Updates from MaDPuPPeT

Wow. I've been slack on posting. April 2014 already.
Just finishing up the car mod this week and hopefully sending to iTunes at the end of the week if all goes well.
Also doing some rewrites of the UI to make the world usage a bit more intuitive.
There will now be a Create World on the main menu that lets you create a world from scratch and import blocks, actors, objects and vehicles from various other worlds.
You can drag items around now to sort and manage your pieces better.
You can create single seat cars. Boats/planes and double seaters coming later.

The car physics are pretty basic. I'd like to switch to a streaming full-physics (probably bullet physics) system in future but I'm concerned about how the mobile platforms will perform and the memory usage might be pretty high. Not really a problem for PCs with 2+ gigs but could be a big issue for mobile platforms with 1gig or less of memory.

June update... still chugging away.
I've done a lot of work on the material/texture pipeline of the game so I could have much better support for shaders. That ate up a couple of weeks but was well worth it.

I've been changing the interface to better support 2 handed play. I think the system works but I'm still working on making it as intuitive as possible. I've unified survival and creative interfaces now so you don't need to choose between them. Even creative is always in two handed mode. The downside is that if you put objects/tiles in the left and right hands, you won't be able to dig at all...

However, 2 handed play makes interface so much more complex since each hand potentially wants to effect different targets... ie. if you have a pick, then you'll want to highlight the tile that you will be picking away which includes grass and non-player-blocking tiles. However, if you have a tile to place, you really only want to highlight were you will place the tile, which doesn't include grass.

The current solution I am using is to color code this left/right hand icons and show 2 box UI targets colour coded to which hand the box is for. It's a functional solution but not very intuitive and probably very confusing to new players. Still thinking about other options.

Other news - I've switched the Water/Lava system over to minecraft style spreading. My old volumetric spreading was just too heavy on the network, since removing one tile could require hundreds of other tiles to redistribute themselves.
I've also ditched the fire and smoke tiles - again, way too heavy on the networking and they didn't look/work that great anyway.
Instead, fire is a special system of its own now and not built into tiles. Smoke will just be a particle effect spawned from fire. Downside here is that fire won't cast light .
The upside is that I can now have Poison and Mud as two new water types.
I've put in special refracting shaders for all liquids to make them look much cooler and even 32x32 textures for them look great, so I'll be able to make those available for in-game editting soon.
The end goal is to just let you define all 4 liquid types, what shaders/textures to use on them, and if they harm the player/shed light.

Finally, the day and night cycles have been improved. All lighting is directional now based on the suns direction.
Currently that includes torchlight though thats a bit odd when your deep in a cave, so I may have to drop or tone it done.

Here is morning, midmorning, and sunset. You can see the moon just beginning to rise at sunset.

A few bug fixed for multiplayer and I should be ready to release a new version.
Hopefully then I can get back onto some important gameplay features for setting up actual game modes..

..though my son has been hassling me daily to put in animated (wavy) grass... so I might have to pop that in next to keep him happy.

I put off the wavy grass for now. Just getting some AI modes in and then I think I'll put the new release up. Lots of improvements over the last release in now.

*Sees new update*
REJOICE!