MicroSim

Started to work on some settings here and there. This will allow me to actually optimize it because it’s going to be easy to pinpoint what lines slow down the generation process. I also finished the controls rebinding settings too. Doesn’t seem that long but for whatever reason, it took me a long, long time to do so.

Cheers!
Ryland Grace

Heya There! I made some fairly major progress on the Main Menu. I finally more or less chose the general theme for it, as well as added a couple settings as follows:

• Resolution
• V-Sync
• Max Framerate
• Borderless, Windowed/Fullscreen
• Shaders
• Low Quality, where the resolution of the sprites is halved
• Audio controls for Master, Music and SFX bus’

That’s pretty much it for the day.

Cheers!
Ryland Grace

Kept working on the GUI. Button by button, script by script, the progress keeps going because it sees no end, no bound. I’ve set up a proper tab container instead of my poor excuse of one, as well as started to make some display/audio settings. I also added some background music. GUI really is a pain, but honestly?

I kind of like it here. I feel at peace.

Cheers!
Ryland Grace

Started working on the main menu as well as the GUI. I did a LOT of brainstorming on what kind of theme I should adopt, and I’m still not sure. I also fixed the overlapping problem. Or, rather, the lack of it. If you look up a sample under a microscope, you would notice the suprising abundance of the overlapping. However, thanks to my code, I am able to limit the overlapping to a certain degree.

Cheers!
Ryland Grace

PS.: GUI is a pain. It really is.

Quite a bit of progress today: I made all the cells spawn in little packs of roughly 1-10 cells each, as well as being of the same type together. To do this, I originally wanted to adhere to some sort of randomized noise texture to affect the chances of a cell spawning on a selected pixel, but, after quite a few facepalms, I ended up opting for spawning first a few primary cells, and then spawn a bunch of secondary cells around them. That means that it’s a tad less flexible, but for the time being, that’s what I’ll use.

However, this did add unfortunately quite a bit of lag, so either I’ll have to heavily optimize it, or if that’s just not possible, I’ll have to add a loading screen, which I have no idea how to do. I also started working a bit on the UI and main menu.

That’s about it for today! Doesn’t sound like too much, but I promise you, that was genuinely difficult.

Cheers!
Ryland Grace

Heya there!
I didn’t do an insane amount of progress, however, there still is a measurable leap.

I: Cells now cannot overlap over themselves. No longer are there any jebstacks!

II: Cells now spawn according to a probability depending on the black-white gradient values of a noise texture.

III: Added a new tier of movement controls. Previously, there was only fine and coarse controls, but now, behold! The hyper-coarse controls! (just a faster way to move)

That’s pretty much it for those few hours, thanks for reading!

Cheers!
Ryland Grace

Heya there!

For the past couple of days I have been working on a microscope simulation app/game. I’m still not sure whether I should lean further towards making it feel more “gamey” or a more realistic simulation. I’d be glad to hear opinions on that matter!
My progress during the few logged hours are composed of two parts. The Blender and the Godot section.
I - Blender:
I have created a simple image of a cell during mitosis (meet Jebediah, the cell!). It was genuinely painful and took me quite a lot of time to make it look even remotely realistic. I plan on making quite a few of those, so hopefully they will take less time as my progress goes on.
II - Godot:
The huge majority of my time was spent here. Partly because I didn’t spend that much time on blender, partly because I had to learn so much of Godot, as it was literally my first ever encounter with it. I also spent quite a lot of time learning shaders before giving up and searching them up.
III - Progress so far:

• Jebediah
• More Jebs with random position and rotation spawn within a rectangle determined by your monitor’s resolution when a mouse click is detected
• Movable camera across the X and Y axis using the arrow keys
• Chromatic Aberration Shader (the colour seperation shader closer towards the edges)
• Lens Distortion Shader (the stretching effect that is, again, stronger towards the edges)
• Zoom Controls using the + and - keys (will be replaced later with predetermined zoom factors such as 100x, 400x and 1000x)

I’d like to point out that the controls with the shaders genuinely give off a feeling of a real microscope, it’s actually pretty neat.
Anyways, that’s pretty much it, see you next time!

Cheers!
Ryland Grace

P.S.: I might add some astrophage, who knows?

Due to the recent update to the SD payoff, I have decided to give up on the hardware side of this project. All that will be left will be the simulation itself. In the recorded time, I have decided on the engine that I will use (Godot) as well as how it will function. Essentially, I will render many different sprites of cells and microbes under different resolutions, so that Godot will be able to render them all without too much lag. I am however still unsure whether I should add a possibility to change the wavelength, as this is a fairly “niche” option on most microscopes.
I am fully open to suggestions and commentaries.

Cheers!
Ryland Grace