Do you think I could just leave this part blank and it'd be okay? We're just going to replace the whole thing with a header image anyway, right?
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many worlds might need restored from prior backups due to the corruption from the hacking. So we'll attempt to make sure there's at least some way for you to save the latest clean version of your worlds.
One of my worlds has straight up been replaced with **** so that's fine.
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Hey—meant to post this sooner! Kentiya has finished some of the metal blocks for EEU, and I showed them in my latest video. He's done the three colors in EE, but there will be a few new ones as well. He'll also be doing a few final refinements to these three.
I've also made some progress on various things, mostly to do with commands for world management and administrative controls like the ability to kill rooms. Worlds now display their owner, and that owner is the only person with edit by default. They can of course then give and remove edit from other players. I fixed various bugs and worked some some new smiley expressions, but they weren't good enough yet to call them final.
There should be a bit more to see next week! Luke is making good progress on building the user authentication systems for EEU, being sure to avoid the kinds of issues that are present in how EE and PlayerIO work. Soon enough, we'll be able to pull everything together.
former lead-dev on EE/EEU, 2018—2020
(aka Criobite, Joshua Stone, TechnoWolf99, & LightWolf)
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Metal blocks are confirmed already? That's an interesting choice since they were probably the most underused of the classic free packs. All the blocks we've seen so far are basic, gravity, or coins but now we have the first confirmed new blocks with the new metal colors.
One of the things that made the metal blocks stand out in the old days is that the silver block was the brightest shade of grey on the minimap for a long time. Assuming minimaps return (which I'm sure they will), do you think these returning blocks share the original minimap colors? If so then it could be possible to recreate 2010 worlds with their original minimaps and have them be fully playable, and that would be a wonderful way for the cycle all the way back to the very beginnings.
These new metal blocks are noticeably cleaner and less speckled than the original sprites, and they definitely are an improvement over having modified Super Mario World sprites that tile poorly. That said, simply for respect of the originals and the worlds they were built with I'd prefer the metal blocks look closer to their original appearances.
I feel similarly about the basic blocks as seen in the July 15 video. The dots on the corners were removed, making them look less like metal plated blocks and more like generic blocks in other level editors such as Platform Racing 2 or Sandbox Hero. This is weird since the original concept graphics looked like the classic basic blocks. I hope the appearances of the basic and metal blocks are reconsidered before the game's release.
Welcome back to the EE Crew, metal pack. Oh, how your presence would have been mildly missed!
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In this week's video I talked about the progress made in EEU, including how we now have a full set of six metal blocks! I also addressed the current situation in EE (that we believe the worlds have all been cleaned up, and that the game will hopefully be coming back up). I've also been making progress on my own projects!
I also wanted to address the questions posed by N1KF about the metal blocks:
Metal blocks are confirmed already? That's an interesting choice since they were probably the most underused of the classic free packs. [...] These new metal blocks are noticeably cleaner and less speckled than the original sprites, and they definitely are an improvement over having modified Super Mario World sprites that tile poorly. That said, simply for respect of the originals and the worlds they were built with I'd prefer the metal blocks look closer to their original appearances.
The idea behind the new metal blocks is that they serve the purpose of multiple different metal blocks from EE. They do have a faint "sparkling" pattern on them which could potentially be made more obvious in future revisions, but generally they're meant to be general-purpose enough to be used for any build, as with all of these initial blocks.
One of the things that made the metal blocks stand out in the old days is that the silver block was the brightest shade of grey on the minimap for a long time. Assuming minimaps return (which I'm sure they will), do you think these returning blocks share the original minimap colors?
We do indeed already have a minimap, and the new silver block currently has the brightest color in the game, at #BBBBBC. The colors are generated automatically from the textures, so we won't be copying the exact colors from the original game.
The dots on the corners were removed, making them look less like metal plated blocks and more like generic blocks in other level editors such as Platform Racing 2 or Sandbox Hero. This is weird since the original concept graphics looked like the classic basic blocks.
Those original concept graphics were just a basic upscale I did of the EE/Mario graphic, just to see what 24x24px blocks would look like.
former lead-dev on EE/EEU, 2018—2020
(aka Criobite, Joshua Stone, TechnoWolf99, & LightWolf)
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How is the minimap colour of a block generated in EEU?
Also, how hard is it for you guys to add new blocks? Shouldn't it be trivial? (excluding designing them, obviously)
The color is just generated as an average of the RGB channels from all non-transparent pixels in the block graphic. And yeah, implementing blocks is really simple when they're just simple solid blocks. Obviously anything interactive like coins take a bit more work, but they're still pretty simple to implement.
former lead-dev on EE/EEU, 2018—2020
(aka Criobite, Joshua Stone, TechnoWolf99, & LightWolf)
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The metal blocks look really nice, and I think it would be amazing if we got to see some type of expansion in the future since the colors are quite limited Maybe later in the game's life, we could see a pink one (rose gold) in a Valentine's pack, a green one (loosely based on Uranium) in a toxic pack, and a blue one (loosely based on Cobalt) in a cave pack. These colors are slightly less mainstream with metal, but that makes them cool unlockables if implemented in a way like that.
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ZeldaXD wrote:How is the minimap colour of a block generated in EEU?
Also, how hard is it for you guys to add new blocks? Shouldn't it be trivial? (excluding designing them, obviously)The color is just generated as an average of the RGB channels from all non-transparent pixels in the block graphic. And yeah, implementing blocks is really simple when they're just simple solid blocks. Obviously anything interactive like coins take a bit more work, but they're still pretty simple to implement.
what do you mean "pixels"? this is vector graphics? and is the average performed with correct gamma correction?
I'm known as "haslo" in EE. Also, I refuse to play EEU.
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but generally they're meant to be general-purpose enough to be used for any build, as with all of these initial blocks.
Are all of the blocks you plan to add designed to be general-purpose or do you plan to have blocks that are meant for more specific uses?
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The metal blocks look really nice, and I think it would be amazing if we got to see some type of expansion in the future since the colors are quite limited Maybe later in the game's life, we could see a pink one (rose gold) in a Valentine's pack, a green one (loosely based on Uranium) in a toxic pack, and a blue one (loosely based on Cobalt) in a cave pack. These colors are slightly less mainstream with metal, but that makes them cool unlockables if implemented in a way like that.
There's definitely the possibility of doing more along those lines in the future.
what do you mean "pixels"? this is vector graphics? and is the average performed with correct gamma correction?
I should've clarified—the pixel colors are sampled from a rendered version at 1x scale. I don't think it's technically gamma correct, since I'm adding the values for a channel and dividing each by the number of pixels. It seems good enough, but I'll probably look into whether we should be doing it a different way or not.
Are all of the blocks you plan to add designed to be general-purpose or do you plan to have blocks that are meant for more specific uses?
These initial blocks for closed-beta are meant to be very general-purpose, but over time we'll have more specific use things like a sci-fi pack or something. Same with holiday or event themed packages. But even with those we still want to guarantee some degree of versatility.
former lead-dev on EE/EEU, 2018—2020
(aka Criobite, Joshua Stone, TechnoWolf99, & LightWolf)
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The metal blocks look really nice, and I think it would be amazing if we got to see some type of expansion in the future since the colors are quite limited Maybe later in the game's life, we could see a pink one (rose gold) in a Valentine's pack, a green one (loosely based on Uranium) in a toxic pack, and a blue one (loosely based on Cobalt) in a cave pack. These colors are slightly less mainstream with metal, but that makes them cool unlockables if implemented in a way like that.
No, because people need to be limited so that they use their thinking, creativity, imagination to the maximum.
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Hmm, is that a fully black block I see on the block bar? Not sure if it's been shown in gameplay footage before, but nice.
I was expecting the new colors of the metal blocks to be weirder colors like green or blue. These more realistic metal colors would come quite in handy for EE-themed Minecraft resource packs. Hmm...
The coin graphics are probably going to get replaced, but right now their smaller size might actually work better. If action blocks keep their tiny 1-pixel hitboxes, it would seem more fair to the player if the coin graphics were to match that. Powerups in games usually have far more generous hitboxes.
The more I look at the Basic blocks the less I like them. Compared to the crisp, shiny graphics in EE, in EEU they look dull as the lighting and shading is hard to see (though this might because I am just watching a YouTube video). This, in addition to the thinner outlines make the smileys stick out more than they need to. The dots on the corners of the original make the lighting pop out more.
For reference, here are the original concept graphics:
The idea behind the new metal blocks is that they serve the purpose of multiple different metal blocks from EE.
Multiple different metal blocks from EE? The only similar-looking blocks that come to mind are the white metal block from the Outer Space pack and the Basic-like block from Gold Membership. This is a pretty good approach to take though. Hopefully this time we won't get 6+ unrelated grey brick blocks.
Overall I am liking the new metal blocks. While I don't think this current design should replace the original, they're a lot more fun to look at than the Basic blocks.
generally they're meant to be general-purpose enough to be used for any build, as with all of these initial blocks.
How would the Grass blocks apply to this? It's lumpy grass plastered onto brown bricks which shouldn't logically fit anywhere, the exception being deliberate throwbacks to the original game. For the 7+ years i have played EE I cannot recall criticism towards the old blocks like Basic or Grass being unrealistic, and i think these quirks make EE more interesting to look at and play, even if this is on a subconscious level. In Super Mario Maker most of the course parts are aesthetically bizarre and would be unfitting outside the Mario series. Despite this, SMM is extremely successful and EE shares this trait of bizarritude to a much lesser extent, yet little faith is being put in the Jumping Smiley Face Aesthetic.
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PiotrGrochowski wrote:what do you mean "pixels"? this is vector graphics? and is the average performed with correct gamma correction?
I should've clarified—the pixel colors are sampled from a rendered version at 1x scale. I don't think it's technically gamma correct, since I'm adding the values for a channel and dividing each by the number of pixels. It seems good enough, but I'll probably look into whether we should be doing it a different way or not.
suppose you have those 3 blocks:
one of those cases where gamma correction is required.
convert sRGB to linear RGB, do "the calculations" then convert linear RGB back to sRGB.
I'm known as "haslo" in EE. Also, I refuse to play EEU.
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these metal blocks you poste dunder yor vid look awesome lookign forwars to see more 'ores' being added to the pack wiht a blue/green/red colors ect alos lookign forward to be able to buy a gold pack wihtenrgy (just blocks i kinda like/liked soem of th egold blocks)
thanks hg for making this much better and ty for my avatar aswell
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hopefully all the blocks and smileys will be made of TrueType graphics. this will ensure scalability of EEU
I'm known as "haslo" in EE. Also, I refuse to play EEU.
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No, because people need to be limited so that they use their thinking, creativity, imagination to the maximum.
That's a stupid excuse.
Hmm, is that a fully black block I see on the block bar? Not sure if it's been shown in gameplay footage before, but nice.
Good catch. I didn't see that at first.
Overall, I'm really liking how the game looks, and I think the focus on versatility of the blocks will give it a huge advantage since that's not something early EE had.
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That's a stupid excuse.
It is not an excuse, it is my personal opinion
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Raphe9000 wrote:The metal blocks look really nice, and I think it would be amazing if we got to see some type of expansion in the future since the colors are quite limited Maybe later in the game's life, we could see a pink one (rose gold) in a Valentine's pack, a green one (loosely based on Uranium) in a toxic pack, and a blue one (loosely based on Cobalt) in a cave pack. These colors are slightly less mainstream with metal, but that makes them cool unlockables if implemented in a way like that.
No, because people need to be limited so that they use their thinking, creativity, imagination to the maximum.
I agree. Each pack has to be creative. In my opinion, when ee staff started adding various colors to existing packs, game became less interesting.
It's interesting to have only few unique blocks in a pack, it boosts builder's creativity. It's very boring to have the same color pallet for all packs.
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It is not an excuse, it is my personal opinion
I'm saying 'we're not adding any more block colors because we want to force you to be creative' is a stupid excuse...
I agree. Each pack has to be creative. In my opinion, when ee staff started adding various colors to existing packs, game became less interesting.
It's interesting to have only few unique blocks in a pack, it boosts builder's creativity. It's very boring to have the same color pallet for all packs.
I actually loved when they started adding more colors to packs because it increased creative builds. If someone wants blue metal, no amount of creativity is gonna give them something comparable to blue metal because everyone already expects metal to have the texture shown above. Because of this issue in the previous game, many builds looked off, hard to identify, or even hard to create because certain block colors were missing for no reason. I'd much rather fewer block types and more block colors than fewer block colors and more block types. This just makes sense since colors are limited to what an average person would say is 7-17 whilst textures, especially 24x24 in a world where many games use 16x16, have countless possibilities. This makes certain textures (like the ones seen in EEU) very versatile since they lack anything too identifiable. Colors simply don't act like this since the simplest they can be is one color, and that just makes them more identifiable compared to other colors.
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The more I look at the Basic blocks the less I like them. Compared to the crisp, shiny graphics in EE, in EEU they look dull as the lighting and shading is hard to see (though this might because I am just watching a YouTube video). This, in addition to the thinner outlines make the smileys stick out more than they need to. The dots on the corners of the original make the lighting pop out more. [...]
I understand your concerns, but I think Alex did a good job with the basic blocks. To me, they retain what's good about the originals while being completely original. Here's what they look like currently:
generally they're meant to be general-purpose enough to be used for any build, as with all of these initial blocks.
How would the Grass blocks apply to this? It's lumpy grass plastered onto brown bricks which shouldn't logically fit anywhere, the exception being deliberate throwbacks to the original game. For the 7+ years i have played EE I cannot recall criticism towards the old blocks like Basic or Grass being unrealistic, and i think these quirks make EE more interesting to look at and play, even if this is on a subconscious level. In Super Mario Maker most of the course parts are aesthetically bizarre and would be unfitting outside the Mario series. Despite this, SMM is extremely successful and EE shares this trait of bizarritude to a much lesser extent, yet little faith is being put in the Jumping Smiley Face Aesthetic.
It's not that we're going for realism, we just want these "core" blocks of the game to be as versatile as possible. Some of the later blocks will certainly have a more quirky design. As for how grass works, Xenonetix's idea has been for it to be placed as a decoration that's stacked in front of whatever block you want underneath. We still need to discuss the specifics of implementation to make sure it would actually be intuitive and fit the needs of level builders.
suppose you have those 3 blocks:
one of those cases where gamma correction is required.
convert sRGB to linear RGB, do "the calculations" then convert linear RGB back to sRGB.
Yeah, I briefly looked into it yesterday and I think I'll try implementing it today.
Gosha wrote:LIATRI42 wrote:No, because people need to be limited so that they use their thinking, creativity, imagination to the maximum.
I agree. Each pack has to be creative. In my opinion, when ee staff started adding various colors to existing packs, game became less interesting.
It's interesting to have only few unique blocks in a pack, it boosts builder's creativity. It's very boring to have the same color pallet for all packs.I actually loved when they started adding more colors to packs because it increased creative builds. If someone wants blue metal, no amount of creativity is gonna give them something comparable to blue metal because everyone already expects metal to have the texture shown above. Because of this issue in the previous game, many builds looked off, hard to identify, or even hard to create because certain block colors were missing for no reason. [...]
We're aiming for somewhere in the middle—for a lot of these basic materials, it makes sense to have a nice variety of colors. For metal blocks, I'm not sure if we'd expand the options later on or not, but it wouldn't be to cover a full rainbow of colors. For some packs we have planned, their definitely won't be a full range of colors.
So essentially, some block packs make sense to have a full range of colors, while others don't. And while I agree that certain limitations can lead to creative solutions, there still needs to be good alternatives if you need certain colors or textures, and that's what these initial blocks are.
former lead-dev on EE/EEU, 2018—2020
(aka Criobite, Joshua Stone, TechnoWolf99, & LightWolf)
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N1KF wrote:The more I look at the Basic blocks the less I like them. Compared to the crisp, shiny graphics in EE, in EEU they look dull as the lighting and shading is hard to see (though this might because I am just watching a YouTube video). This, in addition to the thinner outlines make the smileys stick out more than they need to. The dots on the corners of the original make the lighting pop out more. [...]
https://i.imgur.com/dFSZEHM.pngI understand your concerns, but I think Alex did a good job with the basic blocks. To me, they retain what's good about the originals while being completely original. Here's what they look like currently:
https://i.imgur.com/kld3t8n.png
how about TrueType graphics for actual scalability?
if the svg files are not shared then it's impossible for users to make fanmade ttf versions!
I'm known as "haslo" in EE. Also, I refuse to play EEU.
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Just thought I'd add, one of the big advantages for SVGs for us is that they scale consistently. Personally one of the reasons I don't like the way fullscreen EE looks currently is that, even though there is no blurriness at all, it changes the proportions of blocks quite a lot.
Personally I'd prefer a system like we have currently, which although it is slightly blurry at certain zooms, is far clearer than bitmap scaling, and preserves the original block's proportions much better.
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▼PiotrGrochowski wrote:Just thought I'd add, one of the big advantages for SVGs for us is that they scale consistently. Personally one of the reasons I don't like the way fullscreen EE looks currently is that, even though there is no blurriness at all, it changes the proportions of blocks quite a lot.
Personally I'd prefer a system like we have currently, which although it is slightly blurry at certain zooms, is far clearer than bitmap scaling, and preserves the original block's proportions much better.
What do you mean by "they scale consistently"?
"Personally one of the reasons I don't like the way fullscreen EE looks currently is that, even though there is no blurriness at all, it changes the proportions of blocks quite a lot." That's because EE uses nearest neighbor, a form of "bitmap scaling".
TrueType isn't "bitmap scaling", it involves hinting which is made by the font designer, and it can involve your "preserves the original block's proportions", at least to the nearest pixel accuracy (using fractional pixels of course results in blur, defeating the purpose of hinting). Although the textures for ttf can be bitmap, they can just as well be vector, avoiding texture upscaling artifacts. And your preference for unhinted graphics is your opinion; there could be a setting to enable/disable hinting, possibly separately for GUI text as well. Speaking of GUI text, hopefully we get the option to customize the font to any system font.
https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewt … 73#p757973 shows how scalable EEU could look like, in two different resolutions. You have already stated your opinion on block hinting. How about the rest of the GUI, that is, the GUI text? What do you think of the scalability of that? The zoom level of GUI text could be also customizable in the settings.
Also, think about the zoom level of 4.166666666666667%. That's 1 pixel per block. Should there be any differences between the rendering of this zoom level and the rendering of the minimap? How would smileys, coins and switches be handled at this zoom level, compared to the minimap?
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I just mean that if you for example had a brick block or something, the bricks would always have the same width (even if it meant that that width was a fractional number of pixels), while with nearest neighbor / hinting you'd often get some of the blocks being different sizes, which ends up looking weirder than slightly less crisp edges.
I was just comparing hinting to nearest neighbor because when it comes to square blocks with lots of parallel lines, they generally act very similarly, both snap the lines to nearest pixel accuracy and end up distorting the original block's proportions. (When it comes to curved edges hinting is generally a lot better, but in most situations in a game like EE they work very similarly)
The GUI text is done using the browser's inbuilt text rendering engine, so yes, it currently uses hinting We haven't discussed much about whether the GUI scale should be modifiable, but it does change size automatically to keep in proportion with the rest of the game window.
As for the one pixel per block zoom level thing, blocks will probably be rendered pretty similarly to how they are rendered when converting to a minimap colour, but there are several things we don't plan on appearing on the minimap, I believe that coins were one of them (and the minimap definitely won't be animated like coins would be if the game window were made very small).
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The SVG system we have currently is what we'll be using. I appreciate you making suggestions about ways we can do things better like doing gamma-correct interpolation and all that, but using TTF's for graphics is not something we'll be doing. It would complicate the design process more than it already is, and wouldn't really actually offer many practical improvements. With things like this, what matters most is a balanced solution that looks good enough and doesn't over-complicate things.
The UI font in the game will not be able to be changed, since that's an important element of the game's design. We're being sure to keep the text at a reasonable size, and in the mobile version where this is the most important, the UI will be for the most part handled differently anyway.
former lead-dev on EE/EEU, 2018—2020
(aka Criobite, Joshua Stone, TechnoWolf99, & LightWolf)
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