Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Thor | Scorching Engines

@thorwhitemountain.bsky.social

510 followers 69 following 450 posts

Hey, I'm Thor. Aspiring game developer currently working on Scorching Engines, as a side hobby to work as a Software Engineer https://store.steampowered.com/app/2640660/Scorching_Engines/ https://discord.com/invite/H7vHbbRGwh

store.steampowered.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · May 25

Does driving a giant experimental vehicle in a frozen post-apocalyptic game sound fun? Inspired by Mortal Engines, Mad Max and Snowpiercer,

Wishlist at : store.steampowered.com/app/2640660/...

#wishlist #gamedev #indiegame #indiedev #snowpiercer #madmax #mortalEngines #madewithunity #fpsgame #fps

4 10 72

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 14h

Been playing a bunch of Arc Raiders, and honestly it's a shame that it's using UE5 (in the way that the engine puts a massive weight on temporal solutions to fix graphics (solve dithered hair and grass, etc) and improve performance.

But instead it just turns into a smeary mess with ghosting :(
#ue5

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 2d

Poor enemy, they're too dumb to drive :((

#indiegame #gamedev #indiedev #solodev #ai

1 7

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 5d

Gotta love the enemies not respecting my walls and just driving straight through them haha

#indiegame #gamedev #ai

2 7

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 7d

Adding a seperate layer to the start area, and making the city content spawning be blocked by that also, prevent city buildings and resource zones in citites to be spawned in or near the facility

Exaggerated in the right pic to show it more clearly with the small grey cells
#indiegame #gamedev #fps

Normal spawning, where there are resource zones spawned inside the research facility cave. (The blue crosses are resource zones)

Large area marked as occupied by the starting area, to prevent city buildings and resource zones from spawning too close

5 9

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 7d

Aaaand we've got a new build menu, that shows the required resources to build it. As apparently I'd forgotten that before haha

#indiegame #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #unity3d

4 16

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 7d

I used to go to the library and play it on their public ps2... without any savegames haha. Just replaying the same 30-45 minutes over and over

1 1

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 9d

Got a rudimentary FOV slider, that I have no idea why I waited so long to add haha

(options menu is very much temporary)

#indiegame #gamedev

3 15

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 11d

Windwalker

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 12d

hmmmm.... I might have gone overboard with the debug lines this time around....

#indiegame #gamedev #solodev #indiedev

2 15

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 14d

Aaaand we've got navmeshing for the colony. Apparently I'd forgotten that haha

#solodev #indiedev #gamedev

3 13

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 20d

Okay I've fixed the bugs with the POI cell system, and now it works pretty well. And here's a look at it from far away.
The large red cells are city zone buffers, preventing cities from spawning too close (~15km)

Then there's bandit camps in yellow, and resource zones in blue.

#indiegame #gamedev

5 13

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 20d

welp... that didn't go as expected, my poor poor ram

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 20d

I've said it before, but I LOOOVE debug lines.

Refactored the content spawning systems in my game (cities, bandit camps, resource zones, and other POIs) so that they use a shared gridcell system with layers

Now I can debug it to see cells in use and buffers

#indiegame #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Debug drawing all used cells in the game.

Cells with cross are centers and have a places of interest (POI) on them, cells without a cross are buffer zones use to prevent similar POIs from spawning too close.

Each cell can contain multiple layers, so they're drawn in their respective cellsizes, with differing heights and colors.

Blue is resource zones for example, and cities are red

5 22

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 22d

Refactoring the resource / POI spawning systems and seem to have broken it a fair bit... The city is a bit too big and a bit too dense haha

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 24d

Yeah, I swapped to ogg afterwards. Was smaller filesize than both, and didn't have the issue either :)

65kB ogg vs 140kB mp3 and 670kB wav

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 24d

Yeah, I got worried until the first google result had a solution and it was as simple as changing the export format :)

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 25d

Wav is 5 times the file size, 140kB vs 670 kB

replaced it with ogg instead, which only uses 65 kB :)))

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 25d

So apparently exporting from audacity as mp3 causes a blank space in the beginning of the file.
Exporting it as .wav solves it luckily, else that'd be annoying as gaps in looping audio doesn't loop nicely haha

#indiegame #gamedev

3 3 17

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28d

The new deformer implementation means that I can have deformers do this, so the starting research facility in a cave has a long ramp leading down to it.

#indiegame #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #madmax #mortalengines #snowpiercer

2 19

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28d

Okay okay, got it to be 5-10% slower than the old implementation

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28d

WAIT! I lied, i was only using burst compilation on one of them (the old one)...
my bad

With burst the new one is only taking 7.57 ms on average. Nowhere near as bad

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28d

Doing an early out for the ray vs line segment tests gave us an 11% speedup

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28d

created a benchmark for the rewritten interpolation method, so that I can optimize it since it's slower than the previous implementation.... A lot slower

Old 6.14ms, new 89.84ms..which is a 1363.19% increase in time taken to do 100 thousand calls to the interpolation method haha
#indiegame #solodev

New method with a ray vs line segment based interpolation strategy, taking 89.84 ms to do interpolate 100 thousand times

(This one supports offset interpolation, which is needed for ramps and such, so it's not an apples to apples comparison)

old method with a hypotenuse length based interpolation strategy, taking 6.14 ms to do interpolation 100 thousand times.

(This one doesn't have support for offset interpolation, which is needed for ramps and such, so it's not an apples to apples comparison)

2 1 5

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28d

Needed the offset deformers so that I could make a ramp up to the colony

#indiegame #indiedev #gamedev

3 15

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28d

Okay, finally. Had a bug where it didn't work correctly when rotated and offset, but now it's fixed :)))

#indiegame #gamedev #solodev #screenshotsaturday #unity3d

large rotated deformer with big interpolation bounds offset

Debug lines showing if it's inside the interpolation bounds or not

3 14