Matt Downey @SciFiGameDev@mastodon.gamedev.place

Got concave corners working:

Now I have concave/convex/"straight" edges and concave/convex corners working (i.e. all geometry that's possible in my game).

#screenshot https://mastodon.gamedev.place/media/9TQxSz43jgMj_AY2N10

Current list of 2D + virtual reality games made (that I know of / can think of):

Super Mega Mega
Darknet
S.A.D. Cat
Bloody Zombies
The Lost Bear
Pop-Up Pilgrims
Pixel Ripped 1989

All of which are more complicated than Asteroids.

It's so weird that my first commercially-viable game will approximate Asteroids (1979). I've been programming in Unity for >7 years, and in a way this took like three years to make XD

Also, server owners seem to take a default server list as the allowlist, rather than slowly adding servers based on personal research (after user demand/request).

https://instances.social/ lets you choose to allow "illegal content", "spam", "spoilers without cw" which attracts toxic users and bots to the fediverse.

I think things should default to 1) no bots 2) no company accounts 3) one account per person per server (you can advertise for yourself as long as you don't spam) 4) nothing illegal (pick server jurisdiction) 5) ban other 70+% agreed on "bad" things - if not already illegal (e.g. violence, child endangerment).

Mastodon would be a great idea if (for most mainstream servers) you had to meet the server host in real life to make an account.

Online sign-up is the root cause of many spam issues, and we can't easily hold people accountable for as long as they can spoof web addresses.

There's a lot of issues with https://instances.social/ when you first look for a server because we never set up ground rules.

When going fast in my game, you basically can't turn "left" or "right" (without alternating inputs quickly). Think centripetal force like swinging a rope in a circle.

Despite this, the camera rotates in the direction of motion. (Illusion of control)

All because non-Cartesian space is weird.

180 degrees of forward through perpendicular acceleration choices lead to going in a circle.

This seems metaphorical.

Posted without comment.

Tomorrow I'll be starting an Asteroids (1979) -esque 2D virtual reality game.

Fun fact: the world in Asteroids when wrapped left-to-right, top-to-bottom makes a donut.

I have to change the controls and the graphics become a sphere, but otherwise it'll take strong inspiration.

The best coding days are where you remove 100+ lines of code and/or delete entire files.

To see `[Obsolete("MethodX obsolete: prefer MethodY where possible.")]` warnings go away is also amazing.

It is nice to be in university again. School is a very stabilizing force in my life, and I could probably use that now more than ever before.

When developing, incremental changes are almost always ideal for productivity.

That being said, during refactoring I (naively) prefer having long stretches where my code can't compile. Anyone else prefer this? Anyone think this can be a good idea for certain types of problems?

Raycasting in spherical 2D [custom algorithm]

I created a mobius strip in my game, this means that you can walk on both the outside and inside of the 2D surface by going around the circuit "twice".

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/media/06Tyc-uccGjH-jQ-BXE

Here's a link to another mobius strip in case you're curious of what a 3D version looks like in real life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxror-fnOL4

Three things:

1) I'm loving the zoom effect in 2D virtual reality.

2) My camera code just got really simple.

3) Today marks the first day (technically) I've played a 2D virtual reality game, since I previously has the typical 65mm eye-to-eye distance.

This is approximately the 10th time I've gotten collisions/movement "working" with all of the 6+ prototypes and constant refactoring.

Now I have a custom collider component that I can add to objects, though.

Just got my 3-sphere collision system working:

The intersection of two spheres captures a collision for a circle in 3D space, and three spheres captures an arc in 3D space.

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/media/vIcHCFq4QVTEXXYtsw8

This is a nice read for Unity programmers on how to use Update/FixedUpdate less:

http://bradkeys.com/2017/01/30/Avoiding-Unity-Update-Loops/

Until just now I was planning on only supporting FixedUpdate for my game engine XD

I mean, even if I did do that, I forgot that inputs gets "eaten" if you write your code that way.

It's also inefficient, of course.