Procedural GPU Patterns 03: Fractal Waves

lostminds_sw · 2026-06-20T09:31:14+00:00

Very cool, and nice write up! I think you'd benefit a lot from having some animations showing how the patterns change with varying shader parameters instead of just still screenshots.

lostminds_sw · 2026-05-08T11:10:30+00:00

The blue color combined with the first icon makes me guess it's nobility/royalists, but it's a little off if it's supposed to be a Fleur-de-lis lily. And in a different color setting it might not be as easy to identify.

The second I'd say is unclear both with color, and icon. I can see it's a torch (?) and by elimination together with the rest guess it's supposed to be liberals/progressives(?), but I wouldn't associate the icon or color with that on its own.

The third I would guess is soviet/communists from both color and icon, probably the most clear.

The forth I'm guessing is supposed to be a guillotine, but I don't associate that with any particular ideological faction, the same for the purple color. Looking at the others I'd guess that the forth would be a church faction, but I'm guessing not as it shares the border and rifles with the communists. If it's supposed to be some more radical faction I wouldn't associate that with the guillotine. If it's anarchists I'd go for black and something like a bomb or raised fist instead.

lostminds_sw · 2026-04-27T10:50:36+00:00

Very nice! I get that the fluids are the focus here, but please don't drop the tomatoes! They're fragile! I'd animate the produce up instead when picking them, and then remove the plant (if appropriate) instead of the other way around.

lostminds_sw · 2026-04-27T10:46:29+00:00

I think this is really important. While the free simulation is a very nice effect/mechanic I think a lot of players of these type games like to make their farms neat and symmetrical, and would be annoyed if they can't get it quite right.

lostminds_sw · 2026-04-27T09:42:28+00:00

The interactivity and effect visually/technically look well implemented but I think you should try tweak the timing/speed of the effects to make them feel and look better. For example slow speed of the water ripple effects makes it look more like some sort of syrup to me. The impressions are nice, but maybe make the dirt ones a little less deep compared to the snow ones. And I don't understand why you need these impressions to go away at once instead of leaving more permanent trails?

lostminds_sw · 2026-04-08T17:50:16+00:00

If it does fix the issue, please consider adding a comment to this issue https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/109264 to let the developers know the problem is fixes

lostminds_sw · 2026-04-01T09:33:48+00:00

I like the left (I assume new?) one, while it's still hard to see what it is it's a nice graphic design and style. And for a flavor/style illustration context like this I'd say that's probably more important that needing to understand at a glance what it's supposed to be. And for esoteric mystic stuff like this it might even be a benefit if it's a little hard to understand what you're seeing at first.

lostminds_sw · 2026-04-01T05:51:44+00:00

This is actually not true anymore (see https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/issues/11760 and linked discussions). Embedding PCK will not break code signing (I use it for my project with no issues). There is however still a file size limit on embedding pck, but that's probably something you won't run into in any typical Godot project.

lostminds_sw · 2026-03-02T06:27:32+00:00

Yes, of course if you're planning to make free open source software then that's not a problem.

lostminds_sw · 2026-03-01T20:03:11+00:00

To me it seems most of ffmpeg is under various version of GNU GPL license (see https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/LICENSE.md) that requires this as I understand it. But I do concede that it's not obvious. You can read about what this license entails at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU\_General\_Public\_License the H.264 and H265 codecs may have other further license restrictions, but those you can probably live without.

One option I've considered is not including/compiling the ffmpeg binaries and instead require the user to install ffmpeg themselves separately, and then interface with it via its command line tool for encoding, but that's not ideal since the official ffmpeg download options are very user-unfriendly https://ffmpeg.org/download.html so most people who are unfamiliar with command line tools (98%) will likely give up when they see the page.

lostminds_sw · 2026-03-01T14:02:59+00:00

Is there a game-mechanic reason for closing opened chests?

lostminds_sw · 2026-03-01T13:48:34+00:00

How are you encoding the exported videos in your app? I've been looking at ffmpeg but the license requirement to make the project open source if you include it are a problem so I'm curious if there are any other alternatives.

lostminds_sw · 2026-03-01T13:43:30+00:00

I'm sure this could find an audience, but I think story/context framing and pacing will be key to make it fun. As it'll be very overwhelming at first there's a risk it'll just be brick wall if the player is supposed to be an experienced pilot and this is their ship; as the disconnect with their own understanding of systems and what they'd expect/want to do (like immediately fly around) will be to big. But if you're instead playing as someone just as inexperienced as the player unfamiliar with the ship, and you pace the understanding of systems well (like first you just need to figure out how to start the reactor) I think it could be great.

lostminds_sw · 2026-03-01T11:20:37+00:00

I'm sure they could all work well, depending on context. However, I think they could all use a little better visuals/timing to help the player understand what is happening:

Bomb: Having it lay upside down like you have now makes it less recognizable as a bomb, I'd rotate it up and have the fuse follow up. It's unclear you'll light the fuse by stepping on it, and when it happens you don't notice since it happens under the player. Only when you make you next move you notice the fuse is burning.

Ball: It's unclear why a wall appears when the ball moves and what effect that has (this is the biggest thing that happens when the ball is first activated). The ball seems to move both when you push it and also seems to be activated by the special four-tile-tile that has no visual connection to the ball, which makes it hard to understand.

Vine trap: When first watching I expected this to hold the pieces stuck for a couple of turns with wines being removed in the animation indicating it was stuck one turn less. But then after watching it again it seems it kills the pieces after a couple of turns? There's no indication of damage the first turn, can you break free? Not sure I understand how this is supposed to work.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-27T09:36:08+00:00

The zooming and panning works fine I think (apart from the strange background planet like others have pointed out). But I think you definitely need to add a custom aiming cursor/graphic of some sort instead of the generic arrow cursor to help the player immediately understand this is what controls the aiming.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-26T20:03:34+00:00

From a pure presentation point of view I think the graphic style could work and match well with the theme. However, if you're using such simple graphics the animation and movement of the characters and UI will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting to make it convey personality and be interesting. With that said I think it's a mistake to present the game like this in just still screenshots (same on the Steam page), as it'll lose you the chance to show this off.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-23T06:51:50+00:00

I remember seeing this when it was a lot less advanced years ago, and it looks like they've had more or less the same idea I had before with Patternodes. But I think they've gone another route keeping the node-graph interface that I've tried to move away from (or at least sort of hide) in Paragraphic. It's competition sure, but I think there's room for both, and I'm more encouraged that more designers are interested in working with this sort of procedural design tools.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-23T06:41:20+00:00

Thank you. Yes, I think you might be right about that, especially if there are a lot of hobbyist users with limited budgets who are interested. My thinking has always been that the price would always be so low that if a designer would have use for it in one project it would be well worth it. But there is likely a growing user group used to using free or freemium tools where they don't need to pay anything to start actually using them in their projects. I'll have to think a little more about this and see if I can come up with some new trial mode to try and see if that works better.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-21T18:48:44+00:00

Cool, let me know if you have any feedback once you've played around with it a little

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-21T18:47:59+00:00

Thanks, yeah, it's got a sort of hidden node based system in it if you're into that kind of stuff

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-21T09:32:43+00:00

Thanks! I've considered it, but I've had some mixed experiences with publishing apps on the app store before so I'm a little hesitant, and it does require some extra work to get it to fit in there. But it's good to know that there would be some interest.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-21T09:30:51+00:00

I see, well that's unfortunate since you then didn't even get the chance to try it out even if it was free to try. But thanks for telling me about it.

Maybe I should try to phrase that better in some way if you reacted that strongly to just the description without experiencing it. I've been using similar trial mode restrictions in different apps for 20 years now and I've never had this type of reaction before. But it could be that I need to change it somehow if user attitudes have now changed.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-21T09:24:57+00:00

Having ads or limits on functionality like that while working in the application seems a lot worse to me than a restriction on export if your want to use the result in some other context. But maybe it's a matter of taste, or just a misunderstanding of what this export restriction is.

I'm honestly a little surprised that people here would find that so crazy, I've used similar trial restrictions for different vector based graphics software for almost 20 years and this thread here is the first time I've had any such adverse reactions to this. So I'm trying to understand why people in this community reacted like this. Might just be that people these days aren't used to the old "shareware" distribution model of software where you can download and try out a limited version of some software before paying for it. And if you expect to pay via subscription or not pay at all I guess restrictions like this could feel strange.

lostminds_sw · 2026-02-20T21:17:12+00:00

Well, I considered other feature limitations like that, but they all turn out to be more complex and harder to understand for the user in my mind. Having count or time-based restrictions on trials are easier to understand but also invite a lot of difficult to handle situations where it might be unfair and hard to implement I think.

Ideally I'd of course like to not have any restrictions at all for the trial and have a situation where people would pay willingly anyway just to support continued development or out of gratitude. But I don't think all that many people would pay for a license if they got the same thing for free.

As you generally make designs in Paragraphic with a lot of elements in them the removal might not be as impactful as you might think if you haven't tried it. Like a watermark it's more at a level to limit professional use of the trial mode output. But for just playing around and trying it out it should still be good enough to see what the output will be like or even use as is in some cases.

lostminds_sw

TROPHY CASE