johann<p>bananas.org forums are still down but I want to share this big ass banana I've grown in the past 2 years.</p><p>I almost killed it with root rot in the beginning and decided to grow it hydroponically, as it's much easier to control root rot this way.</p><p>Quick stats:<br />It's about 2.5m tall (with the pot) and the largest leaf is more than 1m long.<br />The thickest stem has a girth of 43cm.</p>
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johann@johann@mastodon.gamedev.place
Working on Idu, a detailed plant simulation game. I'm programming data logging buoys for my day job.
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2022
johann<p>I think the main reason for that is that the E27 socket is not really designed for LED lights, causing overheating issues. While a 100W lightbulb got much hotter, it didn't care about heat at all and the main issue was protecting the wiring and light fixture from heat. At the same time, LED bulbs contain electrolytic capacitors whose lifespan gets reduced by 2x by every 10C rise in temperature.</p>
johann<p>Unrelated to Idu, but I need to vent somewhere. I'm really annoyed by the LED bulbs. The shitty design and quality of the integrated AC/DC converters result in bulb lifetimes even worse than incandescent lighting, especially for >10W bulbs and are a far cry from the much repeated lifetime of 3 years. </p><p>Also, the light quality is much worse than incandescent unless you actively look for good bulbs, making everything look a bit washed out and depressing.</p>
johann<p>Decided to ditch the old terminal emulator based UI in favour of a more conventional one with icons, variable width font and more flexible layout options.</p>
johann<p>Just uploaded a new bugfix update for Idu. I found out that the roots were growing uncontrollably and spawning in the millions in some cases. Also fixed the water explosion bug, fov not working, and other things.<br />Full changelog and DL link here: <a href="https://epcc.itch.io/idu/devlog/765023/bugfix-update" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">epcc.itch.io/idu/devlog/765023</span><span class="invisible">/bugfix-update</span></a></p>
johann
johann<p>The new update is finally ready!</p><p>Main things:</p><p>🌊 Added dynamic water physics with currents, streams, waves, vortices, foam and more! <br />🥦 Added moss simulation <br />⬇️ Added branch bending and gravity simulation<br />⏩ Much improved performance</p><p>+ a huge amount of smaller fixes </p><p>Download link: <a href="https://idu.cyberplant.ee/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">idu.cyberplant.ee/</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p>
johann<p>Extended the water to horizon. I can't afford to simulate the whole sea, so the waves outside the playing area are generated by some simple function (currently just a sine). Tricky part will be blending the simulated water and parametric water.</p>
johann<p>I tried all sorts of fixes, like having up to 4 different ranks of branches with their own logic and adding inter-branch competition, but nothing really seemed to fix the issue with large trees. It seems that the problem was that without bending, all the randomness kind of averaged out and the plant ended up looking like a hollow sphere. With bending, large branches cause large scale disturbances, which results in less uniform and more natural looking trees</p>
johann<p>Finally figured out the branch bending!!! It's unbelievable how much better the plants look now. </p><p>I underestimated how much of the large scale tree structure is directly caused by different effects of gravity. </p><p>Before gravity, I had an issue where small trees looked kind of ok, but as they got larger, they started looking more and more synthetic and boring.</p>
johann<p>I'm revisiting the gravity simulation, bc it seems to be hard to generate plausible larger trees without any bending. It doesn't work yet, but at least looks interesting.</p>
johann<p>Water rendering is almost done. The shader code is a total mess now and I'm too afraid to even look at the profiling data. It manages a solid 60fps without any slowdowns on my computer though and my cpu and gpu fan noise suggests that they're not running at 100% yet.</p>
johann<p>Added shadows, tweaked colors a bit and stretched the particles towards movement direction</p>
johann<p>here's also a pic with moss because it looks nice</p>
johann<p>Added some particle effects for waterfalls. I have no idea how to draw these so it would look nice.<br />It looks way too light in the sun and too dark in the shadow. Maybe self shadows could improve this? I have no idea how to do it for transparent stuff and without killing the framerate.</p>
johann<p>I rewrote water simulation again (6th attempt now IIRC). This time the simulation runs in real time and has solved most of the issues I've had with cellular automata water<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbnuBHNrHXg" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">youtube.com/watch?v=rbnuBHNrHX</span><span class="invisible">g</span></a></p>
johann<p>Moss is coming along nicely.<br />Now it only grows in partial shade. If the light conditions change or if it accidentally expands into too much light, it will die.</p><p>I repurposed the unused height channel in the block textures as a moss progression channel. This helps the moss to look like it first grows into the crevices and then expands over the whole surface, if the conditions are optimal.</p><p>Next step is figuring out how to generate moisture data from the waterfalls and apply this to the moss sim.</p>
johann<p>I've started working on moss!<br />Because I'm using a forward renderer, adding decals that work with any geometry was a bit tricky. </p><p>I ended up with an approach that after the z prepass draws spheres, projects the sphere surface to closest solid surface behind it and then uses 3d noise to write the moss color to a separate buffer. When doing the color pass for solid surfaces, this buffer gets blended in, modulated by the heightmap texture. </p><p>Sounds expensive, but performance seems acceptable so far</p>
johann<p>A new Idu demo is ready to play!<br />This update adds new buildable metal structures and overhauls the world generation, as I wrote about in my previous post.<br />More info & download at itch: <a href="https://epcc.itch.io/idu/devlog/662866/update-14" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">epcc.itch.io/idu/devlog/662866</span><span class="invisible">/update-14</span></a></p>
johann<p>After releasing another playable demo, I decided to actually play the game. After about 30 minutes I realized that the previous level generation algorithm just wasn't fun to play in. <br />I built the last level generator to generate structures that seem to have some reason for existing, but at the same time forgot the most important part.<br />So the new generator is a total opposite: I have no idea what it's supposed to be, but at least it's now fun to build channels/pipelines and grow stuff.</p>
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