Matt Downey @SciFiGameDev@mastodon.gamedev.place

There's so few people who write about 2D virtual reality games (but I always find great joy in articles/videos/games on the subject); maybe I should make a new Gamasutra account and write about 2D virtual reality soon.

I should eventually make a presentation about it, and even if it's never used I have a better personal understanding (for explaining it to others).

Different implementations for mapping a checker board onto a hemisphere (or any spherical rectangle).

(Probably the longest I've ever spent on any one algorithm (and its inverse).)

My favorite aspect of math is the infinite number of ways to solve any given problem -- each solution with its own form of correctness.

There are times when I think a small anomaly is unfixable, but as luck would have it I am wrong every time.

A nice tool for voting. It helps you check if you're registered, helps you find your polling location, shows your senate and house elections, finds friends who are registered (via contacts) to help you get out the word.

votewithme.us/r/share

One of the reasons I feel like such an unproductive programmer is I'll occasionally spend 3+ days thinking about how to implement an algorithm without writing a line of code DX

Anyone know what mapping algorithm is used for applying a Cookie to SpotLight in Unity?

As the SpotLight approaches 180 degrees, the results get wacky, and I want to "cancel out" the texture stretch with some extra computation.

My friend got me to set up tests, and within an hour they already solved a bug.

I just got my code working approximately >50x as fast and it still isn't as fast as I want XD

It's definitely workable, though.

I've been misusing the term lighting (I've been focusing on CPU calculations to make cucoloris/cookies rather than doing things on the GPU).

Got light working after a CPU calculation (only needs to be recalculated when the light changes properties).

It hit a very significant (and expected) bottleneck, so next I have to optimize. Depending on how slow things are (or my courage), I may learn GPU lighting.

Growth as a programmer warms my heart <3

Three years ago (and four years after starting), I still had plenty of bad habits that have since been fixed.

Not long from now, I anticipate my code could be fully documented for both public and private interfaces.

Normally lighting is constrained to point lights, spotlights, and directional lights, but I have wanted to see line/capsule lights for a while now.

Finally, I know how to do line/arc lights with spherical 2D ^w^ (it wouldn't be difficult to implement in normal 2D either).

I was gonna say light resolution could be an issue, but as my tech develops I should be able to do a neat trick/hack with ~2 spotlights along a small secant of the sphere (for a special case).

To any French-speaking game developers:

1) Is "Debris Noirs" proper grammar/spelling? What connotation might it have that translation misses?

2) If "Debris Noirs" were a game title, what would you expect the gameplay to be like?

I really should fact-check myself more DX

Also, I seldom phrase statements or questions properly.

Also, most of my questions can be answered by the internet *and* reading *and* reading comprehension XD

A reminder that ethics is an important part of computing and game development:

Have you read the IGDA Code of Ethics? https://www.igda.org/page/codeofethics (5 minute read)

ACM Code of Ethics? https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics (18 minute read)

IEEE Code of Ethics? https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html (3 minute read)

Stanford Computer and Information Ethics? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ (42 minute read)

I guess I should work on d4, d6, d12, and d20 shapes tomorrow (i.e. tetrahedron, cube, dodecahedron, and icosahedron).

I couldn't think of a way to generate them procedurally, and it would probably be hard-to-read if I did, so I'll make each manually.

I'll probably make a single ScriptableObject called Polyhedron so there's no redundancy in code and the data can be serialized separately.

All of this was because I was thinking about how to implement Frogger as a 2D virtual reality game ( https://mastodon.gamedev.place/users/GDNet/statuses/100857465475065726 ).

2D virtual reality frogger would probably be best implemented as a tessellated tetrahedron, since tetrahedrons have uniform angles (because they have three vertices and three edges per triangle and are a Platonic solid (fair dice)).

Another cool thing: now I can split meshes into multiple chunks, which is cool for level of detail (LoD) meshes and frustrum culling for triangles that are off-camera.

Notably frustrum culling is per-mesh, so splitting tessellated spheres into different chunks helps speed up rendering.

Also, you can do more than split on each dice face (as long as the chunks fit together properly).

My new workflow for creating spheres will be:

1) Procedural polygon creation (ideally one function for creating 4-, 6-, 8-, 12-, and 20- sided dice using matrix math)

2) Tessellate each triangle into 4+ new triangles using spherical linear interpolation (for equal area triangles).

3) Merge redundant vertices and edges.

(Procedural UV points will be the main issue.)

Another eureka moment today: tesselated icospheres can be done with spherical linear interpolation across each triangle's edge (while reading an article and then found it mentioned in the comments to confirm). I ended up hardcoding exactly this for an octahedron sphere, but now I know I can do this for all shapes.