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[Ky.]

While slitherio was never really my cup of tea, my kids eat these kinds of games up for breakfast.

I showed my oldest some of the screenshots and she's interested in playing it, calling it "weird but cute" (she's 7 haha)

How's been your experience working with AngelScript so far?

[Schrompf]

While slitherio was never really my cup of tea, my kids eat these kinds of games up for breakfast.

I showed my oldest some of the screenshots and she's interested in playing it, calling it "weird but cute" (she's 7 haha)

Thanks to you daughter. Mine just asks what happens, but she's three, so she has an excuse.

How's been your experience working with AngelScript so far?

The worm thing doesn't even use scripting. Some other projects fared well. While the syntax and some of the API registration are cumbersome, I really enjoyed using my operator overloads for vectors, matrix, colours and such in script. And scripting in general is prone to typos - you have a whole lot of variables and functions that are defined secretly inside the game. Angelscript at least throws errors on compile, while Lua and such silently create new vars.

Still - these days I mostly opt for Visual Studio's Edit&Continue and implement most logic directly in C++. Level scripting is still scripting, but AI and enemy behaviour is C++.

[Schrompf]

I implemented some infrastructure into Snake World. I don't know if there's an official name for this, I call it "Activity Windowing": the server only replicates entities and activities close to the client's avatar. This required an entity-abstract acceleration structure, I opted for a simple grid of id lists. Gotta use this for other spatial queries, too, but I'll put it on the list for later.

I made a small video to get into the habit of doing PR. Implemented a little static central cheater camera for this, and promptly found a bug in the hysteresis. If the player accidentally moves back and forth over a grid cell border, I didn't want the server to spawn and despawn entities over and over again, so the activity window around a player is supposed to keep stuff behind the player longer than it spawns new stuff in front of the player. It's fixed now, but the video doesn't show this yet.

https://streamable.com/5m6y1z

Some day I learn how to embed a video in here.

[marcgfx]

Looks cool!
I think you can embed youtube, but nothing else. Just post the URL but it does not work in the preview

[oahda]

Progressing nicely! That FPS is impressive too.

[Schrompf]

Thanks! It's a beefy machine, though, so my M4D c0D3r sKILLz are only partly to blame.

And thanks for the video hint. I put it on my lonely youtube channel

[Schrompf]

First steps to Customization. Hardcoded dummy colour selection, sent from Client to server inside the SpawnRequest, validated at the server, stored per entity, replicated to all affected clients, only to be rendered as ABGR instead of ARGB. But well... at least there's some progress. Next stop: skins and silly hats.

(Click for large lossless version)

[marcgfx]

http://www.splitterwelten.info/privat/worm_0018_small.jpg
img in a link does not seem to work. Weird... I guess there is some other issue, are you blocking access to that folder. Preventing hot-linking or something like that. I can get to the image url just fine, but can't add it in an img tag.

[Schrompf]

Really? Both small preview .jpg and click-through large .png work for me. What exactly do you see or not see?

Oh, and it's http only, while TigSource is https, so maybe your browser has a security feature that prevents downgrading to http.

[fall_ark]

Ha, the rainbow version kinda reminds me of that ugly cute bean shaped mascot (epilepsy warning at the end). Maybe you could make its eyes bigger too.

[marcgfx]

Yeah, it works on this computer, not sure if it was my macbook or linux. Guess the problem was on my end!
Interested to see where you will go with this project, worms and tentacles are a good start.

[Schrompf]

Basis customization is rendering: skin (the pattern on the worm body), mouth or beard, eyes or glasses, hat on top. I also enlarged the view a bit, you still see enough ahead in any direction, but now everything feels a bit more relevant.

Click to enlarge

[JobLeonard]

How does the camera work anyway? Is it centered on the worm or does it project a little into the direction that it is moving/turning? I can imagine that the latter would feel good if the parameters are tweaked just right

[Schrompf]

Currently it's fixed to the head. But I like the idea of looking ahead. I could center the camera to a point slightly ahead of the snake's head. Or I could even center the camera slightly towards the mouse pointer. You currently play by mouse, the worm changes direction towards the pointer over time. Using this feature I could allow a quick glance in any direction while the worm only wiggles around a bit. Hm. Gotta try that some day.

[JobLeonard]

I guess it would depend on whether clicking is used for targeting something in the world or not - pointing with the cursor to click on things would be more of a hassle, but "mouselook" would probably be nicer.

[vdapps]

Yep, more zoom-in looks definitively better, hopefully it will not impact gameplay negatively (you can see less what's around).

[Schrompf]

I finally conceded that I'm a mere hobbyist. But this liberated me from pushing the same project all the time, I'm now happily jumping back and forth whenever I deem something interesting. And now I had an idea about how to fix the continuity of my walls, so I jumped back to Snake World.

My solution: I simply render every cell as separate entity. My walls are voronoi cells, so everyone of them in isolation is guaranteed to be convex. Now I put up 8 plane equations into each vertex, calculate the signed distance to each, smoothmax() them together with iniquilez' handy formula and put a gradient on it. It's much more "on brand" now, a bunch of cells as seen in a microscope. The look is still to be improved, but for now I'm satisfied.

[oahda]

I'm not sure I realised this was taking place inside some larger organism before, so in addition to looking neat it makes that clear too! Maybe you could even add a little nucleus blob inside each cell?

[JobLeonard]

Yeah, and little floating dots and stuff to represent organelles

[Schrompf]

There will be, I hope. Thanks for the comments, I'll keep you posted.