added a window which displays the current players on the server.

[ 2017-02-03 20:00:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Implemented a basic chat system. Team chat will also be supported. The next step is to make the GUI for it.

[ 2017-01-31 20:35:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Made the LAN discovery of multiplayer servers. Till now we had to enter the ip address in order to connect to a server.

[ 2017-01-29 21:17:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Ok, got now that the inventory is displayed on the client. Had to start a mini server on the client on order for this to work.

[ 2017-01-26 20:37:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

So we are back! Login and shooting in multiplayer is working. Sad thing is that the other players only appear as walking underwear :-)

[ 2017-01-24 20:05:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

The flu has arrived in germany. We are all ill :-(. We will continue with the work on the multiplayer code once we are healthy again.

[ 2017-01-16 09:08:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Bug fixing, bug fixing, bug fixing. At least the login process of the multiplayer mode is working.

[ 2017-01-10 07:15:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Included now the RakNet network library in the game. Compiled without problems. Formely we used DirectPlay and then later Windows Sockets.

[ 2017-01-06 10:45:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

I wrote in the last month over 10000 lines network code. Today I finally reached zero compile errors in the network code. Next step is to debug it. The network mode is working till I fire a weapon. Then it crashes. But we will solve this problem too.

[ 2017-01-04 20:29:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Made the first human NPC. He already holds his weapon and can walk!

[ 2017-01-03 08:47:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

I wish you all a happy New Year!

[ 2017-01-01 07:56:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Worked today on a new HUD element which will display which enemies have noticed the player.

[ 2016-12-30 22:36:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Have a Merry Christmas! And I hope you all got nice gifts.

[ 2016-12-25 08:45:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

We implemented an algorithm which will allow the player to hide in a shrub in order to sneak around the enemy.

[ 2016-12-21 20:58:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Started to add new abilities to the monsters: better sense system, dynamic awareness, only attack/flee when provoked, react when hurt,...

[ 2016-12-19 08:06:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

So, we implemented a new system for the selection of attack behaviours. And we coded on the multiplayer system.

[ 2016-12-16 22:31:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

I debugged today the algorithm which calculates the throw vector for the stone of the ape. The player is now hit precisely in the middle.

[ 2016-12-10 22:57:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

I always wanted to have a monkey in my game and so I added one. Basic stuff is implemented. Only the "throw a stone" algorithm is missing!

[ 2016-12-09 08:50:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

The grenade launcher is now working. And we made a new explosion effect!

[ 2016-12-06 21:43:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

So added now specific particle effects depending on the material type when shooting on a surface.

[ 2016-12-05 21:38:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Yes, muzzle flash and the ak47 in action. No crates were hurt in the making of this photo!

[ 2016-12-04 22:01:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fighted today with the new grenade launcher. The grenade does not want to fly in the correct direction.

[ 2016-12-02 22:52:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Create a lot of sounds for the new weapons: gunshots, reload sounds, ammunition sounds, ...

[ 2016-12-02 08:21:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fighted today with the correct position of the muzzle flash. One matrix in the animation system is not correct.

[ 2016-11-28 21:36:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Game Development: Successfully tested the AK47 on a frog. He wasn't happy about it.

[ 2016-11-27 22:14:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Worked in the last days on a new weapon logic. With aiming, zooming, reloading, heat, ... and the first basic version is working.

[ 2016-11-27 00:06:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Made some designs for the sniper rifle. Particular for the zoom.

[ 2016-11-21 20:44:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

So we have 3 new weapons! We made an AK47, a shotgun and a machine gun. Complete with new animations! Next are the ammo clips...

[ 2016-11-20 22:10:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today we did a lot of work on the collision system. Our goal is that the monsters like the bear, or the wolf do have it's feed on the ground

[ 2016-11-14 20:12:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

So the wolf has now a jump attack and he will try to you push of cliff if he can :-). And guys we started with the sheep!

[ 2016-11-14 07:29:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

In the last two days I had some great ideas about the city generation. Fleshed out which types of buildings will be in game.

[ 2016-11-10 21:01:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

We plan to post more tweets on Steam so that all of you are more up to date! Here is the first one: So we also added a throw and jump prediction algorithm. This will allow our monsters to aim and throw objects.

[ 2016-11-08 10:37:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey guys, as you may have noticed we uploaded an update! Here is the changelog: - Complete new voxel renderer - Up to 120 fps on our machines - Multithreaded world generation - Street and way generation - Dungoen generation - New improved inventory which reduced micro management - Improved the speed of the physic engine by factor 10 - New thread library which improves speed - User space synchronisation of threads (10 times faster than critical section) - Improved speed of world generation - New shapes which you can use to build - Corrected errors in old shapes - Update to recent version of bullet physic engine - Updated to SDL2 - Memory manager which improves speed and reduces memory footprint - Country generation - Dungeon name generation (but I think the names aren't displayed yet). - New level of detail algorithm for landscape and dungeon - Improved java plugin support / added hooks - Improved speed of string class - Improved speed of animation system - Bug fixes in the animation system - Master of Materials now use relief mapping - Navigation Mesh - Complete new generation system for buildings - Castle template set - Templates for the dungeon generator - The normal tools now do damage on enemies So you see we updated really a lot. The voxel rendering system is completely replaced. So if you find any bugs just post it in the forum.

[ 2016-09-28 16:29:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

We did improve the inventory:
When you now select a block you get an overview over all recipes in which it is used. You can not only go to the recipe you can also craft it directly by clicking on the buttons in the info view.
This is of course only possible if you use the correction tool.
And in the recipe view you get an overview over all ingredients and how many you already have. If you do not have enough material to craft the recipe the ingredients is displayed red.
And here you can see that you can craft blocks by selected already made blocks of the same type. And we also put the zombie in the game:
The green path is the navigation path of the zombie.
Here he is really near
Here he is too near. The pickaxe can hurt the zombie (in fact all tools will now do damage). You will be abled to deactivate the zombies if you want to have a more suitable version for children for example. Do you think that we should create a version with less blood? Is the zombie to scary?

[ 2016-09-09 15:26:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

Finally 60fps is achieved! And the new voxel rendering system is working!
The overall polygon count is reduced by the factor 10 and the level of detail of the trees and meshes is greatly reduced (the switch between lods is now barely visible). This not only means that we can render faster it also improves the speed of the physic engine (=> more monsters can walk around).
You see these 2 big blue triangles? The old algorithm generated 128 triangles to display the same surface. And as we do not need so much information to create the triangles we could throw away half of the world generation algorithm. This means that world generation is now also faster. Will upload a new version soon.

[ 2016-08-29 06:30:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Working on the new voxel rendering system. Looks nearly the same except it saves us a lot of polygons => higher fps
The polygon count has been reduced by the factor 6. And there are still a lot of possibilities to improve it further.

[ 2016-08-22 07:32:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello and welcome back to our development blog. The topics today:

• Dungeon generator
• Road generator
• Plugin support improvements
• Manual
• LOD of the meshes
• 3 different dungeon template editors
• 60 fps our new goal
• Faster world generation
• SDL2

Dungeon Generator We worked very busy on the new dungeon generator. Here are some screenshots of a automatically generated dungeons:

The dungeons are generated in way that there is only one path to the finish room (with treasures). Aside from the main path there are small feature rooms which you can also explore too. We plan to include several types of dungeons depending on how much space there is on top of the landscape and in the underground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc4JvFU1Wic Making cities with the dungeon generator We not only want to create dungeons with it, we also want to be able to create cities, settlement, castles and so. We have implemented half of the city generation algorithm. Road Generator

• First version is implemented
• Creates a complete road network over the landscape
• Creates also potential city positions
• Fast A* Star Algorithm
• The roads look really nice:

Plugin Support Improvements

• Exposed more classes to java
• Added support for hooks
• Added 50 new hooks
• Own entity moduls can be made in Java (An entity in the game is composed out of moduls)

Manual

• We started to write a manual in English for the current version
• With description of all game elements
• It already contains 400 pages (although most of them were automatically generated by the game)

LOD for the meshes We finally found a good solution to create the level of detail meshes for our models. We are using Blender and then import it into the game. This will allow us to place many NPCs into the game world! 3 different dungeon templates editors For the dungeon generator we need templates (small building elements which then make up the complete dungeon). I wrote the first one, I didn’t like it. The second one was not really finished (but we are using it now as a dungeon previewer). And finally I created the third one, which allows the creation of dungeon templates in a 3D environment. I should have started with the third one at first. What a mess! 60 fps is our goal And last but not least we want to achieve 60 fps in our game. We already did a lot of improvements. The main game loop is now independent of the voxel stuff. These things are now calculated in separate thread. This allowed us to already reach 60-70 frames when there is not much in the world. In a dense forest we have 30-40 fps. The bottleneck in the later case was the GPU not the CPU. The next step is now to improve the GPU speed. Faster world generation And we also increased the speed of the world generation algorithm. This was done by improving the source code, by adding a new memory manager and by speeding up the compression / uncompression algorithm. It is now nearly twice as fast. Multiplayer And we also worked on the multiplayer code. The first objects can now be transported over the network. And we made the final design for the multiplayer mode. SDL2 As some of you had problems with the game under Windows 10 we switched to the newest version of SDL. This will improve the fullscreen support under Windows 10. And we will update to the newest version of the Bullet Physic Engine Dungeon Name Generator And finally we made a cave name generator:
What's next? As I mention above I want to improve the GPU speed. I had some great ideas. Will test it in the next week.

[ 2016-08-16 20:03:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey here is only a short status report on what we are doing. Artifical Intelligence:

• Navigation Mesh: The game now creates a navigation mesh. It is also dynamically updated when you place a block or remove material.
• Path finding: We also created an algorithm which finds a path on the navigation mesh
• Path beautifier: The paths we get out of our new path finding algorithm sometimes look a little bit "unreasonable". To make the paths more sensible we implemented an algorithm which smooths the path
• Included in AI: We already included the path finding algorithm in our AI system.
• Multithreaded Pathfinding: The complete algorithm works on a different thread as the main game. This means that the framerate is not affected by path finding.
• Expandable: The system is implemented in a way so that we can easy expand it.
• Behaviour Tree: We added new types of nodes to support more complex behaviour.

Monkey: Yes we created a monkey. And we also applied animations to him:
Polygon Reduction: As the polygon reduction of Blender is very good we create a Wavefront importer / exporter in order to bring meshes from the game to Blender and back. This will allow us to use Blenders polygon reduction algorithm on our human models. This means that more NPCs can be disabled for example in the upcoming cities. Dungeon generation (still needs debugging):

• Country border generation: This algorithm creates the borders of countries.
• City position generation: This algorithm searches suitable position for cites and then creates a road network on the map
• Dungeon Generator: We are currently working on a pattern dungeon generator. If this works the algorithm can created caverns, old ruins, mines or houses.

And if you are interested in more up to date infos follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichaelStaud Or on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/staudsoft/  

[ 2016-06-12 20:56:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

There was a nasty bug which prevent the usage of construction sets, chests, ladders, ... This has been solved und an update was uploaded.

[ 2016-05-26 06:25:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey this is the new release 1.2.6. New is:

• Infinite Landscape (no world pregeneration any more)
• Third Person Mode
• Cloths (you start with initial cloths and additional ones can be crafted)
• New First Person Hands
• New First Person Animations
• New Equipment Mode (can equip multiple elements)
• Lots of bug fixes

https://youtu.be/1cyD-ZkA6GA And some screenshots:



And we are working on a navigation mesh. If this works we can steer our monsters precisely throught the landscape.

[ 2016-05-23 18:57:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Ok, the last hand animations were not so good. Here is the update. I created different animations for nearly all the tools. I especially worked on the new knife animation (where both hands appear). And you can also checkout the new pistol model Here is the changelog:

• cloths in the first person mode
• tools with new animations
• improved cpu -> gpu data transfer speed (we want meshes with a lot of polygons or?)
• new rounding algorithm which speeds up world generation
• improved speed of raycasting
• new pistol model
• in-game code editor in test mode
• shape bug resolved: resources are collected again
• polygon reduction without texture coordinates
• worked on geometry library which will be included in the game.
• code generator for network system

  https://youtu.be/OquCpS4w9Fo

[ 2016-05-17 20:05:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

The new hands and the new animations are working. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxDG0-c-xKU Here are some screenshots:

[ 2016-05-10 20:23:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome to our blog about the game Synthetic World. Today's topics:

• new 3D models and animations for the player character in multiplayer
• Clothing for the player and for NPCs
• added new monster models.

This time we have create a better video (in english and german): English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfC6XOgiBfI German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr0smhgEDeo To finally finish the multiplayer mode one needs player models. And it has been our goal to incorporate a third person mode since a long time. Therefore, we have used our new animation system to incorporate realistic 3D models of humans. They consist of an average of 18,000 polygons. Because the loadingh time for such a file was too long, we have also revised the model loader and the storage format. A model can now be loaded in 0.1s. There is also the possibility of creating a female character. Both genders are supported.
The animations that we used were generated by motion capturing. So far we integrated into the game only the movement animations. Soon the animations for the tools and weapons will be integrated. It is also planned to replace the hands in the first person mode. Cloth So that no one has to walk lightly dressed through the ice desert, we of course thought of clothes. So far we have installed more than 100 different cloths. We added both everyday clothing and military clothing. Many items are of course not only for the players but especially for the NPCs with which the player can interact in the future.

Monsters Finally we improved our 3D Model Importer so much that it can load the 3D models for our new monsters. So we could start with the implementation of the bear. We are going to use the same AI algorithms that we implemented for the fish.

We also made new monster models. We want pinguins running around in the icy regions. As an example, we just put him in the grass which has caused some protests in the team because some thought that pinguins simply do not belong in the meadow.
We are working not only on the animal world, but also on 3D models for zombies. We even made a skeleton! Bugs Thanks to the support of the community, we also could eliminate many bugs again. An error of enormous proportions was that we incorrectly marked snow and ice as burnable. This was discovered when a player created fire in the icy regions. The whole landscape burnt. Outlook It's still a lot to do. We want more clothing and animations, replace the hands in the first person mode. We also worked on the support of multiple keyboards and mices on Windows in order to complete the split screen implementation. Thanks for your interest. Until next time.

[ 2016-04-07 17:58:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

The bug which prevented the usage of the learning points has been resolved. You can now use them again to increase your skills!

[ 2016-03-07 09:22:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Only a quick patch: - Crash while fighting - Bed works again - Sign repaired

[ 2016-03-02 08:21:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

In the last month we of course where very busy. We added ton's of new features. And we finally solved the NPC model problem!

Rectangle Tool

When creating a house you need to place a lot of blocks which can be time consuming. So we added a shape mode which makes this much easier. You can draw a rectangle on the ground and the blocks above are then automatically filled (if you have enough materals). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uo5UGKPGDE

Building Blocks

In the last release we introduced a new feature called building blocks. In this update we added over 200 new shapes! We added pipes, cylinders, quarter cylinders, arches, thin walls, plates, … We also improved the placing algorithm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPChCGHnk8s

Gold Fish

First of all: this will be the last fish we will add to our game. In upcoming versions we will add land animals. Anyway we added a gold fish. If you want to see him you will need to create a new map.

Improved Animation System

As we want to add NPC's we again improved our animation system and fixed bugs. We loaded a human model with over 200 bones and it worked. The animations which were used where created by motion capturing.

Bug: Save Game

In the last unstable release was a bug which prevented the correct loading of save games. This has been resolved.

Bug: Electric Wire

And the lamp entity does now work with electric wires! In fact after I corrected the bug I asked myself how this could have ever worked. Strange!

Unstable: Multiplayer

The multiplayer support is also improving. The complete gui has been redesigned to work over a network. And as a first test we will add split screen multiplayer. In this version it does not work very well as we do not have implemented the support for multiple keyboards and mouses. If you want to test it do not forget to disable HDR. The support will be better in upcoming versions. And the „Server“ does now support an unlimited number of players. Every player needs to have a unique number. This will allow you to logoff and logon to a server without losing your inventory. In upcoming version we will add true multiplayer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk57XJTrLxI

Better fbx importer

The importer can now import normal maps, multiple models at once, detect multiple textures, compress textures, change the skeleton of a mesh and even create in-game entities (see cloth system)

NPC Models

How to create the NPC's for our game? This was the big question in the last months. Luckily Adobe bought mixamo, an online service for the creation of human models. It is free now for a limited time. We used this opportunity and created a lot of characters and applied animations to them. Here are some examples:

Upcoming: Cloth System

We also started with the creation of a clothing system for our NPC's. You will be able to equip cloths in upcoming versions.

World Generator: Building cities

To create cities we need models of houses. So we used an 3D editor to create some models and converted them to voxels. This does not looked very good. And as we added support for building blocks the conversion process was not very easy. So we screw this system away and updated our game so that we can create models in the game. This is why we added the rectangle tool. These models can then be exported to a highly compressed format, so that they can be used in the world generator. So that's it for today. I hope you like the improvements. Have fun!

[ 2016-02-28 22:36:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

We uploaded a patch which makes our game compatible with Mac OS X 10.11. Check it out! New updates will follow soon ...

[ 2016-02-14 22:25:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

New construction system We thought that boxes and ramps are a little bit boring so we searched for a way to add any shape. And so we implemented the new building blocks. They can be used like normal shapes . Just select a material and a shape and place it. For now you can add cylinders and quarter cylinders? We uploaded an unstable version. The icons are still missing and we will add more shapes. We thought that you should be abled to test it. Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkAxtfW-OWs This is an windows only update. Old versions will not be abled to load the converted maps!
The quarter cylinders
Binary XML Till now we used XML for our save games. As this is sometimes very slow we introduced binary XML. When you now load a map with the new version it will automatically convert your old save games. We will also use binary XML to save the data for the cities. Increased Bitmap loading speed We removed some bugs which made the loading of the textures slow. WE WANT MULTIPLAYER! The main goal in the next weeks is to add multiplayer support. We already started with the development of a network communication system. And we started to restructure the code of the HUD so that it is network ready. MacOS X 10.11 - El Capitan And we also have a very sad news. Seems that our game is not compatible with MacOS X 10.11. This is because Apple introduced a new security system which prevents the loading of shared libraries which are necessary for our game. We will of course try to find a solution. But at the moment we even failed to simply install MacOS X 10.11 on our Apple computer. We also tried to install it in a virtual machine. We only got a black screen. Then I went to my university and ask whether they have Apple computers with the newest software. The answer was no. No one really seemed to like them. The computer programmers even said: "We are computer scientists, we do not use Mac's." But we do not give up!

[ 2016-01-26 08:32:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy New Year (I know it's a little bit late, but the new animal did not work correctly so I could not post the news). In the new update (which should come out today, depending on the upload speed of our internet connection). We added:

• New stairs shapes
• The first new animal (finally the fish is swimming in the water).
• Changed the player start (so that it starts near water).
• Fixed a lot of bugs in the animation system.
• Updated the world generation algorithm so that it can place monsters in the water
• Updated the save game system so that it is compatible with the new animation system.

Ok here is a photo of the new stairs shape:
And we also created a nice little video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vend12RmvQA To the fish: This is the first animal which uses our new game AI. If you go to near to the fish it's stress level will increase and it will change into the panic behaviour. This means that it will swim very fast around which will make it difficult to hunt. Then if the fish is swimming to long it will change to the eat behaviour. In this case this means that it will swim to the ground. A gold fish is also planned. And we have been busy with a bird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpFQbwyFXFY And we imported nearly all new animal meshes into our game. Only the wolf and the bear still make problems. On the world generation part we implemented an A* search algorithm which will allow use to create streets between settlements.

[ 2016-01-03 08:54:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

I uploaded a new version to Steam which allows you to create your own custom maps. You can create in a paint program a heightmap and then use it to create a Synthetic World map. You can also define the vegetation level and the climate zones. 2 example maps are included. Have fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdeK3dI8nxg 1 pixel = 1 meter The heightmap start at 64 m above the map ground and ends at 196 m. The water level is at 96 m above the ground. So the water plan equals in the height map the color (64,64,64) if (255,255,255) is white in your paint program (this is the case with Gimp). If (100,100,100) is white (like it is for example with Corel Draw the case) then (25,25,25) would be the water level. The height map is smoothed when loaded into the game. Here is the example map which is included: Heightmap:
Climazone (everywhere the same):
Vegetation Level:
And we also increased the speed of the world generator. And we also worked on computer generated houses and cities.

[ 2015-12-16 08:40:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

As you perhaps have seen the game crashed when the player attacked a mob or placed a torch. This bug has been corrected. And the boat is fixed too!

[ 2015-11-18 22:14:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release of Version 1.2.5 We released our newest unstable release! Here is what is new: HDR Rendering
The HDR Renderer is finally working! Color Correction
Depth of Field
Motion Blur
Underwater Blur
Fluent Water Finally our game has support for fluent water:
You can collect it with a bucket:
And then place it again! Beta version of the boat
The boat floats on the water. But be aware that the motor is not working correctly New Textures We replaced for example the sand texture:
Flash Light / Latern Finally the flash light and the laterns are working:

In the last versions there were problems with the shaders. Horizontal Bar
This is useful for building houses… Complete rewritten animation system The animation system has been completely rewritten. But we are still using old models so it won't be visible to you. In further releases we will add our new models Bug Fixes We also did a lot of bug fixes and small improvements. For example: - Increased the loading speed of the textures - Increased the world generation speed - Improved the speed of the mesh rendering algorithms - Water physics corrected - Removed texture loading bug. - Improved the memory management system And a lot of other features are on the way!

[ 2015-11-15 20:10:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Boat

We added a boat. It can be crafted by the player when he has enough wood and iron. The boat can be collected again. And you can push it to in order to bring it into the water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFjmz4PBvws


There is no motor yet. We will add one soon.

Dynamic Water

The water is finally working. There was a problem with air bubbles underwater. But in fact our debugging tool was faulty not the water algorithm! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thN10kg8jrY And of course as you can see in the video: Water can be collected with a bucket and it can be placed again in the landscape.

Red Deer

We also continued our work on the red deer. Check out the idle and the walk animation: Walk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt60ap4ZcaE Idle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6oWn6Xec84

Wolf

And did we showed you the walk animation of our wolf? It looks cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XKBArbayys

Motion capture

I tried to load 300MB of motion capture data in the game. This was a little bit overkill. But nevertheless we will use mocap data.

Animation System (2D Motion Blending)

As you saw last time our engine support 1D animation blending. This means that when the fish is swimming at a certain speed the animations for slow swimming and fast swimming are blended to match a the target speed. This allows smooth transistion between the animations. To also take into account the turn speed of the fish we added 2D motion blending via delaunay triangulation. A video will follow soon!

Artificial Intelligence

And last but not least we really coded a lot regarding the AI:

• Behavior Tree
• Goal Driven AI System
• Serialization of the AI State (this means that when you shutdown the game and load it again the enemies will remember you!)
• New enemy detection algorithms

Even if this does not sound very much it was in fact the biggest change in the game engine in this update. But this of course can't be visualized in a video or in an image. When we have the working monsters will show them you.

Misc

• Added new icons (for water, lamp)
• Improved rendering speed of the models
• Improved the quality of the main shadow map
• Improved the water physic
• Changed the way the physic engine treats mass. The objects will now fall faster and more realistical.
• Improved loading speed of the game
• Improved the loading speed of the textures. And we also decreased the memory footprint.
• Added new sand texture
• Improved the contrast of the gravel texture
• Changed the neutronium texture
• Updated the position of the tools when the player holds them
• Updated the normal vectors of certain materials
• Tested the flash light and the lamp
• Added a boat recipe

What is next?

Perhaps you have noticed that we changed a little bit the direction of our development. We made it because we know that you (the players) would like to have an update. So we will upload a new release as soon as possible.

[ 2015-10-22 22:03:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Here is a video of our new fish. It is the first example of our new monsters for our game. It uses the new animation system which supports animations states and motion blending. This means that when the fish accelerates the animations are blended smoothly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gyoMgDR3c And it also uses our new steering system. It consists of a set of modules which can be configured and combined depending on what kind of monster needs to be simulated. This way every monster will have it's own personal algorithms.

The editor you see at the beginning of the animation is our new in game editor. In later versions we will make it available to the modders.
So what is next? You see that the fish has currently only one type of behavior. We plan to change this by implementing a goal driven AI.

[ 2015-09-23 07:50:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

In the last weeks we only did bug fixing. I thought that it wouldn't be easy to implement a new animation system and an editor for it but I didn't expected that it would be so hard. Because some other systems were incompatible we had to reimplement them. New AI system As the new animation system will (hopefully) allow us to create better monsters we also had to improve the artificial intelligence. So we completely rewrote the steering algorithms. This time they will not only be abled to deal with monsters on the ground. Instead we also added support for flying and swimming entities. The fish is already swimming:
The screenshot is blurred because it was taken under water. This is not a bug it is a feature of our new HDR renderer! New sensor system And as the new steering algorithms support obstacle avoidance we also had to improve our sense system. This allows a monster to perceive its environment. We hope that this will also allow us to support flocking. New collision system And to support monster with a more realistic physics we also added a new collision system. This can be controlled by our in-game editor. Visual programming To improve the development speed our in-game editor supports now visual programming. For this we implemented over 50 different types of modules. Math, physics, animations, steering, … it's all there. So the new stuff can be accessed and controlled directly in the game: Here is how the animation system for the fish looks like in the visual programming editor:
In later versions this editor can also be used to create mods for the game! Other stuff And of course we added other small stuff like „Small Signs“. These can be used to label your chests for example. So what is next: I am currently fighting with the state machine which drives the animations. Then the fish AI needs to be tuned. Perhaps we will add further animations. And then we want the add new monsters like the sheep, the wolf and the bear. And then we have to test the new boat and do some minor bug fixes with the fluent water (there are currently big air bubbles in the water). So it seems that we have much to do. I am sorry that we couldn't upload a test version. We simply changed a lot of internals of the engine.

[ 2015-09-15 07:39:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello and welcome back. It has been a long time since the last announcement. But this only means that we were very busy. The basic features of the in-game editor are working and the same applies to the animation system. We can now import models made in Blender! The editor The editor can now display sounds, models, images and entities. Here is a screenshot:
And we also implemented a property editor (on the right!). This is the entity editing view. The new entity has only an ItemModul which displays a non animated model. The basic undo system is also finished. Animation System When you followed me on Twitter you probably already now that we now can import meshes and skeletons from Blender. Here is a screenshot of the new fish which can now be loaded:
The next goal will be that we will give the fish a brain so that it acutally swims in the water. Hmm, the fish will be of course scaled down! The new sheep could also be imported:
And we are working on an insect:
This model has still problems with the wings. We have not yet decided how we will use it. I am personally thinking about a small swarm of insects which will attack the player. But we will see if the engine can handle this. Rendering System To be abled to deal with the new models we had to change the code of the rendering system. We added better support for skinned models. Up to 3 bones per vertex are now support. And we compressed the transformation matrices which are used for the models. We are using now a combination of a quaternion and a position vector to represent them. This allowed us to increase the maximal bone limit from 30 to 60. If we need ever more bones we will use textures to save the matrices. Bugs And due to the help of gamers we found several bugs. The bed didn't worked correctly. It should reset your health to maximal. Instead it hurted the player. And we found a very ugly bug in the world matrix. One player wasn't abled to place blocks on a bridge any more. We have not found the problem yet, but we are working on it. And we added a horizontal bar shape. One player had the idea that this could help when building a model. And then the flash light. Sorry, I simply forgot to add an recipe for it. So nobody couldn't craft it. What's next? We want to bring the advanced stuff to work. I am thinking here about the animation state machines, motion blending and the monster ai. And we want to implement some of the suggestions players made!

[ 2015-08-20 20:18:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

So most parts of the upcoming version 1.3.0 have been implemented. We are looking forward to a lot of debugging in the next weeks.

Editor

Ok, I should explain why we decided to add an ingame editor. As you probably know we added a new animation system. And this has a lot of settings. These can of course be controlled via C++ code. But this would take a lot of time, as we would need to recompile the code everytime we change something. And this takes a lot of time. The editor will allow us to change the code while the game is running To achieve this we implemented several sub goals: Entity creation via XML and visual programming Normally the entities in our game are create by C++ code. This can not be changed while the game is running. So we added a system which allows the creation of entities via XML. And the XML file is generated via visual programming. So for simple entities we will no longer need to write code. Every entity consists of modules which communicate via events. State machines are also supported. The necessary information is collected via reflection from the C++ code. Reflection in this case means that our program can analyse it's own structure. In Java and C# this is supported by the language itself. In C++ this isn't the case (I do not understand why, it would have saved us a lot of work). We had to augmented our code with additional informations. Improved GUI To be abled to display all the necessary information we needed additional GUI elements. So we implemented a tree view and a scroll box. We also corrected and updated the menu system. Game control The game can be pause, started in slow motion or single steps can be triggered via the editor. Cheats are also accessible. Project viewer We added a project viewer which displays all files which are accessible by the game. Asset viewer And we of course have an asset viewer. Currently it displays images and entities. But we also did other stuff: Sounds I tried to record better environment sounds for the game. But in my home town I did not find a place where there is now noise (cars, people …). It it is really annoying if you think that we are constantly living with such a noise level. Multiplayer I also continued with multiplayer but this is clear as the network system will also use some kind of reflection system which is similar to the one use to create the entities. Animations done We added animations for the bear and the red deer. This are for the start basic ones. What will come... I hope that we soon can create our own entities in the game. I am very exited.

[ 2015-08-02 09:41:45 CET ] [ Original post ]