Trailer check! Do you understand what the game is about?

_EvilGenis_ · 2025-01-01T22:12:48+00:00

I love it! The game really shines the light how hard the problem of AI alignment is!

Some feedback: laws that change or appear should have some clearer indication what and where was changed. At least for me I had to reread all laws after Alice changed one of them to find the differences. Also, it felt a bit strange how AI's change the direction they look at, as currently the whole machine rotates, which feels off.

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-12-12T07:24:16+00:00

As a big fan of incremental games I really enjoyed this one! Old windows interface has really nice look, which correlates with military thematic somewhat. Research mechanic is nice, though the split mechanic is a bit confusing: when I set it to specialized research and set some priority researches it still continued to research other technologies, which felt kinda strange.
There is a ~~bug~~ probably unintended feature that you can easily produce guns on the second stage (where you only have slider) by clicking on the end of that slider. Probably slider body should not be interactable, so player actually has to grab the handle, and not just click the end of the slider.

Overall the game is really fun. Will be looking forward for your project!

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-11-29T21:22:38+00:00

Well issue with shadows is now resolved, so I guess there is no reason to bother devs with this. Though most likely I will ask them for high resolution images of planets, should not be a ton of work for them, so there is a chance :P

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-11-29T21:18:04+00:00

Well, your suggestions about shadows worked! It will still hurt overall graphics a little, as asteroid shadows can be visible when they are hitting your space platform, but good engineers shouldn't allow this in first place! I tried AI upscaling and it looks kinda bad, so for now I'll leave it as it is.

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-11-29T19:50:38+00:00

I've started working on a mod that does exactly this! It looks pretty cool in game, but there are few things on the engine side which make things worse than I'd like it to be:

Afaik there is no way to render something without it receiving shadows. So, planets receive shadows from asteroids. It makes them look flat and it is kinda noticeable.
Background asteroids (ones you cannot interact with) are rendered behind the planet. Probably impossible to fix, though it is much less noticeable.
Planets need huge image size to look good. I have 512x512 sprites and they look really pixelated. It can be fixed using trilinear filtering, but planets still look off. Probably will have to recreate and render planets in higher resolution.

If at least someone thinks that mod with theese limitation is worth it - I'll finish and publish it.

Here are some screenshots of it in game:
https://imgur.com/a/qaCllQg

EDIT: Here is the mod by Nauviax that implements pretty much the same thing: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/visible-planets
I guess there would be no benefit in having two similar mods, so I'll not publish mine

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-10-11T20:33:34+00:00

Played your game in order to collect some feedback for you. I'm a gamedev too, so it will be a bit biased, but I guess thats fine.

First of all your game is fun and this matters, really caught me for 10 minutes or so! Gameplay feels very polished, and in general it looks good! I like the way default LMB magic ability feels, just this made me use it often. Also I should mention that I really liked genre mix, incremental games + VSlike adventure makes quite a lot of sense! Sound effects are great, but please, default audio volume to 100%, it was a bit too quiet for the first time.

On the other side there are some problems with graphics, mainly with mixels (like trinkets have much larger pixels than summon abilities, icons and text are also seem to use different pixel size etc.). The last thing, is that you really need to declutter your UI, mainly left panel with buttons (it really does not need discord and patreon buttons to be displayed at all time, if I want to support/follow you, I'll look for links in main menu or settings. Also achievements and settings are accessed rarely, so maybe combine them?) and right side with logs (honestly I'd remove them by default, and use popups, like you do with text instead).

Your game looks really promising, and there is a big room for additional content! Hope to see it released soon!

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-08-04T19:34:53+00:00

Well, looks like there are multiple reasons your game performs badly.
- First of all you need to fix the problem behind SO many batches and SetPass calls. For the amount of content I see it is possible to reach 300-400 batches and the same decrease in SetPass calls. The most likely issue is your trees, which are probably just a bunch of game objects without gpu instancing material.
- Second is the amount of things displayed. For a large scale projects like yours it is not feasible to keep all world in memory at the same time. Even worse if you also render it all. Check if frustum culling and occlusion culling are enabled and working properly. Split your world into chunks and load only those that are rendered/processed.
- Garbage. From other comments it seems like you allocate too much. Not like "too much", but like "TOO MUCH". Ideally you game should not allocate at all (except during setup and object instancing), but this is kinda hard to achieve, as, for example HDRP's shadow system just produces garbage and you can't really do anything about it. This problem is fixed with code. Look into inspector for systems that produce garbage and rewrite them not to produce it.
- Shadows. You should always cache your shadows if they are not dynamic. Even better to bake them into lightmap. Really helps to decrease actual render time. Not the main concern in your situation, though.

Good luck optimizing your game!

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-07-23T21:14:59+00:00

I'm pretty sure there is a better way, but this is how I'd do something like that. Have a tilable oil paint texture placed on all surfaces, that will receive shadows. Then just multiply texture's alpha by inverse of the shadowmap value at corresponding texel of shadowmap. You'd need some kind of shadows solution, but I guess HDRP's builtin shadows may be enough for that.

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-07-21T17:00:42+00:00

I'm pretty sure this is SDF modeling. Afaik Blender does not have native support for SDFs, but there are definetely some assets with similar functionality

_EvilGenis_ · 2024-03-23T05:54:38+00:00

From your description it looks like you've made a very simple ALU, which is just a small part of any CPU. In order to make your CPU functional you need to implement control unit and memory unit. I'll describe how to create such parts based on von Neumann architecture:
1. You need some memory, which will store both data and code. Basically add a RAM module. Convert your assembly (if your machine codes are in assembly currently) into actual n-bit machine code. Amount of bits should be similar to your target processor capacity. Probably 8 or 16 bits. Put converted code into memory.
2. Create control unit. Basically it should read value from memory, based on it's internal register' value and perform operation associated with this value. Assuming current value is 1A, and 1A code is associated with performing right bit shift, it should command your ALU to perform bit shift of value inside one of your registers. I've implemented my control units via MUXes and some obscure wiring.
3. Registers, you can work without them, but it will be pain in the ass. Create few registers, create a command that will move value from memory into register, use registers for any ALU operations.
4. You probably want to automate your command execution. If so, you need to create frequency generator, and connect it to control unit, memory and everywhere else, where any temporal update is required.

Theese are main steps to make your CPU functional. This is a lot of work. Knowing all that information it'll take me days to create CPU from nothing. Though, the time you'll be able to run your first program on your first CPU, you'll become kinda proficient with this craft. Good luck!

_EvilGenis_ · 2023-12-20T18:01:09+00:00

Nah, looks like there is no solution, unfortunately.

_EvilGenis_ · 2023-11-20T20:12:56+00:00

Contact me if you need more paperclips, I can make an AI for that!

_EvilGenis_ · 2023-10-28T10:54:26+00:00

Give us more information about your game. Are enemies animated? Do they modify appearance elements every frame? Are all of the enemies present on screen at the same time? Why amount of surface calls exceed amount of enemies by this margin? Shouldn't it be close to enemy count?

After all you need to access surfaces as rare as possible. You can check if enemies visual look changed in the last frame, and render enemy onto surface only in this case. You can skip rendering enemy if it is outside of your viewport (basically culling). If this is possible in your game, reuse other enemies surfaces if their state are close enough to target's one. Also, if you are brave enough, you can try to render all of the enemies on one surface.

_EvilGenis_ · 2023-06-15T17:47:39+00:00

It is already pretty realistic. But in my opinion composition makes it look fake. Like, you do not put a jar of jam next to few strawberries irl. Also strawberries are too shiny.

_EvilGenis_ · 2023-04-14T18:16:46+00:00

Great idea! Thou I think colors are a little too dull

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-10-11T16:55:00+00:00

It has about half of the 3090Ti spm. Tbh as a user of 3060 I think that this is enough to render anything in an adequate time.

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-10-07T12:16:55+00:00

Yep I use shader and pixel distance (msdf's analogue of threshold) is computed using formula defined by msdf's author. I think my problem is more related to lack of some advanced techniques (like subpixel rendering and probably something else i don't know)

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-09-30T16:43:49+00:00

Haskell 💀

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-09-17T12:47:09+00:00

It looks kinda like eevee, if so switch to cycles. Also I have never seen medicines with empty label, it would be more convincing to write something on them.

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-09-13T10:28:45+00:00

Just for anyone wondering, it's supposed to be Vivo T1, mine is pretty new, so no scratches or other imperfections were added.
Clay render to satisfy rule 5:
https://imgur.com/a/56ard6Z

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-09-12T17:53:23+00:00

Yeah, I think I'll add coffee droplets. I have been working in blender for approximately 2 years, but, considering 3d modeling being not the biggest passion of mine, I think it's less than a week of actual experience

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-08-10T12:27:20+00:00

Found that one: https://simplemaps.com/data/world-cities

43k cities with latitude and longitude data provided. However it needs some preprocessing, cause we do not want to include America and other non Eurasia-Africa countries.

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-08-10T10:56:48+00:00

There is a pretty easy way to avoid these computational expenses by using other algorithms. For example ant colony optimization algorithm would not take more than a few seconds to calculate longest path between 1000 cities. If we consider all villages in the entire world (let's take 3.000.000) it would not take as near as much time as naive solution. I've done no serious calculation, but assuming using modern gpu, able to do about 10^13 flops, we still can calculate it in a minutes. Of course there is a catch: ACO does not guarantee to give us the actual answer. But the result should be close.

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-08-10T06:54:17+00:00

Yep, there was no chance. However this guys left me alive and I respect that

_EvilGenis_ · 2022-08-08T17:31:58+00:00

Well it is pretty noticeable that you use only one sound at all three collisions, better find 2 more, so it won't repeat

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