GARDEN Released !
I am pleased to announce that Garden is released !
Garden is a short experiment in advanced persistence data usage. By using string concatenation, we can create situational save data for various gameplay elements, and have it translated between players.
The world has some very basic progression, minor story elements, and reacts to what you plant in your own garden !
Primarily serving as a proof of concept, I might continue development if enough people are interested in the project. There will be further updates over the weekend to address missing textures and features that had to be cut to preserve the release date, but overall its majorly feature complete at this stage.
Important note:
There was not enough time to test every edge case. Be prepared to lose your save data, and please check your logs and report errors directly to me !
What Was Learned
Garden was completed in around 3 weeks, somewhat breaking the monthly release schedule target by dipping into February.
Overall, I had to cut a lot of content that either broke at the very last second, or just couldn't fit what I wanted in such a short time frame. I am disappointed that things didn't turn out entirely how I wanted them to; textures and some models had to be rushed or carried over from other projects.
Because of such tight constraints, I will be tempering future projects, and having them ready a few days before their intended release date.
Documentation & How It's Made (Quickie)
I plan on writing up documentation, and doing a tutorial on how the save system was implemented. The tutorial will be freely available sometime in the future.
The image above shows you how the save data is displayed. To concentrate data, it is concatenated together with underscores '_' and separated when PlayerData is restored.
A plants' save string goes as such:
world_transform.x|world_transform.y,plant_type,planted_timestamp_
Data is separated in various ways: With the transform data the X and Y coordinates are separated with bars: '|' while individual data uses commas. While you could use commas for everything, I found it much easier to grab data by specifying different separation characters.
Data Shrinking
Because persistence data is limited to only 100 kilobytes, certain sacrifices must be made to ensure sufficient data can be stored now, and later. If VRChat were to ever decide to reduce the available storage, or if more keys & data is required later; efficient use of storage is a must.
The timestamps are translated to standardized 'Zulu' time, and their seconds & millisecond data is removed. This saves us about 8 characters: When we restore persistence, we can append the missing data.
The first two digits of the year are removed when the timestamp is saved. Garden is technically unplayable past 2099.
The entire game secretly takes place in only world-positive space to prevent the saving of negative numbers '-', and there are checks to remove and warn the user when a plant is saved in negative space.
What's Next?
Right now, I am going to be focused on fixing stuff I had to cut before release. Translations for Japanese and Korean still need to be added, and I'm going to YOLO the Quest release and see if it works
( I do not have a Quest headset. Good luck everyone !!! )
I will cease all work on Monday, and mention plans for this month in the Discord. Something smaller would be pretty nice right about now...
Thank you for your continued support !