STOMY 451

I keep coming down here and imagining this as a Thief tribute. I really should jam one out at some point to get it out of my system.

Music is the title track from Thief's City by Sick Le Lapin:

Something of an unexciting cleanup week this week. Early on I took two days to port over my character controller visualization from Ctesiphon only to then fix a stair-stepping bug in just two minutes.

Turns out because I wasn't pre-clipping gravity's contribution to the character controller against the ground plane, the non-stepping trace would always be rejected so you if a doorway was just over head height, you'd step up and smack into it anyway. The one line fix was to just actually clip off the gravity against the ground plane like I really should have been doing already.

For this Screenshot Saturday, witness the miracle of convex brush collision! I built this whole elaborate test level, only to find out all of the edge cases just work out of the box and instead I finished the week adding stair-handling and crouching.

This technique is so magical I'm genuinely considering having this game just not do triangle mesh collision at all (hey it worked for Quake 3!). It's yet another reason it pays off to make your own engine because the big names wouldn't bother adding something like this, let alone making it the default. Nowadays people are so used to using meshes for collision that convex brushes must seem like an alien concept.

Damn, remember when MSAA was a relevant option for performance? I'm taking my nearly 15-year-old laptop with me to a con next weekend and hardcoding AA off instead of max took the game from barely playable to actually decent. #ScreenshotSaturday

Finally time to post something again: Instead of doing all the boilerplate every time, I'm putting together an engine template with all the common systems all games need. Being for personal use, I know what I'm going to use and what I can ignore.

In there so far:

DearImgui integration

Hotloading

Support for IQM models, audio in WAV, FLAC, and ogg/vorbis, textures in png/tga, materials defined with wal_json

Custom map format (this time repacked from Quake 2 instead of 1)

I got made redundant today, you know that means?

I've been promoted to full time game developer! :D

Until I run out of savings I'm committed to making a Deus Ex clone.