UPlasma development - Play Plasma from the Unity engine

[Lehnah]

I won't pretend to understand any of the technical stuff, but man Sirius, this looks awesome! I hope that all your hard work breaths a bit of new life in to the Uru community and that in the future dorks like me who can't build Ages will have new content to enjoy.

[Tweek]

Any dork can build an Age...you just gotta learn

- A fellow dork who learned how to build Ages.

[Sirius]

I hope that all your hard work breaths a bit of new life in to the Uru community and that in the future dorks like me who can't build Ages will have new content to enjoy.

We're still a long way from it, but I definitely hope so too ! At least it's really cool to see people interested in this small project.

Been a while since the last time I posted. Usually I'd use the occasion to show off some cool new feature, but I haven't made much progress recently. This is because I was writing 60+ pages of work report about wireless VR for school (which I just finished Thursday), while also starting a new job. I'm back on the project today, actually.

Still, here are some news:

• This project's official name is now UPlasma (UPl for short). Not as catchy as I'd want, but that's what I call it in my code, so might as well make it official (I changed the topic's thread to reflect that).
• Mod support is getting better and more stable. Gira now uses a Unity mod to fix lighting in caves, and it works pretty well.
• I'm trying to figure out how to properly implement savegames, avatars and multiplayer since they all tie into each other (esp multiplayer). It's complex but it's starting to make sense.
• Speaking of multiplayer. LAN-multiplayer sounds reasonable, and MASS multiplayer (on the MOULa scale) seems doable. Nothing solid yet, but definitely cool if I can pull it out later.

Any dork can build an Age...you just gotta learn

I'd say having time and motivation to learn the basics of modeling is the hardest and probably what will put off most people, but after that it gets really rewarding once you're comfortable with your tools. Warning: rambling incoming.

Show Spoiler

To me Age building really feels like exploring. I don't know if it's the same for other builders, but to me there aren't any puzzles to solve, just a constant question: "guess what lies beyond".
In Riven, you were always amazed because beyond every door and every curve in the path was something completely new that didn't look like anything you saw before. Or you missed some path you never guessed was here. It's always unexpected, but always ties in with the story later.
With Age building, it's the same, but you have to choose this thing you yourself didn't expect to see. THEN tie this element into the story you're making on the fly. Kind of like lucid dreaming, I guess.

As an example: when I was building my Canyon Age, I had a lot of buildings separated by great distances, along with a lot of nice point of views I wanted to visit. However since I can't draw maps nor concept arts, I never know in advance what I'm doing. So the main question was always "how do I get to point B from point A ?". This means figuring out ways to cross empty spaces, go around or tear through walls, etc. Each path has a different bridge, a different elevator, a different cablecar, etc.
Then you realize in your haste of creating a path to somewhere, you left a big ugly empty space/wall with nothing to see, and decide to fill in the void with something - anything. Hence you start creating more structures, drill through walls, add caverns, etc. And while you're building it, your mind is trying to figure out the purpose to the new area you're adding, and slowly creating a story. Before you know it, your paths are going in all directions like roots of a tree. Really fun.

Then after that comes the complex part of correctly texturing and lighting the whole thing. That's usually less fun than creating bridges, but can be fun nonetheless :P

Anyway, while Age building feels like exploring, writing code for UPlasma feels like advanced puzzle solving. Except it's not about finding the combination to open a door. It's more like being in Spire, building your own magnetic raft using rock and electricity, with the help of whichever tools and knowledge you got over the years :shock:

Okay, this rambling is getting too long ;)

[Christian Walther]

• I'm trying to figure out how to properly implement savegames, avatars and multiplayer since they all tie into each other (esp multiplayer). It's complex but it's starting to make sense.
• Speaking of multiplayer. LAN-multiplayer sounds reasonable, and MASS multiplayer (on the MOULa scale) seems doable. Nothing solid yet, but definitely cool if I can pull it out later.

Wow! As far as I am concerned, this feature is what would make this from a neat toy project into a viable Plasma replacement. I’m excited to hear that you are considering going in that direction now. Good luck!

[Sirius]

Of course ! Uru is still alive because of multiplayer and fanmade content, so I'm interested in bringing back both.

But yeah, this is a big feature. The whole sdl/instancing/avatar/animation system relies on it too, so I'm moving slowly on all those fronts. I'm no network engineer either, but Uru is a rather light MMO.

Also, contrarily to a standard MMO, there would be no need to enforce everyone to have the exact same game install. This could lead to... interesting situations. For instance, you could install on your PC an Age that doesn't exist on the Shard, yet still be connected to the Shard for chatting, etc. Maybe even switch on the fly between playing on the main server and playing peer-to-peer in private instances. Or even switch Shards from within the Nexus, but keep the same avatar. This whole thing could be pretty rad... We'll see.

[Aloys]

Hey there,
I don't have much to add but as I said previously I really love the progress you are making on this big project. (Gira starts to look really good!) So I hope you keep making further progress.

UPlasma

That makes sense.

[Sirius]

I'm delighted to hear it !

I don't have much to add either, save that I'm working on SDL variables. Once they are functional, some puzzles might start working(ish). Should be fun.

To any programmer reading this: Google Protobuf is awesome. This and JSON make serialization a no-brainer...

[Aloys]

To any programmer reading this: Google Protobuf is awesome. This and JSON make serialization a no-brainer...

That is an interesting piece of info. I didn't know about Protobuf but earlier at work we had to JSON-ified part of our Unity datas at work and it was far from a no-brainer...

[Sirius]

Well, to be perfectly honest, I did struggle finding a good Json serializer before. It's only a no-brainer now that I know how to use it
If that can help you, I'm using the Unity port of Newtonsoft's Json.NET, works for most if not all platforms. Unity's own classes can't be directly serialized, but Json.NET allows you to write custom converters for types like Vector3, etc (some people might have written such serializers already).

Protobuf is more "complex" than Json, and I don't use it for the same purpose... Json is good for storing player settings and simple data, and things that the knowledgeable user might want to tweak using a text editor.
Protobuf, on the other hand, is good for storing raw binary data. It's not human-readable, but is very optimized for things like networking. In another project I used it for real-time download of heavy data from a server, it's really efficient.

[sarpedon2]

• Speaking of multiplayer. LAN-multiplayer sounds reasonable, and MASS multiplayer (on the MOULa scale) seems doable. Nothing solid yet, but definitely cool if I can pull it out later.

LAN-multiplayer seems like a more interesting way of playing Uru. It would allow you to solve multiplayer scenarios and encourage cooperative exploration, but it would still give the sense of isolation and venturing into unknown worlds that I think Uru could/could've offer/ed. Of course this would be in a scenario where Uru-Live would have a large number of players at any given time, something that while it has many benefits, creates a challenge if you want to maintain the freshness of ages.
I hope you keep going with this project, its always nice to see many of the ages I've become familiar with since 2003, get a bit of makeover.