Although, I never said soon, but just anytime Paul thinks we should start promoting it. ^^

Gotcha!  

BTW, love the sig line.

Yes, you are on the right track.  And for the most part, you can already craft these objects and I'm pretty confident that I will be able to make them appropriately useable.  You won't have to discover the exact recipe for a chair... just make something about the right height with enough of a flat surface to sit on and people can sit on it.  Likewise, if a big flat soft thing is big enough for a person then they will be able to sleep on it... maybe even sleep better or worse depending on how soft or whatever.  These things are pretty easy to detect and deal with so I'm reasonably confident that I can make that work.

I'd like to extend this to items and tools, too... if I extend physics far enough and use it to calculate certain properties about an item then maybe I can tell that the long sharp metal thing you've made makes a pretty good weapon when used a certain way.  Or that the small sharp pointy thing you've made will make a good chisel but probably take a lot of damage as you use it on certain materials because it's made of stone.  The only thing I know for sure is that if I extend object crafting type of building to item crafting that the scale will be much much smaller... but I'm 75% sure it will be more about building up the parts then just placing blocks that sort of look right.  I just have to see how much abuse the engine can take in that regard or see if some of the tricks I've designed on paper will work.

Much of that could turn out to be impossible... but it will be fun to see.

Wow, that's some really cool stuff you plan on getting to. It actually clears up a few questions I had about the game. Speaking of which, is there any good place to find a list of planned features? Thanks in advance.

No, not yet.  I've been pretty tight lipped... partially because I'm not yet sure what is impossible.  I'm trying to do all of the "impossible" stuff first to make decisions about that stuff.  Once I have a better handle on what I really think I can do then I will start opening up more about specifics.

In general, I'm trying to make a role playing game that I can play myself.  I come from the Neverwinter Nights modding community where there were quite a few really good persistent world servers.  Like MMO-RPGs without the first M.  The problems of building that type of constantly living world were often more of a challenge than any quests that were added, etc... I'm trying to implement the systems in Mythruna so that those sorts of persistent world servers are much easier to create because all of the base systems of a living, functioning, persistent world are already in place.  (In fact, in the simplest cases the towns and cities may already be there, too.)

Combine those systems with pretty aggressive random generation and I believe that I can make a game that even I can play because it will still surprise me.  Layer some add-on or community-developed quests on top of that and I may never log out.

There are still one or two feasibility questions I have to answer for myself before I can really be too much more specific.  For example, even the question "How will item crafting work?" depends on a few things.

There is some truth to all of this.  The forum and community activity sort of comes in waves right now as different people hear about it.  I've done absolutely no marketing on my own and yet the community still grows in little fits and spurts.  The lack of any marketing on my part has been on purpose.

Mythruna is in a precarious place at the moment.  I have a ton of ideas and a pretty clear vision of where I want to go.  I could probably spend a good deal of time posting about my vision and the upcoming features but there is a double edge sword there.  It could turn out that some of my ideas are just impossible and have to be scaled back drastically.  It's one thing to give you guys a cool feature that you don't know is less than it was supposed to be.  Another thing entirely to have built up a high expectation only to disappoint.

The other side of it is that there is competition out there.  I'm pretty sure I'm mostly invisible on the radar but you never know.  The more I write about stuff way in advance the more likely it is that some other MC-like game gets an idea it didn't have before.  I think this is sort of unlikely but I'm still stinging a little from all of the new features MC gets in the next update that were items directly on my roadmap.  And while I will do them differently and in my opinion better, it still makes a bullet to bullet comparison seem a little "samey".

So all of this leads to a problem.  I can tell new users that things will be different and some will see where I'm going and understand (like you guys).  But since I can't really write about too much of it in detail yet, many others will just see "Minecraft with different textures" and in the best case just dismiss the game and in the worst case actively grief the game.  Which is all sort of par for the course especially given the few comparison videos that have generated all kinds of hate.  But I will be unlikely to encourage that myself until I have a stronger platform to stand on.

When physics and town generation is in, with the beginnings of AI started, and maybe one or two more small features are in, I will probably be just as likely to promote things as anyone.

Another thing to consider is that it was 6 weeks since my last update.  That creates a pretty sizable lull.  I hope not to be in a position to do that again.  There were extenuating circumstances in this case since I switched gears after having worked on the most major feature of the engine.

Bottom line: I don't mind people promoting the game on their own.  It's how I've met a lot of great players after all.  And I really enjoy chatting with all of you.  However, promoting it just to keep the forums churning may not be the best motivation depending on how that promotion is done.

Thanks for the interest.  It's clear a lot of you really care about the success of the game and that means a lot to me.

hey look, casesar, you're a mod.

He was persistent on a day where I'd just banned 12 new accounts and deleted 8 spam posts.

I posted a bug fix release.  Not really worthy of its own post but fixes the issue mentioned above and one or two other things.

Yeah, ok... so it is what I originally thought.

The other problem that happens right away in that case is that there is no way to raise an object up, either.  So if you need to stick something on the bottom and run out of room you end up stuck, also.

There is probably another round of changes that need to happen to that interface but I'm hoping that some separate things I have to add will give me some ideas, also.  For example, physics implies things like hinges and/or attach points which may also affect the way a user wants to edit an object.  And then there may also be some kind of assembly area for joining objects together... I just need to let some of this fester in my head a bit.

You mean after you've built it?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding then.

Yeah, it is kind of a pain when you forget to put something on the bottom of an object... requires a little extra planning.

I'll have to think about it some because that interface is already pushing the boundaries of "too complicated" for a lot of users.

D'oh!  Sorry about that.  I've added it to my to-do list for tonight's bug fix release.

As a work around in the mean time, if you create a scripts sub-directory then it should get past the error.  The scripts sub-directory should be next to mythruna.db, not in it.

Note: I have already discovered one bug in this release that I won't fix until tomorrow.

If you edit an object in the blueprint editor and save it then the changes don't show up in the object placement tool.  You have to log out and log back in first.  Newly built objects work just fine.  It's kind of a pain but too late to fix tonight and this was I can see if there are any other issues.

...it will be _VERY_ surprised if that's the only new bug.

Download here:
http://mythruna.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Engine_Test_Build

Release notes here:
http://mythruna.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=20110830_Release_Notes

This release was a long time coming but that's mostly because of the work done on the disabled physics engine.

Major highlights of this release:
-improved logging and error catching... hopefully we can track down more errors now
-some loading performance improvements
-some visual glitch fixes here and there
-a whole bunch of infrastructure changes to support scripted commands and tools, including the new world-revisioning support
-flame blocks
-thatch corners and wood slope corners for roofs (with temporary improper walk meshes)
-now the yellow highlight cube only shows up when in block placement mode, ie: it's now possible to completely get rid of the HUD including the bright yellow selection cube

See the change log for details.  Even though there aren't many player-facing changes there were quite a few things that made it into this release.  And my server admin life should be much easier now.

Thanks.  I always seem to be happy when I post pictures for you guys.  If not for the words of encouragement they generate, I'd probably spin myself into a perfectionist tornado and tear it all down.

As it is, lately my general plan is to work on a visual until I don't recoil in horror, tweak it a little more, post pictures... then live with it a while.

Fire still has some issues but I think it's good enough for this release... and I'm really close to cutting one.

Yeah, metal is on my to-do list.  It will be critical soon... I'm just still working out what shapes I want to support to make what I want to make.

Someday.