Andy Buck

Can I call Battle-Passes & Micro-Transactions one thing please

Not lost to time. We're old, but us PS1 era game devs still exist :-D. That was an easy trick too. Want mirrored ice reflections? just render the character upside down under the semi transparent ice plane. It might need some draw order hacking, but its cheap and looks good.

To be fair, your friend could have used less esoteric language.
For most game-dev use cases 'piecewise affine' could just be "lerp between nearest two values from an array". If what you'd already created worked and wasn't a performance black-hole then I'm sure it was fine.

It's a common trick that we've been using in game cameras for a few decades. For bonus points developers can also handle momentary occlusion (like pillars) differently (Journey does this) and smooth the motion into occlusion handling using something like sphere casts (Veilgaurd does this)

This is one of the many reasons why limes are just, better.

Yeah, billboards were another good way to go if you never really saw the wheels too close up and you had a limited number of expected view angles. Otherwise the sprite sheet sizes could get big really quickly (even accounting for mirroring or any other image trickery).

Finding useful screenshots of ps1 era technology is tricky.
You'll have to imagine an image of an extruded pentagon for the main tire treads then a quad with a wheel image (roughly alpha clipped circle) for the outside. 12 tris per wheel.

Wheels in racing games were just a massive pain back then.

You should see how we used to build and render car wheels :-D.

or... Blender :-D

Here's the results from some Geometry nodes stuff I was messing with recently. And I'm no expert in this stuff I just bashed nodes together until I liked the results.

I build the stuff at the top and my geo-nodes just instantly give me the stuff at the bottom.

yes and no.
I'd love to have made another Grow Home game some day (I was tech lead on both) but now that's not really an option.

As a follow up to my previous post. Here's a very (very) quick test of my new gantry (and pipe) tools inside Unity.

procedural gantry

Nothing delivers human scale in a sci-fi industrial setting quite like a gantry.

But there's only one of me and I'd rather not spend ages building stuff that I might need to change or bin. So I spent this weekend in Blender geo-nodes making an automatic gantry builder (and also a pipe builder).

I would have attached googly eyes to those by now.

Sounds perfect.

The curse of messing around with procedural generation: At some point you'll be unable to get any work done because you just can't stop yourself pressing the 'regenerate' button one more time to see it do it's thing.

Rare drop rates like this have always been a bad design decision to solve a specific design problem. "how do we ensure some items are rare, and so perceived as more 'special' ?". Better design is if rare items simply required more complex steps, resources, risk and skill. e.g. cake in Minecraft

I don't think I've ever clicked the wishlist button so quickly after discovering a game.

As the law dictates. Because some white stuff fell from the sky, I must share pictures of it on social media. Luckily, it looks nice.

Waiting for some more light, then I imagine I'll do be doing the same from here.

Done

I felt like there was a place in the ag-racer market for something more like rally.

So, I made a prototype. Set in the dusty ruins of ancient anti-grav tracks, the crowds gone, but the gates still work.

A ton more work than I could manage alone, but it was fun to get the idea out of my head.

Another weird prototype from a while ago. One of many 'programming' game ideas I've tried making over the years. I think I'd been playing a lot of exapunks at the time.

Thanks for sharing, I'd not seen this video before, it's great. And yes, AA was a guess, based on some assumptions from previous experiences (ages ago) with stencil buffer nonsense. I had to stop doing pure graphics coding in the end. I couldn't keep up with the pace of bleeding edge developments

My graphic programmer brain forced me to spend far too long moving the camera and Raz back and forth through the clipping plane trying to see the magic. The consistency in light and colour from one side to the other was so so good. I think the only tell was a tiny hint in the antialiasing (guessing)

I noticed my current content on here might imply I just make maps. In truth I just make whatever I'm curious about. In this case a sci-fi ROV simulation driven by text commands. Any text could be bound to single key presses to keep things fluid but it had a full coding interface for the brave.

(Trying out the video support on here).
Far to long ago I decided to make a map viewer in Unity for for my overly ambitious D&D world.

Ah .. I see my hope/assumption that BlueSky somehow now supported animated gifs was wrong :-(

It all looks great. Those monsters in the first image remind me of a weird little jam game I made last year.

I do too, 100%. I'd happily buy a blue-ray edition, making of, art book and maybe even the plushy. I hope eventually it gets a wider release.

It does look amazing. But, you're right, it needs to be more widely available. I don't want to encourage the continued fracturing of content streaming by paying for yet another service.