Logic World News

Hello everyone! I hope you enjoy my piece for the Logic World OST called 'Time and Science'.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In addition to writing new music, I've recently been working on polishing some of my previous pieces for this soundtrack. I'm now completely done with 20 minutes of music for Logic World. The full soundtrack will be 40 minutes, so we're officially halfway finished! I'm looking forward to the next half and I hope that you're there with me on Logic World Wednesdays to hear some new tunes!


This week I’ve been working on making the game log the stuff it’s doing. Right now all the game’s output is printed directly to the in-game console (or the server console), meaning that if you, for example, wanted to print an error, you’d have to explicitly specify the message’s color every time you print it. I’ve been working on a system that abstracts this, instead it lets you say “print an error”, and it will automatically print it to the console with the appropriate color, as well as to a file on disk. Mods will get their own dedicated logger, which means that it will be easy to distinguish between mods’ log messages. This is what the logs in the server look like:



Knowing the message’s “importance” level (trace, debug, information, warning, error or fatal) also lets us write some pretty logs to a file:



I’ve added a command that lets you change the log level (which by default is the information level), so that you can see the tracing messages that are hidden by default.

Now that we have a proper logging system, it will be much easier to diagnose and fix bugs and crashes. Logs should also be a big help to modders who are trying to fix their mods.


I’ve also been working on a menu that shows all loaded mods. It’s not complete yet, currently it shows you some details about the mod like its name, ID, version and priority:



(The artifacts you see in the details panel are just some Unity Editor shenanigans)


I’ve also been progressing on Logic Maker, the tool you will be able to use when working on your own mods. I’ve decided to drop the GUI option (at least for 1.0 release), since I think it won’t be necessary as the CLI app is very easy to use.

I spent a while looking for a library for parsing command line arguments, but none managed to quite convince me. The closest one was Fluent Command Line Parser, however it still doesn’t fully support subcommands (like [code single]git fetch -a, for example). This is the reason I am developing Yaclip (Yet Another Command LIne Parser), a library for parsing arguments with a completely fluent interface. It’s also able to automatically generate pretty help messages, this is Logic Maker’s help message (so far):



Currently, Logic Maker allows you to create new mod projects from templates that you will be able to provide, as well as a default template that allows you to configure what you want and don’t want to include in the mod. You’ll also be able to add new components to your existing mod, although this will probably be overkill for simple components.


Building on last week’s work on Global Display Configurations, this week I’ve added some fancy menus for editing those configurations!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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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/

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
I felt it was appropriate to make a video about this rather than just writing a blog post. This is a major bummer, but it’s what’s necessary for the game.


I’ve been working on an overhaul of Displays, to make them faster and easier to use. It’s not quite done yet, but I wanted to show it off in a video anyways.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
These new displays use the Extra Data system I described last week, and indeed they are the main reason for that system existing.


This week I’ve been working on adding some metrics to our cloud architecture. Metrics is a generic word for anything that gives us information, which in our case is a set of applications.

First we have Traefik, which is the application that you connect to when you go to logicworld.net and that routes your connection to the back-end services. Traefik can produce some metrics, which Prometheus collects. Prometheus can be considered as sort of a metrics database, which stores the data it collects from the various sources and allows you to query it. Finally, we have Grafana, which is the front-end for all of this and allows us to create cool dashboards like these:

I’m also working on adding metrics tailored to the site itself, like comment count, post count, etc.


Many menus in Logic World have a popup window to edit menu settings; you can see it in this recent video. Previously, all menus only had one setting, the scale slider, and the menu settings system was tightly coupled to the menu resizing system.

This week I’ve overhauled Menu Settings so that they’re more independent and open to extension. Any menu can add custom settings now.

Currently Menu Settings still aren’t being used for anything besides the Scale sliders, but I have plans for a few custom menu settings. You’ll likely see those 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/

Hello everyone,
I'm glad to be back for another LWW music update. I hope you enjoy this OST sample and that it finds you in good health. This piece is called 'And So We Danced'. Talk to you all again soon!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


I’ve finally added a big missing feature: menus to create sandboxes and load your existing sandboxes! Each sandbox has a description box where you can write notes about it, and you can organize your sandboxes by tagging them.

Additionally, when you create a sandbox, you now have the ability to choose its world type, and to edit settings about that world type.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


As I mentioned on a previous LWW, I’ve been working on redesigning all the cloud infrastructure, including the main site. The current Logic World website is a Single-Page Application or SPA. This means that the site exists only on a single page, and the contents are updated using JavaScript. The new site, however, is being built to use JS as little as possible, and the entire site is guaranteed to work even when disabling JavaScript on your browser. If you do disable JS, you will only lose some QoL features, but the site will still be 100% usable.

You can try out the work-in-progress new site at https://logic.world/. Please let me know what you like and don’t like about it :)


As I was adding features to LogicScript, its performance kept going down. Previously LogicScript was an interpreted language, meaning that scripts didn’t get compiled beforehand and were instead parsed and run. This has a high performance overhead, since we need C# code that’s reading the script and executing the instructions. For this reason, this week I’ve been working on making LogicScript code compile to CIL, which is the same kind of code C# runs as after being compiled. This means that when you load a script it first gets compiled in-memory, and when it gets run it is much, much faster (about 30 times so!).


This week I’ve added a very fancy and versatile system to Logic World, which I call Extra Data. Extra Data is a set of arbitrarily-typed data that is stored with each save file. Currently it is used to store world settings -- see above -- and I'm working on a few more exciting applications for it.

Extra Data is easy to use from code, but under the hood it’s enormously complex. Anybody connected to the server, as well as code running on the server itself, can update the Extra Data. When this happens, it has to be synchronized between all of the connected clients, as well as the server’s master copy saved to disk. The primary source of complexity is the fact that the data can be of any type: the system has to work for numbers, text, colors, lists of lists of six-dimensional vectors -- whatever you throw at it, Extra Data can handle it.

Extra Data is stored on disk as SUCC, so it’s all very nicely formatted and easy to edit if you’re the kind of person to muck about with save files.

Extra Data is fully accessible to mods.

This system was far more difficult to program than I anticipated. I initially budgeted six hours, but it ended up taking three very long and stressful days. This is the cause of this week’s record-settingly-late Wednesday. Sorry about that 😬

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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 like my menu backgrounds how I like my coffee: dark, blurry, and with four or five different settings to configure how they look.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


I’ve completed my quest to update all of Logic World’s user interface! This week I tacked some more complicated menus compared to last week’s updates.

You can click on each of these images to view them in 4k.



When I updated the console, I fixed a longstanding and very annoying issue with resizing it. Resizing the console is now very satisfying:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I am happy to announce that 100% of Logic World’s UI now meets my standards for quality and usability. In my opinion, these last few weeks have seen the UI go from passable to pretty good. I am pleased.

All of the code and assets used to make the game’s menus are part of a package called LogicUI, which we will release for free sometime after Logic World launches. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort developing these systems, and we hope they’ll help others make great UI for other games.

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Bit of a short update this week, but we’ve got some exciting things cooking for you. Stay tuned for a very awesome next Wednesday!

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/

Recently I added Sockets to Logic World. This week I’ve improved their logic for connection detection, and I’ve started experimenting with bigger socket sizes.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As shown in the video, Sockets can now detect whether two world-space squares, both with arbitrary rotations, are overlapping. This is the hardest math I’ve had to use in a while, and I’m very happy I got it to work so well :)


This week I’ve worked more on the modding documentation, and it’s now public at docs.logicworld.net!



The docs aren’t finished yet, but they do have a “Getting started” tutorial to give you an idea of how mods will work, as well as all the reference documentation for the LogicAPI assemblies, which mod code will use to interact with the game.

Right now the docs only briefly mention C# scripting, and in the coming days I want to write some tutorials and other reference documentation about the different systems that make up Logic World.


A little over a year ago, I showed you a system for switching the palette of colors Logic World uses in its menus. This system exists by necessity; we need an easy way to ensure all of the menu elements use the same color, and that same ability lets us switch those colors whenever we want.

This week I’ve finally added the in-game option for switching the UI theme! Now, you can customize the menus to look however you want.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Themes are stored in simple text files like this, and mods can easily add custom themes.


I’ve continued my work from last week in redesigning game menus. Some of these old designs were over a year old, and I’ve learned a lot in that time about UI design and programming. It's been very satisfying to apply that knowledge and bring old work up to my new standard.

You can click on each of these images to view them in 4k.



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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.

See you next Wednesday!

View this post on logicworld​.net. More Logic World Wednesdays

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