The Blog of Zill

As an experiment, I tried rendering Mya from Catmouth Island. There were some weird scaling problems and other errors.

While searching for gameplay footage of the PC port of the original Bubsy, I came across three similar and interesting YouTube channels:

https://www.youtube.com/user/RayceGames

https://www.youtube.com/user/sesesemra

https://www.youtube.com/user/ErmigaGames

It appears someone created a bot which retrieves a set of images based on a search term, concatenates them into a video, adds some mellow stock instrumental music, and uploads them all to a YouTube channel. Each channel has somewhere between 700 and 1500 videos like this, all with similar names and descriptions. On each channel, all of the hundreds or thousands of videos were uploaded on the same day.

Little experiment with PSX homebrew, using borrowed code along with a Blender script I wrote to convert a model into C(++) code which can be read by the PSYQ SDK. It currently uses vertex colors; I'll be trying to figure out how to texture map soon. Not sure what's causing the depth buffering issue on the face yet.

A while ago I posted a similar experiment I did on the Dreamcast, though back then instead of being smart I hardcoded the model with OpenGL calls. I didn't continue to pursue Dreamcast development because A) I had no good means of debugging, B) I'm not much a fan of the Dreamcast's controller, and C) I felt the Dreamcast was still too modern and I wanted instead to try homebrew on a platform with more limitations. As ugly as PSX graphics are, I happen to find the low poly, low resolution, unfiltered look of them charming. Even poor attempts at realism back then look like stylized art to me now.

If your game runs in a web player and requires use of a mouse for anything other than left-clicking menu items, I strongly urge you to do one or both of the following. It's quite easy to do and will make your game much more playable.

Lock the cursor. This will prevent the player from accidentally clicking outside of the window and losing control of the game. You can do this with

Screen.lockCursor = true; 

You should place this code in a mouse event, as the web player needs to have focus for the cursor to be locked. For instance:

if(Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0){     Screen.lockCursor = true; }

Similarly, you can write code to unlock the cursor if the player presses Escape, though I believe this is the default behavior in the web player. You'll also want to unlock the cursor anytime the player needs to click a menu item (and I forgot to do this on my latest game when viewing the scoreboard from the server side, whoops).

Disable the context menu on right-clicking. This only really matters if your game makes use of right-clicking, and if you followed step 1 then the context menu shouldn't appear while the cursor is locked anyway, but I often see games where I'm supposed to right-click and it makes a context menu pop up every time. To get around this, go to Edit->Project Settings->Player, select the web player icon on the far left, and select "No Context Menu".

This might not work on sites like Gamejolt or Itch.io, but I think at least one of those has an option to disable right-clicking when you submit your game.

I felt compelled to make this post after playing several Cyberpunk Jam games that neglected to do anything about fixing these issues. It's a very easy problem to fix and should prevent a lot of frustration from your players once taken care of.