dcolson.bsky.social
Lead Programmer at Climax Studios. Previously worked on Star Citizen. Personal account though. I mostly post about coding and coding projects. He/Hm
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115 following
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I won’t say any more in public on this topic, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble (my dms are available if anyone reading this thread wants to chat), but yea it’s really nice for me to see you try to solve these issues with a fresh take on the matter.
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This whole topic is precisely the issue SC's flight model had/has lol. It's too good, we had to resort to inventing lore that allowed us to nerf thrusters in atmosphere to get it to look okay. And even then it wasn't the best.
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Is it just any speed that contributes to this? I.e. if I thrust from a standstill on the ground, I start to get some forward momentum without any other inputs?
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I have also come to realise that there may be less stabilization than it feels, if you take the stick as a yaw/pitch angle rather than a yaw/pitch _rate_ then when you let go it settles?
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The blending is also very interesting, you can just take off from a standstill in normal mode and I guess you just lift off because it's 100% down thrust, but it very quickly starts moving forward. I have been trying to land vertically in manual mode, but haven't quite seen if I can do that
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An immediate thing that strikes me is how much stabilization you have. Hovering was always such a precarious state when we tried it on Star Citizen. But this feels "managed" which I gives you that "looks cool but is easy" feel. It's very cool, I am a fan
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Oooh yes please!
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Is this something like helicopter style hovering but with assists?
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Is the auto-aim done with a gun gimbal such that it's decoupled from ship orientation? Or something else?
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I don't know how well it'll show up on bluesky, but the text rendering in particular is vastly better.
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Hopefully @why485.bsky.social's game can scratch that itch as a modern day game
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It's more arcadey than I thought it would be, but as a result it's very simple to pick up and play when you want a quick bit of fun. There's loads of planes and loads of content, so it's very easy to enjoy without getting too in depth with anything. It's what I want war thunder to be haha
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Yes you are correct! Not sure how I missed that haha. I will make an amendment. Thank you!
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I should really try a casual server like that, I think that’s my mistake
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How is that possible haha. I rarely play it cause it’s too much effort
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So when you edit a raw asset, we can reimport it, and then figure out which lua table that asset corresponds to and patch all the data in it live, so the game coders have no idea anything has happened, and can just write their code as normal!
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This is very simple for users, loading assets, is just loading a lua table. But how does hot reloading work then?
Well, the lua registry contains a hidden "weak" (not a GC reference) table, listing every imported asset and the tables that they correspond to plus the original asset it came from.
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Behind the scenes raw assets get changed into a special format, which is just lua tables, with extra features to handle large amounts of binary data. That's what the swamp.scene file is. When you "load" the file, we just load those lua tables into actual lua tables in the VM you can do stuff with
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It's really important in the design of this fantasy console that it's quick and easy to develop things for, and so loading assets it's very simple it's just, load(assetname) in code.
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There’s a great Q&A in handmade hero where Casey points out “don’t reinvent the wheel” assumes that what exists already is as good as a wheel, an invention so perfect it’s lasted thousands of years.
How could we possibly assume software is perfect and cannot improve haha
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As someone who’s not used it seriously in quite some years (pre render pipeline split) now I’m oddly curious to try it and see what it’s like now
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Another cool thing I've worked alongside a lot of filesystem features is hot reloadable code. It's one of those features that feels like absolute magic when it works nicely. I'm hoping to absolutely everything be hot reloadable, meshes, textures, code, audio etc.
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I started using the arc browser in part because I loved that it just auto yeets most of my tabs at the end of the day. Otherwise I would just let them exist
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The idea being that scenes, textures and meshes are all relatively simple and fully visible to lua code, which means you can make procedural meshes and textures to your hearts content, and the console will render them happily. Here is how you might access the above data to draw a mesh
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A normal file, like a gltf file gets imported and converted to a lua table which you can easily load into lua. Meshes also get converted to userdata buffers (shown in second image), which can be manipulated however you want in lua.
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So soon for dragon age?!
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The industry is very hard to get jobs in at the moment sadly, but there's nothing egregiously wrong with this portfolio as is. I would just continue doing projects you're motivated to do. The more interesting (i.e. non-trivial and novel) projects on show the better really.
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I like how you link code snippets in the description, one could very easily find a lot to talk about in an interview looking at this. The same is true of the 3D software renderer. Even the older projects have some explanation and video/screenshot material. Overall it's good.
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It's not bad honestly, the RPG project is the star of the show. The easy things I usually look out for are things like
- Is it easy for me to see the project without having to download anything or just stare code
- Does it highlight some interesting problems this person has tackled
...cont.
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Coming from a company that heavily uses UE, I can tell you that a project you are excited about and interested in personally is equally as useful on a CV as Unreal experience.
Good people can always learn unreal.
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I really want to keep well away from a complex abstraction over Vulkan, and so after watching Sebastian's talk the abstraction is very very thin, and doesn't change much about the API or do much complex stuff behind the scenes, it just makes things a bit neater to use.
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I need to play this game now, you’ve sold me with all your gushing haha
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100% this, I have tried the “one game at a time” mode of playing, and i just end up playing less games cause I get burnt out of the big ones