I’m trying to post something on this blog every one or two weeks, so since it’s Friday afternoon and I’m feeling too worn out to say anything interesting, I thought I’d just update you on my “progress” this week.
The new website mostly seems to work, so I think I can leave that to its own devices for a while and start trying to put a new software build together. There are various things to do in order to make that happen, including rewriting the code that validates users, now that we have a membership site. But first I’m working on updating from version 2022 of the Unity engine to version 6.
The fact that this one is called Unity 6 and not Unity 2023, probably indicates how embarrassed Unity feels about releasing their shiny new 2023 version almost at the end of 2024! I share their pain…
From my perspective, major version updates of Unity are always really stressful and frustrating, but I have to keep up with them. This one hasn’t go too badly so far, apart from a significant bug in the physics engine. I reported it but they insist it’s too hard to change and so they’re not going to fix it. Which is a bit odd, given that it’s a regression bug and it worked just fine in the last few versions. But luckily I’ve found a way to work around it.
So far, though, I’ve been unable to get the damn thing to compile a build. Mysterious errors that nobody seems to have seen before. I’ll figure it out eventually, I’m sure. Usually it takes a while for third-party asset developers to iron out the bugs in their own code, so we’re all frantically trying to get our acts together at the same time. You may have to wait for some of them to catch up.
Meanwhile, Unity 6 has some really nice improvements that should make rendering significantly faster and allow things to run okay on lower-end hardware (upscaling, for instance). My first experiments showed no improvement whatsoever, but that’s not too surprising. HDRP has a gazillion settings that interfere with each other in weird ways, so I expect there’s something lurking in a dark corner somewhere that’s preventing the massive improvement in frame rates we were promised. As always, I’ll figure it out eventually.
Once I do get it to build, I’ll write the new validation code and tidy up a few things. That will be a good point at which to allow newcomers who want to get their hands on it, to sign up as paying members, and then, finally, we’ll be truckin’! Don’t expect miracles in this next build, because there’s still almost nothing for you or the creatures to interact with, which makes it all seem pretty boring and pointless. But that’s next on my list of things to do!
For now, I think I deserve a beer… Have a nice weekend!
Oh, wait, I knew there was something: We’ve started having our usual extended and somewhat random conversations in the comments to blog posts, in the absence of any other options. There’s something to be said for that – at least the post provides something to talk about. But it’s not necessarily ideal? It’s not a very chatty format, compared to something like Discord, and yet both blog comments and Discord make topics from previous discussions quite hard to find, compared to a forum. I’d be interested to know what you all feel about the best ways for us to communicate. Any ideas are welcome …er…. in the comments to this blog post!
Personally, I liked having a forum. It feels more organized than any of the alternatives, and since you’re intending for Phantasia to be more public than Grandroids, I think it makes sense to have a forum, rather than centering discussion of the project somewhere like discord that’s invisible to the greater internet. Plus, you already have to sign up for the website to use it, so you may as well minimize the number of things a potential user has to make accounts for.
Discord is for a community. Not for communication. There is a reason they called it ‘discord’
I would recommend starting a discord, once a public advertisable build is released. You pick some volunteer as discord mod. And then we can use it to:
– help new users with problems
– organise creating stuff (for example person A likes making 3D assets, person B likes coding, person C understands real life plants – now they create a garden)
– just chat
For more permanent stuff use the blogs, a forum or whatever.
Discord is just for community, quick communication and a bit organisation.
You can ignore it (you won’t believe how many YouTubers, twitch content producers and similar won’t even visit their discord – you can become one of them 😉 )
Idea:
Make in the forum something that says:
“List of unofficial discords” where we can place our self organising projects and just chat. That way you can very safely ignore it, while keeping it centralised in the forum.
And the importand results of those discords will always flow back into the forum, since that will be the main central hub
I also think having a forum would be nice. It gives members the option to discuss various different topics, introduce themselves etc. and is also searchable.
I think Discord is optional. It could be a nice addition, but at some scale will also introduce an additional surface that requires moderation.
I think if you are able to spare the effort, maybe a WP plugin is available for it. Then differentiating between these blog posts with comments, and a forum with the ability to make threads in predefined categories makes sense.
That said, I do think that is an issue I wouldn’t care about at this stage. This works plenty fine.
Forum works for me! As others have said, a Discord might also be a good idea but they should be considered more ephemeral: basically it’s IRC but managed by a commercial entity with some fancy bits bolted on, and integrations for various stuff.
Fora are kind of out of fashion, but I am not sure they were ever really replaced by something better so much as subsumed by the socials.
Since the gardens are still empty at this time, i assume we can still bring up ruimentary ideas for plants and how they might work.
I already wrote the idea of a grid pattern that got informations of nutrients to grow specific plants.
However this fails in most games, because seeds can’t be stored for long times like in our world.
There could be a simple solution, some seeds become “invissible” and dormant if they can’t sprout directly. Now they are placed in a number sheet in the grid pattern. There they are just waiting until the right conditions apear (checked once every season)
The seeds get a half life time, that reduces their total number of seeds. When they sprout, they are placed randomly on the grid.
This would free up GPU and allow some toxic wasteland to take over an area (or other biome) and the player can clean it up (with a lot of work) and the previous ecosystem can reapear (similar to magic movies where evil magic is removed and suddenly everywhwere are rainbows and plants – or how deserts bloom once it rains)
It would also solve the problem of plants becoming extinct. In creatures 3 plants always gone extinct (partially i have to blame myself for that (maybe it wasn’t a good idea to make an atomic bomb)) – and restoring them out of a machine always seems a bit cheated.
However if the player remembers “here was once a hughe bloom of …uhm… elephant lillys … the player knows that this patch of land just needs the right growing conditions and the seeds might return
also the plants could produce a lot of (temporary) seeds as food source. And if they are not eaten, they just become a number in the grid, stored for later use
EDIT: it would be smarter to store seeds by plant name and not by number, since we had a lot of problems in creatures 3 to organise the numbers of all the agents. When some overlapped (and certain numbers just attract more atention). However when the numbers are displayed to users as names, the chance will shrink, since everyone will name their own agents differently and can remember the names of other agents easyer thantheir numbers
Discord does have that search bar, and it also added “threads” and “forum channels” which can let you use it as a forum and organize discussion topics. But the actual things Discord offers over other options is voice channels – with screen sharing as a feature – and apps for mobile, desktop, and web with push notifications, as well as just being a few clicks to make a new server.
That all said, how many of those features would actually be used is debatable and I wouldn’t mind a forum.
update on the current state of 3D AI assets, since you said once you saw your world in VR i assume you got a VR chat account? Here is a world made with the current resulution of text to 3D. Click here
There you can look at the assets if they are up to your quallity in game
And how that world is made (also how i found that world) click here for the youtube video
i also visited the world meantioned in that video made with the previous version of meshi – that one was crap, but the new halloween one is better than i expected.
fourm