Logic World News

I've added two fancy shmancy debug overlays to the game: one to show your FPS, and another to show your coordinates in the world.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




When I showed off the multiplayer menu last week, you may have noticed an unused "local network servers" tab of the server list. Well, this week I made it work: any servers that share a local network with your game will be displayed in a list here!



In a couple of weeks, I'll add some lovely UI that lets you open your singleplayer game to the local network, and opened singleplayer games will show up in this list. Logic World LAN parties will be incredibly easy to set up :D

[h3]Very nerdy technical tidbits[/h3]
You might recognize this feature from Minecraft, and indeed I did steal this idea from Minecraft. Thanks Minecraft. However, Minecraft's "Open to LAN" feature has never worked right for me. The problem is that when Minecraft servers broadcast their existence, they do so only on the first network interface found on the device; similarly, Minecraft's multiplayer menu only listens for multicasts on the first network interface. This might work fine for the normies, because most people's computers only have one network interface: the Wi-Fi or ethernet adapter. But I'm a massive nerd, so my computer has TONS of network interfaces: VPNs, virtual machines, docker instances, ect. So whenever I try to use that Minecraft feature, it inevitably picks the wrong network interface. I can't see other people's LAN games, and other people can't see mine.

However, Logic World does this right: it iterates through every network interface on the device, and every interface with broadcast capabilities is used for this menu. Servers announce their existence on all interfaces, and clients listen for servers on all interfaces. It all Just Works™ without disabling my VPN or anything. Since Logic World's audience is largely composed of massive nerds like myself, I felt it was important that things work properly here.

As an aside to the Minecraft people -- yes, I am available for consulting, send me an email and we can discuss rates.

• Fixed not being able to see your own reflection in SHINY BOBBY
  
• Fixed IPv6 networking not working on Windows
  
• Fixed being unable to initiate connection to a server from the server list if a discovery response packet hasn't been recieved yet
  
• Fixed "offline name" setting description using outdated nomenclature
  
• Fixed all the server config player lists (whitelist, banlist, admin list) not working
  
• Fixed items in the server list sometimes displaying incorrect data if you spam the refresh button too quickly
  
• Fixed being able get a Sandbox or Saved Board without a title by editing the title after creating one
  
• Fixed the "Create Sandbox" and "Save Board" buttons sometimes being hidden when they should be shown
  
• Fixed many text boxes throughout the game interpreting a "cancel" action (by pressing escape) as a "submit" action (what should only happen when you press enter)
  
• Fixed pressing tab/shift-tab to switch between textboxes not working properly when Popups are open; tabbing between textboxes is in general much more reliable
  
• Fixed Labels and Panel Labels having a slightly different color to the other off-white components
  
• Fixed being able to see the reflections of player nametags in SHINY BOBBY
  
• Fixed the nametag on the little bobby model in the Avatar settings not properly showing when you mouse over the bobby model
  
• Fixed the integrated server not shutting down correctly when leaving a singleplayer game
  

The things you can build in Logic World are very geometrically complex. It's not a simple voxel grid like some other 3D circuit simulators; you've got components and wires attached to each other, and everything can be arbitrarily rotated and positioned.

So the fundamental problem of designing Logic World's building mechanics is this: how do you make it easy and fast for a player to communicate their complex 3D ideas through the user interface? What is the best, most efficient, most intuitive way to take the structure in a player's brain and get it into the game?

It's a hard problem. It's a problem I've been contemplating since the first Logic World prototypes in October 2017, and it's a problem I've been contemplating especially hard over the past month or so; watching gameplay from our newest beta testers, and listening to their feedback, has led me to the realization that the building mechanics need to be much better before release. In my time contemplating the problem, I've had a lot of individually good ideas, and I've even implemented some of them, but they've never come together as a comprehensive whole.

Well, a week ago, all that changed. I was lying in bed after publishing last week's blog post, trying to fall asleep, when suddenly... I saw it all. The perfect building mechanics. Like a switch flipping on, this incredibly difficult problem became transparent to me, and I could see straight through it to the perfect solution. I achieved game design nirvana. I leapt out of bed to get my pen and paper, and I hastily scrawled down some of the best ideas I've had in my life. It's honestly one of the wildest psychological phenomena I've ever experienced.

I have mostly finished documenting my epiphany, and turning those documents into code is the next work I'll be doing on Logic World. I wanted to finish up a few other things before diving in -- see the rest of this post lol -- but now, building is my singular focus, and I am so excited to get to work on it and make building as smooth and intuitive as I can.

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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. Be sure also to wishlist Logic World right here on Steam and join the official Discord.

See you next Wednesday!

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More Logic World Wednesdays

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The first big task I tackled when I returned from vacation was to make the Multiplayer Menu! I'm really pleased with how it turned out, under the hood it's one of the most complex menus I've ever made.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The Multiplayer Menu requires a lot of networking functionality, and so while I was working on the menu I took the opportunity to beef up our network code. There were many lovely upgrades, but the two highlights are:

1. IPv6 networking is now fully supported, so we're future-proofed in that regard until something crazy happens that requires undecillions of network addresses. The default network protocol is IPv6 Dual-Stack -- meaning connections to both IPv6 endpoints and IPv4 endpoints are allowed -- but you can also choose to run both clients and servers in exclusive IPv6 or in IPv4.
   
2. You can now connect to servers by hostname instead of just by raw IPs. So if you own, for example, "EpicPeanutButter.com", you can host your server at that address, and others can type that into the game and connect to it. Previously you could only use raw IPs, which look much less interesting -- usually something like this: "217.160.0.132".
   

Making this menu was very difficult and time-consuming, far more so than I expected going in. I had a lot of fun learning about networking, but I'm really glad I never have to do it again.




As can be seen in the video above, there are presently two authentication modes for Logic World servers: Unverified and Verified. Unverified servers will allow any player to join, with any username, and this identity is not checked at all. Verified servers only allow players to join who are logged into their logicworld.​net account, and it is impossible to fake your identity to a verified server.

Verified mode is useful when you want to have a whitelist of players who are allowed to connect to your server; only the people who are really on your whitelist will be able to connect. But it's less useful if you want to have a public server and ban players from it. Because creating a logicworld.​net account is free, a banned player can simply create a new identity and rejoin your server.

With this in mind, we are considering the addition of a third authentication mode to servers, "Super-Verified". In Super-Verified mode, the server would only allow connections from players who are logged into their logicworld.​net account, and whose accounts are verified owners of Logic World. This means that to evade a ban, a player would have to buy another copy of the game, which they are a lot less likely to do than simply create a new account for free. However, Super-Verified mode would introduce hassle for players; unless you purchased directly from logicworld.​net, you would be required to link your logicworld.​net account with the account you purchased the game on (i.e. Steam) before connecting to a Super-Verified server.

We've been discussing this and we aren't sure how to proceed or how useful such a feature would be. And so, we ask you -- would you like Logic World to have a Super-Verified mode? If you're interested in hosting a server, would you turn it on? If you're interested in playing on servers, would you prefer to play on servers that have it on?

Let us know in the comments, on discord, or in an email :)




When I returned from my vacation, the first thing I needed to do was to test the services that I had migrated from Nitro to mice. I could have just created a "test" service that was hard-coded to call certain methods on certain services, but that's a very inflexible way of doing it. With that in mind, I started the MiceUI project. This project consists of an Electron application that lets you load protobuf files containing the method definitions of a given service, and then lets you send requests to the service instance and inspect the response.



This tool will let me test each and every one of a service's endpoints, making sure that the service is working as it should. In the future I plan on upgrading MiceUI with some sort of test suites, automating the process of E2E testing and even integrating it into the site's CI pipeline.




Many of our beta testers have been playing with the menu themes capability of LogicUI, and many more of you in the community have voiced interest in doing so. Until now, making new themes was very difficult, requiring tedious manual editing of individual RGB values in a config file, and you'd have to restart the game to view the results of your labor. I decided to make this process easier, and added some in-game UI for making a custom menu theme.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




We've added several new testers to our internal beta! These lovely folks are helping us track down bugs, giving great feedback about features, and making cool content to showcase the current state of the game. There is a bunch of said cool content in the #beta-content channel of our discord, so join us there if you haven't already and check it out!

And if you haven't seen it yet, shortly into the break we held a big multiplayer playsession with a bunch of the beta testers. Jimmy's perspective of that event is up on youtube:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I mentioned that the testers have been helping us find bugs, and well, holy moly they've helped us find a lot of bugs. An absolute tidal wave of them. Here are just the ones we've fixed...

• Fixed the "Pick Component" feature not properly recognizing the components already on your hotbar in some specific circumstances
  
• Fixed world rotations being bad and glitchy for components placed on the environment with a non-standard up direction (i.e. on the side of a hill)
  
• Fixed awkward-axis rotation being incorrect for grabbed boards placed on the environment with a non-standard up direction
  
• Fixed Edit Title textbox not being properly selected when you create a new sandbox or saved board
  
• Fixed linux version not starting up properly due to a file system error
  
• Fixed linux version not loading some important resources from GameData which was causing a myriad cascade of issues
  
• Fixed scroll wheel input direction being inverted on linux
  
• Fixed scroll wheel having 1/120th sensitivity on linux
  
• Fixed Keys going crazy when you try to press them if another player is in their range
  
• Fixed server giving a Load Board response to every player on the server instead of just the player who requested to load the board
  
• Fixed decorations on grabbed, cloned and loaded components not being tested for collision
  
• Fixed missing flag graphics in Choose Language menu
  
• Fixed double newlines in the beta start screen
  
• Fixed "Realtime GI is not supported in Universal Pipeline" console spam
  
• Fixed failure to connect to a server if another player makes changes to the world while you're connecting
  
• Fixed moving and then deleting a socket causing server errors and sometimes corrupted saves
  
• Fixed sockets not connecting properly after they've been moved
  
• Fixed error and disconnection if another player moves/rotates/deletes the chair you're sitting in
  
• Fixed various cases where the server could crash if a client sent them bogus data
  
• Fixed component position/rotation imprecision issues within deeply nested stacks of many child components
  
• Markdown renderer: fixed weird visuals on the first and last line of a list if that line is very long
  
• Fixed changelog saying "2020" for all the dates in 2021 lol
  
• Fixed client going to error screen if it tried to connect to an unverified server when the Logic World servers are unreachable
  
• Fixed servers having a hard cap of 32 maximum players connected even if a higher value was set in the config file
  
• Fixed servers crashing if a client sends garbage data in the discovery request packet
  
• Fixed clients connecting to the wrong server sometimes
  
• Clients now ignore the data instead of going to an error screen if a server sends garbage data in the discovery response packet
  
• Fixed the volume sliders on music components having the incorrect range (0-10 instead of 1-100)
  
• Fixed fatal error if you tried to delete a component on the same frame you modified its data (i.e. pressing a button and deleting it on the same frame)
  

This Christmas might possibly have been the best Christmas ever. Jimmy's mom and brother Andrew teamed up to make two pairs of got dang Logic World socks, giving one pair to Jimmy and sending the other across the ocean to Felipe.



Just look at those things. Absolutely fabulous.

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Thanks for reading our blog :) lots of fun stuff is coming up, so watch this space. We absolutely cannot wait to get this game done and into your hands.

To get updates on Logic World beamed directly into your inbox, you can sign up for our newsletter. Be sure also to wishlist Logic World right here on Steam and join the official Discord.

See you next Wednesday!

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More Logic World Wednesdays

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

This week I've been optimizing Logic World's building mechanics. When you create or destroy a large amount of objects simultaneously, that should be as fast and fluid as possible, and I've made a lot of progress on that front.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




A while ago I shared my plans for a system that would allow game servers to verify the authenticity of the players that connect to it. This week I've implemented the final features of that system. Now, when in online mode, the server will retrieve the player's name from their authentication payload. This prevents a client from logging in as a user and send another user's username, since now the server will ignore the username that the client sent.

So, Logic World servers can now officially require online verification! Players will be denied connection to online-mode servers unless they are logged in and verified with logicworld.net. This allows you to have banlists and whitelists that actually work, as players can now prove they are who they say they are.

This entire system is optional, you just need to enable offline mode in the server's settings and users will not be verified, which also means that no logicworld.net account and no internet connection would be necessary. It's important that you're in control of your game, and we'll never require that you connect to our servers to play Logic World.




Before connecting to a server, you most likely want to know some information about it, like Message of the Day) or how many players there currently are in it. I've implemented a system for requesting and retrieving this information, in preparation for Jimmy's multiplayer menu. You can now request discovery information from a specific server (by its IP), or from all the servers in your local network. This last feature will make it really easy to connect to a server that someone else in your network is hosting, you won't even need to know their IP!




As Felipe mentioned above, I've been working a little on the server list. There will be three tabs: your list of saved servers, discovered servers and open singleplayer games on your local network, and all games your friends are playing in, so you can easily join them.

The server list isn't done, but I have finished the Direct Connect popup. Finally, Logic World has a way to connect to a server using a menu!



Some fun things about the Direct Connect popup:

• It remembers the most recent IP you typed in. (Passwords are currently not remembered, but most servers won't have a password anyways)
  
• The password box has a button to toggle password visibility
  
• As soon as you open the popup, the Server IP text box is fully selected, so you can start typing/pasting an IP immediately
  
• The two text boxes can be switched between with the tab key
  
• Hitting Enter in either text box will start a connection to the server
  

It's simple, but it does its job darn well, I think. I look forward to finishing the multiplayer menu -- I'll make a video about it when I do :D

• Fixed some simulation bugs that could occur when deleting components with wires attached to them
  
• Fixed not being able to connect to a server when signed in to your logicworld.net account
  
• Fixed crazy lag that could sometimes happen when managing your hotbar
  
• Fixed search box text being cut off if you typed too much in it
  
• Fixed the "disconnected" screen not displaying the reason for disconnection
  
• Fixed popups not being removed properly in some circumstances
  
• Fixed not being able to connect to a server when logged in
  

It's been a big year for everyone.

For Mouse Hat Games, 2020 was the year we came into our own as game creators. On January 1st, we sort of knew what we were doing. But today, in the dusk of this year, we quite solidly know what we are doing. For two self-taught kids, that's an amazing and empowering feeling. We could not be more excited to finish Logic World and get it into your hands.

Thank you for being on this journey with us. We're going to take a week or two off for the holidays, but we'll see you soon on a Wednesday in 2021 -- the year Logic World finally releases!

Xmas builds are from Brown Falcon TV, and were built today live on stream!

Take care, friends, and happy holidays ❤

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More Logic World Wednesdays

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I've been working on various optimizations to speed up Logic World, and this week I've significantly improved the circuit simulation performance. I made a little video to demonstrate gameplay in an insanely demanding world before and after the optimizations.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




Historically, sound effects in Logic World have been closed, hardcoded things. Mods could play the built-in sound effects, but it was difficult if not impossible for them to add custom sound effects. It was also an annoying amount of work for us to add new hardcoded sounds.

Well, this week I redid our sound effect system, and sounds are now loaded from disk at runtime. Adding a new sound effect, for us or for modders, is as easy as dropping a .wav or .ogg into your mod folder and writing a small data file.






Taking advantage of the new easy sound effects, I've added a system for custom ground types. Every point on any object can declare its ground type, and each ground type can declare a specific sound effect for players that walk or jump or land on it. I've also been experimenting with ground types that affect the movement logic of players walking on them.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Ground types are the latest in my series of tools to help me build epic environments for doing logic in. I'm super excited about these worlds, and I can't wait to show them to you in forthcoming Wednesdays :D

• Fixed non-connected input pegs sharing a circuit state with some random piece of circuitry in worlds that have filled up all the starting circuit state indexes
  
• Fixed a couple issues preventing you from loading a second save after already doing so once in a given session
  
• Fixed exclusive pegs not having a deterministic update order relative to components
  
• Fixed some potential issues with unconnected exclusive pegs
  
• Fixed music not playing if the path to the music contained a '#' or a '%' or was a UNC path or various other edge cases
  

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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 character movement logic, to ensure it feels smooth and pleasant in all situations. You're going to be using the character controller pretty much every single second while you're playing Logic World, so it's important that the movement logic is really solid.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




As I spoke about last week, one of my main tasks for this month is to create awesome environments for you to build circuits in. It's time to put the 'world' in Logic World.

To that end, I've been working on environment tech and tooling this week. I've got a bunch of really cool stuff in the pipeline, but today I want to show you two particular shader features for rendering ground textures.

[h2]Stochastic Texturing[/h2]

Human brains are finely tuned for pattern recognition. So when a game uses a repeating texture, we can easily spot the repetition. We see the grid lines, and it looks "fake".



There are a number of ways to solve this problem, and I did research into many of them this week. The solution I've chosen is procedural stochastic texturing, a technique invented by Eric Heitz and Fabrice Neyret in 2018. Stochastic texturing is fast, it looks amazing, and it's incredibly easy to set up.



The algorithm works by taking random hexagonal samples of the tiled texture, rotating them randomly, then laying the samples out on a hexagonal grid and blending them together. This, in my opinion, is absolutely bloody genius. There's a great visualization of how it works on page 5 of the research paper.

Logic World will use a particular implementation of stochastic texturing developed by Jason Booth for his Microsplat tool. This implementation uses texture heightmaps to blend the samples, to ensure the blends are super high quality with no visible seams.

[h2]Triplanar Mapping[/h2]

A common issue with terrain in video games is that the textures are typically projected onto the terrain from above. This results in very ugly and gross stretching of the textures on steep slopes.



A common and effective solution to this problem is triplanar mapping. This technique uses three projections of the texture, one for each plane in 3D space. The projection used for a particular point on the terrain is determined by the normal to the surface there. At the borders between projections, they are blended together.



I want to build lots of lovely cliffs and mountains. With triplanar mapping, they are sure to look their best 😊




This week I haven't had much time to dedicate to Logic World since I'm preparing for more final exams, but regardless I have made progress on mice, my new microservice library. More specifically, I've been working on migrating all our existing services to this library, which is just tedious work since I have to go one by one.

• Fixed player vertical flying speed not changing proportionally with player scale
  
• Fixed "Player Gravity Scale" slider being adjusted in increments of 1.0 instead of 0.1
  

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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/