Build 576: Town Doors & More

Just rolled out Build 576 which adds Town Doors and several fixes:

  • Added Town Door – Town doors have white handles, and any citizen of the town it is placed in can open it (thanks for the suggestion, ZackAttackHall!)
  • LawyerCats no longer spawn in mid-air (finally! ;))
  • Fixed bug where picking up items that are returned to someone else’s inventory counted against your inventory quota
  • Improved netcode – Env packets are 45% smaller, Inventory packets 27% smaller
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Today’s Server Update

New server update today to help with performance / decrease lag:

  • Several performance fixes here & there.
  • You no longer can carry more than 250 items in your inventory (very large numbers of items in your inventory were the biggest source of lag)
    • Only the first 500 inventory items will be sent to you if you have over 500.  Place them and relogin to access the next 500.  Or, sell everything with one command (see below)
  • A given region is limited to no more than 1000 items.  Currently only three regions have more than this, so it shouldn’t be a big issue.  (Also, at ~500 items/region the client starts to lag.  By 1K it’s rather choppy.  May need to adjust this limit more in future, and/or do client-side optimization to support it).
  • You can sell all items in your inventory with the command /sellallinv.
    • You will sell back items to the shop at 1/5 current retail price.
    • Plat items are NOT affected.
    • Items you have placed in the world already are NOT affected.
    • Free grass tiles (dark grass, not light grass) are sold at .05/unit, since they are not purchasable via the shop, and are generally worthless.
    • I plan to make a drag&drop version of this in future so you can sell back specific items.
    • If you have a LOT of items in your inventory, you may need to execute the command multiple times to sell them all.

This patch helps with lag, but I still have more work to do — expect more fixes tomorrow!

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Map is Done!

After spending three days rendering more than 65,000 screenshots… the map is done!

You can browse the map as a guest by heading over to 8BitMMO.net/megamap.  Or even better, launch the map from in-game via Menu > Map to see a marker of where your character is.

The map has a number of nifty features:

Go to any position – Type any coordinates (you can use full coords such as 0,0,0:0,0=65, or just region coordinates 0,0) to see that location in the map.

Get position you are looking at – If you are scrolling around and wondering where a given position is so you can visit it in-game, click ‘Where am I looking now?’ – the answer will be shown in the coordinates input box.

Get URL to this position – Click this to get a URL to the position entered in the coordinates box.  Great for sharing your work with friends!

Where am I in-game? – (only if map launched from in-game) Shows your character’s position from when you first launched the map

Where’s my stuff? – (only if map launched from in-game) If you have lost your building, click this to find out which areas contain your blocks.  Clicking a given position listed will zoom the map there and place a marker nearby.

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Town Official System

With the latest server update, town permissions have changed a bit.  By default, town citizens are now only able to pick up their own blocks (though they can still place them anywhere)

If a mayor trusts a citizen a great deal, they can promote them to a Town Official.  Officials have permission to take ANY block from the town.  Mayors should be very careful who they add as an official.

To designate a town citizen as an official, the mayor can type /townoff <player name> in the chat window.

Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas about this!

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Diversity!

Build 518 is playable now, and adds basic color choices:

To use it, just type /color <number> in the chat window, where number is between 1 and 9.

I plan to work on additional character customization features soon, including:

  • Ability to choose color in a window
  • Be a non-human race
  • Wear clothes
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Player Trading is done! (Build 511)

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve completed work on one of the top voted ideas from the suggestion box… Player Trading!

In build 511, you can trade with another player by getting close to them and typing /trade <their player name here>

Drag the items from your inventory that you wish to offer to the dark gray box at the top half of the trade window.  You can drag an item out of the trade window to no longer offer it.

To change the quantity of an item offered, press / while dragging an item stack in or out of the window to increment or decrement the quantity by that much.

When you are happy with the trade, click ‘I accept this trade‘ – your box will turn green to indicate acceptance.  When both of you click accept, the trade will be executed.

Happy Trading!

PS – build 511 should also fix that weird issue that sometimes happened where sometimes the active item window quantity displayed got desynced with your actual inventory quantity!  Also, quantity font is white now to help with readability.

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New Build 507 is up

Uploaded a new build with these changes:

  • Everyone is not lawyercats anymore 😉
  • Sword now does damage on where it’s pointed, and on top of you.  So there should be less instances of an enemy sneaking underneath you and you having to backpedal
  • On death, enemies will flash red and fade out instead of just disappearing
  • On the referral screen, ‘copy refer link’ will now actually copy the refer link 😛
  • Less screen flickering when reading through multiple dialog boxes
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