Welcome to the return of TeraSaturday, a not-so-weekly update post about all the neat stuff that has been going on in the world of Terasology! Half blog, half changelog, completely cool.

đŸ“¯ Accepted for Google Summer of Code

First of all: For the 6th year in a row, The Terasology Foundation was accepted as an organization of Google Summer of Code 🎉 We're looking forward to awesome student projects over the summer, and hopefully keeping the students as valuable members of our community afterwards 💚 If you're a student, look at our GSoC Idea Cards, become active within the community and join the students that already started preparing to apply on Discord 🤓

And if you're not a student, help us spread the word 😉

📰 Since last TeraSaturday ...

Many thanks to our contributors since last [TeraSaturday #10]({% post_url 2021-02-27-terasaturday-10 %}): @4Denthusiast, @agent-q1, @askneller, @DarkWeird, @iHDeveloper, @jdrueckert, @keturn, @pollend, @sin3point14, and @skaldarnar.

Overall, we shifted our focus towards getting Terasology up to speed with gestalt v7 to become more future-proof. This required a lot of groundwork around updating depencies (#4558, #4557, #4564) and tests (#4563 and associated module PRs migrating to JUnit 5). Alongside, we got back to subsystem extractions driven by @DarkWeird and some fine tuning of LOD Chunks (#4567) by @4Denthusiast and improvements to the Discord integration (#4271) by @iHDeveloper.

In total, we merged 41 engine PRs and 36 PRs on modules.

🎀ī¸ Community Highlights

This week's community highlight started off on November last year, when @askneller opened a PR to add a "red flash" as visual indicator when the player receives damage (Terasology/Health#53). We eventually found the time to follow-up on that, and push it over the finish line (Terasology/Health#67).

From now on, you'll see a visual indicator when being hit. The indicator will hint at where the damage is coming from, e.g., show a flashing read indicator on the left edge of the screen when being hit from the left. If no specific direction can be identified, e.g., if the damage is due to thirst or falling damage, all indicators will flash up at the same time.

Sorted in-game help

Let's end this post with a "service announcement" which also fits the Today I Learned category of things:

ℹī¸ Public Service Announcement: Clean the log files from your ~/.gradle/daemon folder once in a while. I've got over 800 MB in there right now.

(That's the gradle user home directory: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/directory_layout.html#dir:gradle_user_home Windows might name things differently?)