[Server] Inside The Box [Puzzles]

[sofar]

Nore and Sofar present:

Inside the Box - A Puzzle Server

!Over 160 puzzle boxes!

A Minetest (version 5.0.0 and newer!) Puzzle server where you can create, share and play puzzle maps.

The server features a unique system that allows players to create their own puzzle boxes using a system of mechanic and logic nodes and share them with everyone.

Please visit our Official website - http://minetest.foo-projects.org. On our website you will find updated lists of boxes, player rankings, builder rankings and all of the help information you might want to know, including builder video guides, playthrough videos, walkthrough videos for the tutorial, etc, etc..

Code: Select all

Server: minetest.foo-projects.org
Port: 30394

Important: Read the server rules. Type `/rules` after you login to review them.

Screenshots: Please visit the imgur gallery: http://imgur.com/a/1nRlL or open the Screenshot section:

+ Spoiler

Server chat is connected to #insidethebox on irc.freenode.net. Come join us and help out. It's OK to give clues to players that are stuck in a box.

Since it's OK to post spoilers on levels in here, please feel free to ask for, or give hints to solve levels in this thread!

Open this spoiler for info about the `telex` command that this server uses to send messages between players:

+ Spoiler

Step 1: right click any in-game terminal.
Then type your telex commands.

- list messages in your inbox: `telex list`
- read a message: `telex read 1`
- create a new draft message: `telex draft`
- edit your draft message later: `telex draft`
- send your draft message to sofar: `telex send sofar`

More help is shown by `telex help` and `telex help <subcommand>` !

Update: code is public. Visit the server code project thread for more information.

[GreenXenith]

I must say. Favorite. Server. Of. All. Time. And I haven't even finished the tutorial yet :D
And I'm the guy in the 15th screenshot :D

[red-001]

Glad to see that the server/game is finally at a state were it's ready for public testing.

[sofar]

So far, we've had over 70 new players today. The highest player count was 8. We've seen a few new boxes get created as well already, and they were enjoyable! Looking forward to getting it ready to share new puzzles with everyone.

[texmex]

Pure excellence.

[azekill_DIABLO]

The greatest expression of what a server can be. Really, good job, everthing looks amazing!

However there are a few oddities:

1. When playing...
2. When using teleprter pad, I can sometimes glitch trough the blocks under the teleporter and fall out of the box!
3. The moving platforms behave in quite erratic way, sometimes disapearing too fast, sometimes stacking up, sometimes moving not like usual. It can really break the fun as the part 5 of tutorial contains lots of these.
   When creating...
4. The set door thing doesn't work at all. Or it seems so.
5. Steel doors can be placed next to each other but don't act like double doors, which oblivously looks terrible.
6. Steel doors can't be removed at all, even with the editing tool, the pickaxe or the admin tool.

[the_raven_262]

You can place the set door thingy, only on +x and -x walls. The one at +x will be the exit, the -x will be the entrance.

[kingoscargames]

[*]Steel doors can't be removed at all, even with the editing tool, the pickaxe or the admin tool.[/list]

I think i have problem.. XD

[sofar]

If you run into issues when creating boxes, ping nore or sofar and we can come and show you or help you remove blocks.

[TumeniNodes]

This looks absolutely awesome!!!
Very very nice work guys...

[sofar]

[*]Steel doors can't be removed at all, even with the editing tool, the pickaxe or the admin tool.[/list]

I think i have problem.. XD

This should be fixed now!

[azekill_DIABLO]

[*]Steel doors can't be removed at all, even with the editing tool, the pickaxe or the admin tool.[/list]

I think i have problem.. XD

xD amazing box, need to try it!

[sofar]

Things have been a LOT of fun this weekend. We saw a ton of new players work their way through the tutorial and Master series, and the first new puzzles have been made by people that didn't even know about the server two days ago.

Special thanks to The_raven_262:

"A house in the woods"


and GreenDimond:

"There snow way out"


for their excellent additions! These 2 new levels are now part of the master series and everyone can enjoy them!

[sofar]

Just to make sure people know issues are fixed as fast as we can:

When using teleprter pad, I can sometimes glitch trough the blocks under the teleporter and fall out of the box!

That's sadly a really difficult problem to solve, since the client owns the movement, and we'd have to lock your character in place for a while to work around it, but you'd just be stuck in place, which isn't nice either.

The moving platforms behave in quite erratic way, sometimes disapearing too fast, sometimes stacking up, sometimes moving not like usual. It can really break the fun as the part 5 of tutorial contains lots of these.

This is essentially lag. The server is running relatively smooth, we can't really do that much about it, and removing these type of puzzles would make the game more bland, sadly, so this problem will likely stay.

The set door thing doesn't work at all. Or it seems so.

It works, except, you can only place/move them on east and west walls of the box. It's all documented in the library on the server, too, btw.

Steel doors can be placed next to each other but don't act like double doors, which oblivously looks terrible.

I'm not sure what you mean. You can place them side by side and if you place the left one first, the right one is automatically placed mirrorred. If you couple them to the same input signal, they will open at the same time. You just have to wire them up correctly.

Steel doors can't be removed at all, even with the editing tool, the pickaxe or the admin tool.

Fixed. The edit tool can remove them without problems now.

[azekill_DIABLO]

thank you for all the explanations and the fixes!

[DS-minetest]

I can't find the subgame.
On the server is an address to it:

screenshot_20170905_133159.png

(344 Bytes) Not downloaded yet

But https://github.com/sofar/insidethebox is not the web page I am looking for.

[sofar]

On the server is an address to it (...)
But https://github.com/sofar/insidethebox is not the web page I am looking for.

No, the source code is not yet posted online. We will do this at a later stage.

Two of the reasons that it hasn't happened are that I want to make sure I get all the attribution properly, and that we resolve the most important bugs.

I must note though that most of the code is highly specific to the server, and will be of little use to anyone making subgames without making major modifications to it.

[DS-minetest]

A texture pack is a good way to reduce the amount of client side memory usage since the skybox images are so heavy. I scaled them down to 128² and my memory usage was only 788mb.

[azekill_DIABLO]

demn son

[sofar]

A texture pack is a good way to reduce the amount of client side memory usage since the skybox images are so heavy. I scaled it down to 128².

So the textures were compressed a lot, but we still map them to a 2048x2048 texture, so they consume a lot of texture memory (and thus, system RAM).

I will go and see if we can reduce the texture sizes, but keep the quality of the images high. This is one of the things that JPG is actually really good at, and so we can probably win a lot of RAM memory back. If we go 1024x1024 textures, we save 72MB ram usage, if we go to 512x512, we save almost 90MB ram usage.

This does however mean everyone will be re-downloading all the images again. Fortunately we have a media server running to make this efficient.

[sofar]

Updates! We've been focussing on bugs and playability, and a lot has improved in less than a week:

• We've fixed a few puzzles to be a little bit more forgiving. We've noticed a lot of players never finish the tutorial (we didn't expect them to, but not that many) so we'll try to balance the tutorial to be difficult enough but not overly troublesome for most players.
• Music! We've added more music tracks to the server. Music will now continue playing once in a while when solving or creating puzzles too, and you can turn it off if you want in the inventory.
• We reduced the skybox textures from 2048x2048 to 1024x1024. This is a 75% reduction in game client memory, and another 6mb reduced download size, while maintaining a high level of quality.
• Better series reset progress. There is now a formspec that appears that explains what resetting does and what your options are.
• Fly while editing! Many have asked for this, so, you got it.
• Two small, but important texture fixes.
• Several crash fixes in the terminal mod code
• Fix edit tool to allow digging doors and trapdoors, even metal ones.

Many thanks for everyone for reporting bugs and suggestions. While the code matures due to all the live testing that is going on, I feel more confident that we can release the code sooner and start tracking bugs in an open project setting.

[GreenXenith]

Fly while editing! Many have asked for this, so, you got it.

Yes! Thankyou!

[sofar]

I did a quick collection of player origin and made this map:



It's cool to see that players are coming from all over the world. Some regions appear to be underrepresented, though, like China and most of Africa.

[azekill_DIABLO]

holy... i'm a blue point.

[kingoscargames]

Are you stalking me!?!? O_O (:P)
Edit: LOL