Posts by ROllerozxa

Posted by pele

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but on wiki like mediawiki you can revert vandalism very quickly and everyone can remove mistakes without a review.

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Everyone can edit it, everyone can revert vandalism, but in reality nobody actually did and I was solely the one cleaning up and reverting vandalism when it would occur. This way vandalism does not even show up, but if it does their PR will just not be merged and the user visible wiki pages stay pristine.

Now that Principia is an open source project, you can build it from source to target any device possible within our supported platforms, or port it to a new platform.

A while ago I ported Principia to Haiku OS. The support code is still in the main repository and there's a link to the compilation instructions on the download page, but I haven't tested if it still works in a while.

As Haiku OS supports OpenGL and has GTK3 available, the port is more or less fully features, barring some minor platform-specific code that hasn't been implemented and would need someone more familiar with Haiku OS to implement.

These forums effectively run a custom software at this point, so it would need someone to implement it. But I do not feel the desire to implement the ability to upload files directly to the site, I would rather skip the hassle of dealing with that.

You can embed images from other sites here, but principia-web employs a CSP for security reasons that restricts what domains a browser will connect to. Currently Github and Imgur are part of the image whitelist, but I can add others such as Postimages upon request. To embed an image, you use typical Markdown syntax, like such:

![](https://files.voxelmanip.se/misc/iso.webp)

apparatus-web has been decommissioned for a while now due to inactivity. A full dump of the levels and database with sensitive data excluded have been published to the Internet Archive.

Open source does not mean no cost. In addition to this it also costs money to upkeep the server, which is the reason for the donation banner in the footer. The cheatsheet was an idea from me to offer a nice product that gives you the convenience of a summary of the LuaScript API for a small sum of money that goes towards server costs for the project.

I had thought that after enough sales I would release the sources to the cheatsheet (it was designed in HTML/CSS and converted to PDF with Weasyprint, fun fact), but at this rate that seems unlikely. A total of 0 people have purchased it, so I guess it wasn't something people are interested in.

Nothing is planned, there is no release date, there is no roadmap. Realistically there won't be a new version anytime soon as things are looking right now, but if there will be it will be whatever gets merged into the Principia repository. The Changelog usually has a section for a "201X.XX.XX" version which lists all changes that have been made in master since the last release and is what you'll get when you run the nightly builds.

Going to such an event has always been an interesting idea in the back of my head but I don't really have the financial means to get to FOSDEM.

As for a Principia stand I assume we're not popular enough to get one either, looking at the kinds of projects that got one last year. There would also need to be at least two people responsible for the stand and I'm just one person, even if I was able to go and they would otherwise accept a stand for Principia. I don't think it would be possible.

Considering I don't receive enough donations to cover server costs I haven't even considered doing a fundraiser to ask for anything more superfluous. And there is no "another developer" here right now, it's basically just me. The second person responsible could just be any community member who is close by and is interested, but I don't know if there are any.

In general, I don't think we're very well prepared or have the resources to attend, whether it be me personally or running a Principia stand. But maybe that will change for a future year.

I'd be more than happy to see the Matrix space being revived.

Some more details about what happened with the previous attempt: We used the Matrix<->Discord bridge bot service from T2bot, which runs on matrix-appservice-discord. The reliability of it was terrible, with messages being delayed sometimes up to half an hour or dropping entirely, one way or the other. During this time there an incident that occurred with the bridge itself that made all channel associations disappear (this was not related to us), and shortly after that it ran a bit smoother but began to again slow down again as people reregistered with the bridge.

The space was open for about a year and in that time the only one who had ever participated from over the bridge was basically me, there were a few others from the Discord server who had joined the Matrix space but as they would also be solely active from the Discord side I considered it to be entirely unused. Which wouldn't be a problem if the space actually had a functional bridge, but with the state it was otherwise in I just decided put it out of its misery.

With that said I do need to mention that the issues we had with it are more or less out of T2Bot's control - it is one of the most used of their bot services and Matrix simply does not scale at all to a bot of its size. The general recommendation in their Matrix room is basically that if you can at all help it, host your own bridge instead.

But hosting the Discord bridge appservice means running your own Matrix homeserver with Synapse which is extremely heavy to run, there is other Matrix server software in varying stages of incomplete one can try and see if they are compatible. I don't know if there is any alternative bridge that one can host that does not require a homeserver to host it on, this page only lists ones that do.

If you're willing to just take care of this (and it is a lot of responsibility to host a Matrix homeserver), then it would be much appreciated. You can contact me privately and we can get things sorted out to invite it to the Discord server as well as setting up new rooms in the space (which still exists, but is empty).

We ended up getting Matterbridge set up over the evening and now the Matrix space is back again thanks to Luna. The Matrix link on the index page of principia-web takes you to the space again. :)

Since last year there has been support for compiling Principia to WebAssembly using Emscripten. WebAssembly is a modern web technology that allows you to compile native code such as C or C++ into something that can be run inside web browsers, which can be combined with WebGL for more advanced graphics rendering. Principia was able to be successfully compiled (which was pretty easy due to SDL's great support for Emscripten), but that was about it.

Recently I picked back up working on it and it has now gotten to the point where the main menu works and you can go in-game without it crashing. However everything but the GUI and the background does not render, the exact issue for which is currently unknown. I ended up throwing up a web build of the game in the current state that it's in (note: very much not playable!), which is available here:

https://principia-web.se/~web/

Help would be appreciated in getting the web port fully functional one day, as the current GL errors that make the game world not render is very difficult to track down.

The goal for the web port would be for it to function well enough for playing levels from the community site in one's web browser, though having the sandbox and level creation experience be fully functional would also be a bonus. The WIP and experimental Dear Imgui dialog backend would also be handy for that.

There are now compilation instructions available for Emscripten on the wiki, and the status of the web port is being tracked in issue #154.

The web browser which you're reading this post isn't necessarily obscure, but it is certainly a unique platform that Principia will hopefully be playable in one day. The experimental Principia web port has its own forum thread over here.

A while back I created a new YouTube channel by the name of Principia, which is intended to serve as a place dedicated for Principia video content (and which is also intended to be of higher quality than the kind of stuff I put on my personal YouTube channel).

https://www.youtube.com/@principiagame

There is no content uploaded to it as of yet, but the possibilities are endless. Suggest ideas for interesting content, or if anyone is even interested in making videos that could be uploaded there and has a good setup for it (pls no phone recordings).

Posted by voxel

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(also this once merged would allow importing custom audio and sound effects:)

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The pull request has not seen activity in a long time and the author is known for starting work on something and then abandoning it shortly after. Not that there is anything wrong with losing interest, but someone else would need to adopt and finish it for it to be merged and I don't see that happening.

(I also don't know if importing and loading raw audio samples is a good idea for the LuaScript API. One could of course make an audio file converter like we do with images now, but it's also not a requirement to make the API as low-level as possible.)

Ever since the beginning, Principia has been using GTK as a GUI toolkit for the more complex dialogs in the game on desktop. It was likely being used very early on in development when the game ran on Linux, and then became visible to regular players when the Windows version officially released around 1.4.

The choice of GTK for the dialogs was always seen as a quick solution until something better was implemented. But from the player's perspective it has always felt like a strange choice, as the dialogs end up being independent of the main window and generally felt out of place. In response to a (now deleted) comment on reddit, sdac wrote the following about it:

Right now we use GTK for configuration dialogs for the various objects in the game, and misc other dialogs. Our plan is to replace GTK with an OpenGL alternative, but GTK was a quick solution and easy to bundle with the exe on Windows. We had previous experience with GTK so that's why we picked it.

That plan of course never turned out as expected when the game was later abandoned in late 2014. But with the open source release, the plans to replace GTK were given another life.

Up until relatively recent developments with the game, we have always been using GTK2. While GTK3 was already released back in 2011, GTK2 was still very much current in 2012-2014. Now it is an abandoned relic that most want to drop sooner rather than later (even though it still sees use in the same way Python 2 is still used).

The natural thing to do would be to upgrade the game to use GTK3, which turned out to be a very large undertaking due to the large amount of compatibility breaking changes in version 3, but VOXEL just enough managed to do it. It was subsequently polished and made to work on Windows in a redistributable manner (which turned out to be a non-trivial endeavour).

But GTK was never a good choice for Principia. GTK3 is also very clearly not designed for our usecases. Neither was GTK2, but GTK3 is larger and more opinionated than GTK2 ever was. Just as an example, the regular colour picker dialog from GTK2 that we use for configuring colours in the game:

...Has been declared deprecated in GTK3, in favour of a new colour picker that is a toy in comparison.

I genuinely do not understand why they did this, but it doesn't really matter. There are some other features we use that have been deprecated with no proper replacement, and reimplementing them ourselves is not really worthwhile. We will not update to GTK4, nor will we update to GTK5. And until we have replacement dialogs using something else that is up to parity, we will stay on GTK3.

When discussing GUI replacements, one option that was brought up was Dear Imgui. It basically ticks all the boxes I wanted to see from a replacement, being lightweight and self-proclaimed "Bloat-free", integrates well into the Principia window and is also much more portable than GTK for any potential console endeavours. It is also very customisable and themeable, beyond the default blue theme that you probably recognise from somewhere else (a lot of games use Dear Imgui for technical development tools, modding tools and similar):

VOXEL subsequently worked on integrating Imgui into Principia's engine and began reimplementing dialogs using it in #138. I later ended up adopting it and recently got it merged into master behind an experimental compile option to build the game with it instead of GTK. Currently there are still a large amount of dialogs that are not yet implemented, tracked in issue #173, but one day the Principia GTK dialogs will finally become history.

Starting this thread to hopefully hear some interesting stories from "OG" community members that have been with the game since the early days, because I know there are a lot of people that, like me, grew up around Principia and have it to thank for their interests or even career (Though if you've come across Principia in later years it is nice to hear from you too).

I'll start:

I got the full version of Principia back in Christmas of 2013, I was 9 years old at the time. While I had played Apparatus before, getting the full version in Christmas of 2012 and playing the LITE version before that, Principia was undoubtedly more influential for me. It shaped a lot of my interests and was most likely what really got me into programming and related things afterwards. And now I'm 20 years old studying software engineering at university.

Principia was also very much the thing that later made me come back in 2020 to reverse engineer the game and create principia-web as an (at the time) unofficial community site replacement for the game (more about it in this blog post), which later led to the open source release of the game which I now maintain. Sometimes it felt like it was destiny, and I would not have it any other way.

Posted by ROllerozxa

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Currently Github and Imgur are part of the image whitelist, but I can add others such as Postimages upon request.

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I had apparently ended up adding Postimages to the whitelist after writing. I would recommend it over Imgur nowadays IMO. Simply pasting an image from your clipboard when going to postimages.org should be able to upload it, and on the resulting page you can find the snippet to copy for these forums under the "Github-Reddit markdown" section:

Third-party image hosts can be bad to rely on, since it has shown time and time again over the years that running a service where everyone can stuff images onto your server to hotlink from for free is not economically feasible. Sooner or later it will go under, turn images into advertisements, or worse, and the fallout will be thousands of broken images on forums and other websites. Imgur has slowly been transforming itself from a image hosting site to a meme site (I mean it literally) and using it for the original intended purpose of hotlinking is against their ToS now.

Postimages has been around for a long time now and seem to be stable throughout it, but their monetisation strategy remains questionable and I have no idea how long it will last. However the hope is that images that get posted will be scraped and archived in the meantime, by me or by other archivists.

GIMP 3.0 was just released a day or so ago, after many years of development and after some years of broken ETAs.

https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/03/16/gimp-3-0-released/

I have tried their 2.99 dev builds on-and-off in the past while usually going back to the latest stable 2.x. I installed 3.0 yesterday and after the shock of widgets shifting slightly out of their normal positions I think I'll get used to it, and am interested in the new non-destructive effects they added that were planned for 3.1 but that ended up going into 3.0. Also nice to finally get rid of GTK2 from my system, after Principia and now GIMP have switched away from it. :)

I of course remain happy with GIMP as my go-to image editor even with its flaws, switching to it from Paint.NET even back when I used Windows. GIMP was also used a lot during Principia's development for assets even back in the day, along with other well known free and open source software such as Inkscape and Blender.

A new Principia building contest is now live.

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

As of writing, principia-web.se and related services has now moved to a new server. This is following some pretty serious issues I had with the previous cloud provider (which you have likely heard of if you follow the Principia Mastodon account) that required me to urgently move things elsewhere.

Previously we were hosted on a VPS in OVH's Frankfurt datacenter. Now we are with Hetzner in their Nürnberg datacenter. Things should generally be faster once I have gotten things sorted out in a couple days.

Some things like the screenshotter are not yet set up. Other than that all core functionality should be working, and let me know if something does not work anymore.