Shifts in technical priorities, over time

Something I find kind of interesting is that I am old enough to have lived through, or seen the direct aftermath of, a few different iterations of software development culture. I was reminded of this when sighing at an OctoberProject stack trace [...]

I walk through the new demo8 release, showing the orcs and cows in the world.

Their AI is still very basic and the spawning rules need to be balanced but this at least demonstrates the functionality. The cows are spawned when new cuboids are [...]

I quick demo of the latest development in OctoberProject. This update includes tools, weapons, and armour. Additionally, the UI has been re-worked and inventory capacity and management have been changed.

Additionally, you may now see some tick [...]

Updates when stitching the world

The change to OctoberProject's item addressing is complete and, while I still don't like it (the addressing still feels "not quite right" in some way), it does do everything required and probably in about the most reasonable way possible.

Moving on [...]

Item versus tool management - stuck in the back-and-forth

For the past couple of days, I have been stuck in that frustrating mental trap of not being able to think up an elegant way of doing something, so you keep prototyping different ideas, using lots of time, and not coming up with something good while [...]

A quick demo of the new OctoberPlains build. This version introduces health, hunger, basic combat, some worldgen changes, fixes to intermittent network and persistence bugs, and a slight UI overhaul.

Note shown in the demo is the combat mechanic: [...]

A quick demo of the new OctoberPlains build. This version introduces lighting and basic farming, as well as the first steps toward declarative mechanics.

At this point, the lighting definitely improves the look and feel of the system and the [...]

Parallel light flooding

While thinking more about this new lighting mechanic and doing some research into the subject it looks like the common approach is a breadth-first flood-fill kind of approach. This makes sense and can be reversed when lighting is removed (and then [...]

A quick demo of the new OctoberPlains build. This version introduces falling item debris and flowing water, as well as some under-the-hood optimizations.

Looking forward to demo5, that build will include a farming mechanic, a lighting engine, and [...]

Synchronous or Redundant

I have been experimenting with different approaches for the "block update" mechanism in OctoberProject. This means that, for all blocks which somehow changed in a given tick, an event needs to be run on the adjacent 6 blocks in the following tick. [...]

Just a quick demo of the current state of OctoberProject. This is the v0.0-demo3 release of OctoberPlains.

The demo4 release will focus on things like falling block/inventory types, flowing water, and general "implicit block update" behaviour. [...]

October Project: First rough demo

I think I am now to the point where I have a basic rough cut of the first multi-player demo of "October Plains". Ideally, I would run this by some people to see that it at least basically makes sense and is worth continuing before pushing these [...]

OctoberProject: Mutation streaming and data consistency

The current design for OctoberProject is that the client produces mutations directed at their own entity which are then sent to the server. The server applies or rejects these mutations, potentially creating follow-up mutations (against the world or [...]

A short video to show what OctoberPlains currently looks like. This is the first demo application built on top of OctoberProject. It is intended to be a purely top-down view of the world. The logic behind it is still the complete system, though: [...]

October progress: Basic inventory and block placement

Now that the latest re-work on consensus and timed mutation has been completed, moving on to some new mutations to support inventory item selection, inventory movement, and block placement was comparatively simple.

Still, these are somewhat [...]

Re: October Project: More thoughts on consensus

Hmm, that is odd that they would call it all "coding" (although that term is already overused to the point of meaningless so I am not too surprised).

I would have thought that character writing and in-game world-building writing would be about the [...]

October Project: More thoughts on consensus

One of the other things which is odd about working on a game while having no game development experience yet substantial systems and distributed experience is that I think about what could be called "anti-cheat" more often than I probably should.

I [...]

October Project: On to UI

I managed to recently do a big re-work to dramatically simplify time-based operations. I also added in the basis of the crafting system, at least for simple cases. Still, I have a pretty good idea of how to extend it to handle other systems like [...]

October Project: Integration milestone

I finally managed to progress to the point where I can integrate all the bottom-up components (yes, I know that this is the wrong way to build things but I wanted to experiment with whether each idea would work since many were new to me) into a [...]

October Project: Going backward and forward on backward and forward

While trying to figure out how to handle timed actions (like mining a block: You start at one point and finish later, or crafting, as it will work similarly), I came up with an idea to allow an entity change to schedule a later follow-up change (as [...]

October Project: Game logic frequency

Something which I find to be an interestingly common problem in many areas of software is the issue of how you make something discrete appear as though it is something continuous.

For an example of what I mean, consider audio: It is a stream of [...]

October Project: Block update perf experiments

I made some improvements to the block update logic within the primary 15-bit octree storage but I still wonder if that will be enough.

A worst-case scenario of writing a unique block type to all 32k blocks in a cuboid takes about 7 seconds, on my [...]

October network logic basically working

The network layer logic and framework for October seems to be generally working. This hasn't been stress-tested, nor are all the network packet types implemented (those will be added as needed) but the basic design is in place and working.

This is [...]

Re: Mired in graphics

Thanks. Things are going reasonably, but this is definitely the most difficult area for me. After muddling through LWJGL (which is what Minecraft uses for portable graphics) and LibGDX (which is built on top of that and adds other game-related [...]

Mired in graphics

I managed to get a basic path-finding algorithm loosely based on A-star implemented, yesterday. This will be the basis of some near-term testing and later-term AI for non-player entities in October Project.

Today, however, I decided I should [...]