Ian Kettlewell

Developer and designer.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

Today I'm open-sourcing Tangle: a new library that automatically 'entangles' and syncs WebAssembly.

Play with the demo: https://t.co/Q2fAy2gAEN
And check out the code: https://t.co/MnTd8KLAV7

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@Mohsenkhajavin1 Thanks for the idea! I like the idea of wipers for mud and water. I'll add that eventually!

I don't know if I want dirt on the camera. It would look cool but it also could be frustrating. It's subtle but so far I'm also treating the camera as a human eye not a camera.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

Vehicle skins + more lighting improvements!

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

Before I was using AgX tone mapping, which looks good overall, but it was straying far from what the real locations looked like and it was limiting the usefulness of wider gamuts like Display P3's.

However the new tone mapping approach may look less "cinematic".

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

Immediately after this earlier tweet I went down a rabbit hole that's led to the largest lighting and look changes so far.

I'm still deciding on if it's a good call.

Before / after at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park with a low sun on the horizon:

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

Quite pleased with how the lighting is coming together in this game.

This is running on a MacBook Air in Chrome at 60 fps.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

With the various custom game engines I've made I've always wanted them to support Display P3 and they kinda have, but never in a way that showed up in 3D scenes. No more!

Now you can have your very bright sand extra bright and your cyan truck eye-bleedingly cyan!

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@Seanmclem On desktop and Android (I believe?) that's not an issue. It would be iOS where they'd have a problem.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

It would be difficult, but I wonder if Epic will try to port Fortnite to web.

They've been fighting app stores and platform holders. Web's advantage is it has no gatekeepers and it's like a game is always installed, which has retention advantages.

[Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic]

It's a new age of game development! This is the Unreal Engine 5.9 preview, consisting of huge improvements to AI acceleration ported from unfinished Unreal Engine 6, plus entirely new support for play inside web browsers.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@00989757833479B Thanks!

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

Quite pleased with how the lighting is coming together in this game.

This is running on a MacBook Air in Chrome at 60 fps.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@Mohsenkhajavin1 Thanks for the feedback! Some of that exists already. Your vehicle can definitely get dirtier and it leaves tracks in soft sand.

I'm probably not going to make the windows transparent because I don't want to add a real human visible driving.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@Rolf_of_the_Son I haven't. I've watched some videos for inspiration but I should actually play them.

A big inspiration here is actually the old Trials games if you're familiar. This is a bit like that but with an extra dimension.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@Rolf_of_the_Son I want to have at least some rock crawling be part of the game. I'm still tuning the physics to make it work well.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

Game design & optimization are both very difficult and nuanced. Looking at most of the demos coming out they check the boxes of being a game but don't succeed in hard to articulate ways.

I'm both curious about and fearful of the possibility of AI bridging that "taste" gap.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

With the state of AI today I think these "one shot" game demos are impressive but hard to make into something players want.

There's so much perf & design importance in small details and it can be very difficult to correct those problems when the AI progresses in such big chunks.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@feidoes3d It's custom! Originally it was my own hand-written engine that I've had kicking around for years but I've been expanding its capabilities a bunch with AI-assisted code.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

This would be a positive thing for web. Web has many of the pieces to make games great, but there's a lot of rough edges because for a long time now games haven't been a big priority for browser maintainers.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@invalid_degen @threejs @WebGL_WebGPU @WebGPU @80Level As someone also making dunes and sand and driving in the browser I'm envious of how good your sand & dunes look here.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@WrongNebula This is extremely impressive work! I thought the 2nd image was just a photo.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

@krismicinski I've been experimenting with a tiny language on Metamath Zero and Peano arithmetic. It works, but I haven't managed to get velocity to where I want it.

Agents get bogged down in verbosity and lack of familiarity.

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

I've been putting lots of optimizations, backend work, and graphical improvements into this but the most fun new feature of the last few days is vehicle skins!

[Ian Kettlewell @kettlecorn]

More graphics improvements + a preliminary map system.