There will be a way to turn it off at some point soon.  The people who make videos have requested this several times.

Minecraft has a selection cube too but it's black.  In Mythruna a black cube could almost never be seen so I made it more visible and when you are building it is useful.

At some point there will be a distinction between building and just "gaming" in the UI... at that point the selection cube will only be there in build mode.  Even before that, I will add a way to toggle it on and off... I just have to get some other things done first that are driving me crazy.

Yeah, this sort of balance of limitations is always tricky.  Fortunately, I have a game in mind and my vision doesn't waiver that much... though it morphs a little here and there.  If something strays too far out of the "fantasy role playing" setting then I just say to myself that I hope the modding community picks up that challenge.

Maybe when everything from the main vision is in place I will circle back and do some of this stuff or help/encourage other efforts... but in the mean time I concentrate on becoming a dragon slayer... and all of the steps leading up to that.

If you know the people then I don't see why not.  There have been plenty of unofficial postings around the internet at this point so I don't think we can avoid random griefing.

If you are really concerned about a particular group of people then you could wait until the property system is in place... then at least parts of the world can be protected from the worst stuff.

Note: it is possible the rope bridges would explode.    And I'm only partially joking.

When many things are chained together it can send the physics engine into fits.  I have some strategies for reducing it but it may always be a little scary to create long chains of things.  We'll see.

Nice.  Heheh... your expectations are so low.

Rope in Mythruna will not be a block type.  It will be a special physics object.

How it will probably work if I can get it working at all....

You will select the rope as your build object.  You will click somewhere and drag.  The click sets the rope end and the drag stretches out some length of it.  When you release the mouse, that's the length of the rope.  If you've attached it to another object then they are now connected.  If you left it dangling then it swings in the breeze... ready to be attached to something else or lengthened.

At least, that's the simplest interface mechanism I can think of.

Flipping it over into the other way, I could click the rope on the back of a chair and drag it out a little before releasing.  Now I have a length of rope attached to the chair, just flopped down.  If I switch off of the rope tool and back to a regular hand or glue or something then I can pick up the end of the rope and attach it to the ceiling.  Now I have a chair swinging from the ceiling.

Note: the above will definitely NOT be in the next release but it's on the plan for how physics should work when finished.  Well, unless I get a super tailwind and everything works smoothly... maybe ropes will get in.  But I still have to write the rendering side of ropes so I sort of doubt it.

Spirit magic/crystals are for wi-fi.  Whatever energy signatures you pump in come out of all spirit crystals in the world... then you can use crystals/circuits to filter and trigger on specific frequencies.  At least that's the design at this point.  It may turn out a little differently.

When there are more mods and stuff... this will have to be something supported by mods.

I'm going to primarily concentrate on making the role playing game.  I add some simple things to the pure build mode when it's easy or really necessary... but an in-game editor is kind of a lot of work.

Besides, at some point there will be building templates and ways to place them and size them... this might be similar to a world builder.  When the NPCs and the world generator generate buildings it will be based on a library of templates... shapes, architectural styles, etc..  It might be possible for me to give the player some control over that.

And as far as external tools to edit, that's one of the reasons I created the external tools section and posted the Java notes on how to connect to a world database... because another player was asking me about it.

Yeah, I think a silent IP ban list is on my to do list now, ie: banned IPs just fail like a connection error or something.  I don't really want to provoke anyone if I can avoid it.

Other than that, I guess I will need to spend some time beefing up the server tools.

Max width and height were both set to 600.  I've upped max width to 1200... so maybe that fixes it?

Just caught a mass-griefer in the act using automation to remove a large chunk of the world... and part of my castle with it.  Fortunately, I backed up the world last night and so just restored that area.

Spent a half hour last night rebuilding large portions of spawn town (with some help) that had been randomly removed and griefed, huge craters in the street, large sections of walls missing from the stable, inn, and surrounding buildings, random blocks placed all over.  Time well spent.

It was inevitable but it's just depressing.  It's not like I don't have better things to do, after all...

Yeah, it might be cool.  It's getting rather large.

...just one more thing for me to try to remember to do.   I know I posted one version a while back maybe I'll update soon.

...but for example, your combination lock that only you can open could be as simple as a circuit where you've used a crystal to store a bit of your unique life energy.  When you touch the lock, these energies are combined and if they match then they trigger the lock and send some of the life energy back into the storage crystal.

The fun part is that in theory, someone who knew this could secretly capture some of your energy ("Here, hold my dagger for a second.") and somehow use it to open a lock... Then maybe you are paranoid and require a specific set of tiny energies to be sent too... in some sequence that a special wand sends out (fire, fire, water, light, fire, life)... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The idea behind the circuits is definitely to be able to shrink things down.  After all, it's these sorts of devices that will power the wands and provide the plugin "chips" to give you special abilities.

I'm still working out exactly how the circuits will work but they will be based on elemental magic energies that behave like light in the circuits.  Black marble, sand, and glass will be important components for insulating, combining, and reflecting these energies in various ways.

I'm working from memory, but some of the elemental magics will be things like: life (which is actually a class of energy and each living thing has a slightly different frequency), water, fire, spirit/ethereal, electricity, gravity, light, etc..  And each of those would have different gems or crystals that could be used to generate, remove, or transform magic energies.  So maybe you could make a solar powered device that generates water (in fact you will since that's how a player would make their own spring)... or a life force powered device to give you some ability like flying.

The player characters have a special magic aura that NPCs do not possess... because player characters are not from the world.  So most NPCs won't be able to use the same magic devices the players will.  Well, certainly some will never be usable by a standard NPC.

I change my mind about some of the details sometimes and I'm not sure how flexible I can get without killing the engine.  But we'll see.  It's all pen and paper dreaming at the moment and may turn out to be impossible as written above... in which case I will fall back on something simpler... though hopefully not as simple as preset recipes.

That's pretty close to how it will be.  I'll post more about it at a later date.

Accessing a local Mythruna world map from Java is fairly straight forward for someone who knows Java.  I won't describe how to do this in a multiplayer game as a) it's dangerous, b) setup is difficult, and c) that will certainly be clamped down at some point as eventually the remote world database implementations will not allow direct modification at all (except through separate commands).

Anyway, to access a mythruna.db you will need the game .jar files.  For Windows these are tied up in the .exe so it's better to download the Linux version for this.  The only difference between the Linux version and the Windows version is how the games are launched.

(Note: interfaces and implementations are subject to change though these should be pretty stable.  Note also, the game code itself is copyrighted and cannot be used in other games without permission.)

The best way to access world data is through the WorldDatabase interface.  It provides built in caching and a way to save back changes.  All of the below classes can be found in the mythruna.db package.

Code:

    // Create the actual file I/O layer for "leaf" data
    DefaultLeafDatabase leafDb = new DefaultLeafDatabase( new File("mythruna.db") );

    // Create the factory that generates the world data
    ColumnFactory colFactory = WorldUtils.createDefaultColumnFactory();

    // Create the world database
    WorldDatabase worldDb = new LocalWorldDatabase( leafDb, colFactory );

At this point I'm not really prepared to provide javadocs for the WorldDatabase or related interfaces but a clever Java program can figure out the callable methods from their IDE or by using javap.

The Mythruna world is divided into 1024x1024 meter "nodes".  These nodes are sub-divided into equal size "leafs".  A leaf is 32x32x32 blocks/cells.  So a node is 32x32x5 leafs.

Should it ever matter, the mythruna.Coordinates class has methods for translating from world coordinates to node, leaf, cell, etc..

All WorldDatabase methods take world coordinates in x,y,z where x,y are a map location and z is the elevation.

The most interesting and straight forward methods on WorldDatabase are getCellType() and setCellType().  These can be used to query or change the values of blocks in the world.  Though if you will be querying and changing a lot of blocks then there are better ways.

getColumnInfo() returns a ColumnInfo data structure for an entire stack of leafs at an x,y location.  This includes elevation and surface type information used to generate maps, for example.  This data structure is the most likely to evolve of any.

getLeaf() returns a LeafData object that contains the raw 32x32x32 data for a leaf.  If changes are made to this leaf then WorldDatabase.markChanged(leaf) can be called to save it again.  (Note: if changes are made through this approach then lighting will not be recalculated.  Set LeafData.getInfo().lit to false and it will be relit the next time it is loaded.)

For the most part, that's about all of the support I can provide other than answering some questions.  I have a game to write after all.

I will add that directly mucking with the LeafInfo fields (as retrieved by leafData.getInfo()) is pretty dangerous.  This API was not designed for safety but for internal speed and ease of use.  Modifying those fields directly may totally hose your world database (except in the case of the lit flag mentioned above and even that "may" cause issues with lighting.)

Good luck!