#enginedev — Public Fediverse posts

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@archo/117073673325587159

so with this it seems I've reached feature parity in terms of engine features

though not design/editor features compared to e.g. blender - the animation editor doesn't support IK (which would also require rotation sampling and subsequent curve optimization)

idk if I'll bother considering that I want my touchpoint anims to be predominantly (if not completely) procedural anyway for level design adaptability

#gamedev #enginedev #animation

The GUI "API" is fine enough I can do *this*!

The choppy framerate is Windows's another screen capture feature that doesn't work as well as the Game DVR, I assure you it's smooth as butter.

#enginedev #gamedev

first human animation made using the animation editor

there are still bugs but I finally figured out what rotation format should be used

also figuring out design principles that work with the QLIF splines, particularly in terms of rotation (due to the weird broken up curves)

namely, keypoints should be at locations where either velocity or acceleration is ~0, then plausible tangents should be chosen, then transition points are added to cover discontinuities

#gamedev #enginedev #animation

the more I think about materials, the more it feels like they shouldn't be either a one-per-file thing (like unity/unreal) or an embedded object thing (like godot)

instead there should be a big database-like pile/table (or several - one per package) where it's cheap to do all sorts of operations on them without having to do a complex file system scan

tho I haven't figured out the whole thing yet

#gamedev #enginedev

implemented autogenerated materials but ran into an issue

the materials also store the aspect ratio used for generating UVs

when they were generated at asset processing time, this aspect ratio was transferred during the generation step

now the generated materials are being set up prior to the textures being loaded

sometimes material data is even loaded without the textures (though usually the textures are still loaded by something else)

#gamedev #enginedev

thinking about trying to use single-texture autogenerated materials in the engine

not that materials are some huge bottleneck to design but they still seem to get in the way quite a lot

and when several different variations are needed depending on the circumstances (at least opaque + alpha cutout + decal), pregenerating all of them no longer seems like a reasonable option

#gamedev #enginedev

created a terrain test

the result mostly seems fine, except for the weird overlap in the middle

turned out that the convex polygon check wasn't detecting 180 degree turns

#gamedev #enginedev

moved to triangle check (#verts <= 3) for determining the validity of the initially generated areas as the old angle check was failing

this required fixing issues with link generation so that it's much closer to 100% correct
- issue 1: forgot to check vertical overlap in parallel-intersect cases
- issue 2: midpoint checks too strict (this one might return later, should rethink it)

also fixed my flood fill code to find all connected areas, as it was generating duplicates

#gamedev #enginedev

added a 135 degree corner link merge
(first image = new/after)
it results in links being created that are rotated in 22.5 degree increments
it also apparently results in a more simple navmesh

#gamedev #enginedev

finally the spiral platform navmesh builds correctly

had a bug with some link intersections not being detected

also had a bug with the traversable link check not checking correctly whether the reached endpoint is on the same level (elevation) as the desired endpoint

#gamedev #enginedev

was using only a slope angle check for adjacency data, which was favoring diagonals
now also added a step height check
not entirely sure what's the best approach here but this works for now; can revisit later

#gamedev #enginedev

created a spiral platform test
it rasterizes and detects features seemingly correctly but the edge connecting step is currently broken here for some reason

#gamedev #enginedev

started testing overlapping platforms
untraversable links were being created

added a traversal to check if the link is walkable (https://www.cse.yorku.ca/~amana/research/grid.pdf but with known adjacent tile selection instead of stepX/stepY)

#gamedev #enginedev

reenabled area finding code (link walking on either side) and joined areas across redundant links

#gamedev #enginedev

removed the garbage links
fixed a missing edge link

#gamedev #enginedev

added a type to each link
adding more connections between points
the result is similar to triangulation

#gamedev #enginedev

filtering of inner links
merging of straight link chains (ported some old code)

#gamedev #enginedev

connecting found features

#gamedev #enginedev

looking for elevation corners
(H/V only for now, could do diagonal later)

#gamedev #enginedev

finding adjacent tiles and edge tiles

#gamedev #enginedev

rebuilding nav mesh building code, this time with full 3D support

this is step 1 (raycast + space checks -> multilevel heightmap)

#gamedev #enginedev

so this is where the "spline" part of the "spline mesh" finally appears

every edge can be turned into a cubic spline

there's still a bunch of things that don't work yet (e.g. tangent visualization and editing, spline-aware edge picking and face previews)

but at least the intermediate positions are being generated, the spline edges are rendered correctly and they also appear in the exported polygons

#gamedev #enginedev #graphics

making some progress with rig processing

- added conditional tagging
for now there's only face count for vertices/edges and part count for faces, so it's possible to find outlines and inner vertices/edges

- added conversion to polygons/polylines
from there it's possible to make fill/edge meshes etc. from that

could in theory add materials and other metadata to the rig directly but idk, will try to make upgrades as I proceed and see what's needed/helpful

#gamedev #enginedev #graphics

created some extrusion code

the basic mesh transform (outline finding + vertex/edge duplication + face-vertex/face-edge redistribution + bridge faces) turned out much easier than expected

but making the full thing would probably require upgrading the transform gizmo

just need to do missing editing features (element tags, grid, selection modes) and element extraction and it'll be ~enough for editing procedural modeling rigs

#gamedev #enginedev #graphics

finally developed enough features that I could finish skinning the test character at a base level (without finger or face bones)

also ended up not needing undo so far 🤷

the weird thing about developing a reasonably efficient tool is that suddenly the work ends up taking like a few hours total and you wonder if spending several weeks on the tool was worth the effort

hopefully I'll be able to cash in at scale (after skinning a bunch of characters, together with iterations)

#gamedev #enginedev

noticed a really weird issue with dual quaternion skinning

at the end of the day, all skinning is a nasty approximation

(though in this case linear blending looks a lot less weird, even if still unnaturally stretchy)

I wish there was a better option that didn't involve lots of work (cloth simulation + overbuilding the character for it)

#gamedev #enginedev #graphics

the slowest part in all this seems to be the process of figuring out what is it exactly that I want to make:

- dogfooding
- noticing problems
- coming up with several solutions
- coming up with their costs and effectiveness without actually making them
- picking the optimal combination

there's a lot of fancy 3D view selection/editing things that I'd like to make but they seem to cost far more and thus I could only justify them if I have seen somewhere that they worked best

#gamedev #enginedev

did a lot of tiny things but also

1️⃣ removed *shared* bone weight shapes (ones used for all skins)

reason: it would be more difficult to fit most of them to 2+ skins than I initially thought

2️⃣ made weight shape transforms absolute (used to be bone-relative)

reason: allows moving the bone pivot without moving the shapes

reason for both: now all skins are self-sufficient and could be moved into separate files to prevent shared changes from rebuilding all associated files

#gamedev #enginedev

back to working on the mesh skin set editor - a second pass to support more cases

- made the test view functional (as in, finally allow pose changing)
- added the missing weight shape visualizations

yet to figure out how to design the weight shapes for optimal weights (spine seems to be especially complicated... but I have an idea)

self-intersecting meshes could be a challenge but flood fill might solve it (the test model has teeth, can test later)

#gamedev #enginedev

been working on a "spline mesh" for some time (a tiny bit at a time) and finally have something to show

the data structure has been seemingly figured out now and there are a few basic actions available

it's not yet enough to design anything but could be eventually

the goal is to build control rigs for things like this and more: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@archo/115384498813589175

eventually it should be possible to turn edges into splines and extract faces as polygons

#gamedev #enginedev #graphics