STOMY 451

"You can go home now, Turner. We're done with you. You're good as new." - William Gibson, Count Zero

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I keep coming down here and imagining this as a Thief tribute. I really should jam one out at some point to get it out of my system.

Music is the title track from Thief's City by Sick Le Lapin:

[stomygame]

Something of an unexciting cleanup week this week. Early on I took two days to port over my character controller visualization from Ctesiphon only to then fix a stair-stepping bug in just two minutes.

Turns out because I wasn't pre-clipping gravity's contribution to the character controller against the ground plane, the non-stepping trace would always be rejected so you if a doorway was just over head height, you'd step up and smack into it anyway. The one line fix was to just actually clip off the gravity against the ground plane like I really should have been doing already.

I also made it so it's valid to stand in the crease between two invalid surfaces. This is only checked at the start of the movement trace so you won't automatically step into these creases but you can step out of them. The main point behind this is just to have less cases where the player could get stuck.

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Another high-effort attack for artfight. This time I did ~Raqi_oh's OC Erina as a cornered sorceress on the run in The City, unleashing some sick chain lightning on the fools chasing her.

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For this Screenshot Saturday, witness the miracle of convex brush collision! I built this whole elaborate test level, only to find out all of the edge cases just work out of the box and instead I finished the week adding stair-handling and crouching.

This technique is so magical I'm genuinely considering having this game just not do triangle mesh collision at all (hey it worked for Quake 3!). It's yet another reason it pays off to make your own engine because the big names wouldn't bother adding something like this, let alone making it the default. Nowadays people are so used to using meshes for collision that convex brushes must seem like an alien concept.

With stair handling now 90% in, this is already a better movement system than Ctesiphon's and the possibility of me going back to handling collision with some physics middleware has become even more remote.

[stomygame]

Drew a character from the upcoming indie game Occult: Scarlet Elegy. It's this story-heavy dungeon crawler with a wicked saturated art style.

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I kinda owe Ratalie for kicking off my artistic awakening over the last year. Couldn't resist the excuse to draw her again for Mousetrap's new update.

[stomygame]

I'm mostly doing a lot of drawing this week, but the game comes first! View Bobbing!

[stomygame]

I couldn't just let BikiniArmorMonth slip me by, I had the perfect indie-game supermodel in mind: Zan from Hedon. Grab it on Steam right now for half price!

[stomygame]

Damn, remember when MSAA was a relevant option for performance? I'm taking my nearly 15-year-old laptop with me to a con next weekend and hardcoding AA off instead of max took the game from barely playable to actually decent. #ScreenshotSaturday

Gonna prioritize adding a setting for that for the next update, lol. While we're at it I'll add a toggle for AF as well.

[stomygame]

Gamedev moment: spending hours rubbing myself against concrete walls in blissful satisfaction at a custom collision system working as intended

[stomygame]

I'll be bringing Ctesiphon to AVCon on July 4th-5th. I'm planning on having a slightly customized build with the convention's mascots forcefully shoe-horned into the plot for laughs.

[stomygame]

Reached an important milestone today: detecting collisions against brushes!

[stomygame]

Finally time to post something again: Instead of doing all the boilerplate every time, I'm putting together an engine template with all the common systems all games need. Being for personal use, I know what I'm going to use and what I can ignore.

In there so far:

DearImgui integration

Hotloading

Support for IQM models, audio in WAV, FLAC, and ogg/vorbis, textures in png/tga, materials defined with wal_json

Custom map format (this time repacked from Quake 2 instead of 1)

Resource manager and persistent settings with PhysFS

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Added a couple of new secrets in v1.04d

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I found out my BMFont rendering has been completely wrong for like a decade. The fontfaces exported by the ancient Hiero utility have completely messed up specs so I'm not touching it anymore. SnowB works much better anyway.

[stomygame]

Ctesiphon on Steam

A retrowave/mecha-inspired sci-fi first-person shooter featuring fast-paced combat in old-school style open-plan levels packed with pickups,

I got made redundant today, you know that means?

I've been promoted to full time game developer! :D

Until I run out of savings I'm committed to making a Deus Ex clone.

If you would like to support me, consider grabbing my last game, Ctesiphon: s.team/a/3808730

[stomygame]

Got really carried away with some alcohol markers today.