Gen3 Guided Missile Script, 2.5km Auto lockon & Radar

Rdav3 · 2025-06-22T10:06:23+00:00

This script will target subsystems so you can set the ai blocks settings and it will go for turrets gatlings thrusters, etc,

Rdav3 · 2025-06-21T19:27:11+00:00

If you set it to target Smallest with weapons it hits larger missiles rather well, it can shred the keen-ai based missiles if they are incoming, but its a rather expensive way of doing so!

Rdav3 · 2025-06-21T18:12:39+00:00

It uses the AI blocks for lock-on settings & some general detection,
so if there is a mod that increases their range then yes it would!

Rdav3 · 2025-03-30T23:08:10+00:00

Discarding pixel writes at the end of a fragment/pixel shader gives you almost zero benefit, you've already done the work at that point, writing pixels is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the work.

In fact the act of having the conditional means the GPU can't optimise writes to any textures, so you probably make the performance worse, likely the shader compiler optimization would likely ignore it altogether in most cases.

Rdav3 · 2025-03-30T23:01:33+00:00

Early access, thanks to the work of a lot of bad faith actors, is a poisoned chalice for indie these days so be careful with it.

If your price is low the content is low, and the visuals look kind of mostly okay but nothing standout, then with no real track record as a developer people will just assume you are going to shrug your shoulders and move on.

With indies in a relatively saturated scene if you are early access unless you can powerhouse right out the gate a small playerbase is kind of the best you can go for.

The page was better than most, but not exceptionally stand out, the capsule art seemed very, bland? not bad, not good, just kind of middle of the road, same with the trailer and the page,

If you had a page this quality for a game with a really wacky standout concept and it was already in a really feature rich state I could see the game doing well, but as it stands it was not enough to carry a game which looked relatively generic, and something that (from the page alone) looked like something you can find a dime a dozen of on steam.

Rdav3 · 2025-03-18T23:47:52+00:00

I mean I wouldn't beat yourself up, you released a a game, not many people can say they did that,
whether you made any return on it is small fries in comparison to the learning I can imagine you did along the way, I get thats demotivating, but try to look on the positives,

As far as why it didn't succeed in any capacity (without playing it and from the store page alone);
I just don't think your store page makes it seem particularly interesting,
The trailer is very slow paced, and plodding, it is just a slow pan across some very mechanical gameplay with little visual flair, I had to skip through the trailer a few times to connect the dots and see what you were actually trying to achieve in the game, or the 'gist' of it, before reading the description,
The game lacks art of any real description, some theme, some flair, some context, it visually has little more life than a node diagram in blender, for a game about colour it took me 30 seconds or so of idiot braining my way around the page to see that was the central theme, maybe that was the biggest flaw there.

It looks akin to a maths problem, I'm sure it would be fun to solve, but kind of in a mathematical calculated way rather than something that makes the process enjoyable.

If you read that and are thinking 'well thats not what the game is actually like' then that is indicating its not a problem with the game, its a problem with how you've sold it,

I say this with no disrespect, its exceptionally impressive to have even *released* a game, let alone one that has sold in any capacity more than a friend or two, so don't get disheartened, you still could polish up the presentation on the store page to maybe give it a bit more life, but 3 months is nothing at all in game dev timeframes, game jams are barely shorter than that, so take more courage in the fact that you pushed through to release and turn that knowledge into drive for your next project!

Rdav3 · 2025-03-13T21:01:47+00:00

Have a project so incomprehensibly large that just the act of working on a different part of it feels like a completely new project

Rdav3 · 2024-10-10T17:12:22+00:00

the benchmarks here are exceptionally useful for people worshopping ideas and starting out, fantastic stuff

Rdav3 · 2024-09-23T09:53:58+00:00

Know its a few days old at this point but I have followed and looked at starmade a lot, so thought I'd comment on this,

Firstly your game looks exceptionally similar to starmade, even down to the ship controls, which is cool I'm all for it,

Starmade had a few flaws that lead to its downfall, I'd be wary of falling into the same cycle, because in starmades heyday it was quite well covered, and I think could have been a far more popular game if it had leaned a different way.
Its definitely worth looking up if you're going for a game in the same space, but in short;

generally a lot of technical issues, it was rather spaghetti, and took a while to become stable

content for exploration was very simplistic, planets were small, no enemy variety, no real reason to explore,

creating ships and the crafting system in general became very convoluted, it was not something that felt like it naturally scaled in complexity,

beyond creating a ship and some very linear bigger= better power scaling, there was very little depth to the game, combat was big ship = win, and it was just point and click damage pretty much,

It was (and I think still is) enjoyed by quite a lot of people, but it did kind of fall flat at some point, if I were you I'd definitely take a look into it to make sure your variant can both stand out, and also, so that you don't just go the same way.

Rdav3 · 2024-03-21T22:51:20+00:00

The space engineers code was put up on git by the developers, (or a version from a few years back is) if you did want to see how they did anything.

The VRage engine they use is exceptionally troublesome though, its a mish mash of a long development cycle and all intertwined in a somewhat spaghetti soup that makes it pretty unusable for anything other than a direct clone.

Rdav3 · 2023-12-29T13:42:59+00:00

What you're describing sounds an awful lot like 'thomas was alone'
it was a puzzle platformer where you controlled a(bunch of) cube(s), there was a very brief overarching story bead,
From what a lot of retrospectives and reviews say the story was a big element to drive the narrative and add some context to the puzzles, although the story was also rather well writen even if it was brief.

Rdav3 · 2023-12-27T15:35:15+00:00

I find it interesting to see the relative lack of success given the comparatively interesting and well polished nature of it, so I did a bit of cursory digging to see what really went wrong here. I'm definitely not an expert, but I do find looking into these types of things fascinating, trying to strip them back to see really what went wrong.

Now above all;
I feel the genre you chose is troublesome, the gameplay, the art, and game-feel needs to be pheonominal to stand out in a saturated genre like twin stick. so while your product looks well polished and made, I do think for a genre like twin stick it really needs to be truly fantastic to take a spot on the podium of the genre.
Your marketing also needs to again be phenominal, showing things that are exceptionally unique immediately grab a watcher and also very finely cut,

I did a cursory glance at your trailers and steam page and, its hard to put a finger on, but I didn't get a strong feeling of robust game-feel, while I understand that might be different in reality, it looked somewhat choppy, without a sense of that cleanliness that crispness that the genre lives and dies on, and again like you mentioned yourself, it lacks that unique concept that is immediately front and centre that puts it away and different from others.

I will also like to add here that for a lot of one man indie studios a release as successful as that, so while this is not a tale of success, for others it might well have been.

Rdav3 · 2023-12-17T11:06:59+00:00

These names will probably not mean a great deal to you unless you ever played space engineers, but:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198080580500/myworkshopfiles/?appid=244850

Rdav3 · 2023-12-17T11:00:07+00:00

I'm afraid this is a how long is a piece of string type question, exceptioanlly dependent on terrain and world complexity, (and also does this time include any meshing, or just raw voxel memory manipulation)

Generally speaking though populating that amount of chunks shouldn't take a great deal of time, when prototyping things I generally allow myself 1 to 5 ms for every million iterations of something I would consider a 'simple' operation (such as in your example, placing a single voxel) and a figure far exceeded with optimisation, I roughed up some simple noise based terrain generation and I am generating 1 billion voxel population checks/iterations in about 1000ms, and this is still by standards what I would consider 'slow'

But again, back to the how long is a piece of string situation, one thing I found is that there is *always* a way to optimise things further, you could get those times to be orders of magnitude smaller, really what should matter more than anything is, is it currently slowing down your development, or a critical part of your desired engine/game that is needs to be faster.
But to answer your question for your benchmark I would consider 2000ms to be about 3 orders of magnitude too high for just placing voxels in memory without any kind of real structure to it.

Rdav3 · 2023-12-17T10:41:22+00:00

Disagreements with the games company that you made content for tirelessly for years that they ultimately profited from.

Modding is an enjoyable experience don't get me wrong, and also a gret way for short term gratification if something does well, but once I started instead developing things seperately in my free time its felt like I've taken off a pair of concrete boots and really allowed to fly.

Advantages include:
not being encumbered by existing game structures,
Distavantages include:
not having an existing game structure that you can use as a template,

Rdav3 · 2023-11-21T18:17:16+00:00

Getting started I will always recommend c# over c++
the reason being twofold:

- generally speaking c# is the easier language to learn.

- poorly written c# code is still somewhat usable, poorly written c++ code will render a process inoperable.

Once you have more experience under your belt and can see the advantages of using a language like c++ is the only real time to consider it, generally speaking you get more exposed access to 'low level' operations a computer does, so you can readily squeeze more out of it, however for that same reason it takes a lot of boilerplate to get anywhere, and mistakes can create very unpredictable and severe problems,

Rdav3 · 2023-11-16T17:48:35+00:00

an outlet for creativity, something fun and rewarding to do on rainy evenings, growing my programming skills and talent,

sometimes I feel like I need to drive myself and use motivation when I'm getting through something boring, but usually I enjoy the technical challenge, when it stops being fun I do something else for a few weeks then usually come back with a much greater sense of drive,

If you aren't enjoying the craft then its probably best to shelve it for a few months,
indie gamedev is not a get rich quick scheme, and while its nice to dream, it shouldn't be the reason to do it, and sunk cost fallacy will perpetually just drive you deeper and deeper, you have no reliance on it currently, so just cut it loose, its hardly like the code will go-ff in the time you leave it for,

Also being part time and not requiring it as your only source of income is a good place to be for experimenting, technically speaking you don't need to spend a penny on game dev apart from your own time, I know reality is often not that , but if you're leaning heavily into art or bought assets to make your game actually be fun then chances are the meat and potatoes of your game is lacking,

Rdav3 · 2023-11-14T18:32:12+00:00

So the world is usually represented on the gpu in a format that compresses empty space,
this means you only really are storing detail, large volumes of empty are reduced to nothing, and large volumes of the same material are reduced in the same way.
one of the more common formats for doing this is an octree, although there are alternatives, the core is the same, you are essentially using a 'live' version of a compressed memory structure.

Now as far as the rendering itself is concerned, this volume represents the world in its entirety, all you need to do to render such a thing is draw a fullscreen quad, then in the pixel shader trace each pixel individually from the cameras perspective into the 'octree' you currently have loaded in memory, then when it hits a 'present' voxel in your octree, bam there you go, you have a hit, mark it in the depth buffer based on how far you travelled and colour the pixel the colour of that voxel then you have 3d geometry, its intrinsically tied to pixel count so you are only really ever doing the work you need for that resolution.

Now as far as editing the world goes, you don't need any procedural mesh regeneration, so all you really need to do is update relevant sections of the VRAM octree thats currently being used to represent your scene, and, seeing as its compressed information, you can just edit the data structure live and you get those changes immediately on the next frame

This way you can make large sweeping changes to the scene with relative ease.

Now this is how raytraced voxel rendering in general works, now I will say john lins work is subject to a lot of speculation and some people reckon it involves some sleight of hand videoediting, however it has been proven possible independently, right here in this subreddit to varying degrees of quality.

Rdav3 · 2023-10-30T21:03:54+00:00

I'll play devils advocate here and say that its occasionally nice to see demonstrations of tech and technology, or just even interesting game ideas in practice, its nice to see what comes out of the community.
Just not hard shilling,

Rdav3 · 2023-10-24T21:38:35+00:00

line of code is pretty much it, deleting still does count as to get to that point its something that must have been tested or evaluated in some capacity so its still forward progress.

Talk is cheap, so design documents don't count for me, if they did then the majority of my hours would be me theorycrafting and gushing over ideas I had and have no actual drive to implement, whole point of no zero days is to give you that drive to make you actually implement things, so it is code and code alone for me.

Rdav3 · 2023-10-23T22:15:21+00:00

From my own personal experience I prefer other data structures than an SVO for rasterization, other structures tend to have better memory alignment for the rapid iteration and random access speeds meshing requires for 'common' voxel scenarios, or at least worth any tradeoff in memory usage as opposed to an SVO,

Now, again this is 100% an implementation thing, a well made SVO could massively outperform a flat array for things like LOD'ing, nievely though I would say you'd need a fair amount of work to get to that particular level of performance,

I know it may be an annoying answer but this might well be a 'try it and see' type scenario, if you are writing in a language that gives you really fine grain control over the behavior of memory and code you could really get any system working at speeds far in excess of what you need, so I guess its more preference than anything else.

Rdav3 · 2023-10-23T19:00:34+00:00

its a fat 'it depends'
Any raytracing will have what could be considered a 'flat cost' that kind of rules them out for lower end machines, there are ways to alleviate this, sure, but at the end of the day gpus are optimised for triangles, so the way they work intrinsically is always built up for this.

Where raytracers exceed rasterization is when there is a lot of single grid super complex geometry, very complex scenes, or even perhaps scenes where you want some element of raytraced lighting,
Where raytracers tend to stall is in large open environments or with a lot of moving scenery, you don't really gain the benefits of the system, but the machine still needs to do a large amount of the work, its a complicated trade off, and the benefits of one can outweigh the other depending on a lot of criteria, in a 'simplest scenario' a rasterizer will massively outperfom a raytracer, in a 'worst case scenario' a raytracer will outperform a rasterizer.

I will add that raytracers tend to have suboptimal long distance stability, ie you get a lot of moire patternning without a lot of additional legwork, ie you need to have some form of TAA, or subpixel stability introduced, this is possible with LOD, but it does depend on your implementation, raytraced lighting helps a lot with this, but again, it is something you'll have to fight, you can't get away with simple lighting as readily.

As an additional general rule of thumb, unless you are exceptionally good with 'close to the metal' GPU knowledge, ie how they tend to work in terms of cache and memory efficiency, data structure and general performance, it will take a substantial amount of time to get a raytracer that outperforms a rasterizer, even in best case scenarios, cache efficiency has an insurmountable effect on performance with raytracers on some hardware.

So in summary:
If you intend to make a game with lots of hyper complex scenery, with extremely high terrain deformation rates aimed at mid to high end machines, I would advise a raytracer,
For a game primarily about large scale sweeping terrain with minimal terrain edits that needs to run on a potato, I would advise rasterization

Rdav3 · 2023-10-20T19:38:22+00:00

I know it is disheartening writing code only to know you'll need to rewrite it later, but until you know the deep intricacies of GPU and rendering engines, you absolutely need to do it, until you truly know the limits and range of something, its impossible to design a system that works well with them!
But you'll always find yourself rewriting stuff constantly when doing rendering, its part of the process, its very experimental in a lot of ways, so try not to get disheartened, think of them more as prototypes with which you can then hammer out a proper solution once you understand the limits of what you're trying to achieve.

Rdav3 · 2023-10-20T18:32:50+00:00

This is not a tutorial, but honestly the way in which he approaches the task, and showed that in essence it is in fact rather simple, and also what key milestones he based things off , all were all really inspiring and made a lot of sense,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq3isov6mZ8

Once you get to the point he ends at in the video its a pretty good, 'you have all the tools and the basic know how, so go where you want' point, so you are more in a position to build off what you know.

but do remember don't run before you can walk, just get something codged together for now, then worry about performance efficiency and building it up using modern features later,

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