My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap...
I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".
Still desperately need to make time for this game
It's such a wild dream come true to work on a game I've been playing since I was a kid!
Finally able to announced what I've been doing professionally for the past couple years!
I've been one of the lead programmers working on porting Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 to PS5!
Been so excited about this and it's been difficult not being able to talk!!
Huge congrats to Paul and team for this launch, probably the one of (if not the?) best Irish developers out there right now!
Doors open in 1 hour!
I have been sitting on a follow up post about PS1 rendering based on my project about that which talks about doing this. I must get it finished one of these days.
Regardless this is the shader that does the dithering: github.com/DavidColson/...
A steam deck with a screen shot of The Séance of Blake Manor on a Steam Deck. A large green verification tick is in the centre of the screen.
We're happy to say that The Séance of Blake Manor has been #SteamDeck verified.
Launching on the 27th of October. You can wishlist it or check out the demo in #SteamNextFest.
Check out the demo: bit.ly/47Pm8XA
#indiegames
The new clouds still need some better lighting effects, but chasing planes through them feels pretty good #gamedev #flightsim
The current thought is to transition away from linked list and instead optimize queries with a tree like VSCode has done or like the Fred editor shown at handmade cities. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmIN...
I came into a frustrating issue in the design my text editor. I had this great mechanism for caching linked list nodes to make it faster to jump around the file and query stuff.
But I've just realised, caching nodes like this is wildly not threadsafe.
Going back to the drawing board for a bit lol
I've learned a lot of really interesting things about text rendering, syntax highlighting and UI stuff, which I hope to share bits of and maybe write some articles on stuff
I'm supposed to post more but I frequently forget, but anyway, major text editor update!
- Completed a rewrite of the UI and text rendering
- Implemented syntax highlighting!!
- Smooth scrolling, and countless bits of UI polish
Really coming together, I'm able to use it day to day more often now
This often comes up in the context of small game entity systems, where usually you don't have more than a hundred or so entities, and so a fat struct entity does not incur much performance penalty because you don't iterate over that many, and in exchange you get a simpler architecture.
There is a tradeoff here that is worth discussing I feel. Fat struct architectures are simpler and more flexible, but yes they are worse for cache use.
The situations where one might use them would be when you don't have that many instances of something, so the memory throughput benefit is minimal
The devil is in the details! In design, things are often made just a bit different so that they appear consistent and balanced.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversho...
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical...
The lower leagues of motorsport emphasis driver skill _much_ more (they often race with the same, or at least normalized cars) and the difference is really noticeable compared to F1
What I think is crazy cool about F1 is that the drivers are ridiculously talented, and it's super hard to drive at the pace they do. But they're all so close in skill after filtering out so many other drivers, that what separates winners from losers ends up not being driver skill in many cases.
The prototype version of this spaceship landing thing is now available on itch. The prototype has been done for weeks now, but it's taken me a while to put to paper what I wanted to about how this works and how to fly it. I'm really proud of how this little prototype came out.
I won’t say any more in public on this topic, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble (my dms are available if anyone reading this thread wants to chat), but yea it’s really nice for me to see you try to solve these issues with a fresh take on the matter.
This whole topic is precisely the issue SC's flight model had/has lol. It's too good, we had to resort to inventing lore that allowed us to nerf thrusters in atmosphere to get it to look okay. And even then it wasn't the best.
Is it just any speed that contributes to this? I.e. if I thrust from a standstill on the ground, I start to get some forward momentum without any other inputs?
I have also come to realise that there may be less stabilization than it feels, if you take the stick as a yaw/pitch angle rather than a yaw/pitch _rate_ then when you let go it settles?
The blending is also very interesting, you can just take off from a standstill in normal mode and I guess you just lift off because it's 100% down thrust, but it very quickly starts moving forward. I have been trying to land vertically in manual mode, but haven't quite seen if I can do that
An immediate thing that strikes me is how much stabilization you have. Hovering was always such a precarious state when we tried it on Star Citizen. But this feels "managed" which I gives you that "looks cool but is easy" feel. It's very cool, I am a fan
Oooh yes please!
Is this something like helicopter style hovering but with assists?
Is the auto-aim done with a gun gimbal such that it's decoupled from ship orientation? Or something else?
I don't know how well it'll show up on bluesky, but the text rendering in particular is vastly better.
Been a while since I've posted, still working on projects. I have completely rewritten the renderer and UI system for the text editor, it now looks vastly nicer, and we can have a lot more interactive, better looking and complex UIs.
#programming #texteditor
