SirDimples @sirdimples@mastodon.gamedev.place

Nice! things are working, failures and anomalies are reported. The last tricky part I see from this point is adding mds/mdf conversion support as I don't know yet how to approach that. Looking forward to running this script on ~300GB of roms😅

Today I did a practice Blender project, got into Material Maker to evolve my pipeline to include PBR procedural materials, and finally threw all into Godot to test how far I can push its renderer in a static scene. The result is this really cool looking test 😊 #godot #blender

A long time ago when I was 15 I learned all about 3D Studio MAX from a book I found, 2 years later I did a few small modeling contract jobs before my programming career put that all to sleep.
3D Studio MAX is not an option now for an indie so I have no choice but to go into Blender's embrace.

2 days into Blender now, learning about every button and option.
Couldn't be happier with it :) we've come a long way! 😗

Bye Adobe

I don't pre-order games and advise my friends/family to avoid it.. but sometimes, the temptation is too much especially if it's a discounted special release with cool physical goodies I'd pay for separately.
Elden Ring 🤨 OOOHHHHHHH Elden Ring 🙏

Art: "Waiting for Elden Ring" by @ndasfw

Today I wanted to render a map created in tiled using MonoGame.Extended.Tiled but build fails due to a Nuget issue: "Couldn't find default importer for .tmx file"

Almost gave up when I found this: https://community.monogame.net/t/solved-couldnt-find-a-default-importer-for-tmx-files/11782
which explains the issue in detail.

Here's how I fixed it in Fedora toolbox:

⏺ create a link to nuget packages in project folder: `ln -s ~/.nuget/packages packages`
⏺ in Content.mgcb, add `/reference:../packages/*` to point to the dlls as shown in screenshot.
🤨 🌴

Today in Hover# I tried to automate isometric sprite rendering, ideally a script in Wings3D that repositions the camera to 5 required angles and render each using a povray or YafaRay preset. Wings3D has some sort of scripting, it provides an Erlang repl.. which I've never used and doesn't look trivial.
So I tried Blender, strange thing is... its UI is terribly flickery!? after a few hours of digging, turns out it was a fresh mesa bug.. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/5782
😿

HoverECS final update: got a minimal gameloop going, passed 7000 pico8 tokens & almost all building blocks are re-usable. So new vehicles, enemies, buildings, etc should be construct-able using existing components in theory.
I consider this experiment done. The final challenge I had was scene management in pure ECS. Perhaps a balanced compromise is having a traditional scene manager where each scene runs its own ECS (map, battle, menu, etc).
Try the demo here: https://cloudmillgames.com/demos/hover-ecs.html

So now I have a proper collision detection system running fully in ECS, I refactored some elements and to my surprise it seems that whenever I break a component into smaller ones, the result is cleaner code!
At this point the code is taking up 5370 tokens, I have a pretty complete barebones ECS system with some interesting properties, and I think I reached the magical point of things glued together just magically working 😎
I'm happy with what I learned so far and may take this further 😏

X11/Xorg were always a turn off for me, they feel wholly archaic and unintuitive. But for a system so old.. you'd expect it to be well documented, right? RIGHT? this is captured from the official docs https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/man/man5/xorg.conf.5.xhtml 😂

Putting these isometric sprites together, the results were better than I expected! In a full project, I'd create some automation for rendering models from all required angles then creating initial sprites by scaling down the renders

I started by implementing a small piece directly in pico8 in the way I'd do it if this was a gamejam, through this stage I experimented on creating isometric art by making a rapid model then rendering it from 8 isometric viewpoints then hand drawing 16x16 sprites in pico8 based on the renders. I used wings3d+povray to do these

Winter works. Great success 👍

I have a sandisk ultrafit 128gb flash that overheats like crazy and starts to periodically halts then dies and disconnects if you transfer large data fast, it got so hot it killed a usb port in a cheap usb-c hub I used 💀
I should probably bin it.. but if I can somehow cool it while writing to it, I can setup batocera & roms on it and as long as I avoid any large transfers it would be usable.
hmm 🤔..💡! it's -7 outside, there is a window next to me and a half dead aluminum usb-c hub
oh well

Many years ago I looked at a Geforce 6800 Ultra in its box and wished I had $600 to throw away at it...
About 2 years ago I bought a cheap phone as backup (Sony E4g) which has an abysmal MediaTek MT6732 with a Mali-T760 MP2 GPU which has a theoretical computation of 48 GFLOPs and supports DX11.1/SM5.0.
That 6800 Ultra I dreamt about? 54 GFLOPs and DX9/SM3.0.
The realisation blows my mind.

How is it that USB flash disks are still so terrible at writing large files? while smaller cheaper sdcards resolved these issues.
It's not just that they are slow but they periodically io freeze for a few seconds when moving large files.
To experiment I bought a mini SSD in flash disk form that are similarly priced, and the difference is significant!

Whenever I see this, it's a reminder that we are a tiny ball of dirt and water floating in a sea of gravity in this vast constantly changing universe 🌝