Sandbox Development Update - November 2023

Hey, everyone!

Despite it only being less than a couple months since we first started on Sandbox, it's managed to come a long way from what we've shown previously. Those of you on our Discord server are already well aware of most of this - but for the rest of you, you might be surprised at what's happened since the project began.

So, without any further delay, let's dive right in.

World Generation

First and foremost, world generation has been greatly improved and expanded from our earliest screenshots. Biomes are now supported, along with various ground details (which we refer to as decorators) such as small grass tufts, rocks, flowers, and things of that nature. Additionally, tile entities are implemented as well - which currently only includes a basic placeholder tree. However, these can be generated per-biome, and so you'll only find trees generating in forest biomes. The last major improvement to world generation comes in the form of what we refer to as world features - these are any sort of developer-designed structure, land formation, or otherwise that can generate within a world. Currently, the only world feature generated is in the form of an easter egg at a specific location on a specific seed - see if you can find it (hint: check the Discord chat history).

With all of these changes also brings with it support for multiple worlds. We've also added a couple of comfort features relating to this - for instance, when creating a world, if you provide a string of text as a seed - that original text will be stored along with the parsed-out seed, so you can still keep track of it later on if you'd like. Additionally, worlds will keep track of the version they were last played on, as well as first created on - so you can not only see if a world was played on an older (or newer) version, but you can also see how far back a particular world goes if you were to keep playing on a particularly old one for many years on end.

Inventory/UI

Additionally, we've made some changes and additions to the user interface. The F3/debug screen shows a great deal more information now, for starters. But of course, we've also introduced a fully functional inventory - with items and everything! It works exactly as you'd expect. You can pick up items dropped in the world, and you can drop your own items in the world if you don't want them anymore. In the future, you'll of course be able to stash your items away in chests and containers.

More broadly, a great deal of UI across the board has been introduced and enhanced. The old placeholder UI from the days of Stripper Run have all been either replaced, removed, or updated to better match the aesthetic of Sandbox. It's not perfect - and we no doubt expect to make some tweaks later on as time goes on, but you can get a sense of the sort of aesthetic we're currently leaning towards.

We've also introduced new UI for things such as world creation and selection, game settings, pause menu, and the join server screen. Speaking of which...

Multiplayer

That's right - we've introduced multiplayer support, already! It's got some kinks that need to be ironed out - as it doesn't take much to strain the connections over the internet - but overall, it works relatively well for being in Pre-Alpha. You can either host a server locally by starting a server while in a singleplayer world, or you can download and run a standalone dedicated server executable - which you can run wherever you like.

In the future, we'd love to introduce a Bukkit-like plugin API for servers - allowing server owners to have a great deal of ability to customize and tweak the experience players can have on their servers - though in this early stage, it's more of an idea - rather than a commitment we're going to stand by for sure.

Character Editor

A more recent development that's still very much a work-in-progress is the character editor. It's exactly what it sounds like - it allows you create and edit any number of characters that you can switch between. These can each have their own name and customized appearance. This is currently still very early on, but you can get a sense of where we intend to take it - we want to make this editor as in-depth as possible to give you a great deal of control over how your character looks.

In worlds and servers, each character has its own position, inventory, and other data stored separately - effectively, each character is treated as its own separate player, allowing you to easily progress in different ways within the same world, if you like. Mind you, however - this data is still stored per-world. You won't be able to bring your inventory from one world to another, or from singleplayer to multiplayer, or vice versa.

This could've been done in theory, but from experience hosting both Minecraft and Valheim servers over at Chaotic United, we've found that Valheim's inventory system - which does allow for stats and items to be brought from singleplayer to multiplayer - makes cheating in illegitimate items trivial. As such, we've opted to keep it more like Minecraft - where your data is tied to the world, rather than the character.

Keep up with Development

Most recently, we've been working on setting up ways for those of you interested in the development process to keep a closer eye on things - similar to what we have for Blamite. As such, you can now view the commit history and Stratagem pages for Sandbox. For those already familiar with the equivalent pages for Blamite, the Sandbox pages work identically to their Blamite counterparts. For the rest of you - our commits page allows you to view the full commit history of our Git repository for Sandbox. This will include author information, the commit hash, and a title/description detailing the changes. Meanwhile, Stratagem is a Trello/Kanban-style board system built directly into the website - which is what we use internally to keep track of development. We'll have cards for various bugs, new features, ideas that may or may not make their way in, and more.

And, of course, the best way to keep up with development in almost-real-time is to join our Discord! We routinely post in the #sandbox channel over there as we work on the project - so you can see things as they happen, often before they're even commited to our Git repository.

Wrapping Up

For now, though - that's all we've got. As per usual, though - we are still in fact looking for folks to join the Blamite development team! You didn't think we were done with that, did you? While we (or more accurately, I) have been focusing more on Sandbox, we still very much intend to return to working on Blamite at some point. If you're up for joining our team - you can make that happen sooner rather than later.

If you're interested in applying, check for our current openings here.

You might also be wondering if we're looking for folks to join the Sandbox development team. Currently, we aren't actively looking for folks to join the Sandbox development team. However, if you think you have something to offer - feel free to drop in a general application! Depending on what you can offer, we might be able to make use of the help.

In either case, be sure to hop into our Discord to keep up with both Blamite and Sandbox - and we plan to have another update to share with you in the not-too-distant future.