Logic World News

This week I’ve improved a few details on the website. First of all, I fixed the annoying newline formatting, now you can insert more newlines after a paragraph using
tags. Also, now you can see each post’s score when browsing a forum, along with the existing comment count. I’ve also fixed a couple of issues involving comment deletion, as well as added the possibility to edit comments!

Here’s a picture showing the forum details:





The main output component in Logic World is the Display. Displays change color based on the state of their inputs. Previously, these colors were predefined, but this week I’ve added the ability to change them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqNI9Nek8AA

This feature was suggested by @TheWildJarvi. Thanks, Jarvi!



Every week we’re adding small details and polish to Logic World. Individually, these are too small to get mentioned on Wednesdays, but from now on we’ll be doing compilation videos that show them off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5TI6OQoU8Q

The difference between a game that’s pretty good and a game that’s fantastic is the attention to detail. We want every single part of Logic World to be a smooth and polished experience.

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See you next Wednesday!

View this post on logicworld.net.

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

Last week I showed you an early version of the Color Picker menu. I’ve spent a lot of time this week polishing and improving the color picker and it’s now my favourite piece of UI in the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpFBcw5cb3A

The color picker now has:

• an HSV wheel
• a hex code input
• sliders for red-green-blue and hue-saturation-value
  • these can be toggled on and off individually
  • the slider colors update to reflect what changes they would cause
  • each slider has a field to manually enter a value
• a list of saved colors
• keyboard shortcuts

I’ve done quite a bit of work this week on the logicworld.net user profile pages, which were quite lackluster before.

The first thing I did was to add a badge system, which are shown in the bottom part of the sidebar in your profile page. Right now the only earnable badge is the ‘Verified email’ one, which you can of course earn by verifying your email address (if you signed up using a Google account you won’t need to), so go ahead and try it! In the future we will be adding more badges that you’ll be able to earn by for example purchasing the game in stores, winning contests or participating in events.

I have also added a customizable bio to your profile, which is a short paragraph of text in which you can talk a little about yourself or link to your social media (remember, Markdown is supported!)

Here’s a picture showing these two features:



You may also have noticed that there’s a number indicating the total amount of likes your posts have gotten. In the future you'll be able to like comments as well, and those likes will contribute to your total.

In the right side of the page you’ll now also see a feed of the user’s activity, i.e. posts and comments, which you can filter and sort!





I’ve been working on a system that lets you adjust menus to your liking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2T1fEJ_8aM

All Configurable Menus allow you to adjust their size, shape, and position on the screen. In the future, some menus will have additional control panel options that are specific to them. I want Logic World’s interface to be as customizable as possible, so everyone can have the menus set up how they want or need.

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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.

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

Welcome back to another Logic World Wednesday! Before we begin, we’d like to share that this week Logic World surpassed 2,000 wishlists on Steam. Thanks everybody!



This week I’ve been working on a menu that lets you choose colors! It will be a sub-menu in many different higher-level menus. Currently you can use it to change the color of circuit boards, buttons, and switches. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYP0pURAjFs



This week I’ve been making improvements to Logic World’s graphics. The game now not only looks better, but it runs faster as well.

Lightweight Render Pipeline

Logic World is a 3D game, but its 3D world is displayed on your 2D screen. A “Render Pipeline” is a library of code which takes that 3D data about the world and converts it to a 2D image to be displayed on your screen.


Previously, Logic World was using Unity’s built-in render pipeline, but this week I’ve ported it to a new pipeline called the Lightweight Render Pipeline or LWRP. I did this for two reasons:

• Performance. LWRP is built to be as fast as possible. It’s missing some advanced features - such as realtime global illumination and detail maps - but Logic World is not a realistic looking game so we don’t need realistic rendering.
• Modernity. Unity is moving away from its old built-in render pipeline and will eventually deprecate it entirely. By using one of the modern render pipelines, we ensure that we’ll always have access to the newest and fanciest rendering tech.

It was a lot of work to move everything over to the new system, but I’m glad I did it.

Ambient Lighting

I’ve added omnipresent soft lighting to the world, so you can see what you’re doing even in shadow. In the future, the amount of ambient lighting will most likely be configurable.

New Outline Tech

In Logic World we use “outlines” to highlight objects in 3D. This is most often used to show which object you’re looking at or which object you have selected. Our old outline system doesn’t work with LWRP, so I took this opportunity to upgrade it.



Not only do the new outlines look better, but they can also be any color now. The previous system was limited to only three colors. Now that that restriction has been lifted, we have much more freedom, and can communicate the meaning of an outline with more flexibility.

Video

I’ve made a short video that shows off our new rendering setup and what each layer of the rendering stack adds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2qQ596gM7s



Now there’s a bell in the top right side of the navbar in logicworld.net. It will light up whenever you get a notification! You’ll also be able to see the details of each notification if you click on it! This bell will only be visible when you’re logged in.

Currently you only get notifications when someone replies to your post or comment, but in the future you’ll get a notification when someone @mentions you in a comment or post, and you’ll be able to subscribe to a thread and get a notification when a new comment is posted!



Previously, you’d get an email whenever someone replied to your post or comment. This is great except for the fact that you can’t choose whether or not to receive them, that’s why now there’s another column in the Account Settings page that allows you to enable and disable web and email notifications for each type of notification (currently only replies).



I’ve made rotating big components more fluid and intuitive. Previously they would always be rotated around their corners, but now they are rotated around whichever point you’re looking at. This is kind of hard to describe with words, so here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1MocWQzV4s



I’ve finally added a friends list to the game, which will show you the name of every one of your friends, as well as their profile picture and their current status!

Here’s what it looks like currently:



Keep in mind this is really WIP as of now (as can be seen by the white profile picture).

This menu will be used for various things related to multiplayer games, like inviting people to your singleplayer game and playing challenge packs with friends.

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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.

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

One problem of releasing Logic World on multiple platforms is not having a way to easily connect with your friends that have bought the game on a different shop. Thus, I set on to build a friends system, akin to that of steam (although much more barebones). This means that you’ll be able to chat with your friends and join their games, no matter where they got their copy of the game from, be it Steam, Itch.io or Gamejolt!

The system is powered by a gRPC server running on the cloud, to which clients will connect to in order to send and receive messages in real time. This whole system is completely opt-in, meaning that we won’t bother you at all if you choose not to create an account.



To access the friends system, we must verify that you’ve successfully bought the game, which you can prove through your linked Steam account or by authenticating on itch.io. You only have to do this once, and you’ll be able to add your friends!



A number of components in Logic World have parts on both sides of circuit boards. This week I’ve added a building mechanic that lets you flip these components upside down, either before or after you place them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnnBNeEzD5I



In Logic World, the client and the server use the same code to store their internal physical models of the world, and this model is synchronized between the server and all the clients that are connected to it. Previously, only the server had access to the code that generates save files from this model of the world. I’ve modified the save code to work without the server, only that shared physical model of the world. This means that when you’re connected to a server, you now have the ability to download that server’s world.



Logic World has two methods of saving your progress. First, it will save your game to the current save file. Second, it will automatically backup your save file, just in case. This week I’ve been working on making these two systems more configurable, and you now have the following options:

• automatically save when the game is closed (true/false)
• enable/disable autosave
• time interval between autosaves
• enable/disable auto-backups
• time interval between auto-backups
• an option to make a backup every time the game is saved (this would be in addition to auto-backups if you have them enabled)
• the location on disk which backups are saved to
• the maximum number of backups to keep per-save before the oldest one is deleted

Currently, if you want to upload an image to a post on the forum you’d have to previously upload it to an image uploading site (we were using Imgur), and then insert the image using Markdown notation. However, now you can directly upload images to logicworld.net and insert them into your post by writing {{!N}}, where N is the index of the image you’re referencing. Here’s how the UI looks like at the moment:



I do want to make it prettier but this works for now, even if it’s not the best UI.



Last week @woox2k left a comment suggesting a keyboard shortcut for the search function in the selection menu, and this week I’ve added it. When you run a search, you can now press enter to add the first search result to the end of your hotbar. It also selects the entire search box so you can immediately begin searching for another item without having to use backspace. There are a few more advanced shortcuts as well:

• alt+enter will add the item to the beginning of the hotbar instead of the end
• shift+enter will replace the currently selected hotbar slot with the item
• ctrl+enter will insert the item into your hotbar right after the currently selected hotbar slot

I’ve found that these become muscle memory quite quickly, and they allow experienced players to edit their hotbar without ever using the mouse.

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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.

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

Welcome to another Logic World Wednesday! This week, Jimmy works on the UI system for the game, and Felipe continues to add features to logicworld.net.

We’re trying out a new format this week: rather than giving each developer their own section, the post is divided into sub-topics, each with a developer’s name attached.



I spent this week going over all our UI code, adding features, fixing bugs, and reworking everything to be more flexible/modular. The goal is to establish a set of tools that help us build functional and beautiful menus very quickly. This isn’t quite done, but it’s close.



Logic World will be localized into several different languages. This week I’ve made some improvements to the system that allows the game to switch languages.



Firstly, mods can now use the localization system. Mods can now add translations for any text they add. Mods can even add entire new languages!

Next, I added a language fallback system. This allows localized text to revert to a different language if a translation is not found in the preferred language. For example, say you’re a native Spanish speaker but you know some English. You have the game language set to Spanish. However, you’ve installed a mod which only has translations for English and Portuguese. Without language fallback, all the text from that mod would say “missing localization” - but if you assign English as a fallback, that mod will be in English even while the rest of the game is in Spanish.

If you’re fluent in a non-English language and you’d like to help translate Logic World, please send us an email at [email protected]. Translators will get their name in the game credits!



Last week I was crunching numbers and I discovered that more people are visiting Facebook than logicworld.net. While investigating, I found that we were missing a like button! This shall be no longer; there is a button with a heart in it at the end of this post on logicworld.net, make sure you try it out!



As you may have noticed on the last LWW, comments weren’t working properly. Specifically, you weren’t able to reply to 1-level deep comments. I haven’t yet found the change that introduced this bug, but I suspect it’s related to a merge in posts and work items (more on work items later 😉). Whatever the cause, I’m sorry for breaking conversations in the last LWW. To make up for this, make sure you give us your thoughts this week!



Some people were affected by a bug where you wouldn’t get an email notification when someone replied to one of your comments. This was caused by a user preference that I added in the back-end but ended up not adding to the settings page itself. Thus, the default value was to not get any notifications! This has now been changed to always receive notifications, but expect an option in your account settings in the future.



Not much to say here, now you can delete any comment you have posted. This will be accompanied by comment editing in the near future, so look forward to that.



It’s useful to be able to refer someone to a specific comment, which is why this week I added comment permalinks that look like https://logicworld.net/Forum/Comment/18. You can get this link for any comment either through the comment’s date text or the dropdown options menu.



All the menus in Logic World uses a consistent selection of colors. This week I’ve been working on a system that lets you easily modify that selection.



Now, when I add something to a menu, I don’t choose a color for it, I choose a part of the palette for it. That menu element (a block of color, a scrollbar, some text, ect) is then assigned a color based on the current palette.

Originally I was doing this to save myself time; if I want to slightly change the shade of one of the colors, I now only need to do it in one place rather than adjusting the shade in every individual UI element that uses that color. But then I realized that this system could be used to support multiple different UI themes, and so that’s exactly what we’re doing. Logic World will ship with a few different menu palettes, and mods can add additional palettes. You’ll be able to personalize Logic World’s menu colors to look exactly how you want them to!



If you’ve ever shared a link on Discord or Reddit you may have noticed that they have an image attached to it. This image didn’t show up on any logicworld.net links as I had overlooked it, but now there’s a pretty logo! I plan on customizing the image for each page, for example showing the first image found if the link belongs to a post.

Before:



After:





Last week I showed the search system in the selection menu. By default, when you close and re-open the selection menu, the search box is cleared. This is convenient because it lets you search for something, grab it, close the menu, and have everything back to normal when you open the menu again. However, you might not always want this to happen. For example, maybe you’re using search to narrow down the displayed components to a particular subset which you want to return to later.

I’ve added a Lock toggle to the search box. While Lock is on, the search box isn’t cleared each time the menu opens.





Perhaps most importantly of all, we now have a database backup system that runs periodically. Right now this includes all user data, as well as posts and comments. In the future though, you will be able to share worlds, boards and mods, which will also be included in the automatic backups.

All websites come to an end eventually, and ours will probably be no different. When that happens, we pledge to release all of this data as a torrent for all of you to download and preserve this bit of history!

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Thank you to the following people for translating the selection menu for this post:

• Polish: @Qik
• Estonian: @woox2k
• German: @JuliaEllie
• French: @Nano

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.

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