Indie Game Developer. Unity, Unreal and custom projects in: C#, C++, C. Ported homebrews to the PS Vita. Studying game engine development
#Unity#GameDev
Working on our next Dream Disc '25 game for the Sega Dreamcast powered by Raylib, C23, and most evil of all, libGimball!
Our animation system, POPAnim, utilizes libGimbal for function overloading in C23, bringing dark magic OOP where it doesn't belong.
@zeddotdev Zed I want to love you so much, but the application is chugging battery juice so badly on my MacBook Pro 14". I can't get more than about 2 hours of dev time before I have to charge. There's an issue for it on GH, is this something that will be focused on soon?
Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.
Presenting sh4zam, a new hardware accelerated general math and linear algebra library for the Sega Dreamcast's SH4 CPU, providing the optimized routines developed for our Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City ports.
The plan was always to take what we created for GTA and bring it back home to the community at large... It's my hope that this library will allow for all DC developers to fully and efficiently harness the power of the SH4's FPU with their engines, games, and apps.
The library is split into 3 distinct layers, with the lowest layer being a collection of "intrinsics" written in (mostly inline) SH4 assembly. The intrinsics allow for efficient usage of the SIMD and fast-math instructions and provide access to the secondary bank of floating-point registers which holds the active 4x4 matrix... all concepts unknown to GCC.
The second layer is written in C23, with a series of structures provided for vectors, quaternions, and matrices, along with routines implementing their mathematical operations. You'll notice I have opted to both pass-by-value AND return-by-value here... which you would typically think would be a performance no-no...
Fortunately, we can force the compiler to inline these routines, which essentially optimizes away any copying of temporary variables to and from the stack, leaving us with an API that is both efficient AND ergonomic from C, with a high level of composability, since we can now chain calls into each other, passing the return value of one function as the argument to another... vastly superior than having to take each structure parameter by pointer.
Finally, we have a C++23 layer above that, within its own namespace, which simply extends the base C23 structures and implements their operations as a series of wrapper member functions. These wrapper functions also get optimized away by the compiler, but they allow for some modern C++ niceties like overloaded space-ship operators for lexicographical comparisons, overloaded subscript operators for array-like accesses, overloaded arithmetic operators for convenience, etc.
For C programmers, include the .h header files for the C23 API. For C++ programmers, include the .hpp header files for the C++23 API.
If anyone has any requests for math routines to be added to the API or for new operations that should be accelerated, please open a ticket. It's still very early, but I'm actively working on scoping out the entirety of the API and its features!
https://t.co/QWLqwVrymp
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL!? That "very special" new Half-Life compatible engine, Xash3D, which @craf7y24 just BARELY got ported to the Sega Dreamcast the other day? ...Well here's a direct hardware capture of it now bringing us back online with COUNTER STRIKE 1.6 running on the DC!
In addition to fixing the obvious polygon jittering towards the camera's near Z-plane (which, seriously, we have no clue about yet, lmfao), he's also hoping to become the first engine to support downloading custom maps and assets from remote servers and storing them onto the DC with either the SD card or the IDE/SATA hard drive mod!
For the full capture and even more footage of of this engine and various other homebrew, please follow DC-SWAT's YouTube channel. He's the author of DreamShell and posts new captures regularly!
https://t.co/QVxTOaBBFG
Actual hardware capture of the latest build of jnmartin's #Doom 64 port to the Sega #Dreamcast, which has now become the definitive, prettiest way to enjoy the title, with its dynamic lighting and bump mapping. SO MUCH NEW SHIT TO TALK ABOUT:
First of all, this is the very first game to utilize the brand new "hybrid" vertex submission mechanism we just added to KallistiOS. It was a long, cruel week to get all of the issues there sorted out, but they have been, and it has further boosted the game's performance while under load and is now something the rest of the DC community can utilize in their homebrew. This scene in particular used to lag using the traditional, DMA-based vertex submission mechanism with all of the lights and its higher geometric complexity, but notice it's not even dropping a frame now!
Next, support for the Dreamcast's MOUSE and KEYBOARD have been added. These controls play EXTREMELY well and feel like a very smooth, natural way to play the game, if you want the Steam/PC control scheme.
Finally... if there is any doubt as to whether the Dreamcast version is actually the definitive way to the play the game, jnmartin now allows you to export the assets from the (LEGALLY PURCHASED, DAMNIT!!!) Steam version, and import them into the Dreamcast version, where you can enjoy the extra bonus levels and campaign with the new and improved graphics!
THIS IS NOW PUBLICLY AVAILABLE! The project repository, along with the README with build instructions can be found here: https://t.co/6fm62eJqYz
#gamedev #retrogaming #n64
We are honored to be joining our best friends Hail The Sun for their 10 yr anniversary of Wake. When that album came out, we were all in the trenches together sleeping on floors, & saving every pennies for the dollar menu. We are so proud of our bois & how far they have come ❤️
12am tonight. Phenomena II.
The sequel 10 years in the making.
New songs, new characters, new album.
1. Castle in the Sky
2. Daywalker
3. Demon Killer
4. Level 12
5. Eater of Worlds
6. The Last Son
7. Chaos Reigns
8. Death Mask
9. Corruption
10. A World on Fire
11. Enigma II
LMFAO!!! #GTA3 has been under development for the Sega #Dreamcast for just a few weeks, literally just the first baby steps in development, and people are already modding it! 🤣
#gamedev#indiegame#retrocomputing