Month: October 2012

The 1.4.2 release (Mystcraft 0.9.4.00) should be up later today; just fixing some bugs and issues. 🙂

Enjoy!

The next release of Mystcraft is scheduled for 14:00 my time, which is 3 hours from now. It will be available from a post in this blog.

Lots of new things coming up and so much I hope you will enjoy and find exciting to explore.
Some of the highlights are the new instability mechanics, lecterns, colored portals, and numerous performance improvements.
Be careful of the new instability. Decay is no longer the only option, there are more mild forms of instability, but they can get quite troublesome. There are also even more deadly forms. These will really make you think twice about adding all those dense ores symbols. 😉

Check the Mystcraft Forums for updates and the changelog.

Enjoy! The waiting is only for a little longer!
EDIT: Everything went so smoothly I released almost immediately after this post went live. 😛

There have been many issues with the website lately in terms of registration systems for the bug tracker and the forum. These issues are caused by a recent move of the hosting server and we’re trying to fix them. Sorry about the dust. In the mean time the authentication for the forums is on manual (Veovis is having to manually go through and approve people) and I’ll try and get the bug tracker so that one of us can do that there too. If you find yourself waiting or really urgently want to get on one of them just swing by the irc channel (#mystcraft on espernet) and try to catch one of us there. 🙂

Otherwise, Mystcraft progresses well. Balance is undergoing final checks (the testers only have a few more points to check) and everything seems to be working very smoothly, now. Something about testing balance seems to help find more bugs and issues. 😛

The release will come out before 1.4. The following release will hopefully be hard on the heels of 1.4, and then, after that, new content. 🙂 Wheee! 🙂

Enjoy!

Hello! Sorry for not posting more frequently!

The testing team has been checking over balance. Things are looking good. 🙂
Taking what we’d been looking at and noting the failures of the system, I added a leveling mechanic to the instability mechanics. Now they can scale better and limit how many times they get added to a world. This means that the system works much better, but it also sets us back some for testing the balance. We need to check over everything again to make sure that this change doesn’t break balance (though for the most part it should improve it). The main concern is that some things may need to be softened a little because they scale now.

While that’s going on I’ve been streaming some things I’ve been working on. If you want to catch me when I do that be sure to subscribe to my twitch channel (http://www.twitch.tv/xcompwiz). I don’t tend to know in advance when I will be streaming!
Last stream we went off on a tangent and played with colored portals. Now every time you place a book in a receptacle it will randomly select a color. That color will be used for the portal it spawns. It’s really quite cool looking. At present there isn’t an in-game way of selecting the color -just picking up and putting down the book again- but there will be a way in the future. 🙂

The stream also saw some bug fixes and some neat particle effects for when you link.

I just added config options for symbol registration. It’s now possible to prevent a symbol from being registered, effectively disabling it. This will remove the symbol from the game but not from ages or notebooks so be careful using it on existing saves! Things will work, but ages, for instance, might have to select a new symbol to replace the lost one.

I’ve got some other things in store for you, as well. I look forward to you getting to see these things and your responses.

Enjoy!

Sorry for not updating the blog recently. I have been very busy (and forgetful) and not thought to keep everything bouncing.

I have been streaming over at twitch.tv/xcompwiz, as well as present on the IRC channel and even on MineTV, so there has been news. 😛 Just not here.

At the moment Mystcraft is being tested for balance. More specifically, I have added a whole new system to handle world instability in Mystcraft Ages. Now there is more than just the well known decay effect (which from now on will be “black decay”). There are lots of new mechanics like worlds with poisonous surfaces; worlds where the sun will set you ablaze; worlds where you find yourself weakened or slowed; even meteors. Let those who thought that 100 dense ores symbols were a great idea beware!

That said, all of these new mechanics need to be tested not just for bugs but also for balance. Do they work well together? Do they compare well to the instability of the world? What tier of instability is right for a randomly generated world? How many instability effects should it have? At what point should worlds start to fall apart or at what tier can the mechanics attack resources? All of these questions and more have to be considered and everything must be weighed and measured over and over. It’s the hardest part of game design and development: Game Balance.

Once that’s all done then the release will be set. We’re already feature-frozen, meaning nothing new from this point on without really good reason, so it’s pretty much just testing and bug fixing.

For everyone asking when I’ll update Mystcraft to whatever version of Forge: the next release of Mystcraft will require Forge 4.2 and should work on any version after that. The next release of Mystcraft will go in the Mods folder. It is no longer a jar mod.
A big thanks to Lex and cpw for merging my pull requests into Forge. 🙂 Lex has been working over the past month getting different things in and showing me how to improve my changes to work better with Forge and cpw pulled the remaining changes into Forge this morning. We’re all set. 🙂

Cheers!