Space Nerds In Space

Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 19 Apr 2020, 02:39

If you haven't already noticed, reinventing wheels is kinda my thing. :)
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 20 Apr 2020, 03:07

Development update for 2020-04-19: https://youtu.be/QLkJ8u0nxzY

Transport Contracts, a new font, and SDL2.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby MCMic » 24 Apr 2020, 22:10

I finally found someone to host the ISO for the SNIS live USB, so builds now gets uploaded to https://snis.mugoreve.fr/

[EDIT] Note that I did not test a recent build of the USB live
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 25 Apr 2020, 03:25

So I've got the SDL port at pretty much parity with the GTK implementation, seems pretty stable, doesn't have any weird oddities that I know of.

It also doesn't have anything over and above the GTK implementation. And it does mean the limited client will die.

So the question is, should I proceed with this? It would make a windows port easier, but I'm not doing a windows port (maybe somebody else will, but I won't) so that is a purely theoretical advantage at this point. My multi-window system is so far not panning out (a bit buggy, and less performant than just running two clients) so that's not a real advantage.

So the question is, do we ditch the limited client on the hope that someone comes along and does a windows port? There's no other benefit from the SDL port, really.

If you want to try it, there's a branch, "sdl2-conversion-2020-04-22-B", but you'll want to back up to commit 20dd7adfde127450069369706b3fb8867b662bf9 as commits after that have to do with the multi-window stuff that doesn't work so well.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby CapnRobberts » 25 Apr 2020, 16:50

In its current state the work for a Windows port is the same with SDL 2 as it was with GTK. GTK exists on Windows. It's all the other unixy things that would have to change, time, networking, anything in unistd, etc...
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 25 Apr 2020, 17:29

CapnRobberts {l Wrote}:In its current state the work for a Windows port is the same with SDL 2 as it was with GTK. GTK exists on Windows. It's all the other unixy things that would have to change, time, networking, anything in unistd, etc...


Yeah it does (and I even had another much simpler game I wrote that used GTK get ported by someone to windows) however, the combination of GTK and opengl is very much less common on windows and harder to deal with and seems to be pretty offputting, whereas SDL2 and opengl are common as dirt on windows.

But I expect the actual answer is nobody really gives a shit what I do with it, because nobody plays this silly game anyway, ha.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby CapnRobberts » 25 Apr 2020, 17:43

Market-share wise they may be related. I know it's a pet/learning project for you, but if you wanted more people to play it, a Windows version would possibly give you a larger audience.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 28 Apr 2020, 03:11

CapnRobberts {l Wrote}:Market-share wise they may be related. I know it's a pet/learning project for you, but if you wanted more people to play it, a Windows version would possibly give you a larger audience.


This is not really new information to me. But, I don't have a windows machine, I'm not going to get one, and I don't know anything about windows and haven't used windows at all since 1999 or so, so even if I did get a windows machine, I seriously wouldn't have the slightest idea how to even use it. If a windows port emerges, it will be because someone other than me deems it worthy of a port. And that is as it should be.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby CapnRobberts » 28 Apr 2020, 04:11

Oh no, I was not suggesting you do the work. It's quite clear where you stand on that :) Just that collaboration for the work rather than a simple port may be better, such as using more of the features in SDL. I'm sure it'll get sorted out eventually.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 01 Jul 2020, 13:41

Awhile back, I mentioned the long shadows that you see at the terminator on the lunar surface and how you won't get those using normal maps for lighting:

Certainly using a normal map in the lighting calculations won't get you the kind of long shadows you see if you look up images of "lunar terminator", like this image from NASA:


And I posted this picture to illustrate the kind of shadows I'm talking about:

Image

Now I come across this technique, called "Normal Mapping Shadows": http://enbdev.com/doc_normalmappingshadows.htm

Here is an example without this technique and with it. The effect is especially prominent in the tire tracks. (you may need to "view image" if the forum clips it too badly.)

Image

Now to implement this in SNIS, I would need to overcome a few problems:

1. I need to understand the basics of how it works. I think the basic gist of it is, in the fragment shader, you use a vector towards the light to define a line through the normal map texture that you traverse, summing some dot products as you go to see if a shadow would be cast at that location, and how strongly.
2. I need to take into account the curvature of the planet surface. Currently the fragment shader only has the interpolated normal vector at the particular texel, as you traverse across the normal map, this normal would rotate about the center of the planet by a bit. Might be able to ignore this if the traverse is not too far at some loss of accuracy.
3. I need to figure out how to deal with the cubemap seams. This seems a bit harder because the tangent and bitangent vectors change discontinuously across this seam, not to mention other mind bending complexities.

I'm not feeling quite ambitious enough to think I will really implement this, but it is cool to realize that it *is* possible to do with only the normal map. It might also require a better graphics card that what I currently own to do this fast enough, but worrying about that now is putting the cart before the horse.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby MCMic » 28 Apr 2021, 14:07

Have you played Endless Sky? I’m playing it these last weeks and it’s really nice. And it feels like SNIS could take inspiration from it on how to handle the mission stuff.

Having some real use for the money to buy ships and parts (and also just to be able to go on as you need to pay salaries to crew) is a good motivation to do the transport of people/cargo generic missions, and when you go to spaceports you sometime trigger scripted missions, some of them being part of complicated story lines.

Doing the same kind of things in SNIS with a crew would feel awesome for sure. Well I could not pass the same amount of time on SNIS because of how hard it is to get enough people/computers in the same place to play SNIS, but maybe something a bit smaller/simpler.
The way factions are handled is quite good too.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 30 Apr 2021, 22:33

I have not played Endless Sky. I'll at least take a look at some videos though. Thanks for the recommendation.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 28 May 2021, 20:54

Here's a quick little demo of a new feature which allows the user to hold down the SHIFT key and drag UI elements wherever they want to. Not sure it's terribly useful, but it was easy to implement, so I did.

Image

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-zWoGCLAQU
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby Julius » 28 May 2021, 21:15

Once you got VR working, then people can make their own work-spaces like with https://simulavr.com/ (Godot Engine based btw)
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby jdc » 23 Jul 2021, 11:50

You should create a manual for people to know a bit more of your code, is a project that i could easy incorporate in my one since it have the same language. But width out the manual i don't know what you are doing or it take to much time to know that.
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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby smcameron » 04 Aug 2021, 21:51

jdc {l Wrote}:You should create a manual for people to know a bit more of your code, is a project that i could easy incorporate in my one since it have the same language. But width out the manual i don't know what you are doing or it take to much time to know that.


Since you mention the code, I do have a guide for that, it's here: Hacking on Space Nerds in Space. The intent is mainly to help people who might want to contribute by working on the game. I don't know that my code is good enough to warrant spreading it around into other people's projects -- especially things like the fonts and UI system are pretty weird and idiosyncratic, and that my game is the only one on earth that would do something quite that weird is a probably a positive thing, both for my game (makes it look unique) and for others (don't have to put up with such strangeness.)

If you mean a manual for how to play the game... nobody will put up with having to read a manual for how to play any game these days, so I'm not sure that's worth while. I did think about it briefly, with the idea to create a kind of "Pilot's manual" that was very "in-universe", but... too much work for too little payoff and I don't think I'm clever enough to quite pull it off. There are some tutorial videos for some of the stations: http://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds- ... /#controls

For how to compile the game (since I do not distribute binaries) some fairly detailed instructions are here: http://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds- ... structions

For setting up the game (since it is quite complicated compared to most games) there are some detailed instructions here...

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Re: Space Nerds In Space

Postby bzt » 29 Aug 2021, 18:51

Hi,

Space Nerds in Space is mentioned on Hacker News!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343941

Cheers,
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