Logic World News

Last week I talked about a system that lets players play online hassle-free, and this week I’ve been working on integrating that system with the existing friends system. Now you can easily join a friend’s game through a couple clicks in the friends menu.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


I’ve added a new decoration component: the Flag!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


At the suggestion of our beta testers, I’ve made the resizing arrows partially transparent, so you can see what’s behind them.

• Fixed not being able to bind Keys to a key that would close its menu (i.e. the Escape key with default bindings)
  
• Fixed the resizing arrow on Mounts pointing sideways instead of up
  
• Fixed the Console being unavailable while on loading screens
  
• Fixed the Console rendering underneath popups
  
• Fixed closing the console by pressing Escape also closing some menus if they were open under the console
  

Hi, Jimmy here. There’s some changes happening in my life that will have a big effect on Logic World’s development. I won’t be working on this game for the next few weeks, and as such, Logic World Wednesdays will be taking a hiatus. It will hopefully return in late August. Logic World’s release is also delayed, again. I don’t know when to.

I’m sorry that this is happening, and I’m sorry that I can’t tell you more right now. I will fill you in and give a full update on Logic World’s future when things are stable and I know what’s happening. Rest assured that all three of us remain very committed to Logic World, and it WILL be released.

This week’s edition is, I suppose, a season finale for Logic World Wednesdays. Thank you for all your support and love over the past two and a half years. I’ll catch you on the flippity flip.


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More Logic World Wednesdays

This week I’ve finally finished the user interface for editing your controls!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As you can see from the video, the input system and the interface that supports it are incredibly complex. Programming it all was a very fun challenge.


Over on https://logicworld.net/, we now have a brand new site! I've been remaking the website into a bunch of separate services (coded in Go), instead of the single big application that it was before. This has the advantage of being much easier to iterate on, as there is less code that has to be compiled for a single change, as well as being easier to test since each service can be tested independently from each other.

Perhaps most importantly though, is the fact that the site now doesn’t require JavaScript at all. It does use JS for some stuff but only QoL improvements: the entire site is 100% usable even with all JS disabled.

I’m still working out the kinks on the new site, re-adding missing features, and improving the visuals, so expect lots of updates to it in the near future. Now that the new site is live, I don’t have to worry about maintaining the old site, and I can focus completely on this new version.


This week I've also been working on the system that will allow you to join your friends' games. We intend for this feature to be as easy as possible to use, requiring just a single click from the user's point of view.

This is achieved through UDP hole punching, which bypasses the most common NATs and in turn removing the need for you to forward any ports at all. Hole punching consists of 3 parties: a client, a server and a master server. In our case, the client is the user that wants to connect to a game, the server is the user that's already in-game, and the master server is our cloud server.

When the client wants to connect to the server, it first sends a request to the master server and asks for information about the server (that has previously been registered). When this happens, the master also sends information about the client to the server, and finally they both are able to connect through the tunnel that has been established.

That was a very simplified explanation, if you want more details you can check out this paper that really helped me fully understand it.

The proof of concept is done: I have successfully joined another instance of Logic World running on a remote PC -- Bob, to be precise -- without any port-forwarding. The next step is to integrate this logic with the game UI and Friends system.

• Fixed various issues with game input when there is no keyboard or mouse plugged in
  
• Fixed not being able to bind Keys to buttons on a gamepad or joystick
  
• Fixed not being able to bind Keys to mouse buttons or to scroll wheel actions
  

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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.

More Logic World Wednesdays

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

This week I’ve started working on the workshop part of the website. In the workshop you’ll be able to browse, comment and download the sandboxes, circuit boards and mods that people have uploaded.



Each workitem (that’s my term for all the items you can upload to the workshop) can have multiple versions, and each version can optionally have a (markdown powered) changelog.

To clarify, Logic World's "Workshop" is not the Steam Workshop, but an independent system that can be used by any platform the game is purchased on.


Dark mode automatically makes a website ~12x cooler. In an effort to maximize the website's coolness, I've added dark mode, easily accessible by clicking a link in the navbar.

For example, this is the same page as in the Workshop screenshot above:



As you can see, it keeps the same overall style of the light mode while being a lot easier on your eyes.


This week I’ve added a whole bunch of settings to customize your crosshair!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This has been a very long time coming. Custom crosshairs is something that folks have been asking for, and something I’ve really wanted to add, for literally years. It feels very good to finally have them in the game.


As part of my overhaul of our web services, I’ve been working on a new system for sending out our newsletter. The new system is much simpler, and I’ve given the emails themselves a shiny new paint job!

Before:



After:

• Fixed various errors with multiplayer and with reconnecting to a server
  
• Fixed placing a Display crashing the server
  
• Fixed being unable to load saves with Displays in them
  
• Fixed "Draw Shadows on Additional Lights" setting being forced to off when "Draw Shadows" is turned off and then on again
  
• Fixed pressing the "Open Screenshots Folder" hotkey causing an error if it was pressed before taking any screenshots
  

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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 a menu for editing the controls!



It’s still missing the very important feature of being able to actually edit those controls, but it’s now displaying the controls and that’s a start :)

It can display all of the fancy features of our input system: multiple buttons that must be pressed concurrently, bindings that reference other bindings, bindings that must be tapped multiple times to trigger, and multiple different bindings as options for a single action.



Being able to display bindings visually is not just important for the Edit Controls menu, but also for things like the in-game tutorials, where players will be told to press a given button to trigger an action.


After building Bob last week, we’ve been working on setting up the software to get him building the game.

We’ve run into several unanticipated issues -- because of course we did, why wouldn’t we -- but on the whole it’s going well and it’s almost done. Bob’s computational performance on builds is very promising; he’s faster than our old build server by more than a factor of two.




As I was working on adding context and screenshots for translators, I came across a description for a setting that didn’t make sense. I did some further reading on that setting ("shadow cascades") and it turned out I had no idea how lighting works in Unity.

Well, I did some more reading, and now I have some idea of how lighting works in Unity. I’ve used my newfound knowledge to buff out our lighting settings: we now have seven total settings related to shadows, each with a helpful preview image and informative description.



Shadows are both extremely important to the visual fidelity of a game as well as extremely demanding on a player’s graphics card, so I feel it’s important to have extensive settings for controlling them. I always get a little peeved when a game just has “shadows: on or off” -- not to name names -- and Logic World will not be joining that club of shame.

• Fixed being unable to select hotbar slots beyond slot 10 by double tapping or ctrl+tapping a number key
  
• Fixed client throwing an error if you tried to run an autoexec.lsf
  
• Fixed being unable to make pegs exclusive if they were part of a dynamic prefab (i.e. on a Panel Display)
  

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Thanks for reading, friends! Happy Canada day.

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/

Today, the Logic World Community Translation Project has officially begun!



The enthusiasm of the translators has been absolutely staggering. It’s been less than a day since translations began, and already we have thousands of translation suggestions, seven languages with at least one suggestion for each translation, and several dozen individual contributors.

Thank you to everyone who has so far helped translate, and thank you in advance to everyone who is going to. We want folks to enjoy Logic World in whichever language they wish, and thanks to you, they will!


At the suggestion of the thoughtful @tokumei, I’ve made some awesome changes to the Component Resizing interface!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This particular UI, I realize now, was a big blind spot of mine. For most of this game’s history, you couldn’t resize things at all, and it was a big missing feature. Because of this, I saw any form of resizing as “really good”; I didn’t realize how poor the interface was in comparison to what it could be.

That’s why I’m so grateful to this community and all the additional eyes it puts on the project. To Tokumei, and to everyone else who has suggested features for Logic World: thank you!


This week I’ve been working on making the game connect to our servers, and the first step of that is to let users log in using their logicworld.net account. To do this, all they will have to do is press a “login” button in the main menu, and their browser will open with the login page. Once you enter your credentials and submit, you will be authenticated in-game!

We also considered having the login fields directly in-game. However, the login process is very complicated: it has to support creating a new account, resetting your password if you forgot it, sign-ins with external providers like Google, ect. It would be a lot of work to duplicate all this UI in both the browser and in-game, so we’re just using the browser login for both.


Many, many Wednesdays ago, I wrote to you about how I had started work on a Friends system for Logic World. This week I’ve picked up on that work, and I’ve added an in-game menu for all of your friends!



This menu will show you a list of your friends, including the profile picture they set on logicworld.net, their username and their current status (online or offline). I also want to make this status reflect what they’re currently doing, for example “Playing with 5 people” or “Playing by themselves” (this could of course be disabled in the settings). And, probably the best feature, you’ll also be able to join other people’s games through this menu (if they have enabled it).


I love triangle color pickers. I think they are completely and objectively better than square color pickers in every metric. That’s why, when I added a color picker to Logic World, I made the picker a triangle.

To my utter shock and disbelief, this week I had a few people tell me that they prefer the square color picker. These people are, obviously, completely wrong. But nevertheless I have added an option to use a square picker.



And of course, just like the Fun Spinny Triangle, there is an option for a Fun Spinny Square.


We’ve talked before on this blog about our Cloud Build system: we write some code, we press a button, and a server somewhere automatically builds the game for each operating system and uploads the builds. Until now, we’ve been using a server that we rented from a company. But this had two problems:

1. Companies charge hella cash for high-performance server rental
   
2. Not having physical access to the machine made troubleshooting and problem-solving more difficult than it should be
   

So this week, Jimmy built a new server for us. And if you’re gonna build a server, why not make a vlog about building a server :)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

But building the hardware is only half the battle. We’re still working on the software part: we’ve got the operating system installed, we’ve got all the networking configured, and we’ve successfully activated a Unity Plus license on the server (something we were never able to do on a machine we couldn’t physically access). The next step is to set up all of Felipe’s fancy build software on Bob.

Once that’s complete, we’ll finally be able to build Logic World quickly, reliably and cheaply. Any disasters notwithstanding, you’ll be hearing about the completion of this project next week :)

• Fixed 'Tried to add entity at invalid circuit state index' error, requiring a game restart, if you built a world with more than 10,000 concurrent circuit states
  
• Fixed errors when you tried to resize a component with wires directly attached to it (Panel Displays)
  
• Fixed board hitboxes becoming squished when you moved or placed a board on their edge
  
• Fixed sometimes not being able to resize objects for no reason
  
• Fixed being able to interact with Interactables that are behind players
  
• Fixed various crazy visual errors when cancelling Multi-Wire Placing at stage 0
  
• Fixed in-game changelog not rendering
  
• Fixed the `MissingLocalizations` command incorrectly stating that present localizations were missing
  
• Fixed the Configurable Menu scale slider label having an incorrect localization key
  
• Fixed Resizable Menus always starting in fullscreen when the game is played in Europe
  

Wait a second, did I read that last bug correctly?

Yes you did! This is one of the most interesting bugs we’ve ever had in Logic World. Can you guess what caused it? We sure couldn’t for several hours!

Pause reading here if you want to think about it and try to solve the puzzle yourself :)



We were going absolutely mad trying to figure out this bug. We each did the same thing, but got different results. Who could have guessed that the difference in our digital setups was the physical location?

It turns out the culprit was… different regions using a different character for the decimal indicator! The resizable menus save their size to a SUCC file. In North America, the menus were saving their size as something like 205.872. But in Europe, they were saving their size as something like 205,872. You can probably see where this is going: the numbers were saved using the local culture, but they were loaded as a global culture. So all of the values were being blown up by 3+ orders of magnitude!

A couple of quick commits to SUCC, and the bug was fixed.

Sometimes, bugfixing can be delightful. When the symptoms are bewildering and random, but the cause (and fix!) turns out to be simple and logical… that’s one of the finest feelings in programming.


The lovely @Daniel, a beta tester for Logic World, is now doing regular streams of the game! So far on-stream he’s built a Nintendo CIC), a binary adder, a tic-tac-toe machine and more; right now he’s working on a playable game of Battleship).

In our biased opinion, Daniel’s streams are always tons of fun, and you should check them out! Follow him on Twitch and Twitter to be notified when he goes live.



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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/