Posts by ROllerozxa

Okay I see, so it's an issue with the multiselect connection strength dialog (makes sense, since they are duplicated across platforms and without a doubt contain inconsistencies).

I did some digging in the code and saw that, while the strength that is reported by the desktop dialog is accurate to what the game tells, this is not the case on Android. On Android the strength multiplier factor when converting from a float to an integer is wrong by a single zero causing the strength to effectively be multiplied by 10. This would mean that e.g. 0.05 becomes 0.5 (50%) and 0.1 is indestructible. When you say 1.2 I assume you mean 0.2, which would become 2 on Android (basically indestructible).

So anything above 0.1 on Android, as it is currently, would be indestructible while on PC the only time it is indestructible is 1.0 when the slider is at its max. Dunno what to tell you about having to set strengths on Android. There's no strength level you cannot apply on PC, it's just heavily skewed against indestructible on Android.

Anyways the fix for the Android dialog seems trivial, but it is really late here so I'll save committing it for tomorrow.

macOS support would be great, just needs someone with the hardware that can port it. I would be willing to but don't have any hardware to work on it. I opened an issue #144 for this a while back and wrote a bit about it.

Yes, so principia-url-handler.desktop in the packaging/ folder is for handling the principia:// protocol URLs. This gets installed when you do ninja install or package the game, but if you're running from source then it won't know where to look.

The method I've recommended doing on the Wiki for getting it to work with a source tree build is modifying the Exec path and putting it in ~/.local/share/applications/. Maybe the MIME database needs to be updated after you do this, can't exactly remember.

I'm unsure if there's any better way to solve this. Maybe the game should write this file automatically to the local applications folder if it's not been installed to the system, which is probably what I'll need to do for the AppImage version anyways.

While I was working on the AppImage builds I figured out what was missing in the documentation, namely calling xdg-mime. I assume this is what package managers do automatically when they call update-desktop-database, as when I e.g. build and install the AUR package it will work out of the box without having to register any association. I've updated the Wiki page to include these details.

I've also done some improvements to the level play buttons, if you press it three times a little box will pop up linking to a troubleshooting page on the Wiki which should contain all the possible issues I can think one would run into with the protocol links on various platforms. Hopefully it will be of use to anyone else who has issues with it in the future.

Unless Github does a Sourceforge I don't see any reason to completely move off of it.

Like if they start lacing repository releases with malware, force Microsoft accounts upon everyone, fork the Git protocol into a proprietary one or automatically turn every repository into an NFT then I would reconsider but the current points are not nearly bad enough to justify moving. I'm by no means a FOSS zealot and have no issues with the Github server software staying proprietary or them offering Copilot AI services under the Github branding as long as they don't severely disrupt open source projects like ourselves being on the platform.

One of the things that I would want to stay on Github for would be their very powerful CI machines, which we use extensively for making releases much more painless as it takes care of compiling and making builds on all three platforms for each commit. Hosting our own CI is not going to happen, I don't know if Codeberg has any substantial CI infrastructure and last I heard of GitLab's CI it required credit card verification (I only have a debit card) but maybe they're willing to give exceptions if asked.

Setting up a mirror of Principia related repositories on Codeberg sounds like a good idea though. We'll just be using Github as our canonical source until anything actually happens with Github.

(P.S. Claiming that the issue tracker or pull requests is a type of lock-in is pretty dishonest. pull requests are simply a connection to a branch in a forked repository which can be cloned and stored locally, and issues can be exported from GitHub or even scraped. It would not be any kind of hinderance to a real migration effort)

I have begun mirroring Principia-related repositories on Codeberg based on some advice from a friend of mine: https://codeberg.org/principia/ Currently they are read-only but I heard that apparently it is possible to also mirror the issue tracker in both ways as well as accepting pull requests from the Codeberg side that can be merged and propagate to Github. I'll have to look further into that.

That being said, you (asdfLin) are a toxic individual. I am not a Microsoft fanboy nor am I a corporate bootlicker and I am insulted that you would say such a thing about me. If it weren't for the fact I had already looked into mirroring our source repositories elsewhere I probably wouldn't have done it, especially after this thread. Your attitude is counterproductive to the views you hold and I hope you do not behave in this manner in any other open source project.

I don't think there's much else to discuss, so I'll go ahead and lock this thread.

hi there, glad to have you here ^^

No updates on macOS support. I don't have any Mac hardware to port Principia with, so will most likely never happen from my side unless that changes. That's about it.

I've heard that Wine (compatibility layer for running Windows programs under Linux) is also available on macOS. Running the Windows version of Principia on Linux under Wine works fine without any issues (even though the native Linux version is of course recommended), so it should work on macOS too.

Okay, there is now an update on macOS support. See my comment on #144.

A Jumper? You can configure it to an arbitrary signal value and then insert it into an input socket and it will be fed a constant stream of the configured value.

The selection of featured levels have now been fully switched out to some new levels after a long time of them staying mostly the same. I'd like to feature levels more often and make the process of updating the featured levels smoother so it should be as simple for me as just clicking a feature button in the future, but for now I'll keep the manual process. As usual, please suggest levels in this thread.

There is a(n incomplete) page on the wiki which appears as a link on a level page if you try to press a play button three times for troubleshooting playing levels, unsure if you have seen it. There are about a million different ways things can go wrong based on the OS, install method and browser and we have four different platforms that would all be considered "PC" so I don't know if I can help much further.

I have made a printable cheatsheet overview of all methods in the API as well as their arguments and some other details. Useful to have printed out on your desk or wherever else you are when doing Principia Lua scripting.

It is now available for purchase on Itch.io.

After a long time of no contests, the first Principia building contest after the game's open source release is now live.

For more details see the contest's page. This forum thread acts as a longer form discussion board than the contest comments section.

The contest is now over! The winners of the contest have been selected, and below is also some feedback for every entry from me.

1st place: Imperfect Balance by Blue_Beaker

Very well made minigame with the objective of clearing all objects from the board by placing objects into it. I personally enjoyed playing it very much and eventually managed to get a clean score of 100 after a hour or two of combined gameplay. :)

2nd place: N/A

Because of the lack of interest in the contest I didn't feel it was appropriate to nominate a 2nd place. So it is empty.

Feedback for other entries

• Robot Scrapper by Miner34: Grinding up robots are always fun. Back in the day we used to make extravagant contraptions to rip dummies apart, but with the release of Principia 1.5 the robots became more modular making it possible to rip those apart too. Very destructive, and interesting way of integrating a leaderboard by incrementing the score for each spawned robot and ending the game when the motor is "overheated".
• Air Plane by Galaxium: This submission made me realise I should have noted not to directly reference real-world accidents by name, but it is generic enough that I hope nobody has an issue with it. Watching all the planks fall down is rather satisfying and it's nice that the camera changes focus on the planks once the airplane flies away seemingly unscathed.
• Split by NoenD_io: There really should have been some kind of interactivity to the level. Not much else to say about it.
• Angry Birds Level 2-5 but it's raining mines by Galaxium: I mean the title is not wrong. There's not much else to the level after 10 seconds though when the mines have blown away everything.

Posted by MARRA92-AGAIN

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editing level description by the site instead of reuploading ( metadata edit give error)

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The metadata edit page was disabled due to someone exploiting some vulnerability in it to bring down the site. Someone needs to fully fuzz it to make sure it is safe but nobody wants to do it.

Posted by MARRA92-AGAIN

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thats sad to hear:/

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Yeah it was a bit unfortunate, they brought down the site for several hours while I was asleep right before the last contest was about to end. I think I found the vulnerability they used and have patched it, but I am not generally confident about the safety of the lvledit executable unless someone who knows how to properly fuzz something (not me) can verify it. I've sandboxed it for now which should mitigate any damage that may occur.

Posted by MARRA92-AGAIN

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Search results could show levels that contain the searched words in the level description

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I improved the search page a bit. There is now fulltext search across both principia-web and the archive, a checkbox to also search in descriptions, and a checkbox to enable advanced boolean mode search.

Posted by MARRA92-AGAIN

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hotkey for pivot/fixed interlayer joining

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Yes! I've always found it inconvenient that it defaults to the stiff connection with the keybind. It should bring up the connection type selection mode, where each button also has a respective keybind.

Posted by MARRA92-AGAIN

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ALso alterable behavior on fluid, like color, and the force with which the balls change size while taking speed

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There's some unused code for multicoloured fluid, I haven't tested it but may be sorta functional. The fluid simulation in Principia is based on LiquidFun which has all sorts of other knobs that would be interesting to allow to be configured.

Posted by MARRA92-AGAIN

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just noticed my profile pic (small enough) doesnt show up

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It needs to be smaller than 180x180, smaller than 80KiB and in PNG format. It's a bit picky, it should preferrably be able to resize profile pictures on its own by processing the image on the server but I didn't do that when I first implemented profile pictures and I haven't gotten to it yet...

Posted by MARRA92-AGAIN

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I will donate for the game in few days <3

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Thanks <3 I appreciate it. The server costs aren't very high but it's still one less worry for me if/when the operating costs for the project becomes fully self-sufficient off of donations.

The Wiki contents are stored and version controlled in Git now and you contribute through Github PRs. There is a Contributing to the Wiki page that you really could have found on your own. Changes go through review before merging but I hope it is not too much of a discouragement, I have always wanted more people to contribute to the Wiki but back when it had proper Wiki editing flow the only edits from others were just plain vandalism.

Er, hello, glad that you've found Principia again.

There are no 32-bit Windows builds because they crash on startup. 32-bit Android builds do not have these issues, nor do 32-bit Linux builds have such an issue, it's not necessarily an ideological reason we do not provide 32-bit Windows builds but purely a technical one. But nobody wants to debug and fix what's broken with the 32-bit Windows builds, so therefore there are none and I would suggest anyone who is still on 32-bit Windows to switch to some lightweight Linux distro as I assume the hardware isn't very suited for the versions of Windows that we support either.

As for having a version of Principia that runs on Windows XP that has no reason to do with lack of 32-bit builds. Modern MinGW Windows toolchains, even ones that build for 32-bit, do not target Windows XP. They usually target something slightly newer such as Windows 7 or link against UCRT which XP never received outside of enterprise usecases. So if you were to make a build of Principia in the MINGW32 environment it still wouldn't run on XP even if it didn't crash. To make a new Principia build for Windows XP you would need to build a modern MinGW toolchain that targets Windows XP or dig up an old one that does, and then build all dependencies to target Windows XP. In particular GTK3 has dropped Windows XP so you would need to use an older version or bring back the old GTK2 dialogs.

It would be possible, but it would take some work and effort for what is effectively a novelty.