Still being worked to the bone Paul?

Yeah, unfortunately.  I don't even have much time to flip over the KVM switch to this computer these days. 

I'm still here. Just ran out of ideas on what to say. Still trying to figure out that whole motivation thing too.

I guess it's been  a while since i asked, so... anything new development wise?

No, unfortunately.  Life has me by the scruff of the neck and is wiping my face on the floor.

Your new development videos on youtube suggest otherwise.
By the way everyone, just type in "paul speed" into youtube, and you'll be able to see all the new videos!

One video from a month ago and another from 6 months ago.

The one from a month ago is an app I wrote my kids in case they wanted to try making a game with me over their spring break.  They didn't really do anything with it and I ended up not having time to help them anyway.  You can download it here if you're curious:
http://www.simsilica.com/sdm_downloads/block-ed/

Other than that, I've pretty much dropped all non-work, non-family activities and I'm still falling more behind with that every day.

Soo the mythruna public server Q/A menu only says to use the scroll wheel on a mouse to change block type.  
I don't have one. So how do I change block type without a mouse?

I guess I never included them on that screen... but you can find them described on this old old old link:
http://mythruna.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Engine_Test_Build

I struggle with this topic a few times in my design notes.  There has to be some way of avoiding dismantling dungeons while still giving the player flexibility.

But it's also important to remember that the "disintegrate this block" thing is likely a build-mode only ability.  Or certainly something that requires special setup or context.  (So, for example, you might use it for elemental material types but prebuilt structures would require getting the pick axe out.)

Anyway, I've always seen the build mode and play mode games as totally separate.  Where build mode has full creativity like you do now with many of the normal rules turned off.  And play mode has an extremely limited set of destruction opportunities (until you get into higher level magic).

Either way, your base elements will be stored in crystals and your ability to build would be related to regurgitating those through magic.

Also, even though the player-characters are the only ones that can truly perform magic, they've been visiting these worlds for centuries.  So it might not be unheard of to have already-activated magic devices hanging around.  Especially since the world itself already runs on magic energies.

I'm still here. Just ran out of ideas on what to say. Still trying to figure out that whole motivation thing too.

I guess it's been  a while since i asked, so... anything new development wise?

No, unfortunately.  Life has me by the scruff of the neck and is wiping my face on the floor.

I made ketchup once.  We had the ingredients and it seemed easier than driving to the store when we had run out and I needed some for a meal.

...I ended up going out and getting some anyway. 

I make a lot of my own food but it's usually the stuff you can't really buy.  I cook chicken breasts and then eat off of them for several days.  I keep stuff around to make baked potatoes, salads, etc..  These are interspersed through my more prepared meals.  Though lately I'm on a fish kick.

I do all of my own cooking... it doesn't really count to your question, though.  I buy bread and stuff.

Over the years I have read many of the same pieces of literature that the dwarf fortress guys have.  So it's no surprise that our ideas are similar, I guess.  It's a very interesting topic.

I don't know, really.

Not a plant, but a general idea. You probably thought of it already, but i felt it worth noting. plants in video games have a habit of being uh... binary, as it relates to physics. You either pass through them, or they're like brick walls. Will plants and certain parts of plants restrict movement without outright halting the player?

I don't know yet.

I've moved the releases over to bintray and there are new releases.

Latest release:
https://bintray.com/simsilica/demos/mphys-demo/1.2.0

F1 opens the help.  Tab opens the settings panel.

The big deal now is that objects are spatially "binned" and the engine only processes the active bins.  This was one of the necessary requirements that Mythruna physics will need.

As to your other comments, I won't go into detail but these settings were the ones I used when testing Mythruna objects and they will not necessarily look right with spheres.  They may not look right with Mythruna object either.  As per other discussion, I will always err on the side of stability.  As it stands with these settings, I was able to stack objects two high... which is sort of my minimum requirement in the end.  I'm ok if stacking crates more than two high doesn't work well but I'm not ok if you can't put items on a table.

Anyway, now you can tweak the settings all you like and discover why it's a difficult problem.  And in the end, tweaking it for spheres won't matter for block objects... so I will wait until I have block objects before I mess with that.

P.S.: At least one or two monkeys have shown an interest in seeing the source code... so this improves the likelihood that I will open source it... which also improves the likelihood that others will actually help fix any lingering math issues.

Happy Christmas and Merry Holidays.

Spheres are an easy way to test an physics engine because collisions are dirt-simple and really hard to get wrong.  Any bugs are that much more obvious.

So the first steps will be to get the whole framework of the physics engine worked out and properly partitioning space, etc..  Then I'll start moving the block world-level collisions and test those with the spheres (though by then they might be axis-oriented cubes).  After that I port the block object collision code.

Cell level collisions in Mythruna are treated like a combination of sphere and cube (for the collider, not the collidee).  At least that's how it's worked up until now.  So even if a single block visibly rotates, it's still axis aligned into whatever target it is colliding with. (If that's the world then it's axis-aligned with the world.)  This makes a bunch of things faster and easier and is a reasonable enough approximation.

This past week I've been writing a new physics engine from the ground up.  Both to incorporate a bunch of lessons learned as well as try to incorporate some fundamental missing design elements from the old ones.  I'm structuring this as another open source project but only time will tell if I ever release that way.

Anyway, as part of that, I made a little demo for me to test things.  It's kind of fun to play with for 20 seconds so I posted it for others to play also if they want to.

Here is the download landing page:
http://www.simsilica.com/sdm_downloads/physics-demo/

Here is where the thread starts on the JME forums:
https://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/december-2016-monthly-wip-screenshot-thread/37458/49?u=pspeed

From one of the posts on that other page:

WASD + mouse moves/looks. Left mouse fires big bullets, right mouse fires little bullets... space bar drops a bomb at the section of ground you are looking at. With no crosshair it's kind of find to guess.

The settings are currently optimized for stability so it's possible to get the balls to hang over the edges of the cubes and stuff if you hit them right. I'm also not sure why friction stops the small balls instantly on a rebound. It may be due to some other friction changes I made and it may just be a fact of counter rotation + high friction and low restitution (bounce).

Either way, I will always err on the side of stable versus chaotic. It works better for me and my game. (And hours of playing Skyrim makes me feel much better about my physics engine, anyway.)

Here are some screen shots of it in action:

If you don't mind my asking, what are these potentially impossible things?

It's lots of things but mostly all of the things relying on a really flexible physics engine.  From the top down, "Can players make their own objects?" and all of the things needed to support that.

Will we be able to have ships we can ride on?  Trees that fall over? Etc.

Can I properly distribute the multi-tiered of AI that I plan to have?  How many 'live' cities/towns can I support at once?  Many?  None?

Flowing water/smoke/fog/energy?  Beyond just cheesy cellular automata.

There are lots of these sort of open questions that are fundamental to the eventual final design and no amount of dorking around with textures and fancy 3D menus is going to get us any closer to solving.

If the answers to any of those questions are "no" then sometimes things start to cascade and I end up back to a more classically scripted RPG with random encounters, etc..  Not as much fun but at least the content creation path is clear in that case.

You might be surprised how many things are ultimately contingent on being able to properly and efficiently network the physics engine across a whole infinite really large world.

I said I wanted to do that.  There is work to do to get to that point.

I'm still trying to push the existing engine along while I do some design work on how I want to break things up.

The bottom line is that there are a half dozen things that are on my list that might be impossible.  These are the features that I was never sure would actually work or not and it becomes clearer by the day that delaying a decision is only leaving open ended issues in the engine and/or parts that will have to be rewritten.  So I either need to think of ways I can prototype/implement/prove those features or I need to let them go.

My short term goals going forward are to break the engine up into separate pieces and to do so with an eye on implementing those undecided engine features.  I've been off work for nearly a week and a half... and will be taking real vacation starting Wednesday of next week (through the to the new year).  I don't know what I will be able to get done in that time.  (It is a family holiday after all) but either way it will be telling on how the future will go.