Lys

A beautiful grey cat sitting prim and proper in front of a computer monitor with code on it, staring at the camera.

It's honestly a miracle I can get any game dev work done at all under these conditions. This happens constantly. I took this picture yesterday and she's currently standing in front of my monitor in this exact same pose right now.

I saw a bunch of game awards "my vote cards" in the game dev feed and immediately wondered where indie devs find the time to actually *play* games, and then I realized this is actually indicative of the fact that I have very poor work/life balance.

Give this thread a read. It's a great synopsis of how the speculation- and finance-driven approach to managing game development has gutted the industry. Everyone who actually has their hands in the mud of making games knows this in their bones, but I rarely see it put into words so cleanly.

A destroyed frigate, drifting

Well, I successfully got the enemy AI to stop focusing on the flagship. Caught some rockets in the process...

This is the most basic level of analysis, just showing me how the missions get assigned. I'm sure it'll expand with additional pieces as I find more weird behaviors I need additional tools to figure out.

This in-game debugging tool shows me all of the enemy units, and each round of prioritization and assignment so I can more easily see why specific units are getting tasked the way they are. I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but something else was always more important.

I talked a lot about how the AI works in the second half of devlog 36, but this is what its "thought process" actually looks like. It generates a bunch of missions for each unit, sorts them to find the most important one, and assigns it. It does this for multiple rounds until all units are tasked.

A debugging window for the campaign editor. The left scroll view shows 3 task units and their composition and assigned missions. The main area shows each round of bidding for missions, the selected mission at the top in green, and missions that were removed from the bidding in red.

Gazing into the abyss of my AI mission prioritization system. I started my day trying to diagnose a strange behavior with the enemy AI and instead ended up making this AI state viewer. #gamedev

I've had fever dreams that were more coherent than this.

A module missile launcher with 1-2-3 written in damage decals across the surface.

No one ever tells you how much math there is in gamedev. I just spent *all day* figuring out the correct formulas to remap the UVs for the socket's damage mask to the individual modules of the scalable VLS launchers. At least it finally works.

Just ignore that we haven't made new textures yet.

Still in there, 5 years later. Still don't really know why...

I'm so glad you finally have a steam page! I've been looking forward to being able to give this a try for months. Congrats!

The projected damage UV map of the Mk61, showing the barrel squished lengthwise.

The funny part is that the barrel needs to be squished to fit inside the mount space. I guess we'll see how this works for turrets with more significant barrel overhang, like the 450s...

The editor view of one of the turrets from above, showing how the socket bounds extend beyond the mount's base.

The most annoying part was accounting for the fact that smaller components fit in larger sockets, so the UVs stored in the socket need to be scaled accordingly. Here you can see the gray box takes up more space than the turret base. That took a little bit of napkin math but it worked in the end.

Aside from the obvious increase in shader complexity, there's no additional overhead for this from applying damage to the hull normally: the sockets pull the armor damage mask texture directly from their corresponding hull segment and do a little UV coordinate remapping.

This technique isn't as simple as the engines, which are just mapped directly to their corresponding points on the hull in Blender. I have to determine the corners of the socket and it's rotation on the UV map and record those, then assign those values to the component material after it's installed.

I wasn't super thrilled with the original mount damage effects I did a little while back, which would just grunge up the mount's whole mesh based on damage below it. It was really just meant to keep the mount from appearing pristine after a reactor bloom, but I knew we could do better.

Two Mk61 turrets on the Raines frigate, with damage decals mapped onto them from the hull.

Time for some more #gamedev #techart: Damage effects from the hull being mapped onto the turrets! Using the alternate UV map hack we came up with for the engine damage decals we can now make damage appear on components mounted on the hull as long as their material has the correct properties.

Never a good day when I have to open regedit to debug a crash... #gamedev

A large metal pot filled to the brim with tomatoes.

After a whole season of harvesting and freezing tomatoes from our garden, it's finally time to make and jar some sauce. This pot is like 15 or 18 quarts and it barely fit half of them.

This really whips the llamas ass

It's not perfect, as it only projects the hits directly underneath the bell, but it allows us to texture all of the engine components on a full UV map while still knowing where to address damage in relation to the hull.

The engine bells are projected flat on the UV2 map, down onto the surface that contains them. This allows us to sample the same damage mask from the hull under each point on the bell, and doesn't require another hull segment with its own mask. This works for the small maneuvering thrusters too.

The updated ship models and new damage shaders allow for damage effects on the large engine bells and maneuvering thrusters. The way we did this without adding additional colliders for them is actually a pretty funny hack. #gamedev #techart

I appreciate the little red marks on the affected versions, but I open Unity Hub maybe once a week (or whenever my editor crashes) and update it even less. The email subject didn't include "critical", "security", or "vulnerability". The words it did use I commonly associate with FOMO marketing.

I'm not a communications expert but "Unity Platform Protection" sounds like you're trying to push a branded security product on me and not a notification of a *critical security vulnerability*. Maybe lead with that next time. #unity #unity3d

Somehow ended up with Gold Vauxhall. Gotta say this is a first time error for me... #gamedev

Something funny we learned working on this graphical update for Neb is that apparently there are two models for the Vauxhall light cruiser. One is 10% larger than the other and at first we weren't sure which one was actually currently in the game. #gamedev

My assessment at this point? Aside from 250 AP, which everyone burns through 100% of in a boss room, the consumption rate of most ammo types is actually pretty decent. Some don't get used much but that's because the corresponding threats haven't been encountered yet, so we'll see where those fall.

The large drops following difficult battles are good prompts to place ammo looting opportunities either at the end of that room or in the next one where they can recuperate.