Weekly 7

Changelog

• Fixed container transformations not affecting children in Editor
  • The selection box now appears in the correct place/rotation/scale
  • Moving/rotating assets in layers now not affected by any container transformations
  • NOTE: Scaling is still broken. I recommend using the scale fields in the inspector, rather than using the corners of the selection box in the Editor panel
  • Selection box now appears above all layers
  • Selection box now only covers bounding box of that layer
  • Selection box now contains unfilled circle at the rotational pivot
• Significant performance improvements in Editor panel
• Scrollbars are wider and interactable
• Made foldable section arrows even more consistent with the ones in the layers tree
• Made the window title contain the open project and version of Babble Buds
• Made right clicking clear search bars

Weekly 1

For details on what's happening with development, please check out the discord.

Change Log:

• Fixed puppets duplicating and not animating whenever moved or otherwise controlled
• Fixed puppet changing direction when off-stage
• Fixed several issues tied to puppet movement
• Improved foldables' catets and made them more consistent
• Fixed Connected Users section not taking full width of Multiplayer panel
• Clicking a Select fields (like dropdowns) will now toggle focus
• Fixed puppet icon in puppet field sometimes having a background
• Updated dependencies

Also, these changes have been made in sneak previews but not in official pre-releases:

• Large refactoring, performance improvements, QoL changes, and making things more consistent
• Added tests for most of the redux code
• Made server also host website with Babble Buds information and an admin panel
• Fixed not being able to create multiple stage panels
• Fixed not being able to create multiple control panel panels
• Implemented copy/paste/delete for layers
• Implemented the Editor panel
• Improved error handling, allowing individual panels to crash without crashing the whole program
• Implemented layer enter animations
• Implemented asset bundles
• Implemented (most of) particle assets
• Implemented Environments
• Implemented warnings in Layer panel/inspector when in invalid states
• Improved Welcome screen
• Reimplemented (most of) multiplayer
• Reimplemented popout stage
• Fixed many bugs introduced while implementing the above features
• And several more minor features/bug fixes

v0.8.2-beta

Another bug fix release!

Changelog:

• Fixed deleted puppets not being removed from puppet list
• Changed enabling emotes so that it doesn't close emotes panel
• Fixed zoom get totally broken when I "improved" it in the last release
• Snapping to grid is now relative to zoom level
• Fixed error when attempting to connect to server via the button in project settings

v0.8.1-beta

Small update, with some bug fixes and updated electron and babble.js.

The bug fixes, specifically, were:

• Side panel disappearing in "editor" view
• When creating a new asset list, the old asset list's assets stayed on screen
• Program would fail silently when trying to add an asset when there weren't any asset lists to add them to
• Fixed some?? issues with thumbnails not appearing (I swear this is my most recurring problem ;_;)
• Fixed zoom levels just, like, always being either too big or too small (they also respect your project's Puppet Scale settings now)

v0.8.0-beta

Yes I know this release was promised to take waaay longer than it actually did, but after the last version inspiration struck and I decided to fix the most pressing issue with babble buds: how much of a pain it is connecting to other users.

Before, you needed one player to host, and for other players to connect to them. This often involved port forwarding, using a hack like hamachi, or hosting it on a server somewhere, something that shouldn't be expected of every user.

Now, servers act more as hubs, and multiple groups of people can connect to them, go off into their own little room separate from the others, and go about their business. I'm now hosting such a hub at babblebuds.xyz, port 8080. So just put babblebuds.xyz in the "IP" field in settings, and you're all set! (new projects will default to this, instead of localhost). Of course, if you'd rather to use your own server and have the knowledge on how to do so, that is also completely allowed and encouraged (the server files are available on the github repo).

So what does this mean for you? It means to connect to users all you need to do is say to the other players "Connect to my room: It's called 'VitaliDeservedBetter' and the password is 'Boooooooones' with eight o's" and then the other players will, after expressing their distaste at how inconvenient and excessive eight o's is, will just type those in and press connect, and that's it! Not a single person, including the host, needs to do anything but type in a room name and password.

I also added some cool features like a "connected users" list, complete with fun randomly chosen nicknames (don't worry, you can edit your nick name in settings), and the ability to kick users and make all the puppets move off the stage.

Enjoy!

v0.7.0-beta

I'm going to be up front: I wasn't able to get asset bundles into this release. It will be a really cool feature when it finally is implemented and trust me when I say I did all I could to try and get it in this release, but there's just too much other stuff I want you all to be able to play with for me to hold back this release any longer. Plus, my life is going to get a lot busier for awhile, and I still don't know when I'll be able to work on asset bundles, let alone finish them.

Anyways, there's lots of cool stuff to check out here. The thing you should notice first is the welcome screen, which will populate itself with your most recently opened projects - with thumbnails and everything! Once inside the interface has seen lots of minor improvements that should just make it easier to use. Most of all the changes should be readily apparent and intuitive, but there's some things I haven't come up with a good way of making immediately apparent to the user, like right clicking an asset in the asset library to access its settings, or that you can do stuff like move assets around in the puppet editor by using the arrow keys. There are a lot of new features and I'm kinda too lazy to make a full feature list, but I suppose if your really interested you could look at all the commits since the last release here. Otherwise, I'd also like to suggest you go through the menu buttons (particularyl "view"), there's some neat stuff in those.

Some of the biggest changes made were all about how assets are stored and referenced. Because of these changes there are some new cool things like being able to update assets, sync these changes, and making sure no one is able to do things like delete or replace an asset made by someone else, and syncing assets between clients should be much more smooth and stable than previously.

I hope you enjoy this release, and know that feedback is always welcome and appreciated, even if I won't be able to work on this project actively for a bit. Windows will want the windows build, mac users the darwin build (will be uploaded in a couple of days, can't build it on my laptop), and linux the linux build. For all of those, you probably want the "x64" version, if there are any errors about the architecture or not being able to run the program, try one of the others.

Now, a little about the future. Part of what I'll be busy with over the next few months is actually related to babble buds, or rather the puppet rendering engine I made that it uses. I'll be potentially making a game using babble buds for the cutscenes, similar to tower offense (mentioned here a few posts back), but for a larger game with a larger team over a longer period of time. And, its in unity, using c# instead of javascript. So, I've already made a basic port of babble.js (the engine) to c#, which I'm calling babble.cs, and if anyone is interested in using babble puppets in a unity project, you can check it out here. Please note its not really ready for production yet, as it is still being worked on, but at the same time if you need it now, then it is plenty usable, and the provided demo project should make it clear how to use it. Additionally, I'll be working on a piece of software to help write cutscenes for the babble puppets, as up til now its been tedious manual labor. It'll be called "babble movie maker" and probably won't be ready for general use for a substantially long amount of time, but it's in the works. And of course, eventually there'll be a 1.0 release of babble buds itself, with all sorts of cool things like asset bundles (urgh!), being able to browse community made puppets from within the program, and some features to make connecting to other users much easier, since its currently a hassle still. Once again I hope you enjoy this current release, and rest assured there's still a lot more down the pipeline, but it'll be awhile since I'm just one guy, and I've got a lot on my plate. Thanks!

v0.6.0-alpha

This is an alpha release! It is incomplete and probably buggy. We're getting close to beta though, at this point I'd call it "possibly stable".

Want to play with other people? Here are some of the ways to connect to other users:

• Without configuring anything, you can just open the application a bunch of times, press "Host Server" on one of them, and "Connect to Server" on the rest, and they'll connect
• To connect over LAN (e.g. two people in the same house), have one person press "Host Server", and find your local IP (generally in the format of 192.168.1.XXX). Other users put that IP in the "Server IP" field in project settings, and then press "Connect to Server"
• You have two options for connecting to people world wide:
  • One user can port forward port 8080 (or whatever port they prefer, its configurable), press "Host Server", find their global IP (google search "what's my IP?" and google will tell you this), and the other users put that into the "Server IP" field
  • If you have a server running somewhere (through AWS or Azure or something), on the github page there is a "server.js" file you can run that will host the server for you, and then people just connect to the IP of your server

Changelog:

• Fixed several server issues

v0.5.3-alpha

This is an alpha release! It is incomplete and probably buggy.

Want to play with other people? Here are some of the ways to connect to other users:

• Without configuring anything, you can just open the application a bunch of times, press "Host Server" on one of them, and "Connect to Server" on the rest, and they'll connect
• To connect over LAN (e.g. two people in the same house), have one person press "Host Server", and find your local IP (generally in the format of 192.168.1.XXX). Other users put that IP in the "Server IP" field in project settings, and then press "Connect to Server"
• You have two options for connecting to people world wide:
  • One user can port forward port 8080 (or whatever port they prefer, its configurable), press "Host Server", find their global IP (google search "what's my IP?" and google will tell you this), and the other users put that into the "Server IP" field
  • If you have a server running somewhere (through AWS or Azure or something), on the github page there is a "server.js" file you can run that will host the server for you, and then people just connect to the IP of your server

Changelog:

• Changed sample project and moved old onto to /projects
• Made it so you can change just your body or head by holding shift or ctrl, respectively
• Several bug fixes

v0.5.2-alpha

This is an alpha release! It is incomplete and probably buggy.

Want to play with other people? Here are some of the ways to connect to other users:

• Without configuring anything, you can just open the application a bunch of times, press "Host Server" on one of them, and "Connect to Server" on the rest, and they'll connect
• To connect over LAN (e.g. two people in the same house), have one person press "Host Server", and find your local IP (generally in the format of 192.168.1.XXX). Other users put that IP in the "Server IP" field in project settings, and then press "Connect to Server"
• You have two options for connecting to people world wide:
  • One user can port forward port 8080 (or whatever port they prefer, its configurable), press "Host Server", find their global IP (google search "what's my IP?" and google will tell you this), and the other users put that into the "Server IP" field
  • If you have a server running somewhere (through AWS or Azure or something), on the github page there is a "server.js" file you can run that will host the server for you, and then people just connect to the IP of your server

Changelog:

• Fixed issue with opening a new emote in the editor wouldn't work right
• Fixed issue where closing without saving a project with new thumbnails would still use the new thumbnails even though the changes weren't saved

v0.5.1-alpha

This is an alpha release! It is incomplete and probably buggy.

Want to play with other people? Here are some of the ways to connect to other users:

• Without configuring anything, you can just open the application a bunch of times, press "Host Server" on one of them, and "Connect to Server" on the rest, and they'll connect
• To connect over LAN (e.g. two people in the same house), have one person press "Host Server", and find your local IP (generally in the format of 192.168.1.XXX). Other users put that IP in the "Server IP" field in project settings, and then press "Connect to Server"
• You have two options for connecting to people world wide:
  • One user can port forward port 8080 (or whatever port they prefer, its configurable), press "Host Server", find their global IP (google search "what's my IP?" and google will tell you this), and the other users put that into the "Server IP" field
  • If you have a server running somewhere (through AWS or Azure or something), on the github page there is a "server.js" file you can run that will host the server for you, and then people just connect to the IP of your server

While getting rid of the URealms content I had to remove the old releases, so here is what I think is the changelog from v0.5.0:

• Implemented Flipping Assets
• Made the selection UI not zoom with the puppet
• Fixed major bug when connecting with (or to a server with) puppets using unsynced assets
• Fixed bug with being able to select eyes and mouths when you shouldn't
• Fixed issue with puppets sometimes not appearing in the right place in the editor
• Fixed clicking the "babble" button not working