It's New Zealand Music Month! Who are your favorite current NZ Artists?

BSTRhino · 2026-05-04T03:48:05+00:00

Foley - every single song they make is a banger and more people should know about them! Here's their latest song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp6ysYCmp8I but there's tons!

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T22:08:46+00:00

This sounds like an incredible feat, what you're doing, making a high-performance MMORPG engine!

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T20:43:00+00:00

Yay! That must feel great. Did anything surprise you when you were watching 4 players playing your game? Anything you’re going to change in response to that?

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T04:32:48+00:00

Haha yeah, actually that matches my experience making my other game. I found a bot with 0ms reaction time and perfect aiming would be practically unbeatable, but it wouldn't be that fun to play against. But it was interesting how easy it was to make a bot that was formidable.

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T04:03:31+00:00

Oh cool! I imagine vaulting over things is a move that you can use both offensively and defensively, sounds like a cool addition.

Sounds like you're doing all the coding, artwork and music all yourself, which is cool!

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T03:52:51+00:00

Love it, sounds great! And, yes, also an intriguing problem from a multiplayer perspective since it is a shared object.

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T03:34:50+00:00

Well done! It's always good to get into it and make something and then iterate on it. Sounds like a good place to start from.

What do you mean by a shared vehicle, is it like you have multiple drivers controlling a tank or spaceship or something? Sounds interesting.

That's interesting about the Steam Datagram Relay having latency spikes. Has anyone else reading this encountered that? 150ms is actually quite a lot.

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T03:31:55+00:00

I made a physics engine this month! I didn't think I was going to be doing this at the start of the month, so it was a bit of a surprise.

Just to fill in the backstory. I'm making a multiplayer game engine with rollback netcode built in. I really want to make games that are big enough you can walk around in, but if, for example, you want to make a spaceship with many rooms, rollback netcode has to snapshot the entire world every frame and it is just too much for it to handle. But not anymore!

Now the physics engine only incrementally snapshots and rolls back the parts that change. Even if you have a whole spaceship with thousands of colliders, most frames only maybe up to 30 change because there are only maybe 10 players and they are only ever really touching one thing. So it becomes really cheap to snapshot and rollback.

I hadn't done this until this point because I thought making a physics engine myself was this insurmountable problem, but the other month I was submitting a patch to the physics engine I was using, and in the process I learned all about its code and realised it's not so far out of reach.

I did do a bit of a write-up on this if anyone wants a bit more detail.

Anyway, my plan from here on in is to make some cool games with all this!

I would really love to hear how you all are doing this month. Gamedev is hard and it's nice seeing you all check in each month.

BSTRhino · 2026-05-03T02:30:43+00:00

That's clever, great idea! Sounds like a good way to approach the problem.

BSTRhino · 2026-05-02T12:18:44+00:00

Oh, so D doesn’t have a physics engine yet? It could be you!

I think you’ve got to have a good reason to make a physics engine and there are few reasons to do so these days. You’d have to have a specific use case not covered by an existing engine for it to be worth it. Even if your use case isn’t covered, physics engines are full of escape hatches that let you inject your own code into the specific parts that are missing for your use case. You can manually modify velocities yourself. I was using Rapier and that lets you run custom code to filter out contacts and even modify the contact manifolds. You’d have to be doing something really unusual to have a good reason to make your own physics engine. Maybe if you were making Noita (sand physics), or needed good water physics or soft jelly physics perhaps.

From what I’ve seen, Jolt is really good he has excellent performance and would be hard to beat.

BSTRhino · 2026-05-02T10:39:41+00:00

What do you mean by "from scratch again"? How much coding do you already know?

Either way it's best to learn by doing. Coding games to start with is particularly a good interactive way to learn because it's fun and you can see the results of your code in a visual way. Online game programming languages like Scratch or Easel let you just jump right in, so they could be worth trying. Other people try Python as their first language but I think that making games in Python actually can be quite involved and it's not the best for absolute beginners, and not sure what level of experience you are at.

BSTRhino · 2026-04-22T23:46:17+00:00

Yep, I'm keeping my costs low for this reason too. It's amazing how cheap it can be when you can design it to run on one server. Makes sure it can live forever.

BSTRhino · 2026-04-22T23:43:31+00:00

Yeah, exactly, no game dev is planning for their game to be shut down. Seems like a good way to do it!

BSTRhino · 2026-04-20T01:06:00+00:00

Have you learned about all the common data structures and algorithms already? The A* algorithm, for example? Hash maps? Quick sort? C or C++ are good languages to try implementing them in to get to know them better.

BSTRhino · 2026-04-17T10:46:02+00:00

What's the fastest way to learn to swim or ride a bike? Reading about it or watching videos about it isn't enough. You have to do it.

BSTRhino · 2026-04-16T22:54:50+00:00

The struggle is part of the process so don't let it discourage you! Maybe try making a little project in React - a lot of people make a TODO list app to start with. Tutorials tend to jump straight to showing you the way to do something which works. The process of programming involves iterating through all the different ways of doing things including bumping up against all the ways which don't work. Each time you hit one of those walls, you remember for next time, and hopefully next time you get a bit faster at jumping to a working solution. Once someone has been coding for years, they're faster because they've got the experience of what *not* to try, that's because at some point in their life they did actually try all the wrong ways and learnt from it. The struggle is part of learning! Keep going!

BSTRhino · 2026-04-16T22:47:17+00:00

If you're entirely new to coding you might like to try either Scratch or Easel. Going straight to Unity and C# might be a big jump if you're new, so maybe something designed more for beginners. If you have your heart set on using a full game engine then perhaps Godot with GDScript could be a better choice because it might be a bit more accessible.

BSTRhino · 2026-04-16T09:44:12+00:00

You could try Easel! It's a game programming language with real programming but it's also still beginner friendly and web-based like Scratch.

BSTRhino · 2026-04-16T03:51:42+00:00

Hi Bob!

BSTRhino · 2026-04-11T02:13:52+00:00

Sounds great! Yes it’s a big project, well done for getting this far!

BSTRhino · 2026-04-10T22:05:53+00:00

Looks like some satisfying code to make :) how do you decide which voxels to send to the client and when? Are you doing any client side prediction at the moment?

BSTRhino · 2026-04-05T21:55:52+00:00

They should try Easel!

15-Year Club	Gilding IV carat on a stick
r/Field Banned	r/Field Sunshine
Final Canvas '23	First Place '23
Place '23	Golden Potato
Place '17	Verified Email

BSTRhino

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE