Logic World News

This week I’ve started working on the workshop part of the website. In the workshop you’ll be able to browse, comment and download the sandboxes, circuit boards and mods that people have uploaded.



Each workitem (that’s my term for all the items you can upload to the workshop) can have multiple versions, and each version can optionally have a (markdown powered) changelog.

To clarify, Logic World's "Workshop" is not the Steam Workshop, but an independent system that can be used by any platform the game is purchased on.


Dark mode automatically makes a website ~12x cooler. In an effort to maximize the website's coolness, I've added dark mode, easily accessible by clicking a link in the navbar.

For example, this is the same page as in the Workshop screenshot above:



As you can see, it keeps the same overall style of the light mode while being a lot easier on your eyes.


This week I’ve added a whole bunch of settings to customize your crosshair!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This has been a very long time coming. Custom crosshairs is something that folks have been asking for, and something I’ve really wanted to add, for literally years. It feels very good to finally have them in the game.


As part of my overhaul of our web services, I’ve been working on a new system for sending out our newsletter. The new system is much simpler, and I’ve given the emails themselves a shiny new paint job!

Before:



After:

• Fixed various errors with multiplayer and with reconnecting to a server
  
• Fixed placing a Display crashing the server
  
• Fixed being unable to load saves with Displays in them
  
• Fixed "Draw Shadows on Additional Lights" setting being forced to off when "Draw Shadows" is turned off and then on again
  
• Fixed pressing the "Open Screenshots Folder" hotkey causing an error if it was pressed before taking any screenshots
  

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We'll keep releasing these weekly updates right up until the game comes out. To make sure you don't miss them, you can sign up for our newsletter or join the official Discord, and of course you can wishlist and follow the game right here on Steam.

View this post on logicworld​.net.

More Logic World Wednesdays

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/

I’ve been working on a menu for editing the controls!



It’s still missing the very important feature of being able to actually edit those controls, but it’s now displaying the controls and that’s a start :)

It can display all of the fancy features of our input system: multiple buttons that must be pressed concurrently, bindings that reference other bindings, bindings that must be tapped multiple times to trigger, and multiple different bindings as options for a single action.



Being able to display bindings visually is not just important for the Edit Controls menu, but also for things like the in-game tutorials, where players will be told to press a given button to trigger an action.


After building Bob last week, we’ve been working on setting up the software to get him building the game.

We’ve run into several unanticipated issues -- because of course we did, why wouldn’t we -- but on the whole it’s going well and it’s almost done. Bob’s computational performance on builds is very promising; he’s faster than our old build server by more than a factor of two.




As I was working on adding context and screenshots for translators, I came across a description for a setting that didn’t make sense. I did some further reading on that setting ("shadow cascades") and it turned out I had no idea how lighting works in Unity.

Well, I did some more reading, and now I have some idea of how lighting works in Unity. I’ve used my newfound knowledge to buff out our lighting settings: we now have seven total settings related to shadows, each with a helpful preview image and informative description.



Shadows are both extremely important to the visual fidelity of a game as well as extremely demanding on a player’s graphics card, so I feel it’s important to have extensive settings for controlling them. I always get a little peeved when a game just has “shadows: on or off” -- not to name names -- and Logic World will not be joining that club of shame.

• Fixed being unable to select hotbar slots beyond slot 10 by double tapping or ctrl+tapping a number key
  
• Fixed client throwing an error if you tried to run an autoexec.lsf
  
• Fixed being unable to make pegs exclusive if they were part of a dynamic prefab (i.e. on a Panel Display)
  

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Thanks for reading, friends! Happy Canada day.

We'll keep releasing these weekly updates right up until the game comes out. To make sure you don't miss them, you can sign up for our newsletter or join the official Discord, and of course you can wishlist and follow the game right here on Steam.

View this post on logicworld​.net.

More Logic World Wednesdays

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/

Today, the Logic World Community Translation Project has officially begun!



The enthusiasm of the translators has been absolutely staggering. It’s been less than a day since translations began, and already we have thousands of translation suggestions, seven languages with at least one suggestion for each translation, and several dozen individual contributors.

Thank you to everyone who has so far helped translate, and thank you in advance to everyone who is going to. We want folks to enjoy Logic World in whichever language they wish, and thanks to you, they will!


At the suggestion of the thoughtful @tokumei, I’ve made some awesome changes to the Component Resizing interface!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This particular UI, I realize now, was a big blind spot of mine. For most of this game’s history, you couldn’t resize things at all, and it was a big missing feature. Because of this, I saw any form of resizing as “really good”; I didn’t realize how poor the interface was in comparison to what it could be.

That’s why I’m so grateful to this community and all the additional eyes it puts on the project. To Tokumei, and to everyone else who has suggested features for Logic World: thank you!


This week I’ve been working on making the game connect to our servers, and the first step of that is to let users log in using their logicworld.net account. To do this, all they will have to do is press a “login” button in the main menu, and their browser will open with the login page. Once you enter your credentials and submit, you will be authenticated in-game!

We also considered having the login fields directly in-game. However, the login process is very complicated: it has to support creating a new account, resetting your password if you forgot it, sign-ins with external providers like Google, ect. It would be a lot of work to duplicate all this UI in both the browser and in-game, so we’re just using the browser login for both.


Many, many Wednesdays ago, I wrote to you about how I had started work on a Friends system for Logic World. This week I’ve picked up on that work, and I’ve added an in-game menu for all of your friends!



This menu will show you a list of your friends, including the profile picture they set on logicworld.net, their username and their current status (online or offline). I also want to make this status reflect what they’re currently doing, for example “Playing with 5 people” or “Playing by themselves” (this could of course be disabled in the settings). And, probably the best feature, you’ll also be able to join other people’s games through this menu (if they have enabled it).


I love triangle color pickers. I think they are completely and objectively better than square color pickers in every metric. That’s why, when I added a color picker to Logic World, I made the picker a triangle.

To my utter shock and disbelief, this week I had a few people tell me that they prefer the square color picker. These people are, obviously, completely wrong. But nevertheless I have added an option to use a square picker.



And of course, just like the Fun Spinny Triangle, there is an option for a Fun Spinny Square.


We’ve talked before on this blog about our Cloud Build system: we write some code, we press a button, and a server somewhere automatically builds the game for each operating system and uploads the builds. Until now, we’ve been using a server that we rented from a company. But this had two problems:

1. Companies charge hella cash for high-performance server rental
   
2. Not having physical access to the machine made troubleshooting and problem-solving more difficult than it should be
   

So this week, Jimmy built a new server for us. And if you’re gonna build a server, why not make a vlog about building a server :)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

But building the hardware is only half the battle. We’re still working on the software part: we’ve got the operating system installed, we’ve got all the networking configured, and we’ve successfully activated a Unity Plus license on the server (something we were never able to do on a machine we couldn’t physically access). The next step is to set up all of Felipe’s fancy build software on Bob.

Once that’s complete, we’ll finally be able to build Logic World quickly, reliably and cheaply. Any disasters notwithstanding, you’ll be hearing about the completion of this project next week :)

• Fixed 'Tried to add entity at invalid circuit state index' error, requiring a game restart, if you built a world with more than 10,000 concurrent circuit states
  
• Fixed errors when you tried to resize a component with wires directly attached to it (Panel Displays)
  
• Fixed board hitboxes becoming squished when you moved or placed a board on their edge
  
• Fixed sometimes not being able to resize objects for no reason
  
• Fixed being able to interact with Interactables that are behind players
  
• Fixed various crazy visual errors when cancelling Multi-Wire Placing at stage 0
  
• Fixed in-game changelog not rendering
  
• Fixed the `MissingLocalizations` command incorrectly stating that present localizations were missing
  
• Fixed the Configurable Menu scale slider label having an incorrect localization key
  
• Fixed Resizable Menus always starting in fullscreen when the game is played in Europe
  

Wait a second, did I read that last bug correctly?

Yes you did! This is one of the most interesting bugs we’ve ever had in Logic World. Can you guess what caused it? We sure couldn’t for several hours!

Pause reading here if you want to think about it and try to solve the puzzle yourself :)



We were going absolutely mad trying to figure out this bug. We each did the same thing, but got different results. Who could have guessed that the difference in our digital setups was the physical location?

It turns out the culprit was… different regions using a different character for the decimal indicator! The resizable menus save their size to a SUCC file. In North America, the menus were saving their size as something like 205.872. But in Europe, they were saving their size as something like 205,872. You can probably see where this is going: the numbers were saved using the local culture, but they were loaded as a global culture. So all of the values were being blown up by 3+ orders of magnitude!

A couple of quick commits to SUCC, and the bug was fixed.

Sometimes, bugfixing can be delightful. When the symptoms are bewildering and random, but the cause (and fix!) turns out to be simple and logical… that’s one of the finest feelings in programming.


The lovely @Daniel, a beta tester for Logic World, is now doing regular streams of the game! So far on-stream he’s built a Nintendo CIC), a binary adder, a tic-tac-toe machine and more; right now he’s working on a playable game of Battleship).

In our biased opinion, Daniel’s streams are always tons of fun, and you should check them out! Follow him on Twitch and Twitter to be notified when he goes live.



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We'll keep releasing these weekly updates right up until the game comes out. To make sure you don't miss them, you can sign up for our newsletter or join the official Discord, and of course you can wishlist and follow the game right here on Steam.

View this post on logicworld​.net.

More Logic World Wednesdays

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/

You can now easily move objects around, and their rotations are all handled properly.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This is part 1 of 2 in my Grand Plan to Make Rotating Boards Less Awful and Difficult. You should be seeing part two next week.


To send data between the client and server, we use packets. These are small bits of data that the game uses for communicating things like when a player has placed a component. Previously, these packets were hard-coded, meaning that whenever we wanted to add a new packet type we needed to manually register it.

A big issue with this approach is that mods were not able to add their own packet types. For this reason, I’ve made this system more expandable: instead of packets having their own hard-coded ID they will be assigned an ID when the game starts. This will be very helpful for mods, as they will be able to send and receive their own data, independent from the rest of the game.


This week I’ve also been working on optimizing the code that does all the circuit simulation, namely the clusters system and the circuit states system. The most interesting one is probably the clusters one, since it involved more thinking rather than coding.

Clusters are an internal structure we have within the simulation. A single cluster represents a group of pegs and wires all connected together. Since everything in the group will turn on and off at the same time, they can be treated as one object rather than several.



Previously the clusters that needed to be updated were stored on a simple list, which stored references to all of those clusters. This worked just fine, however it wasn’t the most efficient approach.

Since we only ever iterate through the clusters one after the other, we do not need the ability to get, for example, the fifth cluster in the list. Instead, we only really need to know which cluster is updating first, and which one is updating after it. This is very similar to the concept of a linked list, since each cluster just has to store a reference to the next cluster. This is much more efficient than using a list, since all the operations we need are O(1) (which basically means it always takes the same amount of time, no matter how many clusters there are) on a linked list.

There’s also a distinction between a doubly linked list and a singly linked list: an item in a singly linked list only stores the reference to the next item, while a doubly linked list’s item also stores a reference to the previous item. In theory we would need a singly linked list since we only ever go forward when updating, however using one would mean that we wouldn’t be able to remove an item that’s not the first or the last one (for example when you remove a component and we need to remove it from the list, it’s very likely it’s in the middle). For this reason, we need to go with a doubly linked list.

We could use C#’s generic LinkedList class, however it could introduce more overhead with unnecessary features and end up actually being slower than our old way of doing it. For this reason, clusters will instead build their own linked list of sorts, manually storing the previous and next clusters that are updating. When we want to update all of them we simply get the first one, update it, then check which cluster is next and repeat until we’ve reached the end.

I was going to make a cool graphic diagram to demonstrate the concept, but unfortunately I’m far from a graphics designer so if you’re interested I’ve made a text document detailing what happens when you add or remove a cluster.

This should also drastically improve the performance of Relays, as those components work by creating and destroying clusters. However, we haven't been able to get numbers on that yet.

• Fixed vertical flying controls getting "stuck" when Lock Flight Y Axis is off
  
• Fixed Color Picker often opening by default to a white color
  
• Fixed Gridlands worlds by default being created as pure white
  
• Fixed boards flying away like a butterfly if you grabbed them at an angle that didn't immediately provide a reference location
  
• Fixed crazy errors next time you load a save if you quit to main menu while placing a component
  
• Fixed Edit Label Menu not doing "select all" when it's opened
  
• Fixed fatal error when spamming the rotation key on buttons and keys
  

The amazing @Marutzo -- whom some of you might know as NITRO -- has made a gosh darn plushie of Bobby, Logic World’s beloved protagonist and mascot.



Click here for another photo!

This is pretty much the best thing ever and it has absolutely made our week!

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We'll keep releasing these weekly updates right up until the game comes out. To make sure you don't miss them, you can sign up for our newsletter or join the official Discord, and of course you can wishlist and follow the game right here on Steam.

View this post on logicworld​.net.

More Logic World Wednesdays

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/

It’s been one of those weeks where I’ve combed through the game and added tons of small details and polish. I felt it was time for another video compilation of these :)
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


This week I’ve been working on some performance improvements in the circuit code, but quickly I realised that I had no proper way of testing whether or not my changes actually made a speed difference. For this reason I’ve made a simple framework for us and mods to add different benchmark cases. A single case is an interface with a method in it that does a single “iteration” of work (for example, creating a component), and the framework takes care of running a ton of iterations and measuring how long each one takes, then reporting that to the user.

This framework is accessed by the user through two commands: 'benchmark' and 'stress'. The first command will run iterations in about 1 second “groups”, then average the time each group took and calculate the time each single iteration takes. This is fine for long jobs, but for jobs that are very quick to finish (like changing the state of a wire), the time per iteration is so small that it becomes cumbersome to measure and compare. That’s why there’s the second command, which will instead run as many iterations as it can in 5 seconds and report how many iterations per second it achieved.

These benchmarking tools will be invaluable in the coming weeks as we get serious about speeding up Logic World.


Our brilliant and very handsome beta tester @TheWildJarvi has embarked on an epic quest: to build hardware for rendering the Mandelbrot set in Logic World.




Jarvi is livestreaming most of this process. If you’d like to see hours and hours of unedited Logic World gameplay from someone who knows a heck of a lot about digital logic, you should check out his streams! The first few are already up on youtube, and you should subscribe to his channel so you’re alerted of his future streams.


A member of our community recently suggested that we start including a list of bugs fixed each week in these blog posts. This week has been particularly bug-fix-filled, so it seems like a good time to try out the idea!

Bugs with components

• Fixed Oracles generating a new value when their circuit network is updated, i.e. by adding or removing a connection to their input
  
• Fixed "ghost" display configurations on picked-up Displays with deleted configurations
  
• Fixed Buttons and Switches making extra sounds when they are placed, rotated, moved, and when the sandbox loads
  
• Fixed Buttons and Keys getting stuck on if they are rotated or flipped while being pressed
  
• Fixed held-down Buttons and Keys going up if another player joins the game while they're being pressed
  
• Fixed being able to press Keys when you couldn't see the actual key part
  
• Fixed Keys turning on but not moving and not making sound when a different player presses them
  
• Fixed being able to press Keys when they are visible only via their reflection in SHINY BOBBY
  

Bugs with building

• Resizing components: fixed holding shift to snap to square size not working properly\
  
• Fixed wire ghosts sometimes having a different rotation from the wires they create
  
• Fixed multi-wire placing outlines sometimes being the wrong color
  

Bugs with the player controller

• Fixed player jump sounds always coming from the world origin, rather than the position the player jumped from
  
• Fixed players sticking to the ceiling when they jump into one
  
• Fixed players falling at an inconsistent, and usually too fast, speed when walking off the edge of a platform
  
• Fixed players decelerating in the direction they're facing instead of the direction they're moving
  
• Fixed players accelerating too slowly when the game is lagging
  

Bugs with the user interface

• Fixed hover tags rendering behind popups
  
• Fixed visual artifact on settings sliders when set to minimum value
  
• Fixed terrible glitchy behavior when clicking on scroll bars
  
• Fixed incorrect hover tag text localization key on "Add New Tag" button
  
• Linux: fixed resizable menu custom cursors being gigantic and taking up half the screen
  

Other bugs

• Fixed positional sounds not getting quieter with distance
  
• Fixed client's 'quit' command hard locking the application
  
• Fixed component registry not properly detecting the error when a mod adds duplicate component IDs
  

Please let us know what you think: is this list interesting to you? Would you like to see it return next week?

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We'll keep releasing these weekly updates right up until the game comes out. To make sure you don't miss them, you can sign up for our newsletter or join the official Discord, and of course you can wishlist and follow the game right here on Steam.

View this post on logicworld​.net.

More Logic World Wednesdays

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/