[Game] Exile v0.4.0a

[Mantar]

Exile is a challenging, at times brutal wilderness survival game with simple technology.

Use your wits to find food, water, and shelter before succumbing to the elements, while exploring the mysterious world, and developing your capacities to endure your exile.



Features:
Player health effects: hypothermia, exhaustion,...
Dynamic nature with: Seasonal weather, erosion, soil water flows...
Building matters: make shelters from the rain, kilns, iron smelters, water reservoirs,...

Development status: Active
Exile is still in alpha. It's very playable, and there should be virtually no bugs, but there are still missing features.

v0.4.0a is up for Luanti 5.10 and up:

Contentdb link

Support us on liberapay!

Changes:
- Widespread seasonal changes and effects, applied out to draw distance
- A tutorial to introduce new players to the game
- Many new biomes, trees, and plants
- More complex plant growth and soil tracking
- More intelligent animals, including the new Chichasa bird
- Harsh weather can be exhausting to travel in
- Dramatic new lava effects and behavior
- New food recipes including breads, vinegar, and more
- New crafting system based off rubenwardy's crafting mod
- Crafting "spots" replaced with surface requirements or placed tools
- More in-world construction and materials
- Fewer bottlenecks in the crafting tech tree
- Chairs to let you rest while sitting upright
- New spawn system designed for Exile's specific needs
- Three-button control scheme to reduce accidental clicks
- Player settings and UI themes

[Mantar]

And we're live on the contentdb!

Over on github, I finished up a feature that's been sitting around my to-do list forever: the ability to switch lamps off and on.

You can now shut off a lamp by right clicking it, and relight it with fire sticks. Along the way, I set it up so you can see the oil level by pointing at the lamp, and altered the oil->fuel balance so lamps can now burn a third longer, but it also takes two units of oil to fill them. No more waiting for them to go out before you can top them off!

[Mantar]

A quick version bump is out now, it seems due to some silliness between contentdb and minetest, it seems people were getting the game downloaded with naturalslopeslib disabled, resulting in a busted game. I've switched it over to use a git submodule (thanks to a patch from rollorozxa, who sent it like 30 minutes after the bug got reported!) and testing shows everything's working as it should.

[DreamsInBlocks]

Thank you. I've upgraded my instance from 0.2 to the latest without any apparent problems.

Looks like I am at the end of a long winter, and perhaps the melting snow is causing the appearance of freshwater_source in various places on the surface of the landscape? I would be delighted if someday the dry creeks would be running with water.

[hex]

You should try to contact Gundul about the patches he made to make multiplayer work.

[Mantar]

Yes, melting snow will turn into freshwater sources. Those blocks will evaporate eventually if uncovered, especially on hot days, so those creeks are sadly gonna stay dry.

What patches are those? From what I see, all the multiplayer fixes that were submitted to Dokimi's github were eventually worked in one way or another. Multiplayer does need work, though. Bug reports are very welcome.

[Wizard Of mkdir]

Hello!
I have been working on adding glassworking to Exile. Glassworking was mentioned in the plans files of Exile and there even is a mostly empty file in tech called glassworking.lua. I am wondering if it would be potentially welcome in the main project or should I turn it into a separate mod. (It's still sorta WIP, some textures need replacing and the bottles are a bit weird)

[Mantar]

It's absolutely welcome, make a PR and if it doesn't break anything it'll go right in.

[Wizard Of mkdir]

Started committing the glassworking related stuff today, though it will be finished tommorrow. The main file needs to be split up, and some nodes need inventory images (the transparency of glass does not work well with the default generated inventory images).

[Wizard Of mkdir]

The glassworking is now out on Github. Feedback is very welcome!

[Mantar]

Now merged, and ready for testing. I'll be trying it out soon myself, and I plan on packaging up a new release for this soon after.
Edit: Updated to initialize all the stuff from glassworking.lua. Grab it again if you wanted to try this out.

Recorded my thoughts about it in a discussion

[Mantar]

The new release is up on contentdb, with Wizard of mkdir's new glassworking.

v0.3.2 for MT5.4.x, v0.2.5 for MT5.3.0

Changes:
- Glassworking! Make windows; Make glass bottles which can hold water, and which stack
- Agricultural soil erodes down to a soil slab instead of vanishing
- fix for a baking crash

[Nemesis]

I've found an error in nodes_nature/life.lua, in the following section dealing with soil quality and crop growth. It was also present in 0.3.0.
Sorry about all the ...'s, but I couldn't figure out how to get phpbb to stop removing the indenting in the code.

In local function seed_soil_response(pos)

... if sediment == 1 then
... ... ... --loam is best
... ... ... timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.15)
... ... elseif sediment == 3 then
... ... ... --silt is nearly as good as loam
... ... ... timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.20)
... ... elseif sediment == 4 then
... ... ... --clay is poor, needs to be broken up; i.e. into ag_soil
... ... ... timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.50)
... ... elseif sediment == 4 or sediment == 5 then
... ... ... --sand and gravel are terrible
... ... ... timer_min = timer_min + (timer_min * 0.80)
... end

The sediment value for clay is 2.


Unless I'm reading the code wrong (a possibility), there also seem to be errors in the logic for soil quality.

Wetness is fine.
... wet - timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.25)
... wet, salty - timer_min = timer_min * 1000

Soil types are off. Clay is giving the greatest reduction in growth time, followed by silt and loam, which is the reverse of what it should be. Sand/gravel are fine.
... loam - timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.15)
... silt - timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.20)
... clay - timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.50)
... sand/gravel - timer_min = timer_min + (timer_min * 0.80)

Depleted soil is giving double the bonus of Fertilized soil.
... ag soil - timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.20)
... depleted ag soil - timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.40)

As an example, if timer_min was 10, Agricultural Soil would give a new timer_min of 8, while Depleted would give a timer_min of 6, and the lower the timer value the better for crop growth.

I'm not familiar with minetest scripting, but if "timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.25)" could be replaced with " timer_min = timer_min * 0.75", it would have the same result but make code readability and debugging easier.

[Mantar]

Oh good catch! Looks like when I went in to add adjustments for soil and clay, I copypasted without noticing that it was adding a percentage to sand/gravel, and subtracting a percentage from loam. Oops! A good example of the danger of poor readability.
I dunno what happened with that 4 for clay. I was gonna rework it to use labels instead of the numbers, too, but I left that for when I revisit it after doing crop rewind. I haven't done that yet though. " timer_min = timer_min * 0.75" is what it's gonna be for now, until I get the rewind feature in and make a final pass at adjusting growth times and things.
Thanks!

[Nemesis]

Glad I could help. I only spotted it because I was going through the code to figure out how to do little things like not starve to death. :D

[Mantar]

Wrote up a first draft of climate tracking yesterday that can be used to allow crops to "catch up" when they re-enter the player space, but I hit a snag: climate actually stops updating when the player is underground. That means if there's a rain storm going when you climb down below, it'll still be the same rain storm when you come back up a week later. That's not right. It will throw everything off, and would allow cheating your crops up with continual rain.

I've got to rework some of the climate code to pull out the weather state tracking from all the other code that handles player-visible weather (rain/snow/sand, clouds, sky, fog) so the former can be run separately when the latter isn't needed. Gonna try to get that done today if I can.

Update: It's working, climate history is now generated and kept in memory, but it seems I can't access mod storage for "climate" from two separate places in mods/climate/, so I'll have to shuffle things around in order to be able to save and reload history when the server shuts down.

[Blockhead]

Sorry about all the ...'s, but I couldn't figure out how to get phpbb to stop removing the indenting in the code.

Simply wrap the code in a [code] block to make sure it gets interpreted literally and typeset in a fixed width font. Notice that this won't work in combination with color tags:

Code: Select all

     if sediment == 1 then
               --loam is best
                        timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.15)
                elseif sediment == 3 then
                        --silt is nearly as good as loam
                        timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.20)
        [color=red]     elseif sediment == 4 then [/color]
                        --clay is poor, needs to be broken up; i.e. into ag_soil
                        timer_min = timer_min - (timer_min * 0.50)
                elseif sediment == 4 or sediment == 5 then
                        --sand and gravel are terrible
                        timer_min = timer_min + (timer_min * 0.80)
        end

[Jackknife]

Could earthquakes be a part of the challenge of survival or is that really hard to work into the game?
What about flooding from a lot of rainfall.
Are there any plans for adding in more animals or is that something that won’t be included right away?

[Mantar]

Earthquakes would be neat, but it would only damage things near the player. I imagine one could toss performance to the wind and generate a fake player and have it run around a given area to load blocks for destruction. I'm not sure how well players would like maybe having their huts collapse and having to dig their stuff back out.
Flooding sort of happens, rain generates water source blocks and turns dry ground into wet. (It's important since you can't just clone water yourself as in minetest_game.) This could be ramped up a bit in the rainy season.
Dokimi had plans to add a number of animals in, and those are still on the table. I'd also like to add some traps and ghosts (hostile and non) to the underworld, as it needs some more excitement. There's heat and lava and falls and vicious spiders that can leap farther than a torch illuminates, but it's still not dangerous enough down there IMO.

[Jackknife]

Earthquakes would be neat, but it would only damage things near the player. I imagine one could toss performance to the wind and generate a fake player and have it run around a given area to load blocks for destruction. I'm not sure how well players would like maybe having their huts collapse and having to dig their stuff back out.
Flooding sort of happens, rain generates water source blocks and turns dry ground into wet. (It's important since you can't just clone water yourself as in minetest_game.) This could be ramped up a bit in the rainy season.
Dokimi had plans to add a number of animals in, and those are still on the table. I'd also like to add some traps and ghosts (hostile and non) to the underworld, as it needs some more excitement. There's heat and lava and falls and vicious spiders that can leap farther than a torch illuminates, but it's still not dangerous enough down there IMO.

I can see how the earthquakes might be annoying.
Traps would be interesting. I personally don’t like ghosts or anything like that.
that’s part of the reason I quit playing Minecraft.
Also it’s over done in the Mario games.
I was thinking why not have some way to craft a set of footwear like sandals or something, of course that wouldn’t be very practical in the cold, but good for the summer or spring.
I think having another use for flour might be nice for making some kind of bread.
There are different kinds of ancient grains that could have a use in the game such as making a renewable source of flour.

[Jackknife]

Maybe you could use some of the Animalia mod to add in some additional animals.
It works great.

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=25646

[Wizard Of mkdir]

Wrote up a first draft of climate tracking yesterday that can be used to allow crops to "catch up" when they re-enter the player space, but I hit a snag: climate actually stops updating when the player is underground. That means if there's a rain storm going when you climb down below, it'll still be the same rain storm when you come back up a week later. That's not right. It will throw everything off, and would allow cheating your crops up with continual rain.

Could the climate catch-ups also be implemented for the cane growth? Although that is done through an ABM, so that might be tricky.

Maybe you could use some of the Animalia mod to add in some additional animals.
It works great.

Yea, the world definitely needs more life in animals. Although I think the animals should mostly unique. For example, an idea I was having is to have some big turtles wandering the wetlands that can be killed for a large amount of meat, instead of a cow or something. The world of Exile is very unique, and I think it should be that way. Animalia uses the same API for the animals (mobkit) as Exile.

[Mantar]

Could the climate catch-ups also be implemented for the cane growth? Although that is done through an ABM, so that might be tricky.

That is the idea, yes. ABM or node timer shouldn't matter, I believe they both have a way to get the number of ticks since the last time it processed.
The code's currently loading/saving climate history at about 6kb per in-game year (about 26 hours of play time). I'm not sure how much of a strain that'll be on a server run long-term, but for single-player it's fine, and it wouldn't be too hard to limit history to x years and then just have it fake earlier years by reusing available data. That will need testing before I know what a sensible limit is.
Next up is to wire it up to the crops and test it out. Underground mushroom crops also don't have code yet. They have to be done separately, as they don't have sunlight or temperature variations. That's trivial, though.

Yea, the world definitely needs more life in animals. Although I think the animals should mostly unique. For example, an idea I was having is to have some big turtles wandering the wetlands that can be killed for a large amount of meat, instead of a cow or something. The world of Exile is very unique, and I think it should be that way. Animalia uses the same API for the animals (mobkit) as Exile.

Yeah, I would want to keep the weird feel of the wildlife if I can. I guess retextures and behavior changes may be doable to fit Animalia creatures in.

[Jackknife]

I think this bridge mod fits in with the Exile theme.
At least it could be good for adding in ruins or something above ground.
But it could be useful for crossing over deep openings in the ground
or over water.

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27306

The original creator of Exile mentioned something awhile back about including
settlers or some form of inhabitants.

[Jackknife]

I can’t figure out what the furniture is used for.
I put in charcoal and I get no results
and the same with logs.