ΞtheriaBuilder

Design

During testing of the new (2021) Etheria build mechanics and compression algorithms, there was an open question about what the public build interface would look like. On one end of the spectrum, this builder could have required users to paste in the entire raw build data. On the other, something akin to 3D Microsoft Paint. The former would have been too technical for most users. The latter is challenging to build (for me, the dev) and likely tedious (for the user).

Thus Etheria Builder is designed to be a balanced middleground that mimicks the process that I used to make the birthday cake (tile 737v1.2), the MetaKey logo (tile 348v1.2), and the space shuttle (tile 797v1.2): it allows the user to write *code* to produce builds.

To visualize why I chose this build method, think about the birthday cake: In a "3D MS Paint"-style interface, the user would have to click literally thousands of bricks to turn them white and pink. In this programmatic interface, the cake layers were made with the formula for a circle and created with just a few lines of code.

(UPDATE Sept 2023: Kitten Mittens bought just such a "3D MS Paint" tool from noted Etheria artists The Moonium and Ctrl+R and has hosted it here: https://eirikulversoy.github.io/Etheria-3D-Voxelizer/)

Security

While these UI design choices are powerful and, at least at the current juncture, optimal, they do introduce a situation where code is being executed on your client machine. However, this should be safe in all cases because...

It's code you wrote (or at least understand)
Browsers run with non-admin privileges
Modern browsers have additional security features that prevent most shenanigans

Even if this builder were hosted on etheria.world, the worst case senario is the user pastes in malicious code that can read the cookies of the site (there aren't any, BTW) or see the Ethereum addresses of any connected accounts. (Under no circumstances, even in this worst case scenario, would any client side code be able to read your private keys or send transactions.)

Out of an abundance of caution, however, I've decided to sandbox this builder to an entirely different domain, EtheriaBuilder.com, where...

No personal information is or will ever be available
No crypto wallet will ever be connected

With this security posture, the worst scenario is you, the user, write or paste code that introduces an infinite loop or other CPU overload, requiring a browser restart.

Upper interface

Tile index - The index of the tile for which you want to simulate a build

Name - The name of your tile, up to 255 ASCII-only chars

Height - The max height of your tile. Set this to the smallest value that still holds your build to keep the gas cost as low as possible.

Palette - Choose your 16- or 64-color palette. Note that a 64-color palette will cost a bit more (in gas) than a 16-color palette. To suggest a new palette, join the Discord and make a request.

Examples - Use this dropdown to load a build you've previously saved (to the browser via cookie) or to load one of the examples.

Render - Any time you make a change to the above data, you must re-render to see how it looks and generate the new hex string for your name+build.

Yours - Clear your current build

Others ± - Load or remove the other builds in this map version (default v1.2). For other versions, load the builder e.g. https://etheriabuilder.com/?version=0.9

Save - Write the current configuration to the browser (via cookie). I recommend saving your builds in a text editor often and not relying on this save feature completely.

Load - Load a saved build from cookies.

Beautify code - Self-explanatory

Middle interface

Palette strip - The numbers associated with each color for the currently selected palette

Code area - Write your build code here

Build bytecode area -After clicking "Render", the compressed bytecode will appear here, ready to be cut-and-pasted onto the chain in the "name" field for a tile (using https://etheria.world/tile_manager.html).

Lower interface

Size - Size in chars and bytes

Est. gas usage - Gas units this build will consume

Est. cost at 50 gwei - Cost in ETH if gas is 50 gwei

Copy result - Save the hex string (containing the name+build data) to your clipboard. Note that this data can be pasted into ANY tile, not just the tile you used while building.

Tile manager - This is a link back to https://etheria.world where you can execute a transaction to push your build data to your tile.