Contributors met this week to start discussing what will be done in 0.6. @Zesterer has some cool progress on new settlements. We take a look at the results of the Rust Gamedev Working Group survey.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @imbris, @Zesterer, @xMAC94x, @Songtronix, @Sharp and @Pfau!

This week, contributors met for a 0.6 intro meeting. @Zesterer has started working on settlements, the next step in worldsim. @Sharp got the new minimap merged, with the help of @Pfau.

@imbris has been working on updating the winit crate within Veloren. It just had quite a large update. This should help fix issues with Wayland support, which prevents some users from playing Veloren. The new eventloop structure that @imbris is working on integrating will make it easier to potentially run Veloren in a webpage, as well as allow for smooth resizing.

A visualization of Veloren development over 1 year

0.6 Intro Meeting

This weekend, the team met for a 0.6 intro meeting. The intro meetings are a great way to rally contributors and get excited about what we want to see in the next release. A large focus of this version will be player objectives, and so 0.6 will be known as The Content Update.

You can take a look at the meeting Google doc here. This meeting, we focused heavily on ways we could implement content into Veloren. It has been a goal for many releases to add objectives for the player. In the meeting, we brainstormed some ideas of how we could achieve this most easily. Here are some of the questions that we aimed to answer:

As a player joining the server, what should you be told to do?

How can you be introduced to mechanics at this point?

How should the game tell players to accomplish tasks?

For the answer to these questions, there are many underlying systems that we'll require. These include NPC dialogues, waypoints, mob spawning control, and mob inventories. Moving forward with 0.6, hopefully we can see these implemented.

Explorers burning the midnight oil

@Songtronix started a thread on Reddit that is focusing on asking the community what they want to see in future versions of Veloren. Feel free to take a look at it here, as well as contribute any ideas you have. We love to hear them!

Settlements

@Zesterer is picking up the worldsim/worldgen torch again with settlements. Although it's in very early stages, here are some images to show off some progress.

Rust Gamedev WG Survey

Last August, the Rust Gamedev Working Group ran a survey to gather information on the developer ecosystem within Rust. This week, they released the results for this in a post. We tried to get our developers to contribute information to the survey, so let's take a look at the results!

Only half the participants currently use Rust for game dev, while most of the other half are considering doing so. For many, the game dev ecosystem within Rust isn't mature enough for what they need. However, Veloren escapes the issue of maturity (mostly). We are working on a lot of systems from the ground up, and so we know that when something isn't available, we are capable of making do ourselves. Other projects might rely on underlying engines like Amethyst, while we are creating our own.

The newly-merged minimap

This topic of maturity is echoed in the next section which focuses on the negatives that the participants see. More than anything else, developers want maturity. This is followed by mobile, web, and console support.

A great response from one user reads:

From playing in the space I know it's possible to make games using Rust. However in the ecosystem my biggest negatives is the [lack of] case studies and demonstrations of it working.

This cannot be truer. Many developers' ideas of "maturity" are based on what they can see done in a language. Rust has few flashy projects to show off, especially within the game dev field. Veloren is in a great place to surge forward and become a flagship example of what can be achieved with Rust. Not only does it show how Rust acts on the graphical level, but also within game dev architecture.

Finally, from another survey participant about the Rust community:

[There is a] collective community effort to "build the right thing" and "build the thing right"