Logic World News

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/

For a long time, I've felt that one of the biggest flaws of Logic World is its uninteresting backgrounds. The circuits themselves are super cool, but we need cooler places to build those circuits.

One of my main tasks for December is to add more and beautiful world types to the game. This week I've implemented an awesome tool that will help me to create these worlds: arbitrary world gravity.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I forgot to mention it in the video, but the gravity system is totally open to modders. When you mod in a world type, you can control exactly how the gravity works; you can use one of the built-in gravity rules, or program your own.

• Fixed visual teleport errors if the teleport exit had a different rotation or scale from the teleport entrance
  
• Fixed incorrect player capsule rotation in Chairs
  
• Fixed missing lighting data on Grasslands
  
• Fixed '\\' not being correctly detected and replaced when validating file names for sandboxes and saved boards
  

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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 finally finished with the chat, after two previous videos on it! I've added some security features to prevent you from being tricked by a malicious link sent in chat, and the chat window is now used for telling players some game information.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Shoutout to the many, many people who expressed concerns last week about link security. I was initially going to be lazy and not add the popup, trusting users to take care of their own safety. But that was a bad and irresponsible way of thinking, and y'all called me out on that and held me accountable. Cheers!




The Logic World website backend is made up of many different and small services written in Go, each of which takes care of a single "feature", for example comments, ratings, posts, etc. We use Kubernetes in order to manage all of these applications, which takes care of starting them up and scaling them when needed.

Each of these services needs some way of communicating with each other, which was being achieved using the Go Micro framework. This framework in turn leveraged gRPC in order to provide inter-service communication, as well as some other features like events and configuration. This worked just fine, however the Micro library underwent some breaking changes, and it was overall a slight pain to work with, so I jumped the gun and started to write my own library, called Mice.

Mice is lighter and simpler, and it will help me develop Logic World's web architecture faster, while also removing unnecessary overhead from the services. Mice is still not quite at production level since there's still more testing left to do, as well as some features that our services need, like events. Once all that's done I will begin migrating all services to this new framework, which should hopefully not be too hard since Micro's and Mice's APIs are quite similar.




As you may know, I struggle with an addiction to adding settings to Logic World. This week I channeled that into some settings for customizing the caret in text boxes.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

• Fixed various bugs with the markdown renderer
  
• Fixed issues with caching links in text, leading to apparent clickable links on regular, non-link text
  
• Fixed some situations where HoverTags could become stuck open
  

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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 a bit of a lighter week for us, but regardless we continue to polish up Logic World.



I did a big fat polishing pass on the chat I showed off last week. There are a ton of little new features and enhancements, and I brought my siblings back to help me show them off!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




I have been developing a feature on a separate Git branch in the Logic World repository, and this week I was tasked with merging it with Jimmy's changes. The feature in question is server discovery, which Jimmy needed in order to complete the multiplayer menu he's working on. I took this opportunity to refactor some uglier code that was in the way, as well as unit test some of the areas that would be affected by the merge the most:



I want to keep expanding these tests until most of the server is covered, this will make sure that future changes don't break any existing functionality.




The effervescenct @Red_3D has blessed us with a new Bobby fanimation, showcasing a common fan theory for how Bobbies reproduce. We think it's awesome and that you should check it out.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

• Fixed the unicode shortcut being unreliable and buggy in some circumstances
  
• LogicUI: fixed the ConfigurableMenu OnWidthChanged and OnHeightChanged events not firing when the width/height was changed by resetting the menu settings
  
• Fixed menu buttons sometimes being the wrong color
  
• Fixed being able to open the console while typing in an InputField, making it impossible to type "~" or "`"
  
• Fixed various bugs with the markdown renderer and link clicking utility
  

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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/