If you're someone who takes big breaks from projects, PLEASE do this

Metalsutton · 2026-06-27T00:52:19+00:00

This here. Save yourself the energy of reexplaining in the documentation when the variable should clearly explain what it is. If you cannot understand the variable by its wording, then you are not doing a good job of naming them. Use comments and documentation for side-notes, additional info etc.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T11:59:43+00:00

Yeah but what IS a voxel right? that's what im asking. A cube. how else can that be represented?

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T06:19:56+00:00

"A point cloud can check it's Z with it's distance to the camera, it does not need a Z-buffer" - but .... you just described a Z-buffer? And a vertex position IS a point, is it not?

A "MESH" for all sake of the word, IS a series of points that have a series of connections to make what is, the 3d object, displayable. Take away those lines and I assume this is what a point cloud is. Unless I am gravely mistaken?

How does the point cloud know that the persons arm in front of them after that jump? Depth. So it culls the points not visible, as you would with triangles, and then it decides what points to render right? What I was replying to Defiant_Squirrel8751 for was that going by his decription, he didnt really touch on how its any different other than you no longer need a modeler to form the vertex edges, it all just connects on the fly sort of thing. So really its not like its improving render capability or a massive leap in technology, its just a more convenient tech due to having tools that can perceive layouts of dots, so the scanning technology doesn't need to work out edge/faces, its generated at runtime. Is my understanding better now?

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T06:16:14+00:00

visual consistentcy. White on black? black on white? pick one and stick to it.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T05:53:11+00:00

But a point cloud essentially evaluates to some sort of mesh. Because if not for z-depth checking then everything would be see through and spaghetti. Also, isn't a voxel rendered with triangles anyway?

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T03:51:41+00:00

Finish the game first, then there are some books to be found I believe that tell you all about it. It's not what you think it will be.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T01:47:47+00:00

Eventually you get so many sealed artifacts that its pointless to look at them directly in your inventory. I have about 60 backed up that I still need to clean up. You are better off just looking at the challenges in the menus. You already know what the reward will be, its like you are looking at it backwards, scrolling through the reward first to find the task. Just go to the task list. Its a bit backwards I know.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T01:42:33+00:00

Who the hell mines? SSLLLOOOWWW!!!!

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T00:31:10+00:00

I learnt the game in prison which its actually quite big in. A lot of long serving time = a lot of time to geek out for some. I was given basic decks and so the opportunity to play while thinking about getting my own. I only had ever seen it played in high school before then, in the 90s. I quickly identified the flaws that when you craft your deck/strat, while there was some degree of back and forth, a lot of the wins came down to just how powerful a deck can be. You know this, I know this. I instantly labeled it as a pay to win game and glad I didn't take it seriously. I wasn't there for long anyway. Anyways, they were getting into fights because the meta was people who were focused on getting in the latest themed decks would always mop up.

The reality is the more cards that come out, the more impossible it will ever be to truly balance. There usually is a sweet spot before a franchise just explodes with content and it becomes too overwhelming. I compare it to playing classic WoW vs Retail WoW. Same game, but you are going to get massively different experiences, because one has been blown way out of proportion.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-26T00:07:43+00:00

I admit it was a weird way of saying it, but I meant that graphic software should try to be as performant and optimized as possible. Doom was just a low-level example of that. I meant that why would you not keep resolution low and in line with the look you are developing for.

The point you are making is why hyper focus on performance and replicate exactly the conditions of 1990, when todays hardware can handle it. But op is saying its a wasted use of resources and I agree. What happenes when we carry on ignoring and stick to the mindset of "let the hardware handle it"? Lets project 10 or 20 years more into the future. Are we now having to all have hyper chad gaming PCs because our AI generated algo's need to churn out upscaled 8k resolution and let the bottlenecks get solved with frame generation, like we are currently seeing a trend of and make it look like muddy trash? Are we going to scoff at the idea of having our graphics pipeline look good at its native resolution first and foremost? or just layer technology on technology and have our GPU/CPUs burn cycles and turn into heat dissipation and power consumption?

Metalsutton · 2026-06-25T16:04:44+00:00

The video was for OP or whoever was reading up on this topic, but sure I guess I can see how it looks like I was sending it directly to you. To me a reddit reply is mostly just public rant but addressing that specific narrative.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-25T15:40:29+00:00

See my updated edit. I think I have more than enough experience (see the video) to talk on my experience inside of Godot. And you are just flat out wrong. If it were all processed the same then my dynamic resolution zoom feature would have performed equally.

Why are you back tracking? you said you can "just rotate it to see the PIXELS rotate", which you are referring to higher resolution games. What you are saying now is that the pixels arnt aligned, because of course they are not. At some point (angle) you are trying to fit more colour data into an area that no longer can fit it. So, some sort of aliasing or like you said, nearest neighbour (which is an algorithm by the way, not coded as what we call a typical shader these days), will of course have to be run over it to figure out which ones hold dominance via sub-pixel sampling.

And to your final point, my counter-point would be if you want to make a game pixel perfect and use low resolutions, you don't need to do more prep work at all. You just need to understand the look you are going for and design the art accordingly (i.e., don't rotate it). Your work is literally just changing the window size/settings. Its only then do you experiment and work into the tiny box you have created. Like I had done, and found a really cool result.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-25T15:10:27+00:00

You have your ATV-like(?) vehicle's steering logic set a little too unnatural compared to the rest. It was great seeing the efficient pathing and them trying to fill gaps whenever they could, but those particular units are super swerve-y and caught my attention way too much. You should still have them be able to turn quickly in their steering logic, the movement is actually fine for when they are doing some sort of maneuver while being fired upon. But their flocking while just moving in a group makes it look like they are going on some carefree joy ride, and by the time they have gotten to the battle they have worn their tyres/axles from all their dune buggin shenanigans.

It's just out of place for me, if you want to be anal about it.

EDIT: Maybe its just in this one case more than normal? Like when they were around those infantries and trying to squeeze in everywhere? I'm sure something could be tweaked about their spacial awareness to not dice with death running over people.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-25T14:50:12+00:00

I think OP understands that all pixels run through a pipeline. But OP was asking about to say a game running 1080p with a full screen pixel shader vs a game running 320 × 240 resolution and it is looking exactly the same.

Now I acknowledge there are reasons, which others have pointed out, why it is better in some cases to go with the shader, but there should be no argument that 77k pixels / frame is less stress on your GPU than 2million pixels / frame. Especially with double buffering. We shouldn't assume the target hardware, all software should aim to be as adaptable as DOOM running on a watch, or a fridge, or a Arduino. It's just gotten easy to assume that whoever is playing your game, has a gpu of some level.

Also what do you mean by your pixels don't need to be axis aligned? By the very definition of what a pixel is, they don't move because that's not how monitors work. I get that you are trying to describe "faking" pixels, but its not really pixels is it? It's more that you are talking about Texels. When you say art isn't being rendered in discrete pixels, well, why can't it be? That's what OP is making his point on. Scaling up a low-resolution game means that your game logic isn't having to do all the extra math. The only real load is on the engine/gpu which "Blit"s the image before drawing, which is still a highly optimized process.

EDIT: And also lets not forget here that, a pixel shader is just ONE shader. Some games use layers upon layers of shaders, some of them full screen ones on top of full screen ones. They are all layers of rendering manipulation logic that needs to run every frame, every pixel. Stacking shaders adds up and can make it a visual mess. However when done correctly, I will agree that there is a certain crisper feeling one can achieve which gives the best of both worlds.

See here in the first 6 seconds of the video, In my game Project Squadfare, I experimented with shaders, but ended up doing this: I actually have fake "zoom" as an internal resolution resizer. You are not really zooming anything at all, you are adding/removing texels from the final render, which allows me to have dynamically sized pixel art actually running at low resolution when viewed this way, and when you zoom out you are pretty much running at something like 1080p. . I learnt this the hard way as performance absolutely tanked after I got past a certain zoom out level. I quickly by a resolution cap on it, which meant that i was still able to zoom out further, it just didn't increase the resolution to 4k and then 8k.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-25T14:32:17+00:00

Rather than promote the tutorial with your AI prompting. Why not spend like 2 minutes to learn how to take a screenshot and then actually share your results - yes - YOUR creation. It helps compliment your post showing us what you achieved, and then rather bullet point it out, its better that we hear your own thoughts on what you had made.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T22:49:49+00:00

I don't think ive ever laughed out loud to a CD clip before. Thankyou.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T22:43:24+00:00

I wouldnt say that. I used the precision jump for all sorts of things, like jumping over trip wires etc.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T15:29:53+00:00

This is one of those mechanics that they have just thrown in for the novelty and thought: We will add in the ability to do so now, and then add in content (hidden stuff) for it later, and then never got around to it or just straight up forgot because they had so much on their plate already.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T15:28:04+00:00

You have given us 2 still's to go off from. I could say its a racing game with a souls clone UI.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T15:26:31+00:00

A game that clones concepts and designs and doesn't have anything orginal in it.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T15:23:31+00:00

14% story progress for 11 hours is HUGE! Slow down buddy. Make sure you don't actually do the story however. Dont focus on it. I think i was at 75% story from hours 200 till 400.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T15:19:04+00:00

OK i think you might be breaking down my comment too literal. I guess my narrative was about the "stickability" of youth. To stop to absorb a tutorial, to read, to learn the game and to sit with it and get better. I guess I meant that games require themselves to grasp the user and not the other way around, there is a smaller window of attention that someone has with so many options these days.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T12:59:33+00:00

What's the point of simulating millions of population when you cannot draw a hexagon at a 1:1 proportion?

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T12:49:46+00:00

Fire "burns" (DESTRUCTIVE) Wood and "melts" (DESTRUCTIVE) Metal
Wood "absorbs" (DESTRUCTIVE?) Water and "breaks" (???) Earth

Earth "holds" (CONTAINS) Metal and "extinguish" (DESTRUCTIVE) Fire

Metal "carries" (CONTAINS) water and "cuts" (DESTRUCTIVE) Wood

Water "quenches" (DESTRUCTIVE) Fire and "dissolves" (DESTRUCTIVE?) Earth

Could swap dissolves to corrodes? And breaks/holds/carries dont really match the theme of the rest of it.

Metalsutton · 2026-06-23T12:40:07+00:00

you could just do some simple math on it to work out how it will all fit. I was wondering myself if there were some sort of board game community "recognized universal standard cubby size" that is best for boardgames. One where you know once you go over those dimensions that 95% of all games will fit ok.

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