General modding chat

[paper bone]

oh i guess i still need to fine tune it a bit

it came to ~62k before it crashed

[warm canopy]

Do you have the code so I can also try?

[formal crane]

you hit the hard limit of PioNet sync. objects 💀

[paper bone]

I will release the reworked mod in a few days depending on how much time i have

[warm canopy]

Damn I wanted 500,000 trees

[paper bone]

@formal crane i dont remember if you have already answerd this but
Are you perhaps also looking at alternatives/improvements for the mesh importer?

[median cobalt]

proceeds to add a render pipeline thats based on PBR hidden behind advanced settings

[surreal junco]

Here is the link to my new offroading map https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3546613343

[serene magnet]

Same bro, same

I'm pretty sure I hurt Frans mentally with 20k though so maybe 500k isn't a great idea

[median cobalt]

gonna be looking into my multiplayer HP mods and make them look a bit better today, if anyone wants to help out with the technical block names of the dlcs after 1.9.5 id be glad

[median cobalt]

also, about the richtext part

if someone has extensive information about the glyphs, thatd be great

oh theyre thrown together

guess its worth making a small thread

[median cobalt]

oh thats not good

i cant overwrite mods anymore

its now making duplicates instead even though the mod folder did not change name

@formal crane we have issues with overwriting mods now, it seems ; trying to update my mods results only in duplicates

[paper bone]

update through steam maybe?

[median cobalt]

steam duplicates them instead of overwriting them

i cant just update them manually through steam

[paper bone]

why not?

[median cobalt]

i guess everytime a new version is due itll be a new mod

[median cobalt]

=> steam duplicates them instead of overwriting them

i have not changed my folders name since v 1.0 and im at 2.4 now and it breaks

[paper bone]

when you do it through the Trailmakers upload menu or when you actually do it on the steam workshop page?

[median cobalt]

when i do it through the trailmakers mod menu AND when i do it through the workshop page

both seem to break now

[paper bone]

oh

[median cobalt]

now all the new parts work as intended on the mod atleast, so thats good

[formal crane]

Has it ever been any different?
But yeah it kind of sucks and I wish for a few changes to the whole overall experience

[median cobalt]

i mean it has been

i was able to overwrite mods before

its how i kept updating my multiplayer HP mod

from v1 to 2.3

now in 2.4 it broke

[regal bear]

"PFB_StoneWall_Large" seems to no longer cast a shadow 👀

[serene magnet]

August 28th, our prayers will be answered

[formal crane]

it will be pretty chill

[serene magnet]

I pray for anything at this point LOL

You could fix one thing and id be happy LOL

[formal crane]

Here is a blurred changelist for modding only

And we still working on it!

[serene magnet]

I might actually cry, it's so beautiful.

[formal crane]

I will say that we have prioritised bug fixing like I have been rambling about in here for a while now.
So not a lot of new stuff.

That story is still not done and will continue for a while until we smashed all the major broken things.

[serene magnet]

I don't even care about new stuff. The fact that we aren't left to rot is what's beautiful to me.

[summer cairn]

yea im completely fine with getting bug fixes over new content cuz they can be much more annoying

[scenic echo]

bug fixes is all i want for now

[formal crane]

That makes me happy to hear!

[formal crane]

This shits hits harder with voice message 😭

Glad to hear! Lets gooo

[warm canopy]

antimatter and his voice messages - never change

[serene magnet]

Guh?

[warm canopy]

I think you are one of the only people on discord that use that feature, nothing wrong with that though

[serene magnet]

Little did you know I'm the one that paid discord to add that feature

It's so nice that I can properly express tone using VM's. I'm terrible at doing it over text LOL

[cinder spruce]

ooo frans on stream tomorrow
peak

[thorny sparrow]

COMPUTER - UNPIXEL

[formal crane]

I actually blurred it at first but realised that de-blurring algorithms are quite good nowadays lol

COMPUTER - HALLUCINATE THE TEXT

[cinder spruce]

i know there isn’t a ton of new content so will the stream also be including some larger bug fixes?

[formal crane]

I am cooking up a demo yes. But wont include 80% of the fixes.

[cinder spruce]

im guessing you’re just going to show off the full changelog here at some point

[formal crane]

That will be included in the patch notes when we get there yes 🙂

[summer cairn]

@median cobalt hey i think you should attach the "Tutorial" tag to your post: https://discord.com/channels/296562030624899072/1409212922902741024
im letting you know here so i dont pollute your post

[paper bone]

I pray for server owned structures

[median cobalt]

oh right, sorry

done

btw frans do you have any way to look into if perhaps the workshop api changed

cuz its still trying to duplicate items

i cant manually reupload code into a workshop item either

unless id actually tap into the pure API itself which i dont feel like is aligned with the whole TOS

[formal crane]

To my knowledge there has been no change on our side. Could be that Steam did something. But I dont have the resources to dig deeper into it at the moment!

But I wanna give it some attention later 🙂

[median cobalt]

would be worth asking steam directly but i wont get nowhere , not being a dev nor on a high priority anyways

[thorny sparrow]

Is anyone else having the issue? If it’s unique to you it’s probably not related to a change with the API…

[topaz arrow]

Wish it was coded in some way instead. Having the modding community scramble to decode said message would be super funny to see (and i definitely would try). By coded i mean like a ceasar cipher, or straight up what sub rosa had where each character is represented by a different one or sth

[formal crane]

Love a good ARG! Just have nowhere near that time to make something like that :p

[topaz arrow]

i do not, although maybe theres more to it than just updating a mod

[warm canopy]

Not had the issue

[paper bone]

heatmaps properly implemented

[median cobalt]

if it was unique to me how would that even work

this is an issue that is happening at the level of the api, in either way

the mod directory didnt change, i have not changed where the game is located, i have been updating it since v1.0 and only now do i get this issue

before i was able to overwrite the mod with a new name and new description every version change

now it duplicates EVERY mod including those without name changes OR description changes

making overwriting mods essentially useless

[near parcel]

If nobody else can repro it, it's either you or your pc. The API/game is fine

[formal crane]

Could you maybe explain each step you take?

[ivory agate]

Wrote this so I can come back to it later

Or I guess I oculd have just followed it but yeah

I might make a custom map

[median cobalt]

Upload mod
enters same directory i always do
gives it title
gives it description
upload
wait
check steam
see duplicate instead of overwrite
hæh.mp4

only thing i change is the end of the title and a new description when its a new version, but that hasnt ever made a duplicate up until now

[near parcel]

That's indeed user error

[median cobalt]

its always mods/multiplayerHP as a directory

has never been different

and that seemed to work for like... ages

[near parcel]

That never worked

[paper bone]

🖊️

[formal crane]

I understand you have done it differently before; but from the looks of it, then other people have not used this approach.

#1140936220487192587 message

I have been going through similar confusion some time ago.

With that said; I think there is a lot of confusion in this and it could be improved.

But for now. I see no direct issue.

[formal crane]

Stunning. Is this using the heightmap?

[paper bone]

yeah

[formal crane]

What sort of heightmap data are you using? I wouldn't expect image since you cant really read the pixel data.

[ivory agate]

Is there like a "dump" of all features and things you can do right now? it would be handy and probably the only help I would need

[near parcel]

The correct way to update a mod is to open it in the in game workshop->edit->type the folder and upload it

[paper bone]

i made a little python script that exports a images black and white data to a json file

[near parcel]

Look up my API docs

[paper bone]

i first wanted to read the binary data of the image using the lua mod but i was advised against that lol
(probaply for the better)

[formal crane]

Trailmakers wiki
https://trailmakers.wiki.gg/wiki/Modding

https://trailmakers.wiki.gg/wiki/Basic_Modding_Guide

Otherwise you can also check out TerrorSouls modding portal
https://mods.trailmakers.ludixi.com/docs

And also ALVAROPING API definition which has some additional comments on each function which can be used with the Language Server.
https://github.com/ALVAROPING1/Trailmakers-API-LuaLS

[ivory agate]

The language server?

Oh okay yeah I saw the frans edit

-# Though I don't even have an lsp because I just use notepad like an idiot lol

[serene magnet]

You don't have an ISP? How do you access the internet?
-# do you mean an IDE?

[ivory agate]

No, lsp

Basically all I have is autocomplete from previous code i've written and syntax highlighting

And sometimes a bit more, but not much

So I can't install the TM modding autocomplete because you can't do that with notepad I think

[serene magnet]

Oh.

[warm canopy]

The L on discord really looks like an I at a glance

[serene magnet]

Yeah...

[ivory agate]

But also yeah I don't have an ide techincally

[serene magnet]

I'm 90% sure I can't even install the autocomplete either. I use Pulsar as my IDE

[cinder spruce]

i did NOT see "pens" at first glance

[serene magnet]

The image I was sent did not say pens

[regal bear]

Quick preview of my new multi object placement tool for Track Creator Plus called the "StringAlong" Tool:

https://youtu.be/IP7pl_jbwNE

It allows you to create a line that follows your path and then choose an object to repeatedly spawn along that path. You can then edit many parameters including rotation, position and scale along with the ability to randomize those parameters separately.

This is not in the same class as Blockmantahampta's tool but is still useful within the mod.

[ivory agate]

This is just thinking but is it possible to get material info from a raycast?

Or the very least what object it is

[formal crane]

No. Only the position, normal and distance

[ivory agate]

Oh okay, I know noiro got vehicle block positions but I have no idea how

[near parcel]

There are specific apis for that

[ivory agate]

I saw nothing in TerrorSouls stuff but maybe it's named something different

[near parcel]

ModBlock.GetPosition iirc

[ivory agate]

Oh okay, I guess I just assumed modblock was like something specific to modding and not just all the blocks

[near parcel]

It's the proxy class for a block

[median cobalt]

how fast is the raycast function by the way

[formal crane]

not as fast as it could be

also which one

[median cobalt]

basic lineintersect raycast

wont need much more complicated stuff i think

well, i would need to find a way to properly position all the pixels

the tracespeed to beat would be 400 full* traces / s
-# or about 2500 traces/s

[formal crane]

sounds expensive

[median cobalt]

well, im planning to redo a render engine ive made using lua before

[formal crane]

we use normal non-jobified raycasts, but i dont have any exact numbers.

And from very quick looks of it it hits most things, so properly pretty expensive.

Especially taking Lua binding into account

[median cobalt]

nonjobified is fine

my raytracer also was nonjobified

im planning to recreate this pipeline btw:
mipmapping, AO, rough phong shading, no speculars, and texture mapping based on cube projections

this render took 40 minutes to output and has a res of 512x512 at 128 samples (at 4AO samples per sample)

so thats a time to beat in the long term

ofc since trailmakers might not be limited by operations a second it might be faster

but then again id need to manually set the color of each pixel probably meaning id need to re-spawn assets at a high rate

question is, what will crash first, the renderer or the unity engine

given this raycast wont have material info alot of my code might just not even be used

something else im wondering, by the way

unity uses directx here as a native render pipeline right

or are we using openGL

[warm canopy]

But gl

[median cobalt]

insanity is part of my routine

noone believed id be able to make a raytracer on an inferior cpu bound single core network-bottlenecked pipeline

(you had to network each pixel manually onto the screen from the server to clients because that display is a leftover from 2006 implementations)

ofc if theres more flexibility with trailmakers unity raycasts this might be even faster

because if theres a way i can use sphere raycasts for AO it would probably speed the render time up by 8x

whats the max spawnables limit btw

cuz with a 512x512 screen ill be spawning a whole 262144 planes (twice if i cant directly write color after being spawned)

[formal crane]

65536, but that is total in the session (so structures, npcs, players etc.)

[median cobalt]

maaan thats so tiny

[formal crane]

65536 network synchronised objects is no joke 💀

[median cobalt]

can i atleast manipulate UV on custom objects

so i can just have a chunked object that i can map a LUT table to so i can still set the color per quad

[median cobalt]

i paid for my whole internet im using my whole internet

[formal crane]

Tell that to the lowest denominator

[median cobalt]

throws bandwidth at the guy from australia connecting

[near parcel]

iirc you can only update ~1k objects/frame, after that operations start being spread over multiple frames

[ivory agate]

Compute shaders when?

I guess there would be tons of issues with implementing shaders though, even if they could be fun

[ivory agate]

Game uses d3d11 yeah

[ivory agate]

Assuming you could set up the same state over and over again couldn't you launch more instances of the game?

I mean yeah slow*6 is still slow but

[median cobalt]

i could only set up 6 extra instances before id get thread overlap

and trailmakers really glitches out having 6 individual same players on one map

2 was already very weird

[formal crane]

Have the current list of fixes 🙂

It is not done yet, but growing strongly 🦾

Subtle Messages and GUI elements will now throw a mod error if the message is too long instead of Oh No’ing.

Subtle messages will now throw error if duration is outside range instead of Oh No’ing.

Spawning PFB_Explosion and variants will no longer Oh No after player late-joining. 

Fixed collision on the top of oibjects marked as SetIsTrigger to true.

PFB_Barrel did not always despawn.

Fix exceptions being thrown when trying to remove a UI element that doesn’t exist.

Failed mod loading now shows Error icon for subtle message.

Fixed rare case where failed to load mod exceptions message would be null when throw to user.

Fixed wheel deformation on custom meshes with concave colliders.

Mouse clicks on custom mesh with concave colliders will now be registered correctly.

Soundsbanks from Wwise will now be loaded dynamically, adding 226 new sounds from space sector and pioneers.

Fixed SetPrimary/SecondaryColor being unreliable. Can now be used outside of builder.

Fixed rare case where failed to load mod exceptions message returns null.

Sticky orbit- and Builder camera will no longer override mod camera

Audio Play and Stop should now be more reliable.

Player camera now collide with Custom Meshes

SetTimeOfDay is now clamped between to 0-100.

[fallow fox]

also Frans you better make that beginner modding guide

[formal crane]

I would love to but I am unsure how to make it good! I am talking with another programmer about doing it 🙂

[paper bone]

server owned structures? o.o
pls

[formal crane]

And it is also so different from whatever we do.. It has to be a little bit unsexy.

[formal crane]

No 💔

[paper bone]

😭

[formal crane]

But have this WIP leak that I know you personally want 🙂
It is not done yet, and we are prioritising other stuff at the moment.

[elfin yarrow]

message so this shows up in me chat

[cinder spruce]

ooo

[formal crane]

rally map gogogo

[elfin yarrow]

magnetic custom objects?

[cinder spruce]

wait custom model surfaces 👀

[formal crane]

this is a little dumb but i think ALL custom mesh are magnetic right now lol

[elfin yarrow]

lmao

[formal crane]

anyway sorry for not being able to answer questions; just had to keep up the vibe and I was also nervous.
But like hit me with questions here if needed 🙂

[paper bone]

Frans #1385250615340306523 message
have these blueprint related bugs been looked into?

[formal crane]

Not yet, but are quite cursed atm.
Structures are generally very complicated and always requires talking with a few people.

[paper bone]

ah ok, i think most of them occur because the player is also the owner of the mod spawned structures

[cinder spruce]

any updates on the progress of block health functions?

[paper bone]

would be awesome if we could just spawn blueprints like that without a owner, but from the sound of it thats probaply way more complex than i imagine

[warm canopy]

The ability to disable backspace would be wonderful 🙂

[cinder spruce]

actually that would be pretty useful
is there a thread for it yet in suggestions?

[warm canopy]

Since the beginning of time

[formal crane]

Sounds nifty.. @dim wolf ??? 😄

[formal crane]

Working on it ™

[warm canopy]

Think its the only disable function that is missing in terms of gameplay

[dim wolf]

What kind of ideas do you have with that, @warm canopy? 👀

[warm canopy]

Well it could be used as a potential solution for blockhampters structure issue in terms of we could have structures spawned, if backspace cant be pressed then the structure cant be messed with. Sometimes I like to handle the whole respawn/teleport login myself, in the aerobatic aces mod in the start menu screen, if someone presses backspace it becomes a whole issue as it deletes the structure in the custom menu I made.

Also fireworks in the end screen of the aerobatic aces, but if the host presses backspace then no more fireworks

[dim wolf]

Pro move would be to highjack the button completely, @formal crane. That way modders could just say "nah this does new things now"

Maybe it should be a general thing, so that modders potentially could override all button actions in the game. "Only turn left race, right makes you blow up" or minigames where you can only jump... or whatever

[regal bear]

But then... controllers? If you can only override keys but not controller buttons then it's a bit problematic

[warm canopy]

We can't handle controller keybinds currently anyway, think thats a separate issue

[regal bear]

Indeed - wish we could 🙂

But doing stuff with backspace is pointless if it can be overridden on a controller

We need access to the actual events

[near parcel]

disabling respawn rather than overriding the keybind would fix your issue in controller as well though

[warm canopy]

Do you have plans for a wind setting that is more localised. So at a specific radius around a vector3 etc. It could be used for turbulence and winds in specific areas

[dim wolf]

Yeah but I'm talking about the actions, not the buttons. So "jump" or "respawn"

That way you intercept the intent instead of saying "this button does this"

And works with rebinds

[warm canopy]

Sounds good to me

[scenic echo]

a way to tell if someone respawned or backspaced would be good too, right now we check if the player pressed "r" or "backspace" to know.

[warm canopy]

Yeah, itd also solve that detection of repairing (on controllers)

[near parcel]

that's exactly what they are saying, you could run custom code on a callback from that action

[dim wolf]

Yeah that would be the quick solution, something specific to respawning. I just love general stuff.

[near parcel]

also, instead of full replace, it might be better to have a normal callback with an object to control the default functionality (like js does it). That way you can also add functionality without breaking the normal flow, or have multiple callbacks for the same event (which makes sharing libraries easier, as they can register their own callbacks without the library users having know of its existence and adding it manually)

[regal bear]

Yep that's what I was getting at and was hoping that you meant it that way 🙂

[dim wolf]

My thought would be:
You make a specific input subscription. You get the current input state on mod tick and you can choose to "consume" specific actions so they don't pass to the game. If you don't consume them, they will pass undisturbed.
This way you can also just listen without consuming.

[near parcel]

yeah, that's basically how js does it. You get an event object in the callback and you can call e.preventDefault() to consume it

[median cobalt]

wait

"Soundsbanks from Wwise will now be loaded dynamically, adding 226 new sounds from space sector and pioneers."

did you guys have sound bank limits before?

that sounds odd

[warm canopy]

They had to manually add them as available sounds for modding

[median cobalt]

ewwwwww ok thats alot better then

having to manually add them sounds like more work than needed

couldnt they just compile a soundlist

i mean yeah the .wem files are named randomly

but that is only when writing the files if i know wwise correctly

which i will most definetly check should a micropatch happen again

well

now that i know the modding API works as intended ill be able to finally finish the mod that had issues

meaning i can finally add a method to quickly re-paint blocks with certain colors into other colors

just have to wait

[formal crane]

It was just hardcoded which banks were available to modders.

[median cobalt]

oh i see

[ivory agate]

Ngl this seems familiar to other structure spawn problems
(like non-modding ones, at least the teleport thing)

[ionic jacinth]

In the meanwhile you can adapt my wind utility that uses the wind box prefabs for localised multiplayer compatible wind before flashbulb inevitable make a local wind function.

[formal crane]

This one slipped past me.

Not yet! But totally want to. The global one was just pretty straight forward and not so risky.

[median cobalt]

Wind but you can define a Normal based on a function

would be nice

well, theres one way one can do that already but itd involve direct forces and none of the actual aero

[radiant lion]

I mean, you cooould use getDrag... But that's not exactly easy

Especially since you always get the full drag, even if faces are hidden, so drag would be totally off

[warm canopy]

Can't wait for custom model surfaces. That's going to be a serious gamechanger for mod maps

[surreal junco]

New Map, Just in time for Tank Treads!!!!!! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3563372295

[regal bear]

I thought we didn't have a GetDrag function? Would love it if we did. I've only seen SetDrag.

[near parcel]

there is only setdrag, you would have to make an approximate lookup table for each block name atm

[radiant lion]

Looking back at the docs that's right, I misremembered

[regal bear]

Yeah it doesn't make a lot of sense to not have it

[topaz arrow]

Also, what unit is setdrag in?

[formal crane]

No trailer or basic demo video? 👀

[formal crane]

Yes :p

[surreal junco]

Fine, I will put together a video

[surreal junco]

https://youtu.be/4apuUqMQS4I

🙂

[ivory agate]

Ah yes the classic

[ivory agate]

Is mesh instancing a thing? and if it is does it save on performance and memory usage?

[paper bone]

(my SPAWNS_PER_UPDATE is currently set to 100 so it shouldnt even affect these examples in any way)

[radiant lion]

Is it just me or the other message is gone?

[paper bone]

for me both are still there

[radiant lion]

Well, someone stole mine

[paper bone]

oh yeah restarted my discord and its gone

well well well

[radiant lion]

Found the culprit

Anyhow, you said half and index==nil, by any chance are you doing table.remove inside a pairs?

[paper bone]

i am

[radiant lion]

That's your issue

[paper bone]

alright

[radiant lion]

So instead of ipairs just use a normal for starting from the highest index and going down

[surreal junco]

How would I adjust a hinge block to bend in 2 directions and swivel? I need a rod end so I can stop having to use 5 hinges in every linkage, instead of 2

[paper bone]

you cant modify blocks like that

[near parcel]

dyno doesn't like indented code blocks

[surreal junco]

How do I talk the devs into making a Rod End / Universal Joint block? It would make off road suspensions be much simpler, For each 4 link suspension, I need 28 hinges, and I have 2 4 links on a rock crawler

[radiant lion]

Isn't it already a thing?

Tho 2x2x1

[surreal junco]

it is not free moviing

it is too stiff

so it can't be used

[radiant lion]

The one I'm thinking is only free moving

[surreal junco]

you are thinking of the trailer hinge

it is not free moving

[radiant lion]

Really?

[surreal junco]

really

[radiant lion]

Damn

[near parcel]

It literally is

[surreal junco]

Not in all directions though it has resistance

That, and they are kind of big to put 20 of them in a build

[surreal junco]

Holy crap, they are, but becuse of where they pivit, they get stuck in weird places when you use them, I thought they had restricted movement.

mostly I think they are just broken

[near parcel]

they move up/down/left/right with little resistance, they just don't have roll

[surreal junco]

oddly, they do have roll, but you can't put preasure on them because it's hard to center the force.

I figured out how to steady them, so they are usable, they just have some weird behaviors

[scenic echo]

so i made a 3d model in blender but in trailmakers it's mirrored, does anyone know why?
i used tm.physics.SpawnCustomObjectConcave to spawn it

[thorny sparrow]

Is that what I think it is?!

[scenic echo]

maybe

[cinder spruce]

no clue
i just have to make the x scale negative everytime

[scenic echo]

thanks, it worked

[median cobalt]

just noticed this but in pioneers, this mod breaks, showing transform slots as individual structures

i cant filter these

thats gonna make alot of spam

they also are precisely the transform slot theyre in, ordered accordingly

so slot 4 is place 1, and slot 1 is place 4

for some... reason

is this a bandaid patch from when transform slots caused some crashes

[median cobalt]

oh also can i check if a subtle message is no longer on screen somehow

if no, maybe thats something to add for 2.2

[median cobalt]

i actually have no idea if subtle messages have a handler that just returns the element, do subtle messages leave behind a unique indentifier where i can check if theyre still active or something

[paper bone]

They do return an id, but i dont think you can check wether or not the message still is shown

[regal bear]

I don't know of a way to check if they are still active. Would love to have that ability for sure.

[regal bear]

Yeah, as far as I can tell, when a subtle message is removed from the screen (for whatever reason) it can't be directly called back - even if you gave it your own ID.

Unity gives the message a GUID and that remains associated with your own ID unless you re-issue a new message using that same ID. In that case Unity then gives it a new GUID.

So unfortunately the onscreen state of a subtle message can't be detected via it's GUID it seems. Maybe there is something else that can be checked?
||Or we get more subtle message options in 2.2! :)||

[formal crane]

=====> #1123915629653667943 🙂 (otherwise it will be forgotten through time..)

As a solution you can add duration to the subtle messages and then create a tracking table with timestamps for when you created them so you know when they should close down.

[ivory agate]

Check export settings

[formal crane]

Yeah try and goof around with these in the Export OBJ settings

(If someone has time to figure out the correct settings please smash some words into https://trailmakers.wiki.gg/wiki/Modding:Custom_Assets)

[ivory agate]

The correct settings are

no

[formal crane]

crazy

[scenic echo]

i guess this is the only solution

[ivory agate]

Is this or should I add something or remove something

I don't think anyone here is going to use Maya but I wanted to add more examples than just blender, even if it might be the most common program used here

[median cobalt]

what if theyre meant to stay up but trailmakers suddenly just removes messages after 30min

[formal crane]

Well thats your timer then?

[median cobalt]

how do 954600seconds equate to 30 min

is there like an upper limit

[formal crane]

subtle messeges were never intended to be shown more than 5 seconds or whatever. I think there is some float packers that might compress the values in a way that is unexpected, but cant remember right now

But sure i support the idea of guids handling. But please discuss this further in a #1123915629653667943 thread

[median cobalt]

already done

[regal bear]

I don't think it's related to duration timing. I have some messages set to 999999 duration (HUD elements when racing) and some set to 8 or so. They all work fine most of the time. However every now and then the game just randomly removes one or more of them.

It can be at the very moment they slide onto the screen or after several minutes or anything in between. I can't spot a pattern. The game seems to have some process that somehow hooks into a mod's subtle messages - and eats them!

[formal crane]

Might be we have some system that clears them in specific situations that I am unawre of.

The mod subtle messages shares the same ones as the built-in ones.

[regal bear]

Strangely it doesn't always clear all of them. I can have 2 going - both set to 999999 - and one of them will get cleared but not the other! But sometimes it does both. Very weird.

[warm canopy]

Yeah, it is a tad unpredictable at times

[formal crane]

Maybe we should investigate duration=-1 and then these can be specially handled.

[warm canopy]

Any chance of getting some npc enemies as prefabs in the future?

[formal crane]

Would love to someday!

[ivory agate]

Is there a way to load a binary file or does it have to be plaintext

[near parcel]

You can only read text

Moonsharp lua has no way to store binary data. Normal lua uses byte arrays for strings, but moonsharp uses utf-8 encoded strings and not all byte sequences are valid utf-8

[ivory agate]

Aw okay

I guess I could make a preprocessor that takes binary and just dumps it as base64 or something

[ivory agate]

I'm assuming there's still a way to store binary data

Also it's lua 5.2? that's at least the link on the wiki

[formal crane]

Yes, 5.2

[ivory agate]

I'm reading the manual but it isn't exactly friendly lol

I do know the index 1 thing at least

[near parcel]

your only way is to store it a table of 64 bit doubles were each value is manually restricted to be an integer from 0 to 255

[ivory agate]

Yeah but that's fine by me, unless it does become a performance problem for some reason

Though since it's interpreted (right?) I don't have high hopes

[near parcel]

that's just a fairly standard grammar representation (in extended Backus-Naur normal form). It just means that a table constructor has the form of an optional fieldlist surrounded by {}, where a fieldlist is a list of fields separated by either , or ; (allowing a trailing separator). Each field is then either an expression between [] followed by an = and another expression, a name followed by = expression, or an expression

[ivory agate]

Oh I see now, I thought it was different tables for some reason so I got really confused, never seen this notation

[near parcel]

tl;dr: these are all valid table constructors

{}
{ 1, 2, 3, }
{ ident = 1 }
{ var = 2, foo = 3}
{ [1 + var] = 3, foo = 2, 5, bar = "bar" }

[formal crane]

guh
#1368999049188872204 message

[scenic echo]

Awesome, time to rewrite an entire mod

[ivory agate]

I'm gonna try using vscode for once but I can't for the life of me install autocomplete so I'll have to make do without but I think I can make it work

[near parcel]

usually you just need to install the lua extension for basic autocomplete (and my docs for specific tm api autocomplete)

[ivory agate]

I have syntax highlighting at least

Also if there is no console where do log messages end up

Oh nvm it's just not working

[near parcel]

in a log file in the mods directory, called either <name>.log for local mods or <name><id>.log for workshop mods

[ivory agate]

Weird that the selection would be considered a nil value, I guess I screwed something else up that's causing it to report completely different lines of code

Oh it was variable naming that was causing that, I guess it doesn't have a way to easily convey that

[ivory agate]

Are there bitwise operators

As in do we have the library or no

Yes

[ivory agate]

Nevermind I accidentally used zero and it didn't error so I got confused 😔

[near parcel]

there is bit32, but only works on integers

[ivory agate]

yeah I found that

[ivory agate]

Nice :3

Got a basic base64 decoder working, and some basic syntax down at least

[ivory agate]

Interesting, loops don't break when you disable the mod

Huh

Oh

It doesn't error and it doesn't continue the loop, weird

What happens if you do happen to have strings with arbitrary data by accident?

[ivory agate]

if it's gonna take two minutes lol

Also it's so quiet here :3

[paper bone]

https://tenor.com/view/tumbleweed-highway-blue-sky-gif-14068616

[ivory agate]

Apparently appending stuff to really large tables is slow

[ivory agate]

Oh wow insert is slow

This is just indexing directly, 200ms vs 2 minutes

I guess it doesn't cache the length so it had to calculate it over and over again

[near parcel]

Tables are hashmaps under the hood, counting the amount of elements is slow, and if you have a lot of elements adding another might require reallocating and copying the data

[ivory agate]

Equivalent to the native 'dofile' function in Lua.
Is it?

Okay I got something working for now at least

[formal crane]

It literally just invokes it. There is a bunch of security checks but thats about it

[near parcel]

yes. It just runs the file and returns whatever the file returns

[ivory agate]

There's no way to like store a continuous blob of memory right? so if I want to get arbitrary length data, I'm gonna have to loop over with a bit index
As in
{0b00011100, 0b01110001, 0b11000111}
into 3-bit ints

(endian is wrong but that's just an example)

I have a feeling that doing this hundreds of thousands of times is slow

[near parcel]

in default lua yes, but not in moonsharp

[near parcel]

that doesn't make any sense

[ivory agate]

I guess I could just increment the current bit and if it's larger than 8 just subtract and add to the byte instead

[ivory agate]

Like this (I know I said 8 but just assume my brain is a table )

[near parcel]

that still doesn't make sense

[ivory agate]

as in when accessing that table by
bit32.band(data[byte], 2^bit)

[near parcel]

tables are indexed with integers. If you are trying to split a blob of memory into table elements, you just need to do table[byte_idx]

[scenic echo]

what are you trying to make?

[ivory agate]

Yes? I'm just treating the indexes as the bytes, I guess I could put 32 bit values too but I'll do that later if it's way too slow

Oh I see what you mean, I never got nil for some reason

[ivory agate]

zlib

Or at least part of it

[ivory agate]

I switched to the latter one so I won't be using division anymore

It just happened to be divisible by 8

[near parcel]

table[#table] will always be nil in lua, #table returns the first nil integer index

[ivory agate]

I'm not sure how that's related

[near parcel]

if you are iterating through the table, you will always reach a nil index

[ivory agate]

All the good features seem to be in lua 5.3 😔
Okay no maybe not all of them but still

[narrow acorn]

can someone help me with my first mod

[regal bear]

Sure. What sort of help do you need?

[paper bone]

elaborate

[ivory agate]

I wish there was a way to sanity check my work though

It's weird because I've manually parsed the file and the first two symbols are 12 and 25

The uncompressed data is literally just 00s so I would expect some literals
12 is perfectly normal but I have no idea why 25 is there
Unless it's like flipped incrementing

[dense trellis]

does anyone know if reshade works on trailmakers?

[ivory agate]

That's dll modding

[fallow fox]

it does

[dense trellis]

thank you

[narrow acorn]

sorry for the late response but i can go now

[scenic echo]

You can look at the wiki for information about modding https://trailmakers.wiki.gg/wiki/Modding

[narrow acorn]

ye saw it later thx

[ivory agate]

Will we be ever able to specify our own LODs, I really like details so I'm not sure if I will like the result that the auto generated levels will be

[formal crane]

It makes sense but not something we would prioritise at the moment.

[ivory agate]

at the

Okay no but got it, hopefully we will at least get transparency soon

I'm assuming since this game is forward rendered we could have semi-transparent objects?
At least that's how I think it would work

But also they would have a different draw order? transparency isn't too simple

[formal crane]

I am butchering terminologies here, but the current internal proposal is to have shader variants where one does cheap alpha testing/cutout and one has alpbha blending.

But not promise here, it was just our "best" case proposal and not something I think will land any time soon.

[ivory agate]

(if you have an opaque object behind a half transparent object you need to render the object behind first so you can write the transparency, but normally you'd do the reverse for speed)

[ivory agate]

Okay yeah I see

[ivory agate]

the cutout would just be a fragment shader discard? I think, not sure how unity does it

I'm mostly thinking about aliasing, not sure how "obvious" it is, I guess higher resolution would fix it but at the same time that also comes at a cost of course

[formal crane]

Not much you can do about that other than resolution 🙂
But I mean works in the right context, eg. foliage, in-world UI, etc.

[ivory agate]

4k leaf texture

[formal crane]

this is why modding will never come to consoles

[ivory agate]

lmaoooo

-# I think I do actually have something close to it, a 4k "abstract" feather texture I think
I could make hyperrealstic melvin

[formal crane]

the furry community is not ready

[ivory agate]

The funny thing is, if I were to make realistic Melvin, I would basically use all the stuff I normally use for my furry art, since I specifically made some geometry nodes for placing haircards/feathers on a body

[ivory agate]

I need to rethink this

it's horrible

I also need an actual decoding tree, the current one I use is for an encoder, not sure why I chose that

[narrow acorn]

probably stupid qeustion but how do i get the player id in multi player

[paper bone]

Basically this: #1140936220487192587 message

[ivory agate]

I'm assuming it's faster to do multiple passes over a table to prevent a ton of function calls

Like do one pass for converting the bitstream into codes, then another for the back references

I'm thinking if I need to do error checking, not sure

I guess it would be useful for stuff that is unpredictable

[ivory agate]

A lot more nested than i'd like but it's better

Still need to add full ll and dist logic

[ivory agate]

What in the world, not sure how the lookback length is 23 just a few bytes in and it's so painful to manually decompress the file

[ivory agate]

Ooooh this is 25, so it can just reference it's own data apparently, interesting

Yeah

[ivory agate]

Mostly just me here, but you know what, I don't mind :3

Also yeah it's working 🎉
Now I just need to do the decompression

And then we're halfway there

I still have no idea how to grow the dynamic trees but I will think about that when I get there

[narrow acorn]

What are u working one

[ivory agate]

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1951
Currently it's deflate compression

[narrow acorn]

Got no idea what that means

[ivory agate]

Well when I say compression I mean decompression only and non-compliant because I just need to work, at least this time
Maybe when I actually understand how it works fully I can make it compliant

[serene magnet]

Do you want bootleg melvin for that?

[regal bear]

It's cool - I'm learning stuff 🙂

[elfin yarrow]

where can i find this folder? it's certainly not in the same documents folder as the trailmakers blueprints

[fallow fox]

Iirc you need to make that folder your self in documents

[elfin yarrow]

i'll give that a shot

[formal crane]

Yeah it doesnt matter where it is. In vscode you change the setting to point at the folder so it doesnt matter where it is

[elfin yarrow]

alright then

am i missing something?

[formal crane]

Just click "Open user settings"

And then you can switch to the Workspace tab

[elfin yarrow]

guh

[near parcel]

usually there is an option to open that directly, but i guess it doesn't show up if you don't have a workspace (i.e. folder) open

[elfin yarrow]

yey

[ivory agate]

No I want to make my own, I think it would be fun to try and make it like one of those realistic angry birds

I'm not sure how the eyes would work though, since they're pretty dependant on refraction

[ivory agate]

I do hope lua is sufficiently fast enough for the things I want to do, but I have high hopes because I switched everything to local and got a 10x speed boost :3

It's just that deflate isn't optimized for speed but ratio instead

[elfin yarrow]

damn, what you cooking up?

[ivory agate]

That's a secret as a surprise, alvaro might know but I'm not 100% sure

[narrow acorn]

can someone vc for help?

[ivory agate]

I wonder, does lua have support for variables with emojis

Okay no lol

[serene magnet]

Mmmm. Big things are coming soon

[ivory agate]

How much, if any of this applies to moonsharp? I know about the local thing of course, but I'm unsure of the others
https://www.lua.org/gems/sample.pdf

[ivory agate]

Getting started

I'm gonna try to make it readable this time, I learnt my lesson on trying to make everything fast with the fixed block type

[ivory agate]

I just realized something is wrong too

It should be 7

Nevermind?

Oh 255 is not

Classic naïve search mindset 😔

[narrow acorn]

could some one help me

[formal crane]

write your problem here so we can all help you. loads of people already said they wanna help you 😄

[paper bone]

https://dontasktoask.com/

[narrow acorn]

thanks both im working on a mod that enables some sort of capture the point i have the position of the players and the points but idk how to look if a player is on the point i dont think i should just spam if statements but idk how i should do it

[formal crane]

Quick high-level explanation, I can give details later maybe.

• Have a list of capture points that is the positions
• During every update, go through all player positions with for-loop checking whether their position is within distance of the capture points. From there you can determine if they "capture" it. tm.vector3 should have distance function to compare two vectors. Player position you can get using tm.players.GetPlayerTransform(playerId).GetPositionWorld()

[narrow acorn]

whats the difrence between getpositonworld and getpositon

[formal crane]

None. Get Position was just the old one that has now been deprecated in favour of the more explicit GetPositionWorld

[narrow acorn]

which one should i use

[formal crane]

GetPositionWorld

[narrow acorn]

tm.vector3.Angle(vector, otherVector)
so i would use this

[near parcel]

.GetPosition() isn't documented as deprecated. Should it?

[near parcel]

no, tm.vector3.Distance(a, b) (in practice, you can just do a.distance(b))

[formal crane]

I am just freehanding based on what I remember heh.
I think we should do that to reduce confusion.

But then again, we dont have any policy regarding actually removing APIs yet, so not strictly important.

[narrow acorn]

ah ye i understand the vector distance now

[paper bone]

Why not use triggerboxes?

Seems like a much more performant way

[narrow acorn]

what are that

[formal crane]

spheres are better than boxes

[narrow acorn]

ye was planning on boxes but this is bett

better

[paper bone]

Doing a bunch of distance calculations every frame is worse than having tp deal with boxes imo

[formal crane]

The calculations still has to be done but just on Unity's side :p Plus the box calculations are more expensive.. But I think they might be quicker in Unity.

[paper bone]

Which should be more efficient

[formal crane]

maybe

[near parcel]

depends on how it's implemented under the hood (although c# is likely faster, and if it's done internally in unity it's likely to be in c/c++ and even more efficient)

[formal crane]

But anyway, in my head it was just a whole overhead of spawning a PioNet spawnable object which I felt was a little overkill.
Of course both solutions are totally durable.

[paper bone]

Fair

[narrow acorn]

cant find how to update the vectors

prob very simple

[paper bone]

Maybe share a code snippet, because im not quite sure what you're strugling with

[narrow acorn]

pointA= {834.7769, 345.2936, 1110.791}
pointB= {1947.75, 231.8369, 2247.872}
pointC= {1349.093, 204.0641, 581.9082}

function getpos (playerid)
local pos = tm.players.GetPlayerTransform(0).GetPosition()
tm.playerUI.AddSubtleMessageForPlayer(0, "location", tostring(pos), 5, "Icon")
tm.os.Log(tostring(pos))
return pos

end
--tm.input.RegisterFunctionToKeyDownCallback(0, "getpos", "p")

tm.vector3.Angle()

this is all i have now

the top should be vectors i think

[paper bone]

If you want to check the position every frame you need to define a update function:

function update()
-- code that executes every frame
end

[narrow acorn]

k

[paper bone]

In that function you could loop over your playerlist that you can get with tm.players.CurrentPlayers() iirc

[narrow acorn]

does this output the player ids or number of players

[narrow acorn]

and that would be a for loop?

[paper bone]

Yeah a for loop

[paper bone]

Its a table of player objects

[ivory agate]

In what order?

[narrow acorn]

what are for ipairs and pairs

[paper bone]

Each player has a id that you can acces by player.playerId

[narrow acorn]

ik

[paper bone]

ipairs is for iterating a table with normal number Indices

If you have a table like {"test"=2, "test2" =3}
You would need pairs

Because it has strings as indices

[paper bone]

No idea, test it out.
I dont think anyone has documented it yet or even tested it lol

[ivory agate]

Oh

[narrow acorn]

i think index is a table or smth and the value the value of the table

[paper bone]

Index is the position the element is at inside the table,
And value is the value this element has

[narrow acorn]

ah makes sence

[paper bone]

In this case your indexes would be "test" for the first element and "test2" for the second

But in any other table that doesnt have this notation with the = inside the table you normally have numbers for the indexes

Starting from 1 in lua

[narrow acorn]

whait ipairs or pairs

[paper bone]

Use ipairs to itterate over the table of player objects

You can imagine the playertable to have this structure: {player1, player2, ..}
This table can be itterated over with numbers

[narrow acorn]

what would the player table contain

[ivory agate]

I've always used normal for loops for now, but I'd imagine I'd have to use the pairs or whatever for the players

[near parcel]

undefined, order should never be relevant (because structures are graphs, and nodes in a graph don't have an order operation defined). Only relevant thing is that it's an array, so blocks are in indices [1, amount_blocks]

[paper bone]

The player Objects like i said

[near parcel]

it's defined in the docs

[ivory agate]

(docs being here)

[paper bone]

No the players are just returned in a normal table and have number indexes (what else would they be indexed by)

[near parcel]

ipairs, which is for arrays

[narrow acorn]

im sry its a lot to remeber

ye staring at it

--- Get the GameObject of a player
--- @param playerId number
--- @return ModGameObject
function tm.players.GetPlayerGameObject(playerId) end

this?

[formal crane]

look for tm.players.CurrentPlayers instead

[paper bone]

No, the table you get returned from the function:
tm.players.CurrentPlayers()
Is a list of all player Objects

[narrow acorn]

what is a player object

[ivory agate]

I mean you would have some kind of order, unless it literally just calls a randomizer function
Though I guess that order isn't as simple since it's not like the structure is a tree or something

[ivory agate]

I see

[paper bone]

Its a reference to the physical object in the world and also saves the playerId which you need to call your function

You can acces the playerId of your player object like this:

for i, player in ipairs(tm.players.CurrentPlayers()) do
local playerId = player.playerId

[narrow acorn]

but wouldnt this overight itself with the next player

[paper bone]

Sorry forgot an i

[paper bone]

Yes you need to do something with the playerid in that loop if you save it like this

[narrow acorn]

ah

[paper bone]

You could for example call your other function there

[paper bone]

(Also forgot the ipairs (silly me))

[near parcel]

currentplayers only returns a table with the player id, it doesn't actually have a reference to the physical object

[narrow acorn]

this?

[near parcel]

for _, player in ipairs(tm.players.CurrentPlayers()) do
    local pos = tm.players.GetPlayerTransform(player).GetPosition()
    ...
end

[narrow acorn]

oh ye that was for testing

[ivory agate]

Also, I'm assuming variables need to be declared before being used, even in the top scope
-# I guess after is a bad habit from JS

[near parcel]

you can just do local var_name = init_value. Omitting the init value just uses nil

[paper bone]

Oh interesting i guess i misrememberd

[ivory agate]

No I meant as in

function func(a)
    return a + const 
end
local const = 12```
in the end, I did put the declarations at the top and that works, so

[near parcel]

const there is undefined within the function, because it's undefined at the time the closure is created and it's not in the fallback global environment. The scope of a local variable starts where it is declared

[narrow acorn]

and how do i get my cursor normall again

[ivory agate]

Insert key

It toggles between replace and insert

[narrow acorn]

tysm

its so anoing

can you explain vector3 better dont really understand it yet

thanks for all the help btw

[cinder spruce]

its kind of like a coordinate.
its a data type that stores an x, y, and z components. its mainly used to represent positions and directions. you can create one using
tm.vector3.create(x, y, z)
or you can get it elsewhere like from getting the players position

[narrow acorn]

how do you have mutible

[formal crane]

-- I created one now
local pos_center = tm.vector3.create(0, 0, 0)
-- Now I create a second one
local pos_another = tm.vector3.create(1, 2, 3)

-- pos_center is x=0, y=0, z=0
-- pos_another is x=1, y=2, z=3

-- lets try print them, check the log for the result
tm.os.Log("Here is pos_center informatio")
tm.os.Log("My x is:" .. pos_center.x)  -- this prints the x of pos_center
tm.os.Log("My y is:" .. pos_center.y)  -- this prints the y of pos_center
tm.os.Log("My z is:" .. pos_center.z)  -- this prints the z of pos_center

-- etc

[narrow acorn]

ah ye makes sence

[warm canopy]

Trigger box is more efficient

[median cobalt]

question

are audio files able to be pitched discretely

and can i use doubles for their input

and crucially, are the soundmakers' files exposed to the audiolist

[ivory agate]

Is there a way to detect if someone does something in the editor, I don't see an obvious function in the docs

I guess I could just assume they've done something if they're selected a block, but that only applies to single selections

[warm canopy]

Like what

[ivory agate]

Edit a block or something

Or spawn another creation etc

[scenic echo]

I think we only have the get selected block function, but you can tell if a structure is in build mode if the rotation is perfectly level

[radiant lion]

we do have a getStructuresInBuild (or similar) you can check for number of blocks there to see if new where added, if more than one at the same time it's a new creation/copy
You cannot check if you edit the setting of a block
You cannot check anything with decals
You cannot differentiate moving a block and selecting another identical one
The rest should be doable

Oh, 6 years, I guess

[cinder spruce]

dang already?
crazy

[ivory agate]

I see

[ivory agate]

Guh, every implementation does something different

[regal bear]

Personally I have no idea what any of these questions mean 😛
I hope someone else here can help you

[radiant lion]

Wait, what are you trying to do?

[ivory agate]

Inflate (Deflate decompressor)

I think it will be the hardest part, everything else should be like a breather in comparison, but block type 2 is going to be a nightmare

[narrow acorn]

why does this output hex garbage

players= tm.players.CurrentPlayers()
tm.os.Log(tostring(players))

[near parcel]

Because tables don't have a tostring implementation, so you just get the address the pointer points to

[ivory agate]

When spawning custom models, is there a way to directly modify the transform matrix, or modify the depth it is rendered at?

Thinking for UI

[near parcel]

No

You can only spawn a camera at the correct location

[ivory agate]

What does that mean

[radiant lion]

Probably that you can spawn a camera for the player, and if you spawn it in the right position relative to the object you get the effect you want, problem is you can't apply this to the existing camera

[ivory agate]

I guess I'll just have to use CPU to move the geometry then
At least for 2d elements, gizmos might be harder

[ivory agate]

Guh, literally magic

Maybe I'm just missing something obvious

[ivory agate]

I understand what it's doing but I have no idea how

[ivory agate]

It's generating sometihng, I'm gonna have to check if it's correct but I'm at least a bit happy that something works at least

[scenic echo]

🔥 , i wish i knew what it was

[median cobalt]

we really need access to all the ui elements it would be amazing

[ivory agate]

the react

Don't worry frans it's only like 45k triangles so it should be fine

No fun 😔

[paper bone]

I now have an idea for a mod

Angry birds but its fat chirpos

[scenic echo]

High res melvin is too powerful

[regal bear]

"Salty Chirpos"

[ivory agate]

What would be the pigs then? mildly sinful froggits?

[paper bone]

Hell yeah

[ivory agate]

The modding UI isn't showing up but everything else is working?

Oh nvm it was just ctrl u that freaked out for some reason

[ivory agate]

not even the gz dumper I found works

[ivory agate]

Ngl this sounds like a snack

[ivory agate]

Do functions mutate tables

They do

[radiant lion]

Yeah, tables are passed by reference, not copies

[ivory agate]

Even if I do this?
Wait is it local

Yeah it is, what

[radiant lion]

Yes, even that will still reference the same table

You have to manually make a copy with pairs/ipairs

[near parcel]

because tables are just pointers to data, and recursively cloning them is expensive. Pretty much all languages do the same with arrays/objects/tables/dictionaries

[radiant lion]

so long as you don't have nested tables (you seem to be using them just as arrays, so that's fine) this should work

  local t2 = {}
  for k,v in pairs(t) do
    t2[k] = v
  end
  return t2
end```

[ivory agate]

I don't need it to not be permuted because I know the state and I kind of have the counterpart, but thanks

I'm not even sure it's worth the brain energy to do all this instead of brute force searching most of the values in the table (I mean max length will be 288)

I was just confused over why it happened

I'm trying to find if there's like issues with having a large table but all I can find is that having lots of small ones is wasteful

Like I could just create a 128 length table in this case, but later on I will have to deal with 2^15 so 32k, it's wasteful, but it should be fast if lua doesn't have like overhead for reading large tables for some reason

[ivory agate]

I mean at most 1% of the 32k table will be used but if it's float64 (which I don't know) then that's only like 130K

[ivory agate]

you seem to be using them just as arrays
Yeah I don't really use much else I think

I was comfortable with the options that uInt8Array etc gave me because I didn't have to worry about the weirdness that tends to be implemented with general purpose arrays

I do feel like I need a break because it feels like i've been making minimal progress in the last days

[formal crane]

You have been so busy with your project! I see you here almost all-day everyday!

[ivory agate]

I dont feel busy though it's more like exhausted

[ivory agate]

cf. this, it's like two things i've gotten to

And if I get just one bit (could be literally) wrong I would have no idea where to even begin debugging but that's a problem for future me if it happens

So far ironically the only thing that's really been helping is checking my work with gpt, usually it would suck but apparently it's pretty okay at partially decoding something as it can just write its own program. I was a bit surprised but yeah

I do have like a 2 hour lecture thing I've also been using but it covers gz not zlib, so there's some extra stuff there, but yeah. It's not like "hard" in the sense of I logically can't see this, it's just hard because you have to remeber so much stuff and keep track of it

For now it's just some meaningless numbers but I hope to make even more meaningless numbers so I can make some more meaningful ones

[near parcel]

@formal crane in practice there is no reason to add that because of a couple reasons:

• Lua has closures, so you can just create functions dynamically at the language level without having to evaluate strings. This achieves the same goal of dynamic code generation, but it's faster, less error-prone, and the editor can help you catch errors (since you are working with actual code rather than strings)
• moonsharp already has dynamic.prepare()/dynamic.eval() to achieve the same thing

@ivory agate for your usage of self-modifying code, you can override/shadow function names (simply assign another function to the same variable/global name), although in practice using closures is all you need

[paper bone]

i wonder if we get access to all the space sounds like the voice lines and the elevator sounds, that would be awesome

[formal crane]

Next update will have ~200 new sounds available from Airborne and Space Sector.

[formal crane]

Dont know what sounds though :p

[ivory agate]

I just coulnd't help it 😔

Also these variables are definitely something with the length_code_length and MAX_LENGTH_LENGTH

[ivory agate]

How would I make gizmos though? or is the answer you don't?

I swear I saw some earlier

[near parcel]

spawn a 3d object at the correct location and use mouse raycasts to detect where the user clicks

[ivory agate]

No like the rendering side

Because if I just move them closer to the camera then the perspective is gonna be off

[radiant lion]

If you scale one axis down and flatten it the prospective should look fine, but I'm not sure how good it will look with shadows

[ivory agate]

How would I do that? I don't think I can scale it on an arbitrary axis

But at that point it would be isometric so

[near parcel]

Iirc you can scale objects on each axis independently, and any other direction should be a combination of those

[ivory agate]

No? Because if I do it will just reduce the dimension I'm trying to flatten it on

Basically making it a line with two and just one point with three

[radiant lion]

If you don't set it to 0, but a low enough number it should still not be isometric, once you set it to 0 it will be so, as well as being pretty much the same as if infinitely distant.
You can scale separately the 3 major axis, but this means not every scaling can be made (you can't flatten it on axis that are not the main ones)

[ivory agate]

I'm not sure I understand anymore

What I thought I had to do was scale in the axis projected from the camera that forms the planes, therefore flattening it

[radiant lion]

Yes, BUT, since you can't arbitrarily scale any axis, only the 3 main one, you have to march the axis projected from the camera to one of those

[ivory agate]

But would't that look very wrong?

Okay so I really don't understand

Like, if I just scaled in the x y or z axis it would be wrong right?

[radiant lion]

ah, my fault, i forgot to say this but the axis are relative to the object (when it comes to tm scaling)

so as long as the object is rotated correctly you can scale it properly

[ivory agate]

Okay so it's local, but if I want to rotate it then flatten it?

[radiant lion]

then you can't, assuming i got correctly what you mean

[ivory agate]

Say this, like these two

[radiant lion]

it will only look in 6 directions+ any rotation on the remaining axis

[ivory agate]

I see

[radiant lion]

yeah, this can't be done, not with a "normal" cone 3d model, you'd have to rotate it before exporting it to obj, but this will mean being stuck to that rotation, which i'm guessing is not what you want

[ivory agate]

Yeah no

So I have to make like 10k+ variations of the same model to get decent angular resolution

[radiant lion]

Yeah...

Can't wait for when we'll be able to make objects dynamically directly in-game

[ivory agate]

Now let's run this through the standard algorithm and see if I get sad

[scenic echo]

did you get sad?

[ivory agate]

No it worked

Hopefully fully though

I have no idea until something breaks

[ivory agate]

Once I'm done with all this then I'll finally be 25% done, but that's after exams, have to do them for now

[regal bear]

Good luck with your exams

[elfin yarrow]

curious, is it possible to use SpawnStructure to spawn something like a custom bullet at a certain (adjustable?) location on a moving build?

[near parcel]

You can only spawn blueprints

[elfin yarrow]

yes, the custom bullet is a blueprint

like a dynamite stick or something

[scenic echo]

Should be possible

[elfin yarrow]

nice

[paper bone]

Spawning blueprints always need to be owned by some player which makes them really annoying to work with and can cause a magnitude of issues

[elfin yarrow]

what about just setting the blueprint owner to the one who spawns them?

[radiant lion]

Would be the best option, yes

Just not sure how doable it is on a moving build, iirc spawning stuff takes a little and for that time it can't move, after that you can apply the force you want

You'd need to test it

[ivory agate]

Wait there's no way to do something every physics or graphics frame?

Okay so it does take 200ms to do the lookuptable construction

I'm sure that's fine

Also there's no debugger right? only print statments

[paper bone]

yup

[near parcel]

you can run update() at 60hz

[ivory agate]

What is "faster than the game"? >60Hz?

[ivory agate]

It's not in the docs? or is it official or something?

[paper bone]

yup

[near parcel]

physics run at 60hz, you can't go faster than that

[ivory agate]

Can't you do other things faster than 60hz?

[near parcel]

no

[ivory agate]

Also finally

[ivory agate]

oh okay

Also damn vs code is slow

I mean it's an electron app so I guess it's kind of expected

Especially for 8KB of text

[ivory agate]

Now let's try it with real world data and watch it break 😔

Yup, and it's also in the canonical algorithm which I barely understand

Okay apparently I just set some lengths wrong, let's just hope it wasn't for a specific reason
I'm not exactly sure why I set this to 5, I guess I should just name every constant

[ivory agate]

[ivory agate]

I forgot

0 is truthy in lua

[elfin yarrow]

what does this mean

[ivory agate]

almost 10% of my code is logging

[elfin yarrow]

damn

[ivory agate]

That's not supposed to happen

Nevermind

It actually is like that for some reason

I swear this thing is full of off by ones

All made by me

[mellow fern]

i have no idea what ur even saying, is it maybe binary or smth?

[ivory agate]

Yeah I'm trying to do decompression

[mellow fern]

ok

[ivory agate]

Okay finally, I think no compression is working flawlessly

Lmao

[elfin yarrow]

zero coding knowledge but that's hillarious

[ivory agate]

Also got the actual compression working

Total runtime for now is about 8 seconds, one of which is spent on a crappy base64 parser

[ivory agate]

Do we have math? I assume

[near parcel]

yes

[paper bone]

my mod has been updated, go check it out #1357312069824938114 message :P

[ivory agate]

How do I use callbacks

I just get
function is not a function and has no __call metamethod.

[ivory agate]

Oh so I can't just put a function, I need to make a function that calls a function

I see

[paper bone]

i think you can also just put the name of a function, but i find it to be easier like this

its a little easier to keep track of your parameters this way

[ivory agate]

Oh right the parenthesis executes it

Right

Do structures actually contain data or are they just objects with methods?

Yeah I'm confused

[ivory agate]

Hm

No way to get the id?

[scenic echo]

Of what with what?

[ivory agate]

The id of the structure

I have a structure but I know nothing about it

[scenic echo]

What do you need to know about it?

[ivory agate]

The id

So I can get its blocks

[scenic echo]

i don't think it has an id like player id but you can get all structures owned by a player, tm.players.GetPlayerStructures(playerId) (this gives a table with the structures) and then use ModStructure.GetBlocks()

[ivory agate]

So this is for mod spawned builds only?

[scenic echo]

i think so

[cinder spruce]

yes

structures spawned by players don't have a structure id

[ivory agate]

I see, I will just have my code be intended to run in the builder and always assume one build, seems the easiest

[scenic echo]

there is also this tm.players.GetPlayerStructuresInBuild(playerId) i haven't used it before

[ivory agate]

Yeah that's the one I will use

Since I have no idea how to get the "focused build"

Or the one that the player is currently in

[cinder spruce]

i mean you can just choose the one with the most blocks

[ivory agate]

No

[cinder spruce]

i mean theres no great way to know which structure the player is actually working on

[ivory agate]

Yeah just doing this to explore what I can do

[scenic echo]

one work around that i just thought about is using tm.players.GetPlayerSeatBlock(playerId) to get the seat block and then getting the position of that and then comparing it with the position of other structures to know in which one you are seated

[ivory agate]

I guess that could work

It's also much more sane than what I had in mind for the structure ID if there wasn't a getblocks 💀

[scenic echo]

nvm there is ModBlock.GetStructure()

[ivory agate]

Yeah but you can't check if it's the one you're in

[cinder spruce]

ah this isn't in builder specific
this message confused me for a sec

[scenic echo]

so just do tm.players.GetPlayerSeatBlock(playerId).GetStructure()

[cinder spruce]

thats what this is for

[ivory agate]

Oh right

That's definitely a deer

Y up

Also what are like the coordinates? like sometimes I get the origin when I try build.GetPosition() and sometimes it's some arbitrary position that doesn't really represent anything

I might need to experiment my way to finding out what defines the rotation axis

[near parcel]

iirc it's local to their weld group

[ivory agate]

I'm pretty sure I don't even have the correct global coordinates for the structure either

Yeah

It's just relative to the builder origin

[ivory agate]

I don't see how that makes sense

[near parcel]

because it's likely what the game uses internally and the API just grabbed that

[ivory agate]

I didn't mean each of the parts, I meant the entire structure

No way to get any information about the builder right?

[ivory agate]

Seems to be spawned seat first, (0.0, y, 0.0)

Though that could just be a lucky coincidence

[ivory agate]

Order is relevant though

You're always spawned in one specific seat

[median cobalt]

Do we already have a slipstream drag compiler for racing

i dont see one just yet

[regal bear]

Do you mean in the API? as a mod? externally?

I fake slipstreaming in my mod with trigger boxes and forces

[median cobalt]

you ought to try saving drag levels of the structure and decreasing them instead of adding forces, it might be more dynamic and doesnt do odd forces when the car isnt facing the same direction

might be more stable in 2.2 but im fairely sure its not that broken rn

[regal bear]

That was my initial idea but as we don't have a getDrag function I couldn't figure out a way to do it that way

[median cobalt]

o

then that might work for 2.2

[radiant lion]

That is assuming setDrag also stops behaving weirdly

[ivory agate]

uau it's been silent while i've been on the start of my 2 week minecraft obsession

[serene magnet]

does anyone know what the max size for a Preview.png is? i keep getting upload failures with my current and its 1000x1000 and 1113 KB

[cinder spruce]

i believe it to be 1 mb
so yeah you are over

[serene magnet]

dang

LESGO

[paper bone]

Ayyy nice you uploaded ironwood

[serene magnet]

yep. with a final total of 312 custom models

now to work on the next map, with even more

[scenic echo]

We are now shiny

[cinder spruce]

woah

[paper bone]

Damn

[serene magnet]

woah

[paper bone]

https://tenor.com/view/american-dad-stan-smith-trans-transmasc-picmix-gif-8795936351083452569

Us now:

[regal bear]

Oh yeah shiny - cool

[serene magnet]

Hell yeah

It's nice seeing modders get some fun colors like wikimakers

[paper bone]

how likely is it that sometime in the future we will be able to set snow settings on objects?

@shell ore you mispelled your map in your thumbnail xD
happend to me once too

[near parcel]

keywords: it's not done yet, and we are prioritision other stuff
let's wait until the base implementation is done before wasting time discussing the future

[paper bone]

alright fair enough

[shell ore]

😭 I’ll change it soon maybe lol

[elfin yarrow]

airfeild

[feral cradle]

i have comp mod but the game seems to just give up and crash at 2100 comp, any ideas as to why this is?

[fallow fox]

because your 3 times over the limit set by the decs, also 2048 blocks just crashes your game

[elfin yarrow]

game instacrash at 2048 blocks, mechanical blocks count as two

[feral cradle]

any way to get around it?

[fallow fox]

multipart

[feral cradle]

any other way?

[fallow fox]

use less parts

[feral cradle]

there aint some magic mod for it?

[fallow fox]

no

[feral cradle]

aw

[elfin yarrow]

no

[formal crane]

There are no "snow settings" on objects. There is only show on terrain AFAIK.
We teased the idea, but nothing planned or solidified yet.

[ivory agate]

https://youtu.be/Ge3aKEmZcqY?t=5698
Idk but this video reminded me of the wheel raycast system, I guess it has to use the built in ones though if it wants to hit everything at every angle

[cinder spruce]

much smoothness
@radiant lion

[scenic echo]

I know you can remove custom objects spawned by your mod

[median cobalt]

Do you recon trailmakers will like this much road as a custom object

ill most likely have it be decorated using trailmappers objects and hopefully some buildings from airborne or such if i can get that to work

currently sitting at sub 8k tris but it might turn into about 15k when im done

[scenic echo]

I have like 7km of road and terrain on my spa Francorchamps map so i think it will be fine

[formal crane]

Quick little update for changes to 2.1.2 sound list!

226 new sounds added

Here is a full list of them 🙂
#1423565172018118768 message

They are very untested - it is pretty much one of the lowest of priorities due to resources available.

[serene magnet]

I split my roads into smaller objects and set them all to have origin 0,0,0. It preserves the offset in TM and makes them easier to place/load in game

[paper bone]

-# I should really rework my road creation tool so that it is actually usable and can create intersections etc.

-# another thing that i will always keep on saying, but never actually do

[median cobalt]

neat

[ivory agate]

Instantiation at this rate when 😔

Okay no but 15k does seem like a lot, at least for me

You can't modify the audio right?

Like skip parts, pitch or anything like that

[regal bear]

Correct. Can't even modify volume.

[median cobalt]

When i get to simplifying, alot of the straight roads will be de-subdivided for sure

itll probly trim that down to 4k

[ivory agate]

Hm, is there a sound limit like minecraft?

That way you could just spawn that many sounds each time to clip the previous

[formal crane]

audio modding is like the lowest of lowest priority at the moment 💔

[ivory agate]

How do I even do something every frame?

Everything I can think of just means stalling the cpu with work or checking if something has changed in a loop (which would probably stall it either way)

[ivory agate]

The answer is no

It's funny that it says timed out because it was basically instant
System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> ABBBBABAAABAAAABABBAAAABABBBBBABAABAABABABBBBAB: RepFuncQueue overflow

[radiant lion]

Use the update function, you can then do setModTargetDeltaTime(1/60) so it happens every frame

[ivory agate]

I guess it isn't in the docs for some reason

Also I*m not sure if it's my game but it feels like half the sounds that are avaliable do nothing

[near parcel]

It is

[radiant lion]

i am pretty sure with 2.1.2 they added all sounds dynamically, aka you have access to EVERY sound of the game, which likely also means some useless/quiet ones

[ivory agate]

I'm gonna try all of them at once to check what it sounds like

Disappointment

What why is this even happening, i'm just trying to access an array from outside the update function
System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

[near parcel]

you are trying to use an object that has been despawned

[ivory agate]

I did figure it out it wasn't defined in the first place

[ivory agate]

Also yeah all of the Amb sounds seem to do nothing

Or maybe they're just a lot quieter

What does this mean? it doesn't mean time at least

[near parcel]

should be duration of the audio

[ivory agate]

but you can not stop or move the sound

Afaik it plays until it runs out, at least I tried with 1000, 1 and 0.1 but no difference

[upper niche]

Yo guys
would it even be physically possible to make a TM mod that could allow inputs from a VR Headset?
like binding things to controller rotation or making aiming servos point towards the angle of your controller/headset (Second one would probably be way better because you don't need to finetune the speed and stuff)

Yes this is because I want to become a giant robot

[radiant lion]

Nope, we can't even check controller inputs with mods

[upper niche]

damn that's sad
can I know why?
just curious

[narrow acorn]

speed = 0
for _, player in ipairs(tm.players.CurrentPlayers()) do
local playerId = player.playerId
tm.playerUI.AddUILabel(playerId, "speed", tostring(speed))

end
function update()
speed = ModStructure.GetVelocity()
end

why doesnt this work

[near parcel]

because it's not doing anything. You update the local variable speed, but never tell the game to change the UI after it is initialized

[paper bone]

Assuming 'ModStructure' is defined somewhere ||which i dont think is the case||

[narrow acorn]

no this is the only code i have jet

[near parcel]

then modstructure isn't defined and that will spam errors

[narrow acorn]

ah k how do i do that

[near parcel]

You nees to define the variable and initialize it with valid data

[ivory agate]

You could probably make a macro that translates controller input to keyboard input though

But of course that would be outside of the game

[ivory agate]

Can a mod game object be a player or does it have to be something like a custom model or spawned object?

Asking for the extra sound options

[radiant lion]

I'm pretty sure you can get the playe game object, yes

[radiant lion]

Probably, yeah, but you won't get the precision of knowing at which angle the controller is tilted

[upper niche]

Damn
Why?

oh right

yeah nevermind

[narrow acorn]

how do i do that

[paper bone]

tm.players.GetPlayerSeatBlock(playerId).GetStructure() this returns the structure the player with playerId is inside of
if the player is in no structure this will throw errors

you can check if the player is in a structure by calling tm.players.IsPlayerInSeat(playerId)

[narrow acorn]

for _, player in ipairs(tm.players.CurrentPlayers()) do
local playerId = player.playerId

if tm.players.IsPlayerInSeat(playerId) then
    tm.players.GetPlayerSeatBlock(playerId).GetStructure()
end

end

like this

?

[paper bone]

yeah

[narrow acorn]

k

[paper bone]

just this wont do anything right now as you dont save your structures

[narrow acorn]

is that in func update

[paper bone]

wdym? what do you aim to do with this mod?

[narrow acorn]

im trying to make smth like turn rate mod but with diffrent stats

[paper bone]

then you will want to check every players current structure every update cycle

[narrow acorn]

also whats the diffrence between getspeed and getvelocitie

[paper bone]

speed returns m/s and velocity returns a 3D Vector

[narrow acorn]

so in func update

[narrow acorn]

ah k

[paper bone]

you can do that by having all of your code in the update function and then using the return value of the ...GetStructure() function as the object to perform these other methods on like the getspeed or getvelocity

@warm canopy could you please unmute burger he was just trying to get help on some code

[tacit nymph]

casdekker2010_41269 was unmuted.

[narrow acorn]

how do get that code text?

[narrow acorn]

^

[paper bone]

do you mean how to format text to look like code?

[paper bone]

for short code blocks you can put these `` around the code

for longer code blocks do
```lua ```

[formal crane]

can't believe i forgot a " but whatever

[paper bone]

you will need to include the speed = structure.GetVelocity in your code now to update your speed variable

[narrow acorn]

how do i update the value of a ui label

[near parcel]

Setuivalue iirc

[regal bear]

--- @param playerId number
--- @param id string
--- @param value string
--- @return nil
function tm.playerUI.SetUIValue(playerId, id, value) end

[orchid elbow]

is there any optimizing mods?

[serene magnet]

There are mods that do structure cleanup/antilag but nothing like sodium from minecraft if that's what you mean

[orchid elbow]

im asking because i have a 2 core cpu and 6gb ram 2gb vram and cannot upgrade for a couple of years

[serene magnet]

unfortunate

but yeah no. besides structure cleanup we cant do performance mods with the current API

[orchid elbow]

on the lowest settings I could get i got like 30 fps on test zone

[formal crane]

I would recommend for you to switch to "Force Single Process Server" with a machine like that; it is usually better in low-end machines.

[polar harbor]

not sure what channel to put this in but im wondering if the menu video is editable, here i have changed the original to just a general aviation video, but in game i am met with a frozen first frame of the original

[frigid moon]

show file name extensions make sure its an mp4

[ivory agate]

You have the mouse as a 2d vector, and the mouse wheel as a scalar value, but yeah true

[ivory agate]