Abdullah Al-Rasheed

#Golang Ninja and developer of @uAdminio I talk about tech lifestyle
[email protected]

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

🎬 Finally got the "shell" of my RTS #DroneWars feeling like a real game!

The intro is a "living comic" made from static art, all animated in-engine with @godotengine.

#gamedev #indiedev #GodotEngine #RTS

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

If you use #Flutter, I'm sure you have noticed how slow cryptography could be with the native libraries. I have just published my secret sauce, BoringSSL FFI for flutter

https://t.co/QdiptEpyVY

It's open source, in production for over a year. blazing fast, for Android and iOS

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

@AdilAlsuhaim @Google You got so used to over-the-air updates that you forgot that iPhone and iPad used to require a Windows/MacOS computer with iTunes and an Apple account to update the OS. The process was pretty much offline and took a looong time

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

A final slightly improved version

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

What do you think of the tesla VFX. After hours of tweeking I cannot really judge my own work anymore.

#gamedev #indiegame

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

Then I used the texture of both meshes to make the lightning effect visible from any angle. With a little shader magic, I applied alpha, and a little over lay color to make it start blue-ish then fade to yellowish and disappear all within 400ms

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

Building construction in #DroneWars is finally done. Is uses an approach similar to one of my favorite games Red Alert 2 (Spend-then-place). Also, I hope you noticed the new UI on the right. I'm going for a sci-fi look for the UI to match the theme of the game.

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

Long story short, I used everything thing I have learned over the past 30 years in development to make this. It looks like it should be an easy thing, but it's far from that. This ranks in the top 10 hardest problems I have ever dealt with!

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

Destination formation algorithm in action. This was a lot more complex that I thought (Thread)

#DroneWars #GameDev #IndieGame

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

The solution was closer to distance sorting. Sort X and Y distances separately! then start assigning based on the direction vector taking either X or Y as the main loop and the other as the inner loop based on the direction vector!

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

This turned out to be a much more complex problem than I though. You cannot process this like other things every frame! The way this is done is using area detection with masks so units don't detect friendly units which would be a CPU nightmare.

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

Fresh units are rolling off the factory line in #DroneWars... and they've already been spotted. The enemy doesn't mess around.

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

The boring details for people who like game dev:
Spawning new units was the easy part. But I finally managed to get the buildings to act like buildings. The other part of this is the detection. This has to be lightweight enough to work with 100s of units moving around the map...

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

The trick is to "fake" high detailed mesh with good materials and normal maps. For example, the ground is actually flat. The bumps you see there are just an optical illusion with lights and shadow.

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

I have been working on the art work of Drone Wars. Drone look like drones now

[Abdullah Al-Rasheed @twistedhardware]

Creating good art work for the ground is a lot more work that I thought. All the tricks I have learned over the years working on Blender rendering is useless in game dev. The fact the poly count is everything for real time rendering make it impossible to make good designs ...