May 30 Update

Hello there!

Matthew here. Before we get into the update itself, I’d like to explain something really quickly.
Tunmi gave us some of this content to post, however it’s been edited quite a lot from it’s original form. When Patrick and I were first handed the document, it was 11860 characters; entirely too long for the average article. There were a lot of events written about in the original that, although they were very interesting, were quite frankly not interesting enough to include in an official update such as this one. Although some of the information has been omitted, that does not mean that it is necessarily secret or classified, and Patrick, Tunmi, and I would all be very glad to discuss said information with you upon request.

Anyways, now that that’s out of the way…

What’s going on now?

In short… A lot. Quoting Tunmi’s original update,

Previously what was an alpha with barely anything has slowly been turning into a beta, with features and integrations coming together to form the Python edition of the BGT version.
Usually I am not a person that has a high attention span, but according to Patrick, I wrote over 600 lines of code over one entire week.

Now, lets give a list of (and some more information about) new features and other happenings. Lets get some of the interesting bugs out of the way first, though.

Misc bugs that were fixed

• Various rotation-related bugs were fixed; calculations and whatnot were improved. movement is important! (Tunmi would like to thank X0 for some help with this).

• Nicknames were added; and a bug was fixed where they could be abused. Someone tested it with more than 5000 characters of nickname! Interestingly in Python it is much easier to fix such bugs, check for invalid nicknames, etc.

• There was also a quite interesting bug where Tunmi broke the camera. Basically he made it so that the pitches were way lower than they should have been. This meant that moving the camera around the map sounded like a base drum, among other bad things.

• The script to check if the server was running (yes; that’s correct — if the game crashes, it is logged and promptly brought back up rather quickly) broke in such a way where it kept logging every few seconds to tell us that it was running. This meant that every 10 seconds, it was logging to a file. This file ended up being over 1 GB and lagging the server. For some reason, Tunmi couldn’t quite figure out what, exactly, was happening to it. It caused much lag and there is now no more lag.

I am not sure if there are any other bugs to report about here; lets get on to something I am sure you are all interested in — new features and ideas!

The new GUI (graphical user interface)

Golden Crayon now has a new (virtual / fake) user interface. Now (with no help from the client) the server can make the client spawn nice, user-friendly dialogues that are easier to understand.

The builder has seen improvements related to this interface. Now instead of having to press enter each time to answer a question (such as where you want a platform to be, etc.) you can just press tab or the elements associated short key. You can also go back to previous elements — no more having to cancel writing something just because you made a typo somewhere else!

Sound Browser

Another part of the interface is the sound browser. This is basically how you choose a sound you want to use (such as a door open / close sound, a sound source, etc.) The cool thing about it is it stays collapsed when you don’t need it. You press a key to expand the list of sources and then, once you press escape or enter, it puts you right back where you were. This is used for everything relating to sounds within the builder; doors, walls, music, etc.

As of now, Tunmi is working mainly on patching the browser system. It worked pretty well from the start, however there were several small yet complicated bugs to fix. Work is also being done on making sure the client and server both handle the necessary amount of load each. A common problem among audio games in general is that a lot of functions that are handled server-side can be handled client-side and vice versa, so we’re reflecting on what we know before we move ahead with things, attempting to make the game as stable as possible for release.

Q&A time!

Is there a release date currently?

No, not at the moment. To ensure a smooth exxperience for all players, we want to make sure we spend enough time adding and testing new features, as well as finding bugs in the program, which may take a while.|

Will my maps from the BGT version be automatically transferred to the new version?

No, you’ll need to either create new maps or paste existing map data into the game. Player data from all previous versions will be lost.

Will the game have 3D audio?

Yes, Golden Crayon will have 3D audio at the time of release. We’ve been testing it for quite a while and things are working well.

How are map load times?

Fantastic, and the speed improvements aren’t limited to map loading, either. The game is, I’d say, somewhere between 5 and 10 X faster across the board.|

If you have more questions, ideas, or feedback, feel free to put it in the comments area below; We’ll be checking often!

That’ll be just about all for now. If you’re seeing this late and feel like you’re behind the times on Golden Crayon news, you should consider joining our telegram channel to get notified as soon as new information is available.

Hope you have a fantastic day!