[Implemented][Suggestion] A few suggestions that I and many other players would really appreciate having in the game

[anuken]

[Implemented][Suggestion] A few suggestions that I and many other players would really appreciate having in the game

[Anuken]

1) I'm planning to solve this by allowing the player to hold the mouse while placing in a line (Desktop) and adding special multi-place mode (Mobile). 3.0 is a bit late already, so I'd expect this to be done in time for.. 3.1?

2) Just implemented this. Since it conflicts with scrollwheel zooming, that's now done with ctrl+scrollwheel.

3) Planned! I was thinking on making it an area-selection delete tool; most likely for 3.1 as well. I'll need to add some sort of tool menu for these.

4) Those already have (hidden) keybindings: 1-9 for the weapons, right-click to deselect a tower. But, you're right, I should make them rebindable.

5) This one is tricky. Due to the pixel filter, I have to zoom out in whole numbers (2x scale, 3x scale), etc, where the default 4x. If I increase the zoom-out constraints, it'll be available up to 1x scale, which is relatively huge and breaks smaller maps like Spiral and Grassland, since the camera can see out of bounds. There's also the problem of lag: most mobile devices I've tested can't draw tiles very well, and start dropping frames very fast once you get to lower zoom levels; I can definitely see users accidentally zooming out too far, and getting annoyed as their game slows to a crawl. Maybe a minimap could help instead?

6) Should be fixed now! (on GitHub, anyway)

I'm glad you appreciate my professional sound effects that definitely did not take 5 minutes to make

[skybldev]

1. Got it
2. didn't know that lol.
3. Okay
4. ...nor that
5. ahh okay. Maybe you could have a process that loads all the tiles in the map, reduces the graphics load, displays and updates all the tiles in a separate square container, and use that as a frontend for the background process. Also, i've experienced that map-breaking thing on my chromebook. The stylus dropped on the screen and simulated a finger moving from one point to another point on the screen, thus making the camera go out of bounds and making me unable to play.
6. I see, lol.

okay now to more questions sorry

1. does Mindustry use multithreading?
2. how do i pack the game into an executable and run the builds that are fresh from the vine?

And as you may have noticed recently, I've made a fork of the game, and am currently revising the README lol. In there, I have images as links to downloads, and would like to know if I could host the game files on Gdrive, or upload the files to GitHub, to make direct download links.

And one more thing, I saw your reply to my post on the itch.io page, and I'm gonna be starting on the Wiki tonight, maybe add like 10 pages b4 i go to bed.

Many thanks, Anuken 😄

[Anuken]

1. Nope. It's really hard to implement multi-threading in a 2D game like this, not to mention the fact that HTML5 doesn't really support threads.

2. I assume you have the Java Development Kit and Java installed, and are using Windows. Open the command line in the root Mindustry folder, and do gradlew.bat desktop:run to run the game. To build, do gradlew.bat desktop:dist; the output JAR file should be located in Mindustry/desktop/build/libs/desktop-1.0.jar.

However, if you want to distribute it as an .exe in a zip (like it is on itch.io), that's a much more complex process-- that's probably not necessary right now.

3?) Yeah, improving the readme is a good idea-- but why host the downloads when you can link to itch.io? I'll have to maintain downloads for two different locations-- and wouldn't most people on Github prefer to build the latest version themselves, too?

[skybldev]

I do have it but it tries to download a gradle file which takes forever...

Also for itch.io, I can't link to direct download links like the ones specific for Windows, Mac etc.
If i hosted the files on GDrive or Mega I could get the latest files from the Itch.io page then up it to MEGA then update the links.

But you do have a point there, people on GitHub would rather build the game themselves, and in addition to that, more people prefer to just use itch.io to dl the game. Just linking to itch.io is a good idea that'll save me time.

EDIT: okay, gradle finished downloading, along with all of the dependencies. It errored because i found out that i in fact did not have JDK installed, but only JRE. 🤦‍♂️ Downloading it now. Thanks for the help! 😄

EDIT:
okay i installed JDK, but it still is spitting out errors...

[Anuken]

Looks like you installed JDK 9 instead of JDK 8-- sorry, I forgot about that. See if it works if you install JDK 8 and JRE 8.

[skybldev]

Gotcha. I'll try to install it on my desktop later today. Meanwhile, I'll keep working on the Wiki.

[skybldev]

I keep getting this error: ERROR: JAVA_HOME is not set and no 'java' command could be found in your PATH.

I've installed JRE and JDK 8, and have the Mindustry root in my Github Desktop folder. (C:\Users\Owner\Documents\GitHub\Mindustry) What's wrong? :s

[Anuken]

Looks like you need to set the JAVA_HOME system variable. This should explain how to do it.

[SaphireLattice]

Few ideas that I would love to see added as well:

• Possibility (on desktop) to choose if player is going to control a player character, like it is right now, or control a camera, like on mobile.
• Minimap, especially on mobile. It gets rather awkward to move around when you got a lot of defenses all over the map in small spots.

Also, some kind of sorter would be awesome to have, but that is either adding some kind of GUI, or tons of special blocks, which doesn't seems to fit the game. :c

[Anuken]

Closing, as all of this is now on the TODO.