Welcome back to Logic World Wednesdays, your weekly digest of everything the Logic World team has been up to.
We released update 0.92.1 last week, and it seems to have gone over well, with no reports that the update catastrophically broke anybody's computer and deleted all their data. Hooray!
Anyways, here's what's new with us.
Our ambient occlusion has looked kind of grainy and bad ever since we updated to Unity 6. This week I took some time to tweak it and reign it in to look more normal and good.
Before
After
You might have to open these images separately to see the difference; it's pretty subtle. Look at the edges where two surfaces meet.
This week I added a highly requested revision system for creations that allows you to upload an improved version of your world or subassembly without having to make a separate creation:
Pictured: @Sc0ttB0x's Hard disc V1
This means that it's now much easier to fix an issue about your circuit that you only found after uploading, all you have to do is click the "Upload new revision" button in the revisions tab of your creation, then go back to the game window and upload the subassembly or world as usual.
We also hope to use this system in the future when mods are introduced to the Hub, along with some improvements like more granular version numbers and game compatibility.
I've been working on our Steam store page. My goal is to present Logic World in a way that efficiently communicates what's so great about this game. It's an important part of my broader goal to increase revenue from Logic World enough to cover my rent and groceries. When people who would enjoy Logic World see the store page, I want them to think "this game looks great, I will buy it immediately!"
The most notable change since the last LWW is that I redid the "About this game" section. I completely rewrote the text, and I recorded + edited three videos of LW gameplay to embed in the text.
My favorite part is a section I added at the end with three of my favorite quotes about Logic World. I'm very proud to have received these endorsements, and I personally think this section is quite convincing!
I'd love to get your feedback on the store page. In particular, I'd like your opinion on whether three embedded videos right next to each other is too overwhelming, or whether it works for you.
Please check it out and let me know what you think:
On Saturday, we hosted a multiplayer server and invited anyone who wanted to join. The purpose was to get some screenshots and videos of multiplayer gameplay for use in promotional materials.
We announced this casually on Discord a few days in advance, so I figured maybe four or five people would show up. Instead, TWENTY-EIGHT PEOPLE JOINED THE SERVER.
This was astonishing and utterly chaotic. We absolutely smashed the world record for the most people on a single Logic World server, which I think was previously around ten.
You can clearly see the event in this graph of the Steam player count, courtesy of SteamDB:
Thanks to everyone who joined! Some of the footage from the event is already live in the "Multiplayer" video if you scroll down on the Steam page. Maybe you can spot yourself there?
The previous heading was a lie. There were actually a lot of bugs. People were out of sync with each other, there was severe server lag, and occasionally people's games would straight up crash.
Most of the issues seemed to stem from our networking stack. We use Lidgren.Network for networking, and neither Lidgren itself nor the way we're using Lidgren are well-optimized for a large number of players. When we stress-tested the game by connecting 28 players to a single server, the networking just couldn't handle it.
In the long run, this simply won't do. Our ambition for this game is to scale it to MMO levels, with hundreds or thousands of people playing in one shared world.
We've been discussing what our next-gen networking solution will look like for a while, but as we watched the current networking solution fall apart this week, those discussions became a lot more serious and we started forming an actionable plan.
It looks like we're going to write a brand new, bespoke networking library that's tailor-made for Logic World. It's very early right now, but we have three goals with this project:
It must have extremely high performance.
It must have excellent scalability, handling a large number of connections and a large amount of data throughput with ease.
It must have a great API, so it's easy to add new features to our game and refactor old ones.
We're building this first and foremost for Logic World, but if we do our job right, it'll end up being a great and useful tool that anybody can use to build real-time networked applications. We intend to release it as open source when it's ready.
There's only one problem: we can't decide on a name. That's why we're asking you, the community, for help: what should we name our networking library? Here are some names we're considering:
LogicNet
BobbyNet
Pretty Okay Networking for Gamers (PONG)
Mousehatgames Megacool Multiplayer (MMM)
HatTrick (because it achieves "three goals"!)
Untitled Networking Library
Let us know your thoughts in the comments!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Setting up dedicated servers comes with quite a number of things to do, i.e. configuring the firewall, etc., but also logging in with Steam to prove that you actually own the game.
In way this is pointless as the dedicated server is not exactly usable if you don't have the corresponding client to play on it. So we are proud to announce that you can now download the server anonymously via SteamCMD. Simply log in as 'anonymous' and you should be good to go. :)
For those stumbling across this blog post while setting up a server, the command would now be steamcmd +force_install_dir /<DESIRED_INSTALL_LOCATION>/ +login anonymous +app_update 1252670 validate +quit, which should run without any user interaction, so you neither have to type in your password nor your Steam guard code. Head over to the Dedicated Server Setup Guide wiki page for more details.
If you made it this far, you are a True Gamer. Thanks for reading.
See you next Wednesday!