I am behind all convex planes.

Going Jam this time as I mostly use Unreal these days and I’ve not figured content out. So I’ll be using the little shiny robot man and such.

Will be using Unity, Maya LT, Paint.NET, Audacity, SFXR, and Renderdoc

Guess where I was this past weekend? 😀

I’ve got a project going beta (sweet sweet unity plugin I wish I could talk about), leaving for Dragoncon on tuesday, and dyeing my hair blue at some point in the weekend.

This means that my odds of finishing are not good, but I will give it a go!

I’ll be using Unity with VS2013, paint.net, Maya steam ver, 3dcoat for UVs, BoscaCeoil for tunes, and renderdoc for when it all goes horribly wrong.

I forgot to include a link: https://github.com/Kharzette/LudumDareStuff

There’s a handy tool in there to assemble chronolapse images into a video as well as some other misc stuff I might use. All C#.

I’m probably going to do the Jam this time, as I really want to use the Unity plugin I’ve been working on this year. It is called NeoFur and it makes really lovely furry / carpety / wiggly surfaces.

I’ve been helping port it to Unity, but I haven’t had a chance to use it in my own creations yet. Here’s a furry cube with some force applied:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/FurryCube.webm

Other than that, I’ve got my usual tools I might use at https://github.com/Kharzette/LudumDareStuff, as well as Unity, Maya, 3DCoat, BoscaCeoil, and the mighty RenderDoc.

I know, I know the Jam isn’t over, but I need to work today, so I’ve given up. Here’s about all I got working:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59900676/LudumFur.webm

Just a character running around and a spider chasing. What I wanted to do was have a dungeon or maze or something full of treasure, but filled with poison gas. You would start in a room with a filtering machine, and have to connect up pipes and flip levers and such to clear new rooms, but only one room could be filtered.

Here’s a timelapse of the weekend’s efforts:

Stuff I learned:

-Building indoor maps in art programs is terrible
-How to copy animation around
-Fix crotch areas before mirroring or suffer a crotchsplosion
-Spikey fur makes a cool diseased look
-Unity’s animation editor can fix problems, but then you lose them as it doesn’t save

A side goal of the weekend was to test out the fur plugin I’ve been helping with. It worked really well, and I even used it for some longish hair, which it isn’t really designed to do. I also found 3 minor bugs to fix so mission accomplished!

Have a weekend conflict with moto GP, but not sure if I will go or not. I had a grand time there last year (In Austin, TX).

Seems about 50/50.

If inward, I’ll be likely using Unreal or Unity. Since last LD I finished up work on a plugin for Unity and have done lots of Unreal modding for Conan Exiles, so I should be somewhat capable with either.

I’ll probably use Maya LT for art, 3dcoat for UVs, paint.net for bad 2d art, and bosca for music.

I've done nothing but play games and goof off for months so totally not ready for this. Going to go back to using my old reliable Max for art. I don't really feel like spending $30 on maya when I'm not heavily doing art for something. Probably Unity / Visual Studio for codery, Bosca for music.

There's some good themes in there. Floating Islands reminds me of my october challenge game a few years ago I put on xbox live indies (sky islands). Limited Space could be cool for a galactic empires kind of thing, Tiny Machines would be awesome as nanotechnology is basically magic. Lots of limitations-as-a-theme this time, just hoping they don't win. We always get tons of samey games when they do.

BTW remember the theme a few compos back Ancient Technology? The best commercial game I've found that fits that theme is Torment tides of numenara. I played the hell out of it. I think the setting is earth a billion years in the future and heavily re-engineered into a pangea style continent. Plate tectonics either ceased by then or they were engineered to stop because there's millions of years of tech laying around in the dirt from dozens of dead civilizations. Of course few people know how to use any of it, and lots of it is dangerous.

Good luck Ludarific Darendinias and Darendors!

I haven't touched unity since last LD, which didn't go well :D

I've been on a 12-20 hour a day binge on survival games for months (Empyrion and Conan). I know most people are tired of them by now but I sort of missed the earlier rounds of them. (ark and such)

So whatever the theme I think I'll be doing some mining or building or scrounging for food. Probably Unity and Blender as I've finally shed my chains to Autodesk.

I don't expect to have the full weekend though. I'm going to be watching the overwatch contenders Korea finals at midnight, go Runaway! 🏃‍♀️

My success rate has been rather less than ideal these past few years. When I think about why, I come up with the usual reasons.

• Theme paralysis
• Out of practice with tools
• Sleepy

1 is a bad excuse, 2 is fixable, and 3 just needs better planning.

For 1 if the theme is stupid, I'll embrace the stupid.

For 2, I'm going back to my own rather ancient set of libraries and tools. Ye olde GrogLibs

For 3, I'm going to try to get something running in just 4-8 hours. Then I can spend the rest of the weekend on improvements (at least that's the plan).

Perhaps

Indeed my dot product vs the Ludum Dare plane equation shows negative.

What a time for a HD failure though. The drive with my git stuff (somehow 30 gigs and 400k items) is throwing error events and clearly in a downward spiral. Maybe I can get everything dumped and the drive pulled before the anointed time which looks to be in 1.5 hours hence.

The extra time mode is very appealing for me. When I first started, back in LD24 I think, I could get by on small naps and usually worked a good 40 of the 48 hours. Now I have been struck down by Narcolepsy so my sleep is random and unpredictable.

I shall likely be using Unity, but if the theme is undergroundy I might go with my own Groglibs. In addition: Blender, 3DCoat, VSCode, Quake army knife, RenderDoc, and Paint.Net. Good luck to us all!

I'll likely be doing an original old xbox game for this one, or at least starting on one if I get far enough along on the directx stuff to get something running before the jam date. If not I'll use Uni^H^H^Hgodot or something.

If xbox I'll be using some sort of chimera of groglibs off my github, and probably blender for characters and radiant for levels. I'm switching from quake army knife and the switch is not yet done so I might use that. I use 3d coat for texturing if I get that far.

I've never been more satisfied with a voting round! Well done friends :smile:

My libraries for the coming weekend are slowly taking shape here https://github.com/Kharzette/GrogTestXBOX

I wasn't sure I would actually make it with the xbox, but I think I have enough of a basic library now to get started. Here's what the tools look like. Has to be run in an old windows xp virtual machine:

If I make it to actual models I'll be using Blender. If I have time to texture stuff I'll be using 3DCoat.

2D Stuff I usually use paint.net.

I have zero chance of having enough time for the compo, mainly because the overwatch league finals are on this weekend and I want to watch all of that live, so I'll be doing the extended time mode.

Because of that I might dip into some AI tools. I've got models for textures, icons, and voices if I get that far.

Time to start thinking about game ideas for themes! Have fun everyone! <3

I took the theme and reversed it: Space Limited, or Space LTD. You run a generic space company that does company stuff up in the cold void of space. (trading, hauling, mining etc)

I'm doing the slow 3-week extra mode and making the game with the original xbox. After a week about all I have working is ship piloting and moving about the solar system and a basic piloting UI.

Though the solar system is randomly generated, I tried to keep to typical sizes and distances. The cubic volume of my star systems are INT_MAX sectors at 64k meters across, so about 940 AU or about 1.5% of a lightyear. This is about 5x what you need to cover most systems (our heliopause is about 120 AU out).

The tricky bit is scale. Ships and people need around meter scale, but planets and other big objects are way too huge. I decided on a 1 unit == 1 megameter for big stuff. Our sun is about a 700 radius at that scale, and ceres around 1, mercury 2.4, Jupiter 70.

I could never think of a situation where a ship would be behind something huge as that would make it too far to see, so I just render the big stuff in the megameter scale, then clear the depth buffer and render the meter scale stuff.

Here's the UI and a really crappy shuttle I made in blender in 5 minutes

Here's a gas giant:

I used stable diffusion to generate 20 or so gas giant textures, and will probably do the same for the other planet types. I'll probably do rockies, metals, panthalassic etc

Screenshots look a bit squished because I haven't got around to fixing the resolution / aspect stuff. I think it is drawing 640x480.

Game has a long way to go! Right now it is a bit like a space version of desert bus. Even when I cheat my engine up so I can accelerate at 30g it still takes a long time to get anywhere. Space is big!

Also I added in a tiny drag for the solar wind. At 50 kilometers per second speed there's 0.1 G of drag.

I'm not doing any orbital mechanics, so planets and stations and the like will have a fixed location. This lets me do a sun-relative position and speed. That makes waypoints so much easier.

I threw 20 cubemapped gas giants in a single scene and the old xbox handled it like a champ. 800 fps with all that and no vsync!

This was so much fun! Getting a very quick :bulb: moment for the theme helped me get going. I came up with Space LTD, a generic space services company simulator, which is the theme reversed sort of. Here's the timelapse, with lots of notes below: https://youtu.be/Sky141NOvDk

On the lapse, you'll notice sometimes the left screen goes black. This is when I have that monitor switched over to the xbox. You'll also notice alot of flashbangs from old visual studio. This was kind of unavoidable as I had to use a windows xp virtual machine to code for the original xbox.

So going into this I knew there would be a few timing challenges so I opted for the 3 week mode. There was the overwatch league grand finals, motoGP and an emulated everquest server I had been looking forward to for a long time launched the same weekend.

Stuff I didn't anticipate was a big family gathering 300 miles away, and a death in the family + funeral and such. Then the weather had a bit of a cold snap and I had to abandon my office (and my xbox) for a few days. If you've played Rimworld you know what I mean :)

Codewise I started mostly with nothing, but referred back to my github stuff in both C and C# format. I have some basic collada tools, bsp map compile stuff, a shader library and such. None of which were compiled for xbox. So I spent quite a lot of time just getting text drawing on the screen.

Some of the code challenges I ran into were my usual yaw/pitch/roll camera not working at all in space. Fixing that was just changing any pitch/yaw/roll change to be relative to current orientation. There is no "up" or "forward" just where-am-I-now? Quaternions are great for this, but the old xbox math libs were missing alot of quaternion stuff so I had to go hunting for a few functions to steal.

Physics were the next big one. I was going to just fake some simple velocity and thrust and such but the numbers would quickly go haywire and it was hard to show onscreen data like G forces. I ended up porting over an implementation I had done in C# of Gaffer on games's great physics articles: https://gafferongames.com/post/integration_basics/

That got me thinking (and googling) about power requirements and heat and fuel and so on. We are a long way off from decent space travel, and it mostly comes down to getting rid of heat. I had to assume superconductors had been invented to even get close at decent amounts of thrust.

Then there was the extreme scales of space. A shuttle being a few dozen meters and gas giants being 50 thousand kilometers across. I ended up going with "sectors" that were 64 thousand floating point units across + and -, and then INT_MAX of those, so around 2000 astronomical units of space for a star system. Not enough for the furthest out bits of the Oort cloud but plenty for a game.

I ended up using a megameter scale for huge stuff like planets and major asteroids like ceres. These draw first as I couldn't image anything big enough to draw "behind" them. Then I change projection matrix, clear the depth buffer, and draw the close stuff. This worked pretty well.

I did one realtime journey, but I cheated and gave myself an enormously powerful engine that would accelerate at 30 thousand G. Even with that it took a few hours to do a 7 AU journey. Space is big!

Here's the Git: https://github.com/Kharzette/GrogTestXBOX

There's not much art assets really. Just a font and a couple dozen AI generated gas giant cubemaps. Oh and a terrible shuttle I made in blender in 5 minutes.

This is going to be a strange one. Last time I did an old original xbox game though I didn't finish it. This time I'm using directx 11 on linux.

Here's the goofy halfass code I'll be working with: https://github.com/Kharzette/GrogLibsC

Right now it has basic characters, audio (3d is broken), and a really basic terrain with buggy sphere based collision.

A timelapse seems unlikely this time. Linux is code land and I use blender here, but for texturing I need windows and have to boot over to use 3dcoat and paint.net.

I'm old and sleepy so I will probably fail the 48, switch to jam, fail that, then do the 3 week thing :smile:

Good luck everyone!

It has been a long time since I've finished an entry, but I always have fun!

• Sounds: https://sfxr.me/
• Fonts: CGFG
• Textures: Pinta
• Fuel: Yorkshire Tea
• Meshes: Blender
• Painting: 3DCoat3
• Code Edit: VSCode

Code Libs: - https://github.com/Kharzette/GrogLibsC - https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics - https://github.com/nicbarker/clay - https://github.com/misyltoad/dxvk-native

The Past: https://web.archive.org/web/20191020040518/http://ludumdare.com/compo/author/kharza/

No artificial minds will be working for me. I do sometimes generate concept art, but nothing generated will make it into the game itself.