/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

Where's that link that explains what happened to the agdg community after the exodus? About splitting into groups and whatnot?
I can't find it.

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>>2223
Okay. A lot of my struggles have come from the fact that OpenGL textures and coordinate systems are upside-down and I'm trying to flip it. I've tried simple ways to flip, but it never works correctly because when you use a frame buffer, the frame buffer is upside-down too and thus inverts all the flipping logic, so I'm forced to try more complicated methods.

But I just realized that, unless I'm mistaken, if I pretend that the coordinates on everything are "top-left is 0,0" without actually flipping anything, then everything will always work perfectly except for being upside down. I just need to flip the screen once at the very end when the game has been fully rendered.

I just removed the Y flipping/inverting logic from textures and shaders and vertex buffers and sprite instances and everything, and everything fell into place. I'm not drawing onto a frame buffer yet though, I'm not 100% sure if the result flips every time I draw onto one, but I think it won't.

>>2226
Sounds like good news, then.

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>>2226
I was not mistaken. If I draw onto the screen, it's upside down. If I draw into a framebuffer and then draw the framebuffer onto the screen, it's still upside down. So I can just completely ignore the flipping problem in any and all rendering code, and only flip the screen once at the end of my frame. I really wish I realized that earlier because this makes a lot of things easier to think about and probably would have saved me from a burnout or two.

I was completely unprepared for things working out so well, so now I'm unsure what to do. It's like preparing for a marathon and then getting teleported to the finishing line. Guess I can just move onto my next plan: learning. I want to make a bunch of small experiments just to get more familiarity with various aspects of rendering. The first experiment is waving grass aaaand it worked exactly as I expected on the first try so now I'm stunned again.

Webm related has a "wind effect" value on the vertices, top vertices have 1 and bottom ones have 0, then I just arbitrarily modify the vertex position in the shader like this:
v.x += sin(time*0.004 + gl_InstanceID*0.8)*vertex_wind_effect*8;
v.y += sin(time*0.007 + gl_InstanceID*0.8)*vertex_wind_effect*4;
In a real game I'd maybe want to create some kind of wind mask that modifies the position since that would allow you to combine wind and dynamic effects like explosions or player mo

>create some kind of wind mask
By which I mean for example a texture, each sprite would grab whatever value is under it on the texture. Then you just render the desired wind/whatever motions onto that texture and everything will animate along with it.

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>>2228 Episode 2
I just don't get it. My next experiment is to make world chunks with cached tile sprites, and I can't do it. Why have I never heard of anyone struggling so much even though this seems like an impenetrable wall to me? The problem is once again sorting the sprites.

Take for instance Starbound: metal is always on top of leaves, which are always on top of crystals, which are always on top of dirt. Each of these overflows their own tile boundary and go on top of the adjacent tiles, from all sides. This means that they NEED some kind of layering mechanism, and you can't localize it per-chunk, it has to work across all tiles on all visible chunks which also means it has to be re-done when new chunks load and old ones unload.

How do you build the buffers to draw this? There can be something like 20k tiles on the visible chunks, not counting the background layer. You can't sort and re-build that kind of sprite instance buffer in real-time, which means you also can't walk around the world without frame drops, nor modify a lot of blocks rapidly, nor move the camera between 2 locations instantly.

In this case you could just abuse the depth buffer, but Starbound has entire biomes filled with semi-transparent tiles, you can't layer those through the depth buffer. I also want the ability to use different shaders for tiles, similar to how you can use "negative paint" in Terraria.

Maybe you can pre-gro

>>2119
>Maybe it's because the users have grown too old or something
Partially this, reposting the same pic over and over like a glorified emoji becomes much less appealing after you've seen it all thousands times.

Heads up to moderation: the guy who tanked the /agdg/ thread over on zzchan apparently thinks he's gonna try his shit here too now. His schtick is to post gifs and shit of a bunch of squares moving on a screen and then some inane non-question like "what do I do now? I don't get the maths" or whatever. Keep an eye out and delete/ban on sight please, thanks.

>>2238
This is him is you don't recognize the posting style: 
>>2236
>>2237

>>2238
>>2239
Thanks for the headsup, Anon. Yes, he's been abusing Trashchan for a few days now.

>>2238
I still find it baffling they refused to do anything about it.

>>2244
It's appreciated.

>>2215
Reading shitty manga and webtoons. That's one of the things I do in the morning. Reading manga and webtoons is like reading about politics: it makes me mad how fake and gay and retarded everything is, but I read it anyway.

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I started making a bunch of mini tutorials for my website, but then I realized that the biggest beneficiary would be all the AI corporations who are trying to replace me without giving me anything for my data, and the people who are enslaved to those corporations while sneering and calling me stupid and outdated and obsolete, and I totally lost interest in publishing any of it.

Here's a webm version of a part about vectors.

>>2219
That's really cool, Anon. GG.

Two areas at the bottom remind me a little of B-spline images I've seen.

>>2220
Maybe the animations from wikipedia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zier_curve#Constructing_B%C3%A9zier_curves
Wikipedia is the absolute worst at explaining things simply, so I re-created one of the animations and explained it step-by-step.

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>post game updates on xwitter sometimes
>fuck around with grok for a bit cuz why not
>ask it to identify what historical event being portrayed in one of my gameplay videos (top-down shooter)
<it fucking got it first try in under 3 minutes even though i never posted the specifics of it anywhere
ai is scary

>>1787
Great stuff.

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The developer of Teardown did a talk about their new physics engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvsvd67XUKw

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I've come to a very enlightening conclusion on gamedev and it's really improved my outlook on how successful my game will be. It's based on the idea that most people (90% or more) involved in gamedev are idiots. These are the people that are permanently stuck in tutorial hell/decision paralysis instead of actually making something and getting hands-on experience, trust fund kiddos that do nothing but throw money at third-worlders on Fiverr and Upwork and say "make my game for me" then get really mad when none of it looks good or plays well, people that don't understand why their totally unique match-3 puzzle game with pastel colors only sold two copies, one of which was refunded, or people that actually have a good game but only decided to start marketing weeks before release with some halfassed reddit posts and nobody knows it exists.
So when you read articles like "Most games on Steam never make a profit" it seems demoralizing at first, but when you look a bit deeper you realize that most games released on Steam are asset flips, AI garbage, puzzle games, or games that otherwise had zero effort put into their development or marketing. The few remaining games are ones that actually had effort and thought put into them and are doing pretty well.
With all this in mind, if your game is:
>unique
>fun to play
>looks good
>has a modest amount of mar

>>2222
The vast majority of people are retarded. There's nothing surprising about that, but it's hard to internalize just how far-reaching consequences that has, other people's retardation can warp your perception of reality. Most people really have no idea what they're doing or talking about, and lack even the most basic ability to interpret the world around them or their own actions and their consequences.

As long as you care about making a good game, succeed in making it, and don't completely fuck up the content that is visible on your store page, it will probably find success automatically thanks to Steam's algorithm and word of mouth. You only "need" marketing if your game is ok but not great, or if your game is garbage that relies on meme streamer appeal or virality to make anyone care about it.

>>2222
This has also been a revelatory experience for me, in many things other than game development. With how many generation-defining indie games have released in the last few years (I consider 2025 to be 2 AP; 2 years After Pizza Tower) it can seem daunting to ever imaging having the same level of cultural or commercial success.

But I'm finally trying to get around to doing something with my free time and ideas. If the number of stupid people who've stumbled onto success is any indicator then it can't be that hard.

>>2208
>with web front-end
Wouldn't it be easier to just open a window and draw to it?

>>2210
>open a window and draw to it
That's what browser does :^) 
But if you mean "why two separate programs", that's because I wanted it to always run in the background and be super small. Alas, loading sensors and nvidia libraries completely negated my best attempts to keep memory footprint minimal, but I only realized that after I already finished. I even implemented sockets api at first (instead of using mongoose server) only to find out websockets thing is completely unrelated to that and runs on top of http protocol.
On that note, gnu sockets aren't as hard to use as I thought (especially if using epoll instead of their own shitty tracking function), it's just that documentation is a bit obtuse, and some bickering between gnu, linux, and posix.

New paper!
Blaze: Compiling JSON Schema for 10x Faster Validation
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02770

>>2212
Thanks, Anon! This can be useful for much more than just on games, of course. Cheers.

>>2211
Ah, I thought that having to do a trip through sockets was unnecessary complexity, but I wasn't thinking about it running in the background. And I suppose opening a window on Linux and drawing text and graphs are a bit of a headache if you don't already have a setup for that stuff.

>>2102
>I hope your not planninng on trowing those books away.
Figured I'd see if I could trade in the ones I'm not keeping at a local bookstore.

>>2103
>Judging by the fact that you own 13 programming books but still ask this kind of questions instead of just making things
Part of the reason why I have "so many" is because I inheritted most of them from other family members. All the Java and VB2010 books are either from my mother or my deceased grandpa. I did dabble with the C++ For Dummies, but I had to drop it because other things in life became a priority.

>>2105
>I don't see much value in them unless you want to code for an ancient platform. Post C++11 and new java versions are basically a completely new language. It's like trying to learn pre-ANSI C syntax.
I guess it's a good thing I have the old material then because (From what I'm seeing) the tech industry has spent the past 15 years trying to outdo themselves and what already exists, and the result is that they keep coming up short and underdelivering on their promises. With the "best" programs only providing people something that already exists. Even the "big advent" of AI isn't that impressive once you realize that it's no

>>2105
Newer doesn't always mean better. There's people who still make amazing stuff with just C or "C-like C++" (AKA C with only a select few C++ features) because the fundamentals of programming haven't really changed in decades, it's much more important to nail that part than some C++ features.

>>2108
I haven't read the books but I would avoid the Java ones because that's a pretty abandoned language these days and was always a mistake in a lot of ways. It may be useful if you want to get a job maintaining some old ass crapware that was built on Java though.

Visual Basic stuff will probably get you locked into Microsoft's ecosystem, which is extra bad since Microsoft has been heading straight into the trash in recent years. Some of that stuff is probably obsolete too since Microsoft keeps updating their shit.

>>2109
>Newer doesn't always mean better.
No, but C++11 got some new features to the point it might be considered as a different language (lambdas, vararg templates, range-based for, constexpr functions, etc. Concepts can also be useful if you do templates, but they're a newer additions and assumes you're not stupid. Of course still no static reflection, so you'll be forced to roll your own for anything but the most trivial programs, but that's just how C++ evolves, useful features have the lowest priority)
>fundamentals of programming haven't really changed in decades
Yeah, but these books look more like teach language X instead of teach programming fundamentals.
>I would avoid the Java ones because that's a pretty abandoned language
Thank you for contradicting yourself in one post.

>>2113
I'm not against Java because "it won't get new features", I'm against it because there's no future for it. There will be less and less jobs for it, less of a community and discussion and help, and the virtual machine that runs Java will probably have less support in the future, who knows if it runs on future consoles or phones.

>>2114
>no future for it
I wouldn't say it so clearly. Sure, not as popular as it used to be, but lot of enterprise garbage are still written in java. Visual Basic is much worse in this regard (not that I'd miss any of them, both languages are an abomination).

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>>1587
Are you trying to invent cataclysm:dark days ahead?

>backpacks
Why not just make everything into a storage? All existing items have to be stored somewhere, and a lot of items are both storages and "items". So simply register every item, by ID/pointer into its storage space. On loading, recursively load all used storages, starting from "the world". 
Its actually important part of the interface. Depending on number of items/buttons, game might start lagging, if every button pressed checks every other button location against it. You will need to separate them into containers anyway. 
And with everything being a container of their own, you can have "hidden" part, where item stores materials its made of.  

>how to ID
You either use half assed system, or make a proper all encompassing item ID system. 
> I want to refer to the inventory by it's name
You dont mean, you literally search all existing items via std::string or something like that?

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>>1587
>>1588
>create_item()
>create_inventory() 
I just realized that the way I explained it doesn't make any sense because I left out context. Those functions in reality are create_iteminfo() and create_inventoryinfo().

The way my stuff is organized is that I have objects and infos. The info represents the object's type and has all the static information about it, like name and description and sprite, you only modify those at game startup. The object has per-object information, like how many items are in an item stack, they are actual objects that exist in the world.

Pic related are the actual, un-edited data structures for my items. What I'm talking about is creating an Iteminfo, and connecting the relevant Inventoryinfoid into it. I don't need or want to store the inventory info's string ID into the item info, I just want the numerical ID, but the item info may be created before the inventory info so the numerical ID wouldn't exist yet.

>Are you trying to invent cataclysm:dark days ahead?
Not sure what makes you think that.

Test.

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New bread.
>>1605
>>1605
>>1605

>>1587
You need a better vision of what your game should be about, what is it called?

>>1896
Possible but probably not? You sound like you use giant cpu towers and high-end gpus which are giant anyway.

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What one is better (for game development), the RX 7700 XT or RX 6750 XT?

I'm planning to pair it with an Ryzen 7 7700 and 32gb DDR5 6000mhz.

The price difference between these two cards is about 63 euro.

I don't think anyone on any imageboard has the required level of hardware and software/engine performance knowledge to be able to answer this.

>>1953
Should be fine either way. It only matters for working with blender, and in a minor way. Most new hardware is more than good enough for game dev, except when its something randomly unsupported.

>>1953
Both are fine. You usually just want something with enough VRAM, low power draw and a fast enough core.
However, the 7000 series/RDNA3 has a flaw with rendering proper 1080p with av1, I believe, and AMD just gave up on fixing it since it was a hardware/architectural issue.

>>105 (OP) 
> https://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html
> https://love2d.org
lua + LÖVE (aka lua2d)

>>343
based

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Sorry you are homeless anon Xray engine is got its sauce openes. (Go to github)

Sift through the code copy, paste modify well enough and im sure nobody will notice.

Try one of those webgl javascript engines (frameworks). Also get on some support, I guarantee there's some charity that will hand you a better laptop.

raylib. ez

>>105 (OP) 
maybe werkkzeug3. I've also used LibGDX which was fine - a Java gamedev framework (so more barebones than an engine, e.g. no editors included). It may have got a little more clunky over time but it's more stable and supports more platforms now.