JSP

Good but slow progress (im not finishing this game before stardance ends probably) I want to focus on having the 4 main gamemodes ready to have a good base for the camping, which is gonna be epic!

new features/changes:

• wrote the story for the campaign mode, yet to be showcased, but it is pretty cool, more on that later

• removed the explore mode, this was a thing i had in mind at the very beginning of the development but it doesnt really fit my view right now, will make a comeback at some point, but the previous implementation was just a bunch of dead code

• created a simple spaceship building scene, wip as you can see in the video

• added a very simple splash screen

• improved the planet creation sandbox, now with a paint tool (a bit buggy, for now) that lets you generate a real-time texture and save it to a png file, biggest progress here was made in the engine itself actually. This took so much time fighting with translation of screen-space coords to world-space coords to UV coords, im actually impressed it even works lmao. this was almost gonna get scrapped till i realized the UV unwrapping of the sphere was a cubic projection and that was messing everything up

I am struggling so much with blender and my sandbox, it looks like they hate each other, also WHY DOES BLENDER USE Z+ UP, anyway, stay tuned!
Its hard to make devlogs when progress is so slow but i hope you like it

PD: I just fixed the colors looking like confetti (look at the color of the blue paint brush), apparently i was multiplying the alpha channel by 255 in the texture class because of a previous implementation and that was causing some sort of overflow in the shaders, thus the weird colors, so paint tool is officially finished, hopefully

J.S.P.

I’ve been making some progress in every direction while i find out exactly what i want this game to be. ive started writing the story for the campaign mode that i hope is about 3 to 4 hours.
Overall the main progress of this devlog is summarized in a finished early version of the sandbox, although theres a lot to fix in it, the main stuff is done. Ive also started with the planet creation sandbox and focused on working into instancing even though it is not quite there yet (im thinking of removing the explore mode entirely or do it completely different)

new features:

• improved sandbox mode with actual simulation (very early), a new intro animation, different tools to select, move and change the starting velocity of each planet

• set a base for both the planet and spacecraft creation sandboxes as these mechanics will make the development of the campaign a bit easier, hopefully

• created a simple logo, probably to be changed, i dont really like it but id appreciate feedback

• refactored the scale system to make working with different distances and planet’s radius a lot easier, this new system is so clean i actually love it

As you can see progress is extremely slow, i want to make this right and also make sure that the project is well structured enough to hold up.

Also did a simple check on performance and after a couple tweaks, average fps sit around 3000, fr, on my little rtx 3060 so thats great

JSP

Today’s devlog is not so much focus into the progress but into some design decisions that made me had to restructure the project a quite a lot, ive got a new view of the project that i think will make it a lot more fun

gamemodes:

• campaign: top secret for now
• explore: you can explore, find, filter and search up real-life satellites at their real position, this is mostly done already but i need to work on adding instancing to the engine because rendering ~14000 satellites is not something my little tiny engine can really handle right now, performance drops from ~1700 fps to 9 fps lol
• sandbox: no more real life stuff, distances are too big and not fun to play with, this is the main change. this means that the idea is to now not only allow to play around with 3d gravity and make solar systems, but also to create and design custom planets and spacecrafts (and save/load them to a custom json file that you can share or reuse)

new features

• I want to showcase how the current sandbox mode is like right now, this is only a part of the final sandbox mode tho (read the previous paragraph for more info). I added this cool animation from the main menu, simple movement that scales with distance, and a placing-editing system that took way too long (i had to do matrix calculations lol, math does be useful sometimes), right now the only object you can place is the Earth, but you will be able to place pretty much anything and modify their mass, velocity or anything really

I will now start with making instancing something real and not just a dead branch in the engine’s repo, but this means im gonna have to read some opengl documentation :(

PD: the visual bug in the video is completely intentional

JSP

I’ve been working on a lot of things and the project is taking a really nice shape! ive organized the game into different game modes that independently manage their needs in an organized way. Also ive made some progress with the real life satellites and made some nice main menu!

new features:

• WIP: explore real time satellites and see them move as they are in real life, with custom orbit calculations, still in the works, getting fetched directly from the internet and cached every 24 hours

• Added a main menu, as the engine doesnt have any in-house UI system, Im using a modified dear imgui version that is holding up nicely, also added some placeholders for settings etc…

• Started a new gamemode: gravity sandbox, where you can play around with custom objects and real life planets and their gravitational interactions

I also had to update the engine a bit to make it be able to handle quads and their operations. the idea is to finalize a working sandbox gamemode as that would set the base for many more complex features incoming

JSP

A 3D pixelart videogame about space exploration where you have to save humanity from the Kessler effect, currently working on the “exploration” mode where you can find and explore all the satellites of earth (and later on the solar system) at their real time location.

Current Features!

• I’ve made a simple system that gets the real life data of these satellites from CelesTrak’s Public TLE Text Files, which than caches them and are refreshed every 24 hours, so you can see the real-life position of, for example, the ISS

• Built using my own custom engine, actually been updating the engine while creating this because, lets say the engine isnt very “mature” yet, but its holding up nicely!

• Check out the ORIGIN engine at: https://origin.aloyak.dev

The game will feature this little 3d pixel art style that i really like honestly. The hardest thing to do so far was to setup a fork of the engine so that i could work on the game without actually contributing to the engine itself at all.
All these models used currently are from NASA themselves, so they should be pretty accurate!

I’m thinking of maybe adding a web build but the more i try to make it work the more it breaks lol :(

🚀🚀

I’ve created a really nice UI with a simple controller layout that allows you to monitor the input from the steamdeck with a fancy imgui interface and also tested the performance a bit and its honestly pretty good. I managed to get around 8ms latency with 20ms spikes which is pretty good, also battery life is around 7 hours!!

It currently only works on linux as windows is trying so hard to make my life suck, so ill be adding windows support later on. It currently uses a custom driver with uinput that creates a generic virtual Xbox 360 controller that is automatically recognized by my pc and also by steam so thats great!

The process to make this work is pretty simple:

1. Add the steam deck side to steam as a non-steam game and make it use proton compatibility layer

2. Run the PC side

3. Run the steamdeck side

That’s it, the PC side recognizes the steamdeck instantly and there’s no setup required at all from that point on.

I would also like to add some sort of usb support but i think that will be a lot harder that im expecting :))

Huge progress!!

Wifi connection is working nicely. Right now the best way to do it is by connecting the steamdeck to your pc with a hotspot and the latency is actually pretty nice! Theres still some small bugs but the setup is stupid simple so thats great. You just open the app on the steamdeck, and then the pc finds it right away

I now should start developing the drivers to make the pc recognize this program as a generic controller but FIRST, Im going to make the UI of the desktop’s app fancy because its cool and fun to do.

The idea is to fully recreate the steam controller based on an actual steamdeck, so you have all the features of the new steam controller, although its obvious that some stuff will be missing (like haptics, but I’ll see what I can do about that). And well, I also should research a bit how to make this through USB as well, but that will be done in a long time

YAY

First ever post on stardance!

I’m making a program that allows you to use your steamdeck as a generic pc controller. I’m sort of learning how to do this in the process so I can’t really showcase any future features but so far its going great!

I created a simple program using SDL3 in C++, being my first time updating from SDL2 to SDL3, but not much changed honestly (at least that I noticed) that reads the steamdecks controller input and saves it to a light struct that will later be sent using either wifi or usb to a target pc.

What I’m most proud of so far is how I managed to get a simple working environment to develop and test code on the deck quickly. I code on my computer and with the press of a button my mouse and keyboard now control the steamdeck, also being able to quickly send and receive files to test new builds etc… Thanks to KDE Connect and a few other tricks

I will know start researching how to make any sort of wifi connection reliable enough, wish me luck!

I also created a simple logo using gimp (probably not the last version, hopefully)

Welcome to Stardance!