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inventors-fair · 5 years

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@aethernalstars - Kruzaya, Hammer of Unity has one crazy name. Besides that, though, if you manage to get this creature down, then your opponent is basically locked out of the game in limited, and I don’t see how this card has any constructive applications. What does the activation do pragmatically? I don’t see this card being played over anything else that utilizes multicolor synergy.

@connoissuer-of-fine-vines - Rhajan, Inquisitive Thinker has a great passive, I love that. The fact that it gives mono-blue artifact unearthing is a curious aspect for me. Is that broken? Probably not, but it hasn’t been around since... Tempest? It raises the question of the ability for blue to unearth. I’d like to have seen this on, say, Kaladesh. Very interesting. Small note: should be “Return target artifact card from” etc.

@dancepatternalpha - I think you’re underestimating the power both of Koth, Resistance Leader’s mana acceleration at uncommon and emblem creation at uncommon. Sorin, Lord of Innistrad was insanely powerful BECAUSE of his emblem, at mythic! Non-interactable effects with that kind of impact on the board are too much for this rarity.

@dim3trodon - Aminatou, the Fatechanger is quite odd. Should either black OR blue get top-of-library repetition like that? I don’t think this card would be fun to play against because of its ability to repeat the board state so many times. Like, in WAR - Amass/mill spells by themselves are a hassle in multiples, but if you can do it theoretically infinitely, then that’s just unbearable. I would have these abilities maybe be switched in a way, and even then it feels too powerful.

@emmypupcake - Hannah, Prismatic Guardian feels too powerful because of that first ability. If you have a way to protect her, then your opponent is barely chipping away at you throughout the game while you protect yourself on turn three from any early attack, cutting their damage down drastically. The activation doesn’t actually do anything unless you have a Teferi, Temporal Archmage emblem, since blocking creatures don’t exist until combat and you can’t activate the ability at instant speed.

@follower-of-liliana - Dack, Heroic Trickster is neato. I really love his passive. What is the flavor of the activated ability, though? “I get a treasure, but you get information” or “I have advantage now, here’s some gold?” I’m sure there’s some explanation I’m not understanding.

@fractured-infinity - Azusa, Found just made a rules manager sigh. Does that first ability even work? I don’t know. There might have to be some changes to the comp for that. Either way, the fact that this card is minorly impactful and generally weak for a planeswalker doesn’t endear it to potentially adding significant baggage to the game. I would rather have seen a card with interaction in some form regarding how her presence makes the opponent make choices.

#mtg #magic the gathering #custom magic card #contest #entries #uncommon planeswalker #inventor's fair

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rabidsquabbiteldewrito · 6 years

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ElDewrito Dev Update (Mar 04, 2018) Part 1

It’s been about a month since our last post, and we apologize for the lack of dev blog updates. Many of our team members have been busy/away during parts of the last month (I just got back from a much-needed week long vacation, snowboarding in the Rockies). While we would have liked to have 0.6 released by now, please remember that we’re all doing this in our spare time for free, and sometimes we burn out, or simply aren’t able to work on it as much as we’d like.

That being said, we’re back at full force with refreshed minds and ready to hammer this thing out.

I’ve read many comments from many people, whether it be on reddit or discord or PMs, saying that our communication is too infrequent and needs to be improved. While I do not need to apologize for taking a vacation, I take these comments to heart. It was only a year and a half ago when I was in the same position you are in, on the outside looking in, asking the same thing from the devs. It’s why I made that first 0.6 update post and it’s why I have been writing these blog posts. I’ll honor your guys’ request and go into as much detail as possible.

I’ll discuss the progress we’ve made since our last post, what’s remaining to do, and also showcase some cool new stuff we’ve added. And as always, we’ll show you some new gameplay using the new features or new forge maps.

This blog post is two parts. If you don’t care about the technical jargon and just want to see cool stuff, skip to the bottom - there’s some cool new features to see. For the rest of you, sit down. This one’s a long read; you asked for it.

The ‘Dedi Connection Bug’

In our last blog post, I went into detail about the ‘dedi connection bug’. As you recall, this bug has two manifestations:

Player A can’t join a server because it conflicts with player B already in the server. The join request is actually rejected.

A player attempts to join a server, but the establishment process never completes, yet the player is able to join the voip server and can hear players in the server. This manifestation has multiple root causes.

One of our team members, unk_1, wrote a log parser to detect occurrences of the dedi bug. We turned on network logging on a few of the 0511 dedicated servers and left them running for a week at a time. After analyzing the logs, we’ve found that manifestation #1 accounts for about ¾ of the connection issues. As I mentioned last post, #1 has been completely fixed already.

A lot of work has gone into trying to fix number 2, and while some occurrences might be out of control for the time being (restricted NAT type for example: remember Xbox 360 NAT type issues?), we have made great progress and have fixed one of its causes. I’ll go into a bit of detail about that here.

MTU and Packet Fragmentation

The MTU (maximum transmission unit) is the size of the largest amount of data that can be sent in a single network transaction. If a packet is too big (larger than MTU), routers will fragment this packet into smaller ones and then the data gets reassembled. This fragmentation can lead to a much higher chance of packet loss. In addition, not all routers behave the same in regards to packet fragmentation, and many do not obey the ‘Don’t Fragment’ flag in the IP protocol header.

Why is this relevant? After lots of digging and research, we found that some of the packets that are exchanged during the establishment process were bigger than the MTU size. The solution? Shrink them down to a valid size so that they don’t get fragmented. After testing this in 0511, we saw the number of manifestation #2 occurrences decrease.

While this is great news, many #2 occurrences still were still present in the logs, and we believe many of them are related to NAT. We will provide a how-to doc when 0.6 releases on how to check/open your NAT type, as well as other useful info to ensure that other players can connect to your server without issue. As for the other #2 connection issues that may (we aren’t even sure if any remain) still exist that are within our control, we’re going to leave them to be fixed them in a later update. Debugging these issues are a slow, tedious, painful process. We can’t have this issue delay us any further, so we’re calling it a day. Note: So far, with the #1 and #2 fixes in, we haven’t had a single dedi bug re-occurrence in our testing sessions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t rare connection issues hiding somewhere that we haven’t been able to replicate.

The Updater

The usual question. We’ve made great progress on the updater, and it is pretty much finished. The updater will be a lightweight standalone exe that will allow you to update to the latest version, and even downgrade to previous versions. The updater will not need to be ran to start the game, nor will it act as a launcher like the 0511 updater does. It’s simply an updater. When a future update comes out, for example 0.7, a message will be displayed on the title screen when you boot up the game, telling you that you need to close the game and update. Open the updater -> click update -> done. There are a couple of very small bugs we’ve found during the testing of it, and those are being fixed.

Enough about the boring stuff, on to the fun stuff.

Misc/Small Bug Fixes since last post:

Settings - Fix for Alt binds

Added forge binding to deselect everything

Allow held forge object to be extended unconstrained

Fix transparent materials for reforge

Fix ‘default’ weapon offset preset doesn’t work in the in-game menu

Fix atmosphere toggle on map modifier

Fix weather effects not working on certain maps

Fix issues with custom fog not working well on certain maps

Discord UI - Fix the Ui showing breifly upon starting the game

Chat UI - Add warning alert for opening links that may be unsafe

Fix crash related to forge kill volumes

Fixed exe remaining running in background due to Discord rpc not shutting down

Fix duplicate requests for player info (rank, emblem, ect)

Jaron’s emblem editor that we showed a preview of in the last post has been added and touched up.

Q: Has anything you’ve previously shown us not going to make it into 0.6?

A: Yes, unfortunately the doors and fans we showcased in the last blog post have too many issues and are not ready for prime time. We want them to be polished before adding it, and doing so right now would be time consuming and would delay release. Keeping the doors and fans as-is in 0.6 would break any maps using them we were to fix/polish them in a later update. For these reasons, we’ve decided to exclude these from 0.6 and add the doors/fans to a future update instead.

Q: Have any new cool features been added since the last post?

A: Absolutely.

But before I go into detail on these, I want to make an important distinction about why things are still able to be added while we haven’t released yet. We often see comments like “Why are you still adding features when you could have released?”, or “just release the game and add stuff to it later”.

That’s not really how development for this game works. This team has quite a few active developers. If two people are working on a must-fix bug, say ‘the dedi-bug’ for example, there are other members of the team who are still available to work on other things. If devs A and B are developing the new updater, that doesn’t mean that devs C-G need to sit and twiddle their thumbs until the updater is finished. Some bugs are very complex, and only certain members of the team have the expertise to fix them. This produces opportunities for us to sneak in extra features without slowing down our 0.6 progress whatsoever. So to be clear, extra features that we’ve been showing off in the last few blog posts have not in any way slowed down or delayed the release of 0.6.

That being said, buckle up, because we’ve got some cool new shit for you.

Glass and Emissive Glass have been added as forge materials. Any reforge object can be given a glass or emissive glass material, and can have customized opacity and color.

40 New Materials have been added for forge objects. In addition, Forge Material textures can now be scaled, and the x and y offsets can be adjusted.

Here is a video showing some of these new materials being used in forge, as well as how to adjust the scale and offsets.

youtube

Fog has been drastically improved to look more realistic. Here are a couple of examples:

Directional lights have been added. You can control the direction, intensity, fov radius, color, and near width of any light. Here is an example picture:

Directional lights are great because you get much more control with bleeding (the light doesn’t go through the objects). you can set the FOV to something high like 180 and it’s like a point light but it won’t bleed above it through objects. In this example - here’s where the light is:

With a point light instead of directional light, it would be super bright up here:

Pulse and Flicker functions can also be applied and customized to any light source. You can control the minimum intensity, maximum intensity, as well as the frequency of the pulse or flicker. Here’s a video showing some of these lights being created/altered in forge.

youtube

Player size is now a gametype option/trait. Players can be scaled to be tiny, huge, or anywhere in-between. For example, you can create gametypes where the players become huge while in the hill or in the lead, or tiny while holding the ball or flag. A small map like the pit can suddenly turn into a BTB map. The sky is the limit. Players also animate between the two sizes, so they don’t just instantly magically appear large or small when transitioning from one size to another.

A full gameplay video where players are tiny, but become big and slow while inside the hill in a game of KOTH is posted in part 2 of this blog post, but here are a couple of pictures.

A huge spartan driving a Warthog:

Large Spartans as a hill trait:

Skyboxes can be swapped to/from any map. Yep, you can now choose any skybox you want when creating a forge map. There are options for inheriting the fog that comes with the skybox, or you can override it with your own custom fog.

These skyboxes open an whole new realm of creativity. Take a look at some simple examples of skyboxes being used on different maps.

Guardian Skybox on Narrows

Valhalla skybox on Sandtrap:

Here is a video showing how to change/alter skyboxes:

youtube

Here is a small album of 4k images. I will add additional images to this album throughout the day.

Additional Weather Effects have been added. Heavy Snow, Rain, Falling Ash, Slipspace Fallout, and Flood Pollen can now be used as weather effects. While the rain effect is a little underwhelming and needs some work (it doesn’t look very realistic yet), some of the other effects are quite cool. Here’s a gif of the “Slipspace Fallout” effect.

Don’t forget to check out part 2 for some gameplay videos, but for now, let’s get back to business.

Q: Now What?

A: We are at a state where we now consider the game to be ‘Feature Complete’. All of the major bugs that we’ve committed to fixing have been fixed. All of the features that we committed to adding, have been added. No more features will be added. We are going to enter a short, exhaustive, ‘Regression Testing’ cycle where we test every feature that we have added over the past two years. The only commits that will occur between now and release will be fixes for bugs found during the regression testing cycle. The reason this is necessary is because over time, parts of the code have changed, been refactored, moved, ect. We need to ensure that we haven’t broken anything along the way. One of our main devs, unk_1, once said “I can't overstate how much i just molested the engine over the last 2 weeks. It needs to be tested like a lot.” And that’s what we’ll be doing.

When we’re finished, you’ll know.

Until next time (or until we’re playing right along side you); Sincerely,

RabidSquabbit

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