Markus

This is definitely not a indicator for who's going to win the competition. Not everyone has time to be on the forum and check the threads regularly. When the deadline for the contest is over, each jury member watches each GIF and votes, and then we will discuss&pick the winners.

Yes @Murkusfast and @z0mbiesrock. We haven't thought about people re-entering old gifs, but fitting the topic was indeed reason why we hadto choose one gif over the other in topic-based contests. And since this one now is open for everything, you are free to enter what ever you want. So please you two, feel free to enter your old gifs for the last contest, if you think they are great (which they are!), but of course we hope that you will surprise us with even more creative creations Looking forward to what you're creating next ❤️

I think I might have an idea what could be the problem @MR. M THE GREAT. When you press F9, in the right lower corner there appears a message "CREATING GIF". Do you wait until the message disappears before you press the Key again? Or do you press and hold F9? The correct usage would be press F9, wait for the message to appear and disappear again, and then you are able to press F9 again. If that's the problem, then we have to prevent players from pressing F9 during the saving process of the GIF @Micha [edit] Here's a GIF of the reproduced bug. Solution: Don't press F9 repeatedly. Just press and wait

Hello everyone! Thank you all for participating in this round. The topic was very restricted and you all tried to match it with your own approach, what made judging this time very difficult. If you didn't win this time around, please understand that it was really hard for us and even if we wanted to award more prices, we had to limit ourselves. The next contest will be announced tomorrow, and we hope you show us your creativity in the next round one again. And without further ado, here are the two winners for the contest: "Best Flight Show" @TheSaltFactory, who impressed us with a good 3-arc-GIF story and proved his incredible flight and fight skills in a real battle situation. Fighting till the bitter end, beautiful GIFs. Congratulations! @OmegaDeltaZero Who proved to us that the "best flight show" does not just mean most skillful, but maybe rather most graceful. Congratulations! I will send the two winners the Steam Closed-Alpha keys shortly via PM. To all other participants. Thank you again for showing us your skills. The next contest will start tomorrow and I'm sure you will like it. See you soon! ❤️

Not sure if that is common knowledge, but apparently bats can swim??? Never saw or heard this before. Interesting swimming style

Sorry @MR. M THE GREAT, I meant your computer specs sorry for the confusion.

This is really strange @MR. M THE GREAT. Maybe it's a RAM issue @Micha. What computer specs do you have?

Don't be discouraged Currently there are about 850 entries, so the chances are roughly 1/850 to be picked. This might be low, but compared to winning the lottery it's astronomically better Don't forget that we steadily have a Gif competition going on. While you have to create a Gif (with the Demo version), the odds of winning there are much higher. Give it a try I wish you all good luck and thank you all for your interest in Nimbatus ❤️

@MR. M THE GREAT It's really strange how short your Gifs are I personally like the 4th Gif the best, because it tells a story and it long enough so that the viewer can understand what's going on. The other ones are so short it's hard to understand what's going on. Are you cutting/editing the Gifs afterwards?

@MR. M THE GREAT Are you using the Nimbatus-internal GIF capture tool? Are you post-processing them somehow (Ezgif or another service). Maybe something doesn't work right with your configuration, we have to look into that. Also: I really appreciate your enthusiasm about the game and the competition. But simply sending more Gifs won't increase your success of winning. While you have really cool looking Gifs, a lot of them are very similar or convey the same idea. Please post only one Gif per "idea" or story and choose the best one. This also makes the judging for us easier and speeds up the thread, because we don't have as many Gifs to load Remember: We will choose one Gif, not a series of Gifs, therefore there's no need to post several similar Gifs. If you have questions about the contest or the Gif making process, feel free to ask And yes, there will be many more Gif contests [edit] If you created Gifs of your cool drones but won't send it in into the competition, they are not lost: Please feel free to post them in this thread. Makes things easier to organize Thank you for your help.

@Mr MM Really clever usage of Springs, haven't seen this before. Sparks new ideas, I love it ❤️ Thank you for sharing!

Hi everyone The 3nd GIF competition has ended. There were AWESOME entries again, thank you all for participating! So let's go right ahead and start a new one! This competition's theme is: Best Flight Show This time we want to award the flight / pilot skills of you players. Build a nice drone and fly as your live depends on it. Make nice maneuvers and impress the viewers. Post the best GIF to impress the jury and win a Closed Alpha key! The deadline to enter is Wednesday, 13th of June. Here are the rules: Post your GIF right here in this thread. Multiple entries per person are allowed. Only GIFs recorded with the demo version are allowed in this competition. @Roger, @Markus, @Micha and @Philo will pick 2 favorites. The 2 winners receive a Closed Alpha Steam key for free There will be only awarded one key per person. If you won in a previous contest, we won't award you another key. Please note: You can use [F9] to generate an animated GIF of the last 6 seconds gameplay, but feel free to use other tools. Remember that the best GIF wins! Spend some time refining your fly skills and story, make several tries, choose the best one. Tell an interesting story with your GIF. It's not about your drone design, but how you handle it. For this contest the best looking GIF wins. We'll have contests which award pure logic/cleverness at a later time. We maybe show some of these cool gifs on Twitter, Reddit, etc. Please only post here if that's ok with you. Tipp: The GIF capture tool hides bad framerates. If you turn off the Bloom because of performance reasons, turn them on before recording the GIF. The game might have a low frame rate, but the resulting GIF should run smoothly and might result in nicer looking GIF because of the effects.

I definitely upvote this, because I also think it's a hassle to e.g. assign the same tags to several parts, or even settings like distance of several distance sensors. It should be similar to the Unity Engine interface. If you select several different parts, all same properties get displayed, e.g. Tags, Distances, Maybe Time-Delays etc. and if you change the setting, all other parts apply them as well. Maybe it gets tricky with things like rotation, so maybe this has to be locked - or you are self-responsible for the mess which might happen (imagine hundreds of parts rotating and then overlapping each other ^^').

Really cool drone @MLGTASTIC, thank you for sharing that video

Yes @z0mbiesrock, so far there was no limit on how many GIFs one can enter. Sorry if that wasn't clear from the start. Will add it to the rules. Thank you for pointing out.

Awesome idea @MARO445! Haven't seen this approach used yet in this way. Really cool Everyone! All great entries so far. I really like your creativity when building autonomous drones. Looking forward to even more exciting sumo drones

Yes, I agree with you

@OmegaDeltaZero I know what you mean, but I don't fully agree with you Restrictions bear creativity. We will have more open contests in the future, but for this specific contest we wanted to see what people can create inside the sumo arena. So we want to push you to be most creative "inside the sumo arena", not creative with "drone battles" in general (which can be a future contest topic ). So while I agree with you that we get awesome and unexpected creations each time, especially if we're more open, we sometime want to see what you can do within certain more tight restrictions. So it's not only to create just good looking GIFs, but also for us to test certain things I appreciate the discussion On another note: If you're quick to post your GIF instead of waiting, of course it will influence and inspire people. So if you want to be protective of your ideas and designs, I suggest you wait till quickly before the deadline and then post your stuff. In general I think it is a good thing to post early, because inspiring others is a good thing and encourages the community to create better content. We try to award creativity and originality in addition to just "the best GIF", so posting early is also better - because two people can have the same idea. Just post whatever you want and we judges will do the rest @OmegaDeltaZero The GIF you posted before is really cool It does not fit in this contest, but that should not prevent you from entering it in a future one - or maybe you can adapt it so that it is interesting in the context of the Sumo Arena.

I fully agree @Lurkily We're still novice Game Developers with just a few years of experience, so we still have a lot of learning ahead of us And thank you for the book tipp, sounds interesting and relevant to me. I'll check it out [edit] Found the relevant article: https://brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/

@Floppy BlogartIf you have saved the drones, you can try to recapture the gif. The fights won't be exactly the same, but maybe the one you record now is even more interesting than the first one. Give it a try again. You can send in more than one gif.

Good discussion here. I was discussing with @Micha the same topic. It's about how much we want to force players to play in the way we intend and how easy/powerful we should me the game for beginners/casual/experts. I think we need a way to make the game enjoyable for beginners, who never touched Nimbatus before. And we need a way to keep experts engaged for a long time, so that they can program Tetris inside Nimbatus, if they want so Some suggestions, like transferring energy from satellites to the drone-brain, or generally, having energy and fuel a global value (like in the demo), allows for more easily create bigger and more complex structures, but eventually a game should also provide you with a challenge and limitations - and working with and around those is where the fun comes from. So for beginners I think we really need the standard mode that energy only works with connected parts. Maybe we can add a mode where everything is global, so that you can go crazy with your drones and creations - but not mainly for playing/finishing the game - because that would break the balancing - more for using the game as a tool to express yourself the way you want to. On the other hand - limitations are exactly what makes it fun. I mean, if I only want to create a Tetris game, I could use whatever game engine or programming language I want, and just straightforward do it. BECAUSE it is so tricky to create a Tetris in Minecraft, Factorio, Zach-likes or Nimbatus, it is rewarding and fun to do Just adding some thoughts to your discussion, I hope you don't mind it No things are written in stone yet and a lot of considerations are still needed

I was working on the landscape generation of a new Biome when this happened. Is it a Kiwi (Animal)? Still lot of work ahead

Hi everyone The 2nd GIF competition has ended. There were AWESOME entries, thank you all for participating! So let's go right ahead and start a new one! This competition's theme is: Sumo Battle This time, only GIFs are allowed which play in the Sumo Arena (Sumo Arena, Sumo Training Arena). Post your most clever/cool/strongest, funniest/narrowly winning sumo drone GIFs and win a Closed Alpha key! The deadline to enter is Wednesday, 30th of May. Here are the rules: Post your GIF right here in this thread. Multiple entries per person are allowed. Only GIFs recorded with the demo version are allowed in this competition. @Roger, @Markus, @Micha and @Philo will pick 2 favorites. The 2 winners receive a Closed Alpha Steam key for free There will be only awarded one key per person. If you won in a previous contest, we won't award you another key. Please note: You can use [F9] to generate an animated GIF of the last 6 seconds gameplay, but feel free to use other tools. Remember that the best GIF wins! So even if your drone in awesome in terms of logic, make sure to also make those features shine in the spot light! For this contest the best looking GIF wins. We'll have contests which award pure logic/cleverness at a later time. We maybe show some of these cool gifs on Twitter, Reddit, etc. Please only post here if that's ok with you. Tipp: The GIF capture tool hides bad framerates. If you turn off the Bloom because of performance reasons, turn them on before recording the GIF. The game might have a low frame rate, but the resulting GIF should run smoothly and might result in nicer looking GIF because of the effects.

Hi everyone! We have internally voted on the winners for this weeks theme "Fireworks" and choose our two favorite GIFs and a honorable mention! All three will receive a Nimbatus Closed Alpha Key via PM. Thank you very much for participating! If you didn't participate this time, we're permanently having GIF competitions with new themes, so please enter in the next competition. Check the Thread here to go to the newest competition: Sumo Battle! And now to the winners of this weeks GIF Contest "Fireworks": @Notifind For this awesome, clever and simply beautiful display of effects. We would love to sit there on the planet and see this spectacle in real life Congratulations! @Killerwombat02 For this clever use and misuse of drone parts to create a realistic display of fireworks and creating a perfectly timed gif. Congratulations! And our honorable mention goes to @Gamma Warrior! For his nice set of gifs with his Party Machine which surprised us of how many different fireworks it could produce. Congratulations! I will send you three the Steam Keys via PM shortly. Thank you all again for participating. We were having a great time watching your creations!

Interesting ideas. Unfortunately duplicating and spawning of drone parts are taxing for the already taxing physics simulation - but I'll ignore that for the moment because it's interesting What's the difference between having a satellite with a decoupler and a small, additional drone brain? The small drone brain might have additional features, but if it gets destoyed, you loose the mission (risk/reward). But now that we have a camera-part (since yesterday, whee), maybe another small drone-brain is redundant. Do you think so as well? Spawning new parts can be probably somehow exploited if we don't design carefully and the balancing gets out of hand. I still like the possibility thou, but I'm not sure yet how it can be interestingly implemented