kodu

Kodu patch 1 has entered peer review

Health bars of linked-clones did not properly expand when the number of hit points was increased.
Magic brush is no longer active when starting a new empty world, if it was the active brush in the previous world.
Autosave files occasionally stopped showing up.
Start button now toggles the mini-hub.
Sound effect while moving nodes up and down was being triggered too often.
Splash sound effects were being over triggered when water depth was very shallow.
Carried objects now match the couriers’ orientation.
Added an option to always invert the camera.
Mute now only mutes pre-canned sounds, not programmable sounds.
Fixed typo in Path help.
The Soccer Ball thought it could be programmed to move.
Zoom still occurred when in programmatic first person mode, which was disorienting when going back into chase cam.
Crash when opening the virtual keyboard with too long of a string.
Crash when opening example [say] tile from the programming help.
Crash while sharing with friends whose GamerTag’s used unsupported characters.
Softlock when adding more than 8 Lights.
Rock Band/Guitar Hero controllers caused the camera to spin.
Reset World was resetting scores.
Gaps in expressible numbers.  You can now use up to 10 tiles, as well as several more number tiles.
The On Water sensor did not work correctly.
Only the first created object emoted.
Launching held objects did not work correctly.
Bots are now able to inflict zero damage.
Various graphical fixes in the Help screens.
"Technique: Change Behavior" showed two win messages.
The player did not lose in "Turnover", when the stick ate Black Apples.

Creatable objects now spawn at their creator’s height.
Don’t play the speech audio effect if the say bubble string is empty.
Corrected Wisp collision radius.
Camera was stuck in fixed offset while game is paused.
There was a problem with the mine’s animation blend weights.

Fixed a crash that would occur if the Xbox ran out of disk space while writing a file. A warning pops up now stating what's happened, and how to fix it.
Detect failure of storage media to prevent disappearing world issue.
Updated Gawlf: Classic Links so that the Kodu no longer displays shield effects.

Blips could leak through walls

Removed unused audio files to free up space.
Slowed down the rate that land is raised and lowered.

 

Increased the maximum number of programming pages to 12.
Ability to send worlds to friends in a sharing room if they have allowed others to do so.
Added “favorite” world tag.
Option to auto-download worlds marked with favorite tag.
The active tile in the options helix is now highlighted.
Increased the maximum health cap to 1000.
Increased the maximum speed that characters can travel.
Added 26 more score buckets based on the (English) alphabet.  These scores are always invisible.
Ability to turn off collision, damage and healing effects.
Tweak to turn objects invisible (not visible to the user, other bots can still see them).
Tweak to make objects ghosted out (able to pass through anything, and are translucent).
          If both Invisibility and Ghosted are set, the object will be completely invisible. :)
Added a dabber tool to make it easy to select terrain types.
Terrain types used in the current world are now placed at the beginning of the terrain picker.
Worlds now contain a credit listing of who worked on them.  This is accessed in the World Options screen.
Ability to edit world tags in the Load World menu.

Added glyph for soccer ball: [ball], [soccer ball] (replace square brackets with angled. this editor won't let me use chars that look like html tags).
Added per-character tweak options to adjust the distance used by the “close by” and “far away” sensor filters.
Added per-character tweaks for acceleration values.
Added world tweak option to hide resource meter during gameplay.

Well-known sharing sessions can be joined without a friends list entry, allowing beginners to upload levels and download hand-picked levels without becoming friends

 

Posted: 07-24-2009 5:37 PM by mattmac | with 26 comment(s) |
Filed under: , ,

Comments

MMonkeyking said:

so is it gettin close to being released?.... i cant wait for this =P

Keep up the good work =]

# July 24, 2009 9:53 PM

danjohnson said:

Great job. Can't wait to see it. Next patch, can we have a visible clock, perhaps underneath the score? =)

# July 24, 2009 10:50 PM

Sophist526 said:

how many downloads did kodu have?

# July 24, 2009 11:02 PM

DeadlyDan123 said:

Mattmac please please please will you try to include strafinf movement in the next patch, becease it really does annoy me when i am in the first person view, and want to look one way, but move anaother way at the same time.

# July 25, 2009 3:04 AM

T360UK CHIEF said:

Awesome work guys... Can't wait to get back into this when the fix is released.

# July 25, 2009 4:28 AM

kodufanboy said:

Woohoo! Great to hear!! :D

# July 25, 2009 6:35 AM

Leonard McCoy said:

An impressive list of amendments that are a welcome addition to the already impressive programming language Kodu.

# July 25, 2009 12:28 PM

nandaron said:

Awesome! These updates are going to definitely boost the experience.

A question (hopefully answerable) Any chance of split screen coming to kodu?

# July 25, 2009 9:11 PM

T360UK CHIEF said:

Out of interest, how long does it take for the patch to go live after it has gone to peer review?

# July 26, 2009 6:07 AM

kodufanboy said:

T360UK CHIEF: If I recall, I think the max time it takes to release anything after peer review is 48 hours. Meaning it could (and most likely will be) a lot, lot less.

# July 26, 2009 9:38 AM

DeadlyDan123 said:

is there any possibility of us ever bieng able to create our own characters and objects in kodu with their own abilities and stats etc.-this would be a great way to increase the functionality of kodu.

# July 26, 2009 11:44 AM

GantryG said:

WOW, that's quite a list of upgrades in one month after release!  More than I ever thought would happen.  

The increase in code pages to 12 is awesome, ghosted and invisible objects is awesome, the dabber tool and 26 more scores is awesome, being able to turn off collision, damage, healing is excellent, being able to tweak the near and far parameter, and especially the sharing upgrades are extremely appreciated!

Thanks and keep it up!

# July 27, 2009 12:52 AM

stevey101 said:

Sweet! That is a huge list of fixes and additions. I would just like to ask 1 question. Is there any chance of split-screen and online multiplayer being implemented into Kodu 1.0 or is that way down the road. It would make such a difference as a whole new world of games could be created. Either way though, love the game!

# July 28, 2009 11:07 AM

scoy said:

Sorry but split screen and online multiplayer are not likely to happen any time soon.  Both would require extensive internal changes to make work correctly.

# July 28, 2009 4:23 PM

ShotGun said:

where is the best place 2 check other ppls levels and share!!!

btw shame about no split screen!!

:(

# July 28, 2009 6:50 PM

stevey101 said:

Alright, fair enough. I can live without split screen and multiplayer. As long as you know that is would be a cool thing to add, I'm happy! Thanks for the response!

# July 28, 2009 10:16 PM

T360UK CHIEF said:

Hey guys I have just been promted to re-download the updated game.

BUT

It looks like I have just downloaded the same version. The only difference is that the start screen says Indie games instead of community games.

Speed multiplier is still lock to 2 max and it isnt sorting ground textured liek you stated in this blog post.

Have I done something wrong?

# July 29, 2009 6:41 AM

MMonkeyking said:

same with me I was also prompted to download but, nothing really changed =P

# July 29, 2009 10:36 AM

eanders said:

The patch hasn't yet exited peer review. You may have downloaded something related to XNA's recent rebranding of "Community Games" to "Indie Games".

# July 29, 2009 11:37 AM

orthonormal said:

Yea, I thought so. I've been having the issue where the game is crashing because I typed too much text. Oops!

Plus I can't wait to see 12 pages! I'm in the middle of making a RPG and could use the extra space!

# July 29, 2009 8:05 PM

skztr said:

Just wanted to throw out some praise:

With games today being so flashy and complex, I had been looking for something simple which could teach the absolute basics of gameplay, without being intimidating or seeming "too hard" with various ways to lose before one has even figured out the basic controls. (I never really thought about how intimidating something as basic as Mario, which I grew up on, could be when you don't actually know which-way-up to hold a gamepad. By the time you've worked out that pushing the right part of the little "plus" can make your guy move forward, a walking mushroom can kill you just by touching you. Not exactly intuitive for the entirely-uninitiated)

Kodu allowed me, in just a half-hour, to create a simple game where a turtle picks up apples, then brings them back to a specific place to "eat" them, scoring a point. I'd just made it as a test to see how Kodu worked, but to my surprise, my stepdaughter (who has yet to grasp Mario) picked it right up and played it for the rest of the day, without any coaching at all.

The ability to create simple games quickly is just fantastic, and really fills a niche that I've been looking for.

as for feature requests: the ability to inherit rules from another page, or at least "copy a whole page at once", if the concept of inheritance is too much, would be very nice, as it seems to be the only way to implement a logical AND at the moment, eg: got Apple AND over land, eat apple; becomes over land, switch to page 2 (which is just like page 1, except for the addition of: got Apple, eat apple).

Would also be nice if Fish knew not to try to wander onto land, where they get stuck, or if you could set "wander over land of a specific type" or "when over land, move to avoid land"

So many possibilities, I assume one needs to actually work at Microsoft to contribute?

# July 30, 2009 8:45 AM

dussintek said:

skztr:

my fish dont seem to wander onto land so i can't help there.

BUT! if you go to the top of a page where the page number is, you will notice the options for your controller have updated to show cut and paste options for the page you are on. simply cut the page, paste it back, then switch pages and paste again. it is very VERY helpful.

also, feel free to stop by:

http://moco.net/kodu.html

this site is where a lot of fellow Kodu creators have shared amazing ideas and creations.

# July 30, 2009 12:49 PM

eanders said:

@skztr:

Thanks for the praise!

Great feedback too. The "and" operator is something we've been discussing for quite a while. It would add a nice new expressive capability to the language, but also introduce some cognitive complexity, which we try hard to minimize with every new language feature. It also creates a problem where the intent of the statement can be too unclear for us to provide a reasonable default behavior. For example:

 see cycle and see red : shoot it

Who should we shoot? the cycle, or the closest red thing? A red object may be being used as a signal to start shooting the cycle, or the opposite, or maybe you did want to shoot both. We have no way to know your intent here. If we introduced a level of indirection, you could tell us:

 see cycle and see red : shoot subject 1

But this starts to compromise the language's simplicity.

I think all of us on the team want something like this. It's a challenging design problem.

# July 30, 2009 1:49 PM

orthonormal said:

I've spent a while working on my RPG game and I am now concerned, will this update corrupt any saved games we've made to date?

Plus is there any way to make one game influence another? My RPG game is using a scoring bucket as a Karma Meter. I'd like to have the Karma meter automatically carry over to influence future decision. Is that possible?

# July 30, 2009 4:18 PM

eanders said:

@orthonormal:

The patch will be backward compatible with your existing games.

There's no way right now for state to be preserved between game loads. I agree it would be very useful to have a mechanism like this!

# July 30, 2009 8:37 PM

msp said:

It would be nice if there was a solid answer on the PC release.  Even if it's "three months from now".

Some of us would like to participate and yet if there's no answers we'll just be forced to work with other platforms.

# August 4, 2009 10:42 AM