Dark Times Ahead

I had hoped to be able to keep political stuff out of this since this blog is supposed to be about a game I'm making and contain only fun things, but it appears that the real world isn't going to let me or people like me just have fun. As you may or may not be aware Google has recently caved to the pressure of the perpetually offended and has announced plans to make their platform a haven for the intellectually dishonest, just as Twitter and Facebook have done before them. You might be wondering what this has to do with my project, well Blogger (the site your currently reading this on) is owned and operated by Google. Now I'm small and generally insignificant, so I might be able to just fly under the radar, but as that I intend to add a lot of fun things to my game and as the perpetually offended hate fun, there is a chance that at some point in the future I'll be forced to take this project down.

Thank you for your time, I'm now going to go sit in the corner and rock back and forth creepily for awhile.

Update #12

I'm afraid I can't write much for this update, an old hand injury of mine is flaring up making it difficult to use the computer (perhaps I should do a bit less faping). Anyway, I'll try to make up for it with my next post by putting in some actual effort and some shitty ms paint drawing.

Update #11

    Alright, I'm still a little sick, but I feel well enough to write something for this post. I'm not entirely sure "Progress Update" is the right thing to call these posts, so I'm just going to start calling them "Update" since for the time being I'm not actually able to work on the project. I probably shouldn't actually even be allocating the time to make these posts, but it's important to me that I don't forget about this project since I really want to make this game.

Learning to Art:

    My drawings are starting to get somewhat alright, I've still got along way to go before I'm able to make anything fap worthy, but it's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering buying a scanner and sharing them.

Game Ideas:

    Ok, so new section that I'm not entirely sure what to call it, but this is going to be where I talk about things I want to do for my game. For this post I was hoping to delve a little bit into math, but I seem to have misplaced my notes, so we're just going to cover the basic idea. For this post I would like to continue talking about sky boxes, or more specifically that thing hello games promised for No Man's Sky but apparently couldn't figure out how to do, realistic orbiting celestial bodies.

    There are two ways to have realistic orbiting celestial bodies, the first of which is to make it part of the physics simulation like the way universe sandbox did. This will produce accurate results and will even allow bodies to interact with each other and affect one another's orbits, but is very cpu intensive, must be run continuously even when no one is there to see it, and can't handle large skips in time.

    The other way to do it (and the way I intend to) is use mathematical models (I don't remember which ones or I would specifically name them) to predict where an orbiting body will be at any given time, like how Kerbal Space Program dose. How this basically works is if you know the mass of the object being orbited, the mass of the orbiting object, and the initial position and vector of the orbiting object then you can predict where that object should be in it's orbit at any given time. The advantages of this is it requires very little cpu time compared to the physics based method, it only needs to run when it's needed (such as when the player is looking up or the game wants to know what season it is), and it can easily handle large skips in time both forward and back. The only real disadvantage of this is that celestial bodies won't really be able to interact with each other, but that shouldn't really be an issue as I don't intend to place them close enough to one another for them to interact.

Progress Update #10

I was originally planing to get into some maths for this post, but I'm sick and can't really focus right now, so perhaps next time.

Progress Update #9

Well, as I have sadly been too busy with things to work on this game since the last update, but I have been at least setting aside time to learn how to art. However just leaving the post at that seems kind of lame, even though no one reads these. So after some thought, I have decided I'm going to talk about some thoughts and ideas that I have for this game as filler. Hopefully the occasional person that accidentally finds this project with think it interesting.

To start off with, I would like to talk about the shape of the world. As I stated in the first post I made, I'm going for a voxel box aesthetic kind of like Minecraft. It's a simple look that is easy to code and simple to art. But unlike Minecraft, I would also like to have a planet that is about the size of earth and is a sphere but voxel box worlds don't really do round. So how do we solve this? Well we can start by connecting the east and west edges of the map, turning it into a cylinder (or more accurately a conveyor belt). This gives us a roundish map that if you travel east or west long enough you'll eventually get back to where you started, but isn't a sphere. The first thing that dose come to mind to make it a sphere is to pinch the ends, but buildings built on the surface will start to look kind of weird as you approach the poles, so we can't do that. The only solution I have been able to think of is actually to just fake it. By that I mean we take the X, Y, and Z position of the player and convert that into Longitude, Altitude, and Latitude and then use that to figure out what angle everything in the sky should be at if you were on a sphere. The problem with this is that the closer you get to the poles, the more the illusion breaks down. At the pole it's self the illusion would produce such a horrid nightmare that I think it might be best to set up an instant kill zone long before the player reaches it. But between the north and south of a particular latitude (which should be further north/south then any player would have reason to travel) it should look quite nice as the position of the sun, moons, and other planets change to reflect your current position.

With that I'm afraid I need to get back to work and will have to wait until the next update for more of my thoughts and ideas.

Progress Update #8

once again I've had more unexpected things pop up that i need to deal with, so i haven't had much time to work on this and at the moment it looks like there might be a few more of these updates where i won't have much to show.

Code Update:

    I've started working on a memory manager for the game. The reason is that when your dealing with allocation and deallocation of small bits of memory, fragmentation isn't too much of an issue. But if you need large chunks of memory, you could potentially wind up with large chunks of wasted space. I'm hoping to really did into the chunk system soon to begin work on the world it's self, but for that I'm going to need gigabytes of continuous unfragmented ram.

learning to Art Update:

    I've picked up a book on drawing, so hopefully I won't be wondering around blind anymore and it will speed up my learning.

Progress Update #7

I'm afraid I've been a little busy with other things, so haven't had much time to work on this project the passed few weeks. So Happy New Year to everyone and hopefully I'll be able to make some progress for the next update.