badsectoracula

Game Coder

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@JKoukourakis Very important terrain editor usability feature: do not treat as just a 2D image you're painting, but also as geometry itself: make it so that you can "grab" and move (vertically) any "vertex" (with falloff). Click and drag to make mountains, etc :-P. Also add noise mode too.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@JKoukourakis I mean for "can i be here?"/"put me somewhere i can walk on around there!" queries/actions, not so much about finding a path, but when moving (e.g following the path) or examining the walkable areas (deciding what to do next). It is a workaround for points not having a volume :-P

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@JKoukourakis I haven't done navmeshes, so i was curious :-). I've only done nodes since they're easy to write, but i remember them limiting. Though, my code was basic :-P. I guess you could store a "validity range" as a disc (for walking) and sphere (for flying) to get some navmesh benefits.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@JKoukourakis It culls most of the invisible stuff (the more the better). Culling is done on the CPU (first it finds visible sectors, then checks mesh/light aaboxes against them) which made it trivial to use for shadow updates too.

Here is a video from when i added it:
https://t.co/eZWPUqdPlR

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@JKoukourakis FWIW in Little Immersive Engine i just place "sector boxes" (AA boxes) by hand in the editor and the engine generates portals between them where they touch. It takes literally seconds to place a sector in the editor (and is used for other stuff too, like environment settings).

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@JKoukourakis In my engine i have it a bit easier since the world is broken in sectors and portals already but it should be easy with your setup too. Check how the original Thief did it as well as recent Hitman games, which use a very similar idea. Also check the Dead Space remake devlogs too.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@JKoukourakis Audio propagation should be easy too: if source is in another zone, use touching/overlapping zone area centers as vertices on paths representing openings and do a pathfinding-like search to find the closest opening in listener's zone and play the audio from there.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

Just released a new version of my View3D plugin for #krita that adds Krita 6 support, visibility masks to isolate parts of a 3D model, moat generation (to avoid issues with mipmaps/bilinear filtering) and a bunch of fixes.

https://t.co/gw0IqDnWyQ

https://t.co/8ZTyUCcqrc

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@BugoTheCat @SebAaltonen This is something i could have done myself by hand and it is something i've done a lot by hand (that code has moved between various projects and languages ranging from JS to Java to C, C#, Pascal, etc over 20+ years :-P) but it is just a mind numbingly boring syntax edit+tweak.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@BugoTheCat @SebAaltonen I find LLMs to be useful for boring tasks, especially if you have written a lot of code over the years. E.g i recently wanted a matrix function in C, so i put some Pascal code i wrote and know it works in an LLM and told it to convert it to C following the existing coding style.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@BugoTheCat @VinciusMedeiro6 I wonder if they also had to restart from scratch at some point considering they made their engine in Turbo Pascal (the demo has debug symbols that show all Pascal filenames of their engine) and i think Scavenger wanted to target Saturn (and probably Playstation) at the time.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@BugoTheCat @VinciusMedeiro6 AFAIK it was cancelled because their publisher at the time (Scavenger) ran themselves thin by having little money and too many projects they couldn't finish on time, so they bankrupted and that took Triton with them.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@romero @idSoftware Great video John, not only its contents (of course) but also how you edited and narrated it :-).

Also i had a "wait, what?" moment when the Keen scrolling came on screen, thinking "was there a Keen with sidebar inventory?" before i realized it was a tech demo for a Keen 7 :-P.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@punclizme @pymike00 @MarvinTBaumann No need to imagine much, Gopher was an alternative to WWW made in US and after it gained some traction the University of Minnesota (where Gopher was made) tried to charge licensing fees, making everyone scatter to WWW.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@SquaredApe @GreyAlien FWIW since this seems to be for spawning only, it wouldn't matter in a 90s PC either :-P.

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@panoskarabelas Minor correction (FWIW, if anything). Turns out i wrote the code before i played CP2077: i uploaded a video for shadows in Oct 2020 https://t.co/m4q8iE6vmW but the game was relased Dec 2020. Not sure how i thought of that, i don't appreciate getting older affecting my memory :-P

[badsectoracula @badsectoracula]

@panoskarabelas Amusingly, i didn't knew about smap atlases when i wrote that stuff, at the time i was playing CP2077 which had a bunch of shadow bugs (near objects shadows would visibly change res, shadows would stop updating, etc) and i was thinking what sort of approach could cause these :-P