Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Since I’ve recently finished my studies and started to work in the video game industry, I rarely find some spare time to spend on contributing something meaningful to Terasology. The last thing I did were some long overdue updates to Terasology’s rendering part of the engine. Those updates include some shader tweaks and a better algorithm for calculating the ambient occlusion term used for shading the terrain.

Nevertheless the project is blooming – so to say. Many very talented contributors are filling the game with both content and new features, making sure Terasology will be powered by the most advanced block engine out there. Even multiplayer support is appearing on the horizon and might make a first appearance within a few months. But see for yourself… Here’s a recent video by skaldarnar showcasing some of the most recent additions and changes introduced in stable release #21:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

We actually have not finished setting everything up yet and there may be a lot of changes in the forthcoming days and weeks but it looks like all threads, posts and user accounts from the old board were successfully migrated. If anything is missing or not quite right: Let us know! As a small start we’ve tried to reorganize the structure of the message board. Any requests for new forums or overall feedback are greatly appreciated.

You can find the new community portal here: http://forum.movingblocks.net

We finally have a fancy Entity System, thanks to Immortius, huzzah! And a nice world browser built on top of an overhauled GUI framework by Anton/Adeon/Small-Jeeper, yay! The ES is a very important core system that is now also helping us persist everything beyond the plain blocks and such in the world. It also allows us to get fancy, so we now have functional chests, woo! You can move items in and out of the chests (activate with the ‘e’ key) and even destroy the chest, picking it up, placing it elsewhere – and it still has the stuff in it! Revolutionary, I know. Can place chests within chests within chests at the moment – that’ll change. Get a chest using the console (tab key) and the following command:

giveBlock “Chest”

This is just the first nifty little thing we can do with the ES, the creative options explode from here on out

With Milestone 3 complete the next one up is “Interaction” during which we intend to introduce creatures and further, well, interactions! We have already done some prototype model system work, just need to flesh it out some more. Inventory will likely be made fully functional (at last!) and maybe we’ll try to make an actual crafting system functional. The world needs to start gaining some character, which we’ve been discussing at length in the forum. Not too far down the road we also have some work on extensibility to go further with. Javascript for a modding system? Crazy like a fox, but maybe it’ll work!

Meanwhile first thing is a top level directory restructure – that’ll hit develop soon, at which point a full local workspace refresh is probably a good idea for anybody working with source (whack everything and pull fresh via Git)

Download page – Applet page

Don’t forget to bookmark those links!

Stable release 0.2.3 was released just shy of a week ago with a slew of changes in it. Downloads are available now on a new snazzy wiki page with additional details. The team has grown nicely, some of which may have been announced before, with Immortius joining up as architect, currently working on an Entity System, t3hk0de helping there and with persistence too, which KaiKratz is also tinkering with when he’s not busy making WMDs. Exile is still churning out music and SFX, rapodaca got us set up with Gradle and fancy inventory pieces, and basic AI also popped up along with a fancy audio system (those two also thanks to t3hk0de)

We’ve started using IRC regularly (#terasology on Freenode) and you’ll find us there quite often, with an informal weekly gathering on Saturdays in the late afternoon EST (European evening, Russian post-midnight, Australian Sunday morning). We’re also trying to get more up to speed with unit testing and Javadoc. We had a nice story in the forum by an unlikely but promising contributor. Blocks started chasing you around, the applet got updated, you can now take screenshots with F12, tinker with camera settings, and.. there’s probably more, but I’ve spent enough of the evening already writing this!

We’re closing in on Milestone 3 – Persistence being finished, after the first one got renumbered as 2 to match GitHub numbering. After that lots of architecture to finish up culminating in a fully functional Entity System and multiplayer after that!