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[Kyzrati]

I ended up putting that Steam Winter Sale post up on Gamasutra, with mostly the same data but somewhat updated text.

This week in development was mostly about achievements. The finalized list for our first batch includes 255 of them o_O. Yesterday I was working on ASCII icons for every one...


I also multithreaded some of Cogmind's heaviest data loading, cutting startup time by at least 30%. Details on that over in my r/roguelikedev update.

[matriax]

The amount of love/work in this game (code/ascii) is just amazing.

Also the comments until the minor detail and sharing any stats of gameplay/revenue makes this thread a totally must watch for game development.

This makes me continue my old RPG-ascii idea (https://i.imgur.com/1aXYn23.png) but damn, looking all what you did i got tired soon XD.

So, well, congratulations for the success and keep up the good work

[Kyzrati]

Dang, matriax, that screenshot is awesome Definitely going in my inspirations folder!

I'm sure you'd have some instant fans with that...

And thanks :D

[Zireael]

Dang, matriax, that screenshot is awesome Definitely going in my inspirations folder!

I'm sure you'd have some instant fans with that...

And thanks :D

The screenshot is indeed awesome, the walls <3 <3

[Kyzrati]

I cut down Cogmind's startup time by 30% via multithreading! Cogmind can take a while to start up because pretty much all data is loaded right at the start, which for years was fine, but it's continued to grow all this time and sequentially loading everything was starting to be quite a drag, made all the more noticeable by the fact that I have (and prefer to keep) a blank screen while the game starts. Windows might even decide pop up a nice little "this program is not responding" notice.

I'll deal with that message separately later, but more important is that it shouldn't really take so long to get into the game, so I took the three largest chunks of data and multithreaded them. Fortunately this was quite easy to do since each is mostly raw data that in this case really doesn't care about the existence of the others. The three chunks are GUI particle scripts, map particle scripts, and sound effects. (The only exception was particles that needed to reference sound effects, so for that I added some code to link them up after all the threads completed.) Highlighted profiling data for some potential optimization candidates:



So what kind of savings are we looking at? In my test build scenario, startup took 19.13s, including 6.27 for GUI particles, 3.98s for sfx, and 2.31s for map particles. That's 12.56 seconds for three things that can essentially be loaded in parallel. Post-multithreading profiling:



The main thread sleeps for 6.81s, meaning that basically the steps that previously took 12.56s were instead crammed into 6.81s. So startup time on many machines has been cut by approximately one-third... Nice :D

There's more optimization that could be done, but this was the easy stuff and most other work would have significantly diminishing returns so isn't worth it right now. I also left all the old sequential loading code intact so that I can switch over to that with a debugging option in order to properly debug any loading issues, just in case. It's not the kind of thing that usually has issues, but if it does it'll be nice to keep it single-threaded because multithreaded debugging is just asking for trouble and confusion.

Some more images and progress updates in this week's SITREP. (Also Cogmind happens to be on sale right now...)

[JobLeonard]

Nice. Also, you're a lucky bastard in the sense that the loading process wasn't all tangled up

Windows might even decide pop up a nice little "this program is not responding" notice. I'll deal with that message separately later

What are your plans for that?

[Kyzrati]

Nice. Also, you're a lucky bastard in the sense that the loading process wasn't all tangled up

I am a lucky bastard

I was a bit worried about that before starting, but I spent all of two hours on this to get the great results I did, and it was nearly as simple as creating some threads and calling functions from there instead of sequentially in the main thread, which now just waits for them all to finish. Very happy with that...

Windows might even decide pop up a nice little "this program is not responding" notice. I'll deal with that message separately later

What are your plans for that?

While I don't want to have any kind of loading screen, I've heard that you can just occasionally pump the event queue for Windows messages and it keeps that from happening. Makes sense I guess. Windows doesn't really know what the game is doing unless you at least check for system messages, which is something a program should do pretty much every loop under normal circumstances. Otherwise for all Windows knows the game could be hanging in some infinite loop, even if what it's really doing is chugging away loading internal resources.

[JobLeonard]

That makes a lot of sense, actually. So basically you just need to send a few noops to keep Windows happy.

[Kyzrati]

Busy week!

I added a fourth type of map panning, of the RTS variety where you put the cursor against the edge of the screen.


But the biggest progress was made in the area of achievements... all 256 are now decided and listed in the game data, but still have to be implemented xD


I also did a mockup of the achievements UI, also still to be actually implemented...

I like it though, pretty and functional :D (Note that the icons don't actually match the achievements, and there are duplicate names--this is just a mockup so I wasn't worrying about everything being logical/perfect )

That's the latest one, where an earlier version was using my original darker version for locked/unknown achievement icons which I don't think looks quite as good in context? Not 100% sure...


At size 14 I also added an IBM VGA font for the map ASCII. Now there's some nostalgia!

[Zireael]

That map ASCII... ah, my heart! :D

[Kyzrati]

Exactly my response to that font

Too bad it's only really great at its native size in all its pixelated juiciness, otherwise I'd gladly enable it at all sizes.

[JobLeonard]

I added a fourth type of map panning, of the RTS variety where you put the cursor against the edge of the screen.

Yes.
YES!

But the biggest progress was made in the area of achievements...

Wrong. I mean, yeah, the other stuf is nice too but...

I added a fourth type of map panning, of the RTS variety where you put the cursor against the edge of the screen.

AWW HECK YISS!!!!!! 

That map ASCII... ah, my heart! :D

^

[Kyzrati]

Wow you wanted that kind of panning too?! Funny how no one mentioned this in years--just finally got one person making a request on Steam... I've been gradually adding more methods, but in general map panning isn't needed all that often so I never gave it a ton of attention. Too bad this panning style requires true fullscreen, so all the windowed fullscreen players won't be able to use it

[JobLeonard]

You know the feeling when you have some kind of mild chronic pain that you're so used to you're not really aware of it, but only realize it was there when it goes away and you feel the relief? For example, I have it often after sleeping well after long periods of mild sleep depriviation (I get headaches in response to stimuli when I'm tired. Coffee, weirdly enough, doesn't make me feel awake so much as it is a painkiller in this context).

That's what this is: "Oh yeah, I guess I really missed that! Except for the part where the rest was enjoyable enough for me to not really notice until now..." Guess there was just too much other good stuff in the game distracting me from it

[Kyzrati]

I'm sure there are other things, yeah. It's funny if we went back to the first release in 2015, which seemed great, even that simply pales in comparison to the current version. So many features that didn't scream for implementation at the time but have since popped into my head while playing, or brought up by some random player, and now we couldn't live without them!

[Kyzrati]

New achievement icons! This is the set for Style-related achievements.


If you didn't notice I also started another thread for a new game which just happens to be rather Cogmind-ish (but still very much its own thing--plays very differently, check it out!)

(More about that and what I've been up to in this week's update on Steam.)

[Kyzrati]

Heads up that I posted the first part of my 7DRL postmortem over in the POLYBOT-7 thread, worth mentioning here because it has a lot to do with Cogmind! The series will be detailing how I converted this into a different experience for the jam.

[Kyzrati]

A couple new sets of achievement icons! (sheesh there are a lot of these things xD)

"Special Challenges" category:


"Progress" category:


I've also added Part 2 of my 7DRL postmortem to the blog, covering the first few days and work on core mechanics, the UI, and tileset concepts (it'll also be in the dedicated POLYBOT-7 thread in a bit--haven't gotten to it yet ). In any case it has a lot to do with Cogmind, as mentioned before.

[Kyzrati]

Another set of icons, this one for the events and plot-related achievements.

Almost finally done going through all these!

The "LOW_CONTRAST" renderFilter option I added in Beta 5 has been getting some use among players, though it was always kind of a hackish thing in the first place. Lots of Cogmind code and scripts assume the background is black, but I went in and changed that assumption in a number of places where it was more accessible. All of these improvements came as a result of efforts to polish the distinctive look of POLYBOT-7, which uses a low-contrast aesthetic by default. For example:

Path visualization is now much more visible. (All sample images are using the SLEEPY preset.)



FOV edges are somewhat easier to see.



(The following are all before-and-after gifs demonstrating adjustments.)

Activating an Optical Array.



Motion trail fading.



AOE visualization edges.



Structural Scanner and cave-in visualization.



SFX visualization.

[Kyzrati]

I finished my POYLBOT-7 postmortem and put the entire 10,000-word 45-image/diagram article on Gamasutra! (They even have it featured on their front page right now :D)

I'm mentioning it here since it's quite relevant to Cogmind dev, not only due to the enhancements that came out of it but because it also explains a fair bit of how Cogmind is put together that it was able to be converted into another game in one week.

Dev image collage: