Logic World News

[h2]Pick Up Component - Jimmy[/h2]
Pick Up Component is a new building mechanic I’ve added to Logic World this week. It lets you pick up a full component, including any data you’ve edited on it.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Pick Up Component is the second last building mechanic planned for Logic World 1.0. Just one more to program, and then the building is done!

[h2]Settings Menu - Jimmy[/h2]
I’ve been working on Logic World’s settings menu. I think I’ve got a pretty good design for it.



Let us know in the comments what settings *you’d* like to see in Logic World.

[h2]Sexy Notifications - Felipe[/h2]
The notifications system on logicworld.net has been very unstable since I put it together, as I didn’t put much thought into it. This has now changed. I’ve rebuilt the system altogether and now it’s much more robust and pretty.



If you’re logged in, you can check out the new notifications page at https://logicworld.net/Notifications. Make sure to leave lots of replies to each other today so you can properly experience it ;)

[h2]Open Source Shenanigans - Jimmy[/h2]

This week I’ve been working on a few of the open source libraries we’re developing for Logic World. These are chunks of code that we’re releasing for free, for anybody to study or use or even contribute to.

Firstly, I've made a number of improvements to SUCC, the tool Logic World uses to save and load data in configuration files. SUCC can now save and load null - that is, no object - and it’s better at figuring out what value to load if it doesn’t find that data in a file.[/size]

Next, I developed an extension for SUCC called InterSUCC. InterSUCC allows you to treat SUCC data files as objects with properties, rather than requiring you to input text to use as data keys. InterSUCC also contains a nifty feature called ConfigWithOverride. ConfigWithOverride allows you to have a master config file, but have some parts of that file overridden by a particular additional file. In Logic World, we use this to give you per-world settings. For instance, the game has a global setting for simulation speed, but you can change the speed for just one world by editing that world’s config_override.succ.[/size]

Finally, I updated Jimmy’s Unity Utilities with all the goodies we’ve added to it in Logic World’s JUU copy. It now has extended support for color names (used in Logic World’s color picker), tools for saving and loading images to disk (used for saved board thumbnails and for the flags in LW’s languages menu), a precise timing class (used to animate Logic World’s intro), a utility for setting the contents of the system clipboard (used in Logic World to copy console messages), and more.[/size]

While I was at it, I also made a small library called PersistentData. PersistentData isn’t something that will be used in LW, but I’ve been meaning to make it for a while and I’ll definitely be using it in other future projects.[/size]

[h2]BobbyBot - Felipe[/h2]
This week I’ve written a bot for the Logic World Discord Server. His name is Bobby Bot, and he posts updates from logicworld.net to the discord. Right now, he sends a message for each new post in the forum. When Logic World releases, Bobby will send a message for each new WorkItem you upload to logicworld.net: boards, worlds, mods, ect.



Bobby will also help us out by posting our biweekly discussion topics: Philosophy Phridays and Miscellaneous Mondays. Never again will these be late! Look out for our first Bobby-posted topic this Phriday at 18:00 UTC.

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See you next Wednesday!

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

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

[h2]Resizable Components Polish - Jimmy[/h2]
As part of my ongoing efforts to make Logic World’s building mechanics as fluid and easy-to-use as I can, this week I’ve been polishing up the mechanics for building with resizable components. You can now directly start resizing something while you’re placing it, and I’ve added a new Drawing mechanic for building with boards.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I’ve also polished up the look of the resizing UI: there’s a snazzy checkmark in the center that you can click to confirm the new size, and all the UI elements now change color when you mouse over them, to communicate that they can be clicked on.

[h2]Outline Tech Upgrade - Jimmy[/h2]
When I was working on the new Resizable Components UI, I ran into a limitation of our outline tech that was preventing the checkmark outline from showing up.



The problem was that all of the outlined objects were being outlined together as one pass. This image explains what that means better than my words did:



Since the checkmark outline was nested inside the outline of the component being resized, it couldn’t show up; the checkmark edges were not part of the edges of all the objects.

This has been a limitation of our outline system for a long time, and this week I finally set about fixing it. The outline system now supports multiple independent “layers” of outlines, where each layer can overlap with the others.



With these new outline layers, I can now draw the checkmark outline, and you can see it in action in the video above.

I also added one outline layer that has “depth culling” enabled. This means that only the visible parts of the objects get outlined. The depth culling layer is being used for the outlines of interactable objects, and drastically improves their look.



Finally, I added some options to the outline rendering for folks to tweak to their preference. You can now adjust the outline thickness, the outline fill amount, and the outline intensity.



[h2]Spinny Compass - Jimmy[/h2]
After I showed off the Compass last week, many of you suggested that it should rotate as the player does. After playing around with it some more, I’ve come to agree, and so the compass now always points in the direction of rotation.

You can see this in action in the video above.

[h2]Status - Felipe[/h2]
This week I’ve been working on a status page for all the services that make up logicworld.net. A service is a little piece of software (in our case mostly written in Go) that is responsible for a task, like sending emails to users or building mods. This status page is made using Cachet, which allows us to notify you about maintenance ahead of time and it lets you see the status of every service as well as a real-time graph of visits to logicworld.net.



You can check out the status page at https://status.logicworld.net/.

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See you next Wednesday!

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

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

Welcome back to another Logic World Wednesday! We’re back from the holidays, and the push for release is underway.

[h2]Checkerboard World - Jimmy[/h2]
The world you’ve been seeing in the LWW videos has been sort of a placeholder. The ground was completely static, with no customization whatsoever.

This week I’ve begun an overhaul of the world, starting with a lovely ground shader. The shader supports custom colors, as well as dual-color checkerboard patterns.



When you create a world with a grid ground, you’ll be able to choose the color or colors used and the grid size. It’s worth noting that Logic World will support several different world types, and mods will have the ability to add world types. But that’s a topic for a future LWW :)

[h2]Modding API Consolidation & Documentation - Felipe[/h2]
Over the holidays I’ve been working on documenting the Logic World mod API, known as LogicAPI. This documentation is done with XML comments in C#. When coding mods, Visual Studio will show what each method and class does while you’re typing. We are also going to upload a generated static site containing all of the documentation over at docs.logicworld.net. This is a preview of how it will look:



This site is generated by DocFX, and it will contain all the aforementioned code documentation as well as some concrete concepts that may require explaining.

We are also going to have a wiki at wiki.logicworld.net, which will contain broader modding guides and tutorials, as well as some other non-modding related info.

[h2]Tons of cloud stuff - Felipe[/h2]
I have also been doing a big revamp of our cloud architecture:

• We have migrated from having a single server to having two: Phobos and Deimos.
  
• Migrated from a monolithic architecture to a microservices one, which means that we now have a small service for tasks like emailing, logging, storage, etc.
  
• Migrated from regular Docker to Docker Swarm, allowing us to deploy these services very easily and scale them up by changing a single number in the configuration file. This will let us easily scale up the server to meet the demand if we find the need to do so.
  
• Migrated from Caddy to Traefik as our edge proxy.
  

Initially these services were written in C# just like the web application is, however, when migrating to Traefik I realised that every single application we were using in the server was written in Go. Go is a language that’s widely used in reliable and widely used software like Traefik, Caddy and Docker. This sparked an interest in Go inside of me, so I spent a few hours learning this new language and rewriting the logger service. This service is the simplest, all it does is receive messages from all the services and log them to the database, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to dip my toes in Go. When I was done writing this I noticed that the service was using just a fraction of the memory that the C# service was while being a lot more CPU efficient. To sum up, 5 out of the 7 services we currently have are written in Go.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love C#, however it’s become clear to me that Go is much more tuned towards web server-side software development.

[h2]Refined Building Mechanics - Jimmy[/h2]
I’ve done a pass of our basic building mechanics to ensure they are consistent, intuitive, and easy to use. Most notably, I’ve removed the Rotation Lock mechanic; the lock is now always on. Rotation Lock was sort of an awkward and unintuitive mechanic. It was sort of a holdover from when I was trying to copy Minecraft’s building mechanics, back in 2017. But Logic World has grown up a lot since then.

To help communicate the new objective nature of rotation, I’ve added a little compass rose to the UI with a pointer for the object placement rotation direction.



Notice the pointer above the hotbar on the left. As the inverter being placed rotates, so does the pointer.

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If you’d like to receive an email each time we post one of these blogs, you can sign up for our newsletter. Be sure also to join the official Discord and follow @LogicWorldGame on twitter.

See you next Wednesday!

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

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

(this blog was originally posted 2019-12-18)

Welcome back to another Logic World Wednesday! This is our last post before the holidays, and we’ve got some real goodies for you this week.

[h2]Draggable Colors and More - Jimmy[/h2]
Logic World’s color picker is something I keep coming back to and tweaking, but this week I think I’ve finally settled on its final form. I’ve shifted the menu elements around so that the HSV wheel is bigger, and I’ve packed the sliders together more closely to save space. I’ve also removed the ability to hide blocks of sliders; dynamically resizing the menu was causing some issues, and I literally never used the option anyway.

I’ve also added a number of new features to the color picker, including the much-requested draggable saved colors. You can see them all in this video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Mod Hooking - Felipe[/h2]
This week I’ve been working on the hooks system for mods. Hooks provide a way for mods to listen to game events, like placing a component or a wire, and optionally cancel it or modify it. Right now hooks are implemented through “handler” classes, which are abstract classes that contain a virtual method for each hook. Mods can then make classes that inherit a specific handler class and then implement any hook methods that they want.

This is an example of how a mod’s handler class may look like:

public class MyHandler : WorldHookHandler
{
    private int Counter;

    public override void OnPlacingComponent(PlacingComponentEventArgs args)
    {
        bool cancel = Counter++ % 2 == 0;

        if (cancel)
            args.Cancel();

        LConsole.WriteLine($"A user is placing a component of type {args.ComponentType.TextID}, cancel: {cancel}");
    }
}

This hook would stop the player from placing a component every second time they tried to. Handy for annoying your friends.

[h2]Player Identification - Felipe[/h2]
Up until now players in the server were identified only by a username they choose. While this works fine, if someone was to connect with the same username as you they would be able to impersonate you. Now players are instead identified by their logicworld.net user ID, which is unique to your account. You can sign in to the game with your logicworld.net account, and in the Steam version, you’ll be automatically logged in to logicworld.net with Steam.

Servers will also have the option to turn on “offline mode”, reverting back to the username identification system. This is useful in case logicworld.net goes down, as an offline server doesn’t need to verify the players’ identities.

[h2]Yet More Unexciting Code Work - Jimmy[/h2]
Last week I spoke of two very cool features I was working on, and I’ve continued that work this week. Unfortunately, I didn’t finish in time for LWW, but most of the architectural groundwork is now laid.

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Thanks for reading! We’re going to take a two week break over the holidays, during which time we intend to start beta testing. Logic World Wednesdays returns January 8.



If you’d like to receive an email each time we post one of these blogs, you can sign up for our newsletter. Be sure also to join the official Discord and follow @LogicWorldGame on twitter.

See you next Wednesday!

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

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

(this blog was originally posted 2019-12-12)

[h2]Better Saved Colors - Jimmy[/h2]
The old system for saving colors, and managing your saved colors, just wasn’t working; it was too complex and too clumsy to use. This week I’ve redone it, using the same UI as saving Display configurations.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I’ve also added a button for sorting your saved colors - which is a surprisingly complicated thing - and a button for choosing a random color.

[h2]Website Work - Felipe[/h2]
I’ve been working on some minor website QoL adjustments:

• Post embeds on Discord, Reddit, etc are much nicer. before, after
• The Facebook link has been smited from the site. More info
• When logging in you will now be redirected to the page you were previously in
  
• Comments will now be counted recursively in the comment section
  
• All notification emails will now contain the reason why you got them
  

I’ve also been working on an updated “About” page for the site. This new page tells you a bit about us, and it lets your see our faces (to be revealed).



Unfortunately I haven’t been able to deploy these changes for this LWW (LWT?), but you can expect to see them shortly.

[h2]Unexciting Code Work - Jimmy[/h2]
I spent most of this week laying the architectural groundwork for two very cool features. I was really hoping to show at least one of them off today, but they just didn’t get finished in time.

These two features are the final building mechanics for Logic World, and they’ll complete the set of tools you have to manipulate the world.

---------------------------------------------

If you’d like to receive an email each time we post one of these blogs, you can sign up for our newsletter. Be sure also to join the official Discord and follow @LogicWorldGame on twitter.

See you next Wednesday!

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

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