BioGrid

There aren't enough ecology sims out there. I think I'm gonna try to make one.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@phoneSchaja Agreed, it needs proper non-abstract icons for the eye to anchor to, it's too visually uniform at the moment.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

Lots of work on plant composition. Metabolism, size, soil/water preferences, all derive from specific organs now, and there's a "tech/evolution tree" of sorts for each slot, going from simple to specialized types. Here's some UI panels that try to summarize all this new info:

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@JanOrszulik Thanks! Ideally I'd let an actual artist loose on this at some point - it mostly works as this pure SCSS/SVG wireframe, but some raster graphics, fills and textures would improve it a lot.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@twpl_logan Not sure, I haven't checked out that area for a few years and it doesn't compile at the moment 🤷
I'll get around to it eventually, but the demo will probably ship without it.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

Testing grip and physical impacts - losing footing turns an entity into an active ragdoll, basically.
The physical model is really simple but has a proper inertia tensor that gives some fun real-worldish results - compact bodies tumble less and tend to survive falls more often.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@ViniciusLima087 Sure, that's a huge part of what it does. Scroll down a bit on my profile and have a look.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@TheOneRavenous Fun idea, but I have no idea if/how one could load custom burst-compiled jobs into the game? It might end up getting an internal API surface for tiny neural networks as advanced brains but tbh the entities are probably too short-lived and ephemeral for anything bigger.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

A new tool for poking and tossing stuff around. Just...try not to overcharge it.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

Some UI theme experiments. I've built it with CSS variables, so designing and switching them at runtime is pretty easy, everything depends on 10 or so color variables.
I always assumed it'd be a dark-themed UI, but light looks pretty cool too?

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@denis_80s I tried it a while ago, it was...better, but seemed undercooked at that time. And all those XML-based XAML-like systems feel pretty clunky. The main issue though is that UI is complex, and these tools can never catch up to historical work and effort that HTML/JS has received.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

Making my game UI in Angular like some crazy person just to spite Unity

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@TheOneRavenous Sure, but I'm not trying to be super accurate, sorry😅
Whatever real concepts it has, they're distilled and simplified a lot for gameplay - about the same as what Simcity is to real urban planning, I guess.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

Doing some work on terraforming tools and god powers. Here's a fun one - a core sampler for checking what the terrain composition is like.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@denis_80s Yep, I'm using an embedded chromium browser. It has its pros and cons. In some ways its more restrictive, but you get the whole CSS and layout engine, typographical features, 3rd party libraries, event handlers, etc...

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@TheOneRavenous Nah, the perspective is just deceptive. It's not a mountain, just an overgrown sandbank by the river, maybe 5-10 meters high.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@JanOrszulik Not at the moment. The footage doesn't survive video compression very well anyway, it's full of 1px lines and microdetails, even uncompressed video is something very different than what it actually renders.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

Big refactor for particles, it's now alpha-blended with depth-aware upscaling. The dust plumes on cliffs when I add sand there are something new - avalanches. Basically, when granular material slips from a slope, it makes everything nearby also likely to slip and that propagates.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@fixitorgotojail Ah, no, it's massively sped up. That's been a huge tuning headache, but I've mostly got it now - erosion and deposition are fast, but also fall into steady states quickly. There's various slope/cover/bump factors and laplacians to keep the terrain from turning into mush.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

Timelapse of all the geological sim features working together on bare bedrock - avalanches, rock crumbling, sand and soil creation and so on.
Seems okay - I can let players start out with all sorts of weird terrains and trust that it'll become something plausible over time.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@fixitorgotojail It runs the dynamics and erosion for the entire region once every second, it's not really related to player at all.

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@ZealotDKD Unity

[BioGrid @BioGridGame]

@dynamica_jbacon I have a design document but I've just been focusing on building it, not community stuff. I'll try to get something up soon to explain what this project is.