tigerhey! 👋
I'm working on a stealth action game set on the doomed space station of a desperate billionaire fleeing earth. It's Thief, in space, with no combat and scary robots. Here's a thread of what I've been up to recently!
I "modeled" the hacking tool you can use to disable lights and security systems etc using trenchbroom. Yes, trenchbroom the mapping software 😆
This still needs hooking up to the actual systems to do anything useful.
upgraded to godot 4.3 on the 1st of September. not much to say here, upgraded and everything JustWorked (tm) ❤️
still a way to go here, but made some significant improvements to how these security robots chase you down, and (you might not believe it, but) improvements to their animations...
just coming right at you....
anyway, if you made it this far and want to know more, fancy a follow :) ?
Jonathan Hartley's old account@tigerchops but but I'm already following!
I also upgraded our Missile Commander to 4.3, without event. I'm looking forward to putting my background starfield into the new type of parallax layers. The old one didn't work for my purposes (because my camera rotates) but I'm assured this one will.
@tartley one day would love to hear your thoughts about godot and gdscript :)
@tigerchops haha. I'm definitely too inexperienced with it to have an opinion worth listening to. But of course that doesn't stop me from having lots of opinions!
I miss exceptions.
I don't love the "log errors and just keep running" stance, but since catastrophic failures and data loss are relatively unimportant in a game, I can live with it.
I'm currently unsure what the sensible mechanism is to guarantee some clean up action gets run at a later time. The equivalent of RAII or contextmgrs.
@tigerchops But simply having an engine out of the box that will rapidly render the scene tree makes it much more productive than my former Python gamey projects, so I'm liking it.
I used the built-in 2D collision detection for bombs, explosions and the irregular polygonal ground, not realizing until I was done that this won't work reliably because the explosions change size over time. Ended up making explosion collision boundaries be permanently at max size...
@tigerchops ...and then manually doing the final accurate collision check for anything Godot tells me is currently overlapping.
I'm excited to try the new parallax background in 4.3. The old one didn't work for my background starfirld because I rotate the camera. I'm told this new one should handle it.
Also can't wait to try adding CRT glow. It's essentially my central concern, but I've been a good boy and actually written the core gameplay first.
@tigerchops I should say, it took me a while to get comfortable with the enforced tree -oriented organization of everything. I understand that it's common in games and can see why, but still it feels like too much of my logic is too distributed around different objects and presumably racy in ways I don't understand. Probably this is just my inexperience.
@tigerchops I'm currently failing to make a playable web export. Capturing the mouse fails. I believe I have to do it in a user action handler? (maybe a "make Fullscreen" button?)
@tartley oh yeah that last one I've run into a few times - it's good old web browsers keeping you safe but basically yeah it needs to be a button click or some other definitive user action to work 100%.
@tartley re: tree structure and code layout etc. I do agree - this has been my basic issue with all "big" game engines, I think there's something interesting there about the balance between "something people can drag and drop components into" and a more concrete code architecture.
I think it's quite telling that basically they all need to give you some method to "find" another game object by some loosely defined criteria.
I've mostly got over it and accepted it but can relate 😆
@tartley ultimately I came to the conclusion a while ago that if I was going to create game projects that I was happy with in the time available I would have to use a bigger engine. Luckily it's about the time godot "got good" imo (or good enough) and thankfully I think it's a lot more programmer brain friendly than unity.
And of course runs better on linux :p
@tartley For example, having some support for "alternative" editors for a long time - and now even better with the lsp, And being able to make little CLI tools to do chores pretty easily. etc etc 😆 😍
@tigerchops I am still using the Godot editor, but will set up the vim LSP any day now. I only get to gamedev for the odd hour here and there, so never want to spend that precious time on that. Maybe today is the day! Kiddo 90 minute taekwondo lesson coming up!
@tigerchops I don't think I know about the CLI creating abilities. I'll have a look...