and-this-is-my-laboratory

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

I can't stop starting new projects...

HOWEVER

I feel like this one I'm on right now is something special fr I don't even want to post about it until I have a "game" to show which may take forever but I think my idea is more feasible too

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

hi chat I've been so busy!!

I've been working on stuff though, just not Asterium so I haven't been posting about it, maybe I'll make a few posts here later this week.

Also, I'm planning on doing an in person game jam here pretty soon with a group of people so that's cool!

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

Well, I'm laying out the framework for the starship systems in Asterium and it's a little scary because I know any early errors here might be frustrating enough down the line to constitute a rewrite but I mean there's no other way to know what will work best...

Essentially, the plan is to implement a basic Entity-Component System which is semi-redundant in Godot because of the native scenetree system, but I don't think it'll be too messy to have some generic Entity classes that descend from Node and then a bunch of Component classes to extend them that descend from various Godot builtins

Taking inspiration from space station 14, I want ships and other similar objects (for now I'm calling their class StructureEntity) to use a grid mechanic where a tilemap or something similar forms the core of their interface, and acts as a parent to entities that are attached to the ship

But anyway, lately I've been just doing a lot of thinking, trying to figure what's the best way to construct these objects. I've made a nice editor with ctrl+z/y and everything, I've just gotta determine how to format the finished product in a way that is compact but also dynamic and destructible

I'm currently debating using marching squares to generate a collision polygon tightly binding the ship, but this could create issues with my dreams of a structure system simulating stress on the beams making up the ship's skeleton. it'd be difficult and expensive to tell which beam took the hit and where. The other idea is to paint on collision shapes for each tile, and then instance them separately under the ships RigidBody. This could cause an extreme ram bottleneck...

hmmmmmmm

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

Asterium: A first test build!

Hey! it's been awhile, and I have some stuff to share! In between the busy-ness of this summer, I was able to get a clean-enough concept tied together for a first alpha build! (I only built it for win64 though out of laziness lol) anyway, the repo is available here:

I'll be using github's wiki feature to explain stuff as I make it but essentially I'm setting aside the systems I designed in this release for a bit to start working on a spaceship editor, spaceship mechanics, and some other stuff! We're heading in the rough direction of gameplay! :D

As always, forking and contributions are welcome! let me know!

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

lol just logged back in here and saw I reposted something to here on accident

anyway, making big progress to be honest, most difficult portion right now is determining to what extent the planet generation should be simulated...

current issue im facing is, if I determine through some curated world class that a planet should have a "weak" atmosphere, but then that planet is far enough from the star that its atmosphere condenses, then how do I have atmospheric variation?

obviously with gas laws and gravity, stuff is weirder than that, so maybe I just go with that logic that stuff is weird and a fraction of atmosphere can survive even near absolute zero

I just want to move on to the next section but I keep getting too deep into this one 😔

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

UI is such a tedious process but it always tends to pay off. I just hate when the thing holding back progress on something is figuring out what information to display where and how wide margins should be It gives me a new level of respect for any software with nice interfaces whenever I have to make a new dialog or panel for something

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

Asterium Progress Report #1

Movement has been a little slow and unsatisfying as of late because ive been doing a lot of refactoring

After some consideration on it and watching a few very good videos on composition-based code reusability in Godot, I've decided to refactor all of the inheritance based systems

It just wasn't going to be expandable, and plus, it's way more practical in a lot of ways.

But yeah, I know this post kinda means nothing without a frame of reference as to what the game is but essentially my first milestone with it is a foundation for a rather complex planet generator, and for that I had to make a lot of classes which are now just being restructured.

It's long and tedious but it'll make everything less long and tedious to work on in the future

The only thing I'm now concerned about is how I'm gonna document all this lol

[and-this-is-my-laboratory]

Hello, World!

Hey, this blog is gonna be a space aside from my main (@freewifi-png-exe) where i will just ramble about current hobby projects i am working on. I have a tendency to quickly drop projects and move on to new ones and I just figured having a place to log progress on things would help me retain focus and actually achieve things with them Regardless, I go through long periods of being too busy to do much of anything so I will probably still be very slow/infrequent with this blog, but it doesn't matter, I'm not exactly setting out to make something serious here. My current project is a little space game written in Godot 4.2 I'm calling Asterium that I am going absolutely way too far in-depth on game systems, and maybe I'll have something to show for that soon! :)