Marble World News

Hey everyone!

Today's patch introduces the Marble Creation System, a system where you can color marbles based off of templates and edit other values as well! In addition spawners got a slight rework with more options, more on that down below.

[h2]Marble Creation System[/h2]

In the revamped main menu you'll find a new button to go to the creation section. In here you'll find all your previously made marbles and the editor for the new type of marbles which can be customized. We'll call this list the master list, which will be used in combination with spawners.

When swapping from standard skin to custom skin at the top right a new set of buttons and a dropdown menu will appear. Using the dropdown you can select a template which you can edit, currently there are 18 templates available with more to come in the future!

Every template exists of editable sections, the majority of them out of 2. Every section has properties that can be edited. These are usually color, smoothness, metallic and glow. Some templates have sections that consist of less properties as they're not always applicable.

There's also a randomize button available which randomizes the template and all its section values if you need some inspiration.



[h2]Updated Spawners[/h2]

Previously spawners had some differences between them, where some where useful for racing and others just for spawning marbles. With the new patch all spawners are equal and will have the same configuration UI.

Previously standard spawners used only the name of custom marbles and racing spawners used the full custom marble skin + effect + name when spawning. Every spawner also used the global list which led to poor customization in terms of which spawner should spawn what.

All spawners now have their own list of custom marbles to spawn and some additional settings regarding behavior of how to spawn them. You can select which custom marbles to copy from the master list into each spawner seperately.

These settings and the list of custom marbles in the spawner now persist when uploading your world or prefabbing the spawner, meaning that you can create very specific spawners for specific theme's if you'd like and upload or download those.

In addition, the custom skins from your master list are available through the skin selecting panel in the spawner and the panel when selecting a singular marble. Only your custom skins will appear there, not any which are included in downloaded spawners.



[h2]Patch Notes[/h2]

The notes for 0.1.17:
- Added the Marble Creation System, which can be used to create custom marbles from templates.
- Revamped main menu.
- Spawners are now uniform in terms of functionality and UI.
- Spawners now have their own list of custom marbles to spawn.
- Spawners' custom marbles list persists when uploading the World or uploading the prefab.
- Updated parts of the UI for wide and super-wide monitor scaling. This will be an ongoing process.
- Removed the race requirement of needing 1 custom marble.

[h2]Upcoming content[/h2]

Next week it's time for the Twitch integration! A custom panel is planned where the streamer can configure the behavior of spawning marbles when viewers interact using commands. And I'm also looking into special content for people who subscribe or donate! In addition to that more content is on its way as well.


Thanks for reading!

If you have any questions your always free to chat using any of the social media's :)
As always, thanks for the feedback & support! It means a lot to me.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Patch 0.1.16a fixes some bugs introduced in 0.1.16:
- Fixed an issue where a screenshot for the prefab or the world could not be taken when having a resolution smaller than 1920x1080.
- Fixed an issue where a screenshot for the prefab or the world would not be taken from the centerpoint view of the screen.

Thanks for reporting the issues! Everyone benefits from it :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Hey everyone!

Today's patch will introduce quite some new colors for the regular marble skin palette, and as addition to that an introduction to sound objects is made. And as a bonus you'll be getting 4 water shapes and a new animated water paint!

The full notes can be found at the bottom, or keep reading for some extra info regarding the new content.

[h2]New Colors[/h2]

As requested, 171 new colors have been added for the standard marble skin palette. 9 existing ones from that category have been updated to fit better. They're roughly ordered by color. In the skin picker panel you'll find white and black first, and then the colors.

If a specific shade is not available I can recommend to read the section about the next content patch, which can be found at the bottom for some sweet news.



[h2]Introduction to instruments and sounds[/h2]

A category of decoration that has been empty for a long time is now starting to fill up! Introducing 5 instruments to start off and some individual pieces from the glockenspiel should be enough to get your creativity going. This patch adds a bassdrum, snare drum, triangle, crash cymbal and a 12 note glockenspiel. In addition I've added the 12 notes from the glockenspiel as seperate decorations too incase you want to re-create songs or tunes.



[h2]Water Paint[/h2]

This one has been in production for a while, but it's finally ready to be used in your worlds! A new animated paint has been added that simulates flowing water, always trying to flow downwards.

This paint is best used on relatively steep angles or even flat planes. As paints are supposed to be universally used on any object in any rotation some angles might not give the desired outcome. This is mostly angles that are very near horizontal but not completely flat.



[h2]Water Shapes[/h2]

Water shapes have also been in production for a long time. Similar to the pond water in the garden world you can now place down your own! All marbles inside the water shape move slower like the pond does and it will refract your view when looking through it. The water shape comes in 4 different shapes to help you create your favorite pool/pond/water source of choice. You'll find a cube, sphere, cylinder and a half-sphere to get you started.



[h2]Patch Notes[/h2]

Here are the notes for 0.1.16:
- Added 171 new marble colors and improved 9 other colors.
- Added a new animated water paint
- Added 5 instruments that create sound and all the glockenspiel's individual bars.
- Added 4 water shapes which can be used to create ponds or bodies of water. Marbles are slowed when inside.
- Improved AO effect.
- Fixed an issue where transparent objects where rendered infront of World previews and Prefab previews.
- Fixed an issue where preview ghost objects didn't snap correctly.
- Fixed an issue where checkpoint/finishline rings had collision.
- Smoothing the 90 degree up/down track pieces.

[h2]Upcoming content[/h2]
In Febuary, I'd like to introduce the Marble Creation System. (lets call this MCS in short)

Previously it wasn't possible to assign color-picked colors to marbles as Marble World needed to handle 25k marbles at most on high-end PC's. When every marble had a custom picked color (by the player) this would prevent optimization to work and would horrendously lag your PC. The optimization would only work when colors (skins would be a better name) where made and integrated into the game by default. Recently I discovered a technique that would let you color-pick marble colors and also keep the optimization working!

The purpose of MCS is to have you be able to customize marbles with own colors / shinyness / other properties in a seperate section of the game. (Like the sims)

See it like coloring in a printed blank 2d image where you can freely fill in the area's with whatever color you want. The game will provide the templates and you can edit the values of various predefined area's on the marble.

The game will have a "master list" of all your created marbles. Every spawner will have their own list of marbles to spawn. At the moment all spawners share the same list, but they will be per-spawner with MCS.

You can then drag / drop marbles from that master list into the spawner. The game will then copy your marbles from the master list into the spawner. And you can edit every spawner seperately. The goal here is to then also have the spawner's lists be integrated into the World/Prefab save files so they can be uploaded too.

Ultimately I'd like to introduce teams too, where you can drag and drop complete teams with just one mouse drag into a spawner to make things a lot easier.

You will still be able to just not make any custom marbles but rather have the spawner fill up with the already existing skins / effects. Also the difference in behavior and UI between the race spawner and the standard spawner will go away. You'll always get the same panel which will have the option to use custom marbles or standard skins or a combination of them.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any questions your always free to chat using any of the social media's :)
As always, thanks for the feedback & support! It means a lot to me.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Patch 0.1.15a fixes some bugs introduced in 0.1.15:
- Fixed some internal errors
- Moved stability marble to underneath the flat world
- Fixed an issue with the banking value in the free-form track building panel
- Fixed snapping issue when loading in prefabs which had objects with free ends too close to eachother
- Fixed a rendering issue with the edit tools
- Increased the ring size of the rotate tool by 2x

Thanks for reporting the issues! Everyone benefits from it :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/

Hey everyone!

This patch marks a new chapter for Marble World as various new features have been added and improved! 0.1.15 includes Grouping, Prefabbing & Uploading and a graphical update amongst lots more!

The full patch notes list can be found at the bottom, but if you'd like to know more in-depth about the features I'll be going through them!

[h2]The Graphical Update[/h2]

Here we have a before / after picture. Normally depth was very hard to see when similar painted objects where close to eachother and in the shadow. In the before picture (left) it's not clear where the escalator depth ends and where the other wood panel starts. However by using a technique called Ambient Occlusion, Marble World will now make intersections and objects that are near eachother darker.



This also applies to the marbles, which now get a slightly more realistic look!



[h2]Grouping[/h2]

A requested and fairly simple feature has been added which is called "Grouping". You select the desired objects and at the bottom right you'll find the group management panel. In here you can create a new group with a custom name and the game will remember which objects belong to that group. The groups are saved in the World and across the Workshop too.

Whenever you click on the groupname in the list the game will automatically select those objects again! Now you can easily go back to specific selections and move or edit them.

Grouping has some caveats: you cannot update an existing group, but you can just make a new one and delete the old one. An object can be in unlimited groups.



[h2]Prefabbing[/h2]

The key feature in this update is called "Prefabbing". Whilst it could be thought of as something similar as grouping it has some different features. Prefabs are ment for easy storage of multiple objects which are stored in a seperate file and can be used across all worlds. These can also be up and downloaded from the Steam Workshop!



In the bottom left / middle of your screen you'll find the Custom Prefabs button, this will open up a layout similar to the standard UI where you can select and place objects with.

On the most left there's a button to create a new prefab, you need to have at least 1 object selected to turn it into a prefab. After this you'll be prompted with a name and the game will take a picture for the button for you.

When done the game now knows the composition of objects you had selected and can be freely used in worlds! When hovering over it you can upload it to the workshop, delete it or unsubscribe if the item came from the workshop.

The prefabs can be found in the prefabs folder where your worlds are located.
C:\Users\(Your name)\AppData\LocalLow\Vector Interactive\Marble World\Prefabs

Keep in mind, you cannot create prefabs out of anything in Worlds that come from the Workshop and are locked by the owner.



[h2]Patch Notes[/h2]

The full notes for 0.1.15:
- Fixed an issue where spinners would be at an offset when loaded
- Optimized escalators
- Added speed slider to the escalators
- Added graphical update to the game in general
- Updated the edit tools' visuals
- Added ability to group objects
- Added ability to prefab objects
- Added ability to upload and download prefabs from the workshop
- Improved the picture quality that gets taken of the world when uploading a world to the Workshop
- Fixed an issue where cancelling during free-form track building all the edit tools would be active at once
- Fixed an issue where the top bar showed the wrong mode after loading in
- Fixed an issue where rotating free-form tracks would ruin them or give the wrong visual impression



If you have any questions your always free to chat using any of the social media's :)
As always, thanks for the feedback & support! It means a lot to me.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/