Posts by ROllerozxa

In addition to the principia-web forums I also host the Voxelmanip Forums, a cosy retro-looking forum where you can discuss various topics such as other old Android games, tracker music and other technology in general.

Well this server hasn't seen much of any activity recently...

A while back (erm, a year or two ago), Danil_2461 recreated the font from the Apparatus logo and other texts in Apparatus.

I think it looks pretty nice and accurate. You might have noticed me using it sometimes here and there.

Download .ttf

In what way? It locks the object in the sandbox menu, making it not adjust itself if it intersects with another object. Take a plank, lock it, take another plank, lock it, rotate it 90* and put them together into a plus sign and they will stay that way, despite intersecting eachothers collision.

Of course this is only a sandbox feature so when you play the level they will snap back, but if you connect them to a static object like the Platform then they will of course stay in place. It eases making large contraptions with potentially intersecting objects and without the risk of a badly duplicated object shifting it off the grid.

Yeah I don't think Oil Rigs actually generate in the adventure mode, which is a bit unfortunate as it makes a lot of factory objects unobtainable. At least, not from what I've witnessed from having explored the generated adventure worlds throughout the years.

From the downloads page:

Hey! This download page is from before the source release and contains modded versions of the old proprietary 1.5.1 intended for use with principia-web. There are not publicly available binaries of the open source version yet, but you can currently compile from source for both Windows and Linux.

The official community site archive only works with the open source version, the current downloads are of the old proprietary 1.5.1 patched to connect to principia-web. I've been meaning to update them with 1.5.2 beta builds but there are currently some issues with the Android version I haven't yet gotten around to fixing.

Yes it's going to be able to open levels from both, so there's a primary community site that it will connect to for things such as uploading, authentication and playing levels when a domain is not specified (by default principia-web.se). But in addition it can connect to any other site domain (e.g. archive.principia-web.se, any other site that would want to host and distribute Principia levels) and fetch levels from there if specified in the protocol link.

Thumbnails are taken manually by me whenever I get the time, I run a script on my computer that runs through newly uploaded level and screenshots them.

principia-web predates the source code release so I originally did not have access to the official automated screenshotting tool. Now I do, but I haven't gotten around to implementing it yet.

I've thought about having the LuaScript object being expanded to morph into the model of any signaling object. Instead of it being like now where it has a single model with 4 outputs and 4 inputs, it'd be possible to turn it into the 1i1o object model, the 8-splitter model, the Robot Manager model... And be able to use all those sockets.

Basically it'd allow for creating custom objects written with Lua to a larger extent than we have currently.

Oh hey I actually finished it. Has a leaderboard too.

Yo awesome, I actually had a draft for an LGW article locally but thought that I had to wait until we had a stable release since they require games to have at least one open source release. Hopefully it's allowed to stay, I'll probably update it and add the stuff I wrote too.

Hijacking this into a general "link to Principia!!" thread, I added Principia to the list of games on the Arch wiki. It seems to have done something because I keep seeing people coming onto principia-web from that article. :)

I've put up a listing for Principia on itch.io as suggested by someone. Will be interesting to see if we can gain some traction on that platform.

Good idea, I actually wanted to implement that while I was going through the PC keybinds in the source code and documenting some undocumented ones in the Wiki.

Posted by RI7

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More Variable stuff can be helpfull

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In what way? Principia Lua scripts already have all the variables you could need, and then there's the analog variables that can be set either through Lua or with the Var getter and setters. :)

The way principia-web level screenshots are taken is very different from how they were taken on the official community site (they don't respect cam markers, are taken at the last save position, and are taken by a script I run manually on new level uploads). See the FAQ for more info.

So this server is effectively dead, as Danil lost the world files quite some time ago. Quite sad.

(The formatting this forum uses is called Markdown, and links are done like this: [Link title](https://URL), but also works to just dump them raw like this: https://voxelmanip.se/)

That's interesting, I've always heard of LittleBigPlanet as a game similar to Principia/Apparatus, but I've been too much of a Nintendo guy to have had the ability to test it, so don't know much about it.

Back when Windows 8 was really new, there was this Metro app called Physamajig. It was like a physics-based sandbox thing where you would draw shapes, texture them and then could give them different physical properties and program them using triggers and events. I quite liked it, mostly playing minigames or rube goldberg machines others had created for it, but unfortunately it's long gone from the Microsoft Store and is essentially lost media at this point.

There are a selection of four levels which are featured at the top of the website, as well as visible from the main menu of the game. These have remained mostly the same for quite a long time now, so I am now making a thread to get suggestions for new featured levels.

I don't have any specific criteria for featured levels, but I would like them to be impressive, interesting, inspiring, neat eyecandy or all four of them. Basically anything that would show the strengths of Principia and would be a good idea to showcase for new players discovering Principia. Suggesting your own levels is fine too, if you believe that one of your own levels would be good to feature.

Principia does indeed have puzzle levels, like Apparatus' Building Challenge levels. They are a level type just like Custom and Adventure levels, and the levels you can find in the "Learn with puzzles" menu if you press "Play" on the main menu are the puzzle level type.

Unfortunately creating your own puzzle levels were deprecated in 1.5 (I was very critical of this change back in 2014 when it happened but not much can be done to change what happened in the past, there were different priorities during the development back then). The level type is hidden from creation in the sandbox, playtesting puzzle levels in the sandbox is broken, and attempting to play puzzle levels from a community site is broken (try playing this level, for example). I am in favour of fixing up puzzles so that they fully work again, but the related code is rather chaotic and I haven't been able to fix it yet (it is tracked as issue #91).

For now, you can create puzzle levels by creating a regular level in the sandbox and changing the level type (second byte, after the version field) to 0x00 with a hex editor. A long time ago I wrote a Python script that can do this for you if you specify the level file's path. I've also prepared an empty level file with the puzzle type empty_puzzle_level.plvl that you can rename to some number and put in your levels folder.

When opening a puzzle level in the sandbox, you should be able to see a (rather out of place) button with a dark background and a cursor icon when you select a non-static object which you can use to toggle whether an object is movable when playing the puzzle. If you try to play a puzzle level in the sandbox (either Test play or Simulate options), the level will most likely break. Puzzles are rather buggy in the sandbox in general so it's a good idea to regularly save the level.

To actually play the puzzles, you can take the puzzle level you've created and replace the built-in puzzle levels in the Learn with puzzles menu. On Windows they are installed by default to C:\Program Files\Principia\data-shared\lvl\main\ and their filenames are the order in which they come (1.plvl is the first puzzle level, and so on...).

It's a bit convoluted at the moment and I apologise for it but I hope this may be of use to you.

Posted by RandomMechEngineer

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Hi, I wanted to open a discussion about issues in Principia in the hope that they would be fixed at some point in future.

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Usually you should report bugs on the issue tracker, but the forums are okay too.

Posted by RandomMechEngineer

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A minor thing that might not have come across for many but I have issues with, is the joint strength on PC vs Android version. When using multi-select to adjust joint strenght, the resulting strength is much weaker when set on PC compared to the same strength values on Android.

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Don't really understand what you mean here. The strength value is the same when changing on both Android and desktop. The dialog may be slightly different but it ends up setting the same strength. The physics engine should be the same across all platforms (but realistically will vary because the Android version is built with completely different compiler options for a different architecture, it's a mess nobody really wants to deal with).

Posted by RandomMechEngineer

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Another not so significant bug is the rendering of painted terrain. Sometimes it appears invisible on random spots, both while in editor and playing.

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Yes I've been aware of this issue for quite some time, it is rather strange. Occurs both when painting in a non-chunked level and with chunked terrain generation. Usually seems to happen when the camera is zoomed out so must be a limit in how many textured pixels it can render.

I've opened #156 for it. Why it just cleanly cuts off like that I don't know. Because this is how it usually looks if you hit the limit of how many regular pixels Principia can render which pretty clearly looks like a vertex limit, creating some funny graphical issues: