Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Bad Sector]

Managed to get animations running. Because my pixel shader does isometric projection on its own

Shouldn't projection be on the vertex shader?

 

[Twiglard]

I'm not using any part of their name and you can't just trademark every possible combination of numbers and people on a journey.

Depends. The name 'Lindows' was found to be infringing. Ultimately it's up to you, in the worst case you're going to get a C&D.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Aren't you afraid of a lawsuit? It's kinda close. I would've gone at least for Pentatrail Excursionist, maybe even lower.

I'm not really concerned although reddit is dragging me through the coals over it. I don't think anyone there knows what they're talking about. They keep saying copyright when what really would apply is trademark, but I'm not violating trademark either. I'm not using any part of their name and you can't just trademark every possible combination of numbers and people on a journey.

Twiglard that's cool and all, but what exactly are you doing? Are you prerendering 3D models as pngs?

Agree with them then change the name to Quadruway Pilgrim

 

[RPK]

I'm not using any part of their name and you can't just trademark every possible combination of numbers and people on a journey.

Depends. The name 'Lindows' was found to be infringing. Ultimately it's up to you, in the worst case you're going to get a C&D.

Yeah, but their lawyers probably aren't as good as Microsoft's lawyers

 

[Twiglard]

@Twiglard that's cool and all, but what exactly are you doing? Are you prerendering 3D models as pngs?

I'm baking sprites for ingame use.

 

[barker_s]

What's the setting of your game? I think we need to name it today. Maybe put it to a poll if necessary.

That's the problem, I have no setting and no predefined story by design. Each gameplay session will take place in a procedurally generated world with its own history and distinct features. The gameplay itself will be focused on empire-building, resource management, non-linear, branching progress trees for your nation, and some hero management. See, not much to work with.

And no polls please, I'm not calling my game Kingcomrade.

 

[barker_s]

Ok, enough shitposting on my part. Let me contribute something of value for a change. Here's something I never shared with you guys (or anyone for that matter). My algorithm for generating procedural landmass heightmaps. It's a little bit outdated since moved on from hexagons in favor of regions (think Dominions series), but the general idea stays the same.

It's all done on GPU, hence it's pretty fast. While I was still using Unity I made use of its compute shader support, but since I moved to Godot, I reimplemented it using ILGPU (which is a fantastic library btw).

Here it goes:

Lots of images incoming

Step one: Create a base heightmap image by sampling each hexagon's height and outputting it to an image.

Step two: Modify the base heightmap to make it a little less obviously hexagon-y. In this case, whenever a hexagon has two contiguous neighbors of higher elevation, I fill a part of the hexagon with a triangle delimited by the vertices they share.

Step three: Create a second image filled with random points (using Poisson Disk Sampler algorithm). Overlay it on top of the base heightmap and assign each point the color from the underlying image. These points become my Voronoi kernels for the next step.

Step four: Run a Jump Flood Algorithm on my kernels, which produces a very fine approximation of Voronoi diagrams, generating interesting-looking "coastlines".

Bonus: JFA in action

Step five: Apply blur and optional post-processing. I used a few iterations of box blur to ease the transitions between height levels.

I also generate a secondary map to represent the gradual height transition seen from an angle (you may have noticed it in my last video).

 

[Twiglard]

Step three: Create a second image filled with random points (using Poisson Disk Sampler algorithm).

How'd you do that on a GPU?

Step five: Apply blur and optional post-processing. I used a few iterations of box blur to ease the transitions between height levels.

Good. Several iterations of small-kernel box blur are equal to a single iteration of Gaussian blur with a larger kernel, but way more performant.

 

[barker_s]

How'd you do that on a GPU?

Ah, you got me :D . PDS is actually being done on the CPU, but once the kernels are generated and stored in a texture, I reuse them for all subsequent GPU runs (in case of terrain manipulation, for example).

Good. Several iterations of small-kernel box blur are equal to a single iteration of Gaussian blur with a larger kernel, but way more performant.

That was my conclusion as well. It's also way easier to implement than Gauss.

 

[covr]

15 years into development and mine is still 'untitled 4x game'.

FTFY

 

[Abu Antar]

Septaroad Voyager. The title sounds a lot of Octopath Traveler. I'm guessing that's intentional?

Yeah, intentional. Started off as inside joke only to me. I started working on my next project and tried coming up with a codename. I named all of my stuff SRV* for Septaroad Voyager as a play on Octopath Traveler. Then when I wanted to announce the game, I couldn't think of anything better. And here we are.

Is this inspired by Final Fantasy XII by any chance?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Abu Antar Yes. Very much inspired by FFXII. So much so that it offends people on Reddit. Not like it really takes any effort to offend people on Reddit though, so I'm trying not to read too much into it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

weebs are always offended

 

[Twiglard]

Was looking up the state of Linux GPU drivers. Found out that a senior dev trooned out. What's wrong with all these people?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Was looking up the state of Linux GPU drivers. Found out that a senior dev trooned out. What's wrong with all these people?

Take your pick:

• people who hate their life being offered a supposed miracle cure by snake oil salesmen
• mentally ill people being misdiagnosed with the latest fad disorder -- e.g., look into multiple personality disorder sometime, hoo-boy, did you know it was at one point thought to be an environmental-related disorder because it was almost exclusively diagnosed in north america?
• groomed online into being convinced they're a woman and going doctor shopping
• autogynephilia

 

[Twiglard]

mentally ill people being misdiagnosed with the latest fad disorder

Also autism is highly comorbid with troonery, even absent any PDs (although autists tend to be horribly self-centered and selfish people).

You can find the guy in the userland portion of the drivers if you're bored. I'm not going to go out of my way to attack him as he did plenty of good work over the years.

 

[NoMoneyNoFameNoDame]

Was looking up the state of Linux GPU drivers. Found out that a senior dev trooned out. What's wrong with all these people?

Open source implies negotiable access and modification of source code. The author unable to have progeny begins to think their open-source creations are their true lineage.
Lineage and sex are connected. And so to break from the proprietary nature of how you were actually born, you strive to rebuild parts of yourself.
It is afterall a quality they were born with, to rebuild things. And if the author believes many things that matter are just social constructs anyway, then retreating
to physical self-alteration seems an alluring escape. A possible way to control a part of their identity they don't feel they had control over.

Another possibility is if you enjoy code for its own sake, and not profit: you're the type of person passionate enough to make changes without needing much of a reason.
Some people identify strongly with blind change because it's exciting and thus to alter oneself is the highest form of excitement.
Programming is afterall quite boring.

Lastly it may simply be that when a socalist gains real status they lose the will to be a programmer. Feeling a part of them lost that they enjoyed
they use the money they have to physically try to change themselves. Obviously their original design was flawed, because obviously it led to the loss of enjoyment of coding.

You know what? Let's jump the shark. Computers can model and give a physical reality to arbitrary processes and designs. And nature can support many different types of computers
made of different substrate. Deep down these facts some people wonder might describe themselves. Could they have been different or could they be fundamentally "improved" somehow?

I've also observed some people really like the idea of gray and fuzzy truth. The belief that classical systems don't model reality as it is invites many invent their own reasoning
for how things can be. It tends to be utterly resistant to accountability. Because in truth degenerate forms whether it be bugs in code or nature, are real. They have a right to exist like weeds do.
And becoming a degenerate makes some people feel in touch with what they are: confused.

tl;dr programming breaks you mentally cuz coding is hard and shit, then gives you the impression that designs are all equally valid.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Released my new game. Give it a try if you like Hydlide / Ys and want to play a short RPG where almost every line of flavor text gives you a hint towards something of interest.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Trying to make a blobber in C with SDL2 for a first project. I figured it'd be easy, since Wizardry came out in 1980 and programmers were basically smashing sticks together back then to my limited understanding, so it couldn't be that hard nowadays. Very naive of me. There are TONS of resources for top-down grid-based games because of the Rogue-like development community, but first-person games seem to be entirely absent. I got cocky because I wrote a simple text-based RPG in Python for school, and fiddled with Rogue-like code, but now I'm stumbling at something I thought would be simple: the grid-based movement itself.

So from what I've gathered, grid-based maps are stored in multidimensional arrays, and the value of each element indicates what sort of tile it is, and then there's a variable for the player's position which moves through the array depending on player input. That's all pretty simple and it probably goes without saying for most in this thread (if I've gotten it right, that is). What I'm really stumbling at is the turning perspective: there's gotta be four different angles for each tile to simulate a first-person perspective. So would you have something like a "perspective" array with 4 different values depending on which cardinal direction the player is supposed to be facing?

I just discovered this thread and I'm gonna start reading through the earlier pages to get some more information, but if you guys have any good resources on blobber development I'd appreciate it; that way I wouldn't have to bother you with newbie questions like this.

 

[Ysaye]

Trying to make a blobber in C with SDL2 for a first project. I figured it'd be easy, since Wizardry came out in 1980 and programmers were basically smashing sticks together back then to my limited understanding, so it couldn't be that hard nowadays. Very naive of me. There are TONS of resources for top-down grid-based games because of the Rogue-like development community, but first-person games seem to be entirely absent. I got cocky because I wrote a simple text-based RPG in Python for school, and fiddled with Rogue-like code, but now I'm stumbling at something I thought would be simple: the grid-based movement itself.

So from what I've gathered, grid-based maps are stored in multidimensional arrays, and the value of each element indicates what sort of tile it is, and then there's a variable for the player's position which moves through the array depending on player input. That's all pretty simple and it probably goes without saying for most in this thread (if I've gotten it right, that is). What I'm really stumbling at is the turning perspective: there's gotta be four different angles for each tile to simulate a first-person perspective. So would you have something like a "perspective" array with 4 different values depending on which cardinal direction the player is supposed to be facing?

I just discovered this thread and I'm gonna start reading through the earlier pages to get some more information, but if you guys have any good resources on blobber development I'd appreciate it; that way I wouldn't have to bother you with newbie questions like this.

https://www.dungeoncrawlers.org/resources/gamedev/

Is a good place to start, particularly if you are looking to make a pseudo 3D game like Wizardry 1 - 7.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I just discovered this thread and I'm gonna start reading through the earlier pages to get some more information, but if you guys have any good resources on blobber development I'd appreciate it; that way I wouldn't have to bother you with newbie questions like this.

Gardens of Imagination by Christopher Lampton is a pretty nice book to get you started with common stuff if you have no idea where to start.

 

[Twiglard]

Have you done any research on how a feature-complete editor (or other modding environment) for isometric RPGs should look like? It's one thing to place floor tiles and walls, but another to start adding interactible objects with their own scripts and dialogs.

Is there an already-existing editor for one of the RPG's that could be considered well-designed and suitable for that purpose, so that I may incorporate its ideas?

 

[Bad Sector]

Trying to make a blobber in C with SDL2 for a first project. I figured it'd be easy, since Wizardry came out in 1980 and programmers were basically smashing sticks together back then to my limited understanding, so it couldn't be that hard nowadays.

FWIW Wizardry was written in Pascal which even at the time was a bit higher level than C - kinda far from "smashing sticks together". Of course nowadays it is much easier to make a game than back then but you aren't really gaining much by using C.

What I'm really stumbling at is the turning perspective: there's gotta be four different angles for each tile to simulate a first-person perspective.

Note that the original Wizardry games used wireframe graphics for the maze, which simplified things. Also TBH i do not see the point of using predrawn sprites for the walls these days as even OpenGL 1.1 from the early 90s can draw walls for you much easier and simpler.

Either way i'd recommend to try a top down tile-based game first since aside from the perspective there isn't that much of a difference between implementing the world and movement for a first person dungeon crawler ala Wizardry/Might&Magic and that.

Have you done any research on how a feature-complete editor (or other modding environment) for isometric RPGs should look like? It's one thing to place floor tiles and walls, but another to start adding interactible objects with their own scripts and dialogs.

Aside from making the locations/areas themselves (the tile/floor placement), setting up properties, scripts, etc for actual gameplay shouldn't be any different from any other game editor - and there are as many approaches to them as there are custom engines. I'd recommend checking existing RPG engines with editors for ideas...

Is there an already-existing editor for one of the RPG's that could be considered well-designed and suitable for that purpose, so that I may incorporate its ideas?

...like Aurora Toolset (NWN1) and TES:Creation Kit, both providing a lot of RPG specific functionality and regarded as relatively easy to learn and use - while also being quite different from each other. Also the Shadowrun Returns games have a very simple editor, though it might be a bit too simple at times. On the other hand of the spectrum is RedKit for Witcher 2 - the RPG-specific bits were somewhat inspired by Aurora's equivalent functionality but since functionality and flexibility was much more of a concern than user friendliness, they are much more complex to use.

All of those can give you ideas for how to set up the game. And TBH i'd also recommend checking out game editors in general, not just RPGs, as depending on the game large parts of them can apply to other genres.

 

[Ysaye]

Released my new game. Give it a try if you like Hydlide / Ys and want to play a short RPG where almost every line of flavor text gives you a hint towards something of interest.

Congratulations on the new game - I bought it and had a little spin on my new Aya Neo Air and it looks and sounds awesome in that format.

 

[Tavernking]

Ripping old my old black magic code and replacing it with new cleaner architecture. I'm losing a lot of cool solutions that now I'll have to rediscover the solutions for in the 'right way'. This is for the best in the long run, but psychologically feels like I'm losing weeks of progress.