While I'm packing the remaining stuff in the house....have some experiments on the go....rather than using a static mesh for the hull, voxelise it and have the hull ablate away as it takes damage. Makes the damage mechanic more interesting, and was thinking to have drones fly around fixing up the damage when you arrive in a system.
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mid_gen's Launch a Game Studio Thread
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Ok this definitely has legs, could be the missing extra layer of interactivity and interest I've been looking for....
Having the mothership take damage like this and have the much more comprehensive damage model, take out specific weapons and subsystems etc....will definitely be going deeper on this.
But it's going to have to wait as I really really need to start packing up my study shortly....maybe next week I'll be back up in the new house.
Having the mothership take damage like this and have the much more comprehensive damage model, take out specific weapons and subsystems etc....will definitely be going deeper on this.
But it's going to have to wait as I really really need to start packing up my study shortly....maybe next week I'll be back up in the new house.
Not everything with voxels is Minecraft. The visual look of the game is very much placeholder and explorations like this was always part of the plan.
Anyway, PC is now packed up. Time to concentrate on getting moved.
Voxel fields do not always need to be represented as cubes. Several games out there use volumetric data that is then converted into a polygon mesh that doesn't appear boxy. Enshrouded I think is one that springs to mind. There's ways eg via marching cubes to construct more visually representative surfaces.
Yes it was just instanced cubes for this test, will be be marching cubes or similar in future. The GI system falls to bits using these instanced cubes for starters.
Hope the move went ok.. last time we moved we paid the company to pack and transport.. expensive when you look at the direct outlay but when considered the time and effort, a good investment, but boy was it less stress and hassle.
I'm starting to think that me sitting at home applying for work is a dead end - the new digital economy on AI really means you have to be in the bubble of innovation/startups to demonstrate, only then will the options really be open for wider work. It occurred to me I got the boot perfectly when AI just caused mass-redundancies and turning 50 at the same time, whilst being senior was a double tap. So career reboot needed.. that means getting out, demonstrating and being part of the culture.
I'm starting to think that me sitting at home applying for work is a dead end - the new digital economy on AI really means you have to be in the bubble of innovation/startups to demonstrate, only then will the options really be open for wider work. It occurred to me I got the boot perfectly when AI just caused mass-redundancies and turning 50 at the same time, whilst being senior was a double tap. So career reboot needed.. that means getting out, demonstrating and being part of the culture.
Move is tomorrow, we were going to pay removals but with this chain being so unreliable, didn’t want to risk even more financial losses if they flake last minute again.
I’m going to be 46 soon and a big motivator for going my own way with this studio is to avoid the 50+ problem in tech. I think avoiding the sun in my younger years gets me away with seeming younger than I am which helps
Also, getting games out there on Steam making residual income is a solid retirement investment.
This is the issue that I'm having, albeit I'm a bit younger at 35.
I'm already in the software industry, but I'm looking to leave my current place, which has been incredibly difficult to be honest. Applying for jobs isn't enough, as it's not getting me anywhere...
Little sneak peek of what I've been up to the last week, while getting back into a work routine, setting up my study etc. This is all just whitebox at the moment, but I think the depth that this voxel hull system provides will really fill out the main gameplay loop with a lot more interest. Little demo of the armour ablating away and being repaired by drones.
Some waffle about new hardware and automation.
Had a meeting this morning with local government business adviser, some potential avenues to explore with getting help to hire some artists....will see what comes of that.
Just trying to polish up a few things so I can pull together enough teaser footage for the Steam page to go live....busy times.
Might also see I'm starting to go on a bit of a socials push, Tiktok, Youtube shorts, Insta reels starting to appear.
Obviously working as this morning I've woken up to an absolute deluge of comments to reply to I had a bit of a moan about Steam Next Fest which seems to have struck a chord.
Obviously working as this morning I've woken up to an absolute deluge of comments to reply to
I had a bit of a moan about Steam Next Fest which seems to have struck a chord.Do you have any experience getting things running on Steam Deck via Linux? I've got all my Linux pipeline working and the game is running great native on Ubuntu, but the Steam Deck native build is just crashing on various AMD GPU pipeline related issues. Is it worth the hassle getting native linux working on Steam Deck?
Our games like Horizon and Death Stranding have all been windows games but run through proton ie vkd3d which converts dxil to spirv and runs vulkan.
So no not directly in the sense of Linux on the steam deck. But it's the same really as I'm familiar with vulkan and d3d12 plus done other Linux things that aren't games but still needed graphics acceleration.
I'd turn on vulkan validation layers and look at the output. Shaders or setup might be doing bad things. You may get a lot of spam. I don't know how on top of it they have kept. Suppress each one by id if it doesn't crash it. Need to find the point that crashes it in the remote debugger and the corresponding validation layer message to see what is potentially doing questionable things.
Different cards and hardware will handle things differently. Might work on one, crash on another and just visual issues on another. The joy of pc graphics development! I implemented some ssr recently and it was fine on amd but glitched on nvidia due to wave group difference so need extra memory barriers in the compute shader.
Not the first time unreal is doing something wrong. Years ago it had a bug with shader hash generation for pso collection we had to fix up locally when I used to work with unreal.
Is it worth getting native Linux running? Well I'd probably try the Proton way first with the Windows build and see how it goes as the path of least resistance. Could still hit crashes from the d3d12 to vulkan translation where it tries to do something incorrect. There's quirks too in the win32 to Linux translation that can make issues appear (had some of those on Death Stranding that deadlocked the game in its job system and had to work around them).
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Trying a different vibe with the thumbnail too...