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March 29, 2024, 07:51:26 AM

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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsPERSONAL SPACE - A story of galactic exploration and interior decorating
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Author Topic: PERSONAL SPACE - A story of galactic exploration and interior decorating  (Read 23721 times)
oahda
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« Reply #80 on: February 29, 2020, 11:16:34 AM »

Maybe Ko-fi would be a better fit? C:
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nova++
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« Reply #81 on: February 29, 2020, 11:18:54 AM »

Maybe Ko-fi would be a better fit? C:

I've thought about that too. I think it needs you to give all of your paypal info (full name, email address, etc) to anyone who donates and I dunno how comfortable I am with that...
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nkm
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« Reply #82 on: February 29, 2020, 12:33:14 PM »

I don't know but why don't you just try it out for a while, see where it goes?

I guess people would want to pay you to support the creation of the game. That's the justification.

The downside is that you have to manage all the backer communication.
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nova++
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« Reply #83 on: March 01, 2020, 01:34:57 AM »

This is all kind of devolving into wondering how engaging and valid the game idea really is in the first place. I don't want to bore anyone. There's not much traditional "game" at all... but gluing on such elements doesn't feel right either.

I guess relatedly, I don't know how I'm going to teach the player how the newtonian flight physics works. Adjusting the trajectory of a free-flying object in vacuum with thrusters is not intuitive to most. I have visions of mass refunds and bad reviews if I don't explain it in an absolutely perfect way that everyone can understand.

I don't want to stop, but sometimes I wonder if there even is a light at the end of this tunnel. But I need to finish something.

Maybe I should just go to bed.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2020, 02:53:46 AM by NovaSilisko » Logged

nkm
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« Reply #84 on: March 01, 2020, 06:23:47 AM »

It's funny, I'm currently struggling with the same questions. How do you teach the player the game's systems while keeping it fun? And is the game any fun to begin with? For me, the latter question is very important to get answered before I start working on more levels.

I've let some people playtest the first game world to get some feedback on the gameplay and it became immediately clear that a tutorial was needed as people struggled with the controls. So before I can expect any gameplay feedback at all I've first got to nail down the tutorial part.

To teach flight mechanics (both newtonian and atmospheric) I was thinking of having the player fly a certain course. This allows them to get a feel for inertia and atmopheric drag and such. Maybe this will work for your game as well?

Btw. I found this video to be very useful:


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nova++
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« Reply #85 on: March 01, 2020, 08:10:37 AM »

Despite it being contrary to the attention spans of most people (sometimes myself included), one thing I've really wanted to do is have a detailed in-universe spacecraft operator's manual describing flight mechanics and common repair procedures (possibly splitting those into two volumes). A more interactive tutorial can exist alongside that, but also having that manual written as if it's a real object in the world has a strong appeal to me.

I also wonder if said manual could be made engaging enough that it doesn't feel like a chore to look through to get the basic idea of the flight mechanics. I'm a bit skeptical on that, though, even if it wouldn't feel that way for me.

Though when it comes to the repair mechanics, I kind of feel like it would be essential until you learn what a given system does. If you start noticing your hyperdrive chugging on power-up, you can open to the hyperdrive servicing section, find the symptom you've been noticing, then go to the corresponding page telling you what could be wrong. But once you've done it a few times, you will intuitively recognize the sound and know "I need to re-adjust the turbo encabulator"

Is it weird that that sounds pretty engaging and immersive to me? Mind you it won't be a frequent thing, that's important. You might get several dozen long jumps out of the drive before anything starts even slightly acting up.

Getting back on track, though, it also might be possible to not have to trouble the player too much with a lot of the details of flight. I'm going to have a lot of autopilot systems to help things go smoother. The single most useful one, and certainty the one that will be most-used, will be the velocity cancel autopilot, which just automatically points your ship retrograde and fires the engines to bring your velocity down to zero. Auto-land will do basically the same thing, but will attempt to time the burn to bring you nearly to zero at a few kilometers up, then attempt to gently set your ship down on its landing thrusters afterward. The player could potentially just rely on those two systems and the hyperdrive to get almost anywhere in the game, honestly.

Maybe I'll make a tiny demo project with about the same UI and flight mechanics and try various ways to explain it to people and see what works the best.
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nova++
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« Reply #86 on: March 02, 2020, 09:34:02 AM »

Nice to dunk my head down and get lost in systems and stuff for a while... for the longest time, due to its nature, the terrain renderer didn't have any culling. The procedural geometry that only lives in video memory meant it couldn't be culled ahead of time by the CPU, so the temporary solution was to just render everything all at once. But now I've started making a GPU culling solution for it, and changed it from renderers attached to objects to a fully scripted indirect rendering method with culling. The actual tests aren't done; it needs to properly check against the view frustum, but it's already knocked off 50% from the number of chunks it has to render even without that. Need to make sure the culling routine isn't impacting performance too much though.

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nova++
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« Reply #87 on: March 06, 2020, 01:01:47 PM »

Not much terribly exciting. Trying to make myself do boring stuff, but I keep getting distracted. I found something to re-implement that's less boring, though - hyperdrive FX. Still not done, but here's the new hyper-bubble shader.



Previously, this was achieved with a mess of particle effects and meshes, but now it's all unified into a single shader and one particle effect for the little dust streaks nearby. Here's what it looks like from behind the curtain, revealing the forced perspective trickery going on:

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nova++
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« Reply #88 on: March 08, 2020, 12:07:04 AM »

I'll write a bit more on this when I'm less tired, but I wanted to show some of the terrain landforms I've been working on. I'm really trying to produce something interesting without going too crazy with layering of noise...

From the ground:




From space (with atmosphere off):
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oahda
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« Reply #89 on: March 08, 2020, 01:36:06 AM »

Looking good! Also liking that simple solution for the hyperdrive.
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nova++
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« Reply #90 on: March 08, 2020, 10:13:40 PM »

Trying to stop myself from obsessing over this too much. It's one thing to paint a planet directly, but another thing entirely to try to tell a stupid robot how to build the planet you want. And make it look good with a variety of inputs...



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nova++
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« Reply #91 on: March 10, 2020, 12:09:35 PM »

Just another photoshoot...





« Last Edit: March 10, 2020, 12:15:03 PM by NovaSilisko » Logged

nova++
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« Reply #92 on: March 14, 2020, 09:03:40 AM »

Took the plunge and started doing something I've had in mind for a while now - a modular autopilot system. Previously all the autopilot code was just written directly into the spacecraft class, handled with a state machine. But that quickly grows quite long, and requires adding and managing new states any time I want to add another type of automation to the spacecraft.

So, instead, I went to a module-based approach with a simple base autopilot class that talks to the same systems the ship does (engines, autopilot, physics, etc) and simply reports when it's finished after being set running. From the ship's position, all it does is run the desired module and wait for it to be done (and send an abort signal if the player so requests it). It's much easier to make new autopilot functionality now.

This does not lend itself well to pictures. Sorry. Rest assured it's neat.





In other plunges I've taken, I made an important optimization to distant textures that turned out to be easier than I thought.

Distant textures are stored as a cubemap because it's very easy to sample them for planetary surfaces without needing any sort of UV seams on the mesh, no polar distortion, etc. But until this point, generating them has required generating all 6 faces at once, regardless of what the player can actually see, which is obviously wasteful of resources (especially as the terrain gets denser with detail, I need to take whatever optimization opportunities I can get), so something a bit smarter was needed.



Testing visibility of the faces of a cubemap on a sphere is a pain. I'm still not doing it in an ideal way. I'm currently comparing the angle from the viewpoint to the horizon with the angle from the viewpoint to the angle of the face in question, and assuming said face subtends a circle covering all corners of the face wrapped onto that section of the sphere. It could be better, but I haven't come up with a fully accurate one yet.

Still. It works, and reduces the load of generating the distant textures by half or more, which is always one of the heaviest operations just due to the number of operations required for every pixel on it.

...cause I really don't wanna reduce texture resolution if I can help it.



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oahda
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« Reply #93 on: March 14, 2020, 10:57:04 AM »

Continually impressed at the pace of your updates, and often fairly complex-seeming stuff too. This is just looking better and better! The texture on that planet is gorgeous.
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nova++
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« Reply #94 on: March 24, 2020, 06:39:45 PM »

Feel like I should pipe up again with an anticlimax. Haven't been doing much here lately. Been dealing with, you know, the usual pandemic stuff, and also giving other projects some attention. And actually playing games for once instead of working myself into the grave on exclusively making them.
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nova++
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« Reply #95 on: April 14, 2020, 12:15:44 PM »

HI THERE

Yesterday and today I started bringing back gas giants for either the third or fourth time, but this time with something new.

They're not done. As you can see here, they are presently just solid-colored orbs which resemble Uranus:



Cool stripes and swirlies and turbulence will come later. Soon, but later.

But that's not the main thing. I made an addition to gas giants this time around to make approaching them actually have some sense of place for once - a "basement" cloud deck (currently just represented as a displaced disk mesh that follows you around)



This is not the full volumetric cloud system I would like to have (that will come later...), but so far I think it gives a nice impression. The next step is going to be fading in a sphere of fog around the player when they cross over the cloud layer, which would then get darker and darker as you descend into the endless abyss.

As for some background, that's where things get more interesting I think. This is both a derivative of the old ocean surface renderer and a precursor to its new incarnation. That system also used a disk that followed you around, but it was slow and recalculated vertices to match the planet's curvature CPU-side.

This time it's a bit different - the curvature of the disk and the resulting normals and such are calculated in a compute shader periodically, with the offsets from the original disk vertices placed into a buffer. The data from that buffer is then read by the cloud shader's vertex function, which displaces its vertices based on both those offsets, and an overlaid heightmap used to generate the bumpiness you see there. That's what the updated ocean will use later on, just with tessellation to ramp up the detail up close.

Overall, I'm not 100% satisfied with the look of it - obviously, to be truely cloudly, it needs to be fluffier. But perhaps attaching some particles to the top of it would help in that illusion. And as mentioned, once volumetric clouds enter the equation, this whole thing might end up deprecated. But we'll see.

One last aside - if I invert the high/low colors of the shader and flip the mesh over, it looks extremely convincing as a representation of the underside of some storm clouds:

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Schrompf
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« Reply #96 on: April 14, 2020, 01:20:39 PM »

I like it. And I want to descend into it sooo bad, looking around for giant jelly fish or hovering alien platforms.
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nova++
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« Reply #97 on: April 17, 2020, 07:49:41 PM »

THE RETURN OF THE RETURN OF GAS GIANTS



In the process I unified the distant texture allocator a little bit. Originally it was going to be two almost completely separate paths for gas giants and planets with terrain, but I soon realized all of the differences were easily reconciled into a single path with just a few checks for which generator to run.
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nkm
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« Reply #98 on: April 17, 2020, 10:28:36 PM »

Nice, digging the color palette.

What will you be able to do on a gas giant?
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oahda
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« Reply #99 on: April 21, 2020, 04:57:15 AM »

 Kiss Like a pretty marble.
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