JSP

Omg i need a break! just one more change bro and i will start doing the hard and boring stuff, just one more i swear! This sums up everything ive done for the past few hours, although the new improvements are actually quite important, i feel like im somewhat rushing them instead of focusing on the exploration mode

New things!!

• Simple LOD system for planets, there wasnt a big performance change, but the model swap is very unnoticeable and nice so thats great!

• Added a simple spoiler warning to the exploration mode, the original idea was that you should unlock it after playing the campaign but i guess its fine lol

• I FIXED THE DEPTH BUFFER PRECISION ISSUE!!!! it was such a small change omg, i just dynamically changed the near plane of the camera based on how far you are to a planet, pretty nice

WIP

• Work in progress: I’m porting the whole game to the new action-based input system so that the game supports controllers natively without any kind of steam layer on top, this is till very early and i still dont know how to make some stuff be fun to use with a controller….

I finish this, finish the two major things on the exploration mode that are 100% gonna be quick, make some decent amount of content for it, add the custom spaceship controller and launch system, make the first ~5 minutes of the campaign mode, and then SHIP THIS PROJECT (this will surely go as planned)

PD: the video u see is completely controlled with my gamepad, not the best controls yet but its better than nothing!

JSP

Worked on so many things before getting started with the complicated stuff, ill tell more about that in the bottom section, but for now, im pretty happy with what ive just added, even tho progress is pretty slow!!!

What have i added?

• Full/complete atmospheric effect, it now not only looks good from outside, now from the inside too!!! Its a small trick but when the camera gets close enough to a planet, its atmosphere’s density scales up making the sky blue like here on earth or greatly improving the sunrises and sunsets, they do look beatiful

• Added floating origin: double precision was not enough so ive added a system that teleports all the entities in the scene when the player gets too far from the origin, this works surprisingly good and it was very simple to do, hopefully it wont break physics later on, but so far its great! This allows the solar system to go from ~10000 units wide to over ~3000000!! that is great! This was a engine-level change mostly tho

• You can finally use the planets you discover in the campaign mode in the sandbox mode

• Dynamic settings!!! I made it so that when you first load into the game, the UI scales to your resolution and your target fps are set to your monitor’s refresh rate, might not look like something important but this is actually HUGE

Whats cooking up currently!

• Need a system to allow the player to be placed on top of moving planets (it currently works but breaks sometimes), and also to allow those planets to rotate. This will be achieved with a completely new physics world that will live localy on the closest planet the player is to

• Chunked mesh collider system i really dont know how to this, because of the terrain of my planets (TODO), collisions will be complicated to calculate, if you know about anything that could help, please send it!!!

PD: I wish i could spend more time actually coding than thinking, if that were to be the case id have 300 hours+ in this project already

ORIGIN ENGINE

I’ve been adding some quality of life changes that make working with this engine a lot easier, which means more abstraction in some cases which is not always the best but whatever. Ive also worked very hard on fixing and improving the physics (even considered porting it to now use Box3D instead of Bullet3, but that will probably happen in the far future, and Bullet3 will be kept as a fallback)

What have i been working on i see you ask?

• Added the ParentEntityComponent, a very simple work around for the lack of parent-child entities on my engine, this will probably be deprecated sooner or later but its a decent solution instead of doing all the work all at once

• Added GetRefreshRate to window class, so for example, your game can set the target fps based on this

Changes to physics system (Bullet3)

• Fixed a super hard to find bug where models vertex and physics-engine vertex would have shifter coords and would make the objects act weird on real time, this is such a huge change, it makes physics really good to play with, see the video!!

• Added functions to apply force, impulse and torque to a dynamic rigidbody

• Added the teleport function for kinematic rigidbodies

• Added getLinearVelocity and getAngularVelocity

• Added options to freeze rotation on independent axis

• HUGE: allow the engine to support different physics worlds to live in one same game in real time! this needs some work tho, not featured in the video

PD: This is getting super nice but also growing in complexity, once i finish with my game i will surely start improving the overall structure and start thinking about more serious changes, maybe another graphics api????

JSP

This is one of the most exiting devlogs so far!! I’ve managed to get a very basic “solar system working, not all the time and of course it isnt perfect but it is really cool, heres its lore: (note that planets are placeholders right now, and distances/scale should be a lot bigger in the future)

The “Halcyon” System

Somewhere very very far from our current home, humanity has managed to establish a multi-planetary life in a new system after traveling for generations in their own space station

• The Halcyon system is composed of 5 planets (maybe more in the future) that orbit around a massive black hole (it doesnt have a name yet)

• “Gaia” is the earth-like planet whose own satellite, “Vesta”, is a red dwarf star that provides just enough light and heat in order to live (seen in the demo video)

• “Ying” and “Yan” (names will probably change), are two tiny planets that follow exact opposite orbits around the black hole, when one of them is at the perihelion, the other ones at the aphelion

• “Kepler” is a huge rocky planet at the outskirts of the system where small human colonies currently live

Note that the campaign will be linear and happen entirely inside this place, but you will also have a “exploration” game mode that will allow you to find and see new secrets hidden… :))

Technical stuff (i.e. what was added)

• Created the base for the Halcyon System, planets follow a predetermined elliptical orbit in real-time. Note that for debugging, scale is around 10 to 100 times less!

• Added a simple physics based player controller, this took a lot of engine refactoring too. The player is affected by the gravity of the near planets and, when close enough to a planet’s surface, it is automatically aligned with the gravity vector and its also affected by the atmosphere’s drag (if theres any), this was by far the most difficult thing to do

• Added a little Free Camera controller as well

What will be added in the future

This is only the start . Theres still a few complicated things to do:

• Add double precision and floating origin to solve the problems that will appear when distances become as big as id like them to be

• Add a chunked collision mesh system for planets with complex geometry, like mountains or things like that. Right now they are all controlled by a simple kinematic sphere collider

• This system currently breaks the player movement when planets are moving, this is why i set “time scale” to 0. To fix this ive been thinking of creating a local physics world that sets the planet you are on to be the origin of the physics, making it look like if the planet was static, this will by by far what will take the most amount of work probably

• i also wanna update the atmospheric shader as it is by far the thing worsening the game’s performance, and id like to make the sky fully tint when your inside it

PD: Thank you so much for all the people that support/follow this project, it already has 21 followers . thank you, really!

JSP

I want to dedicate this devlog to @Rupnil as he always says that devlogs need to be 3-4 hours max, so i can explain why thats not always possible. Out of the 8 hours i devlog today, around 7.5 of them were spent ONLY debugging ONE SINGLE BUG for 2 whole days. I started losing my mind lmfao

• the bug:

All the built-in and embedded textures became completely broken and ONLY on super specific conditions on certain parts and game modes. But the worst part was that rolling back to a version from days ago DID NOT solve the issue at all . I even considered that my GPU gave up on my and it was just showing gpu artifact slop in my screen

• the fix:

Apparently there was a small bug with gpu memory allocation in the backend of dear imgui (apparently ONLY in the SDL2-OpenGL backend lmfao) and only for the docking branch of the repo. Rolling back to an old dear imgui version from the main branch solved the issue but damn. Ive also reported the issue as much as i could in the official repo. Pretty much, updating the engine to the latest version automatically updated its dependencies and thus leaked the bug to my game

Appart from that I’ve spent a little bit on starting to develop the open-universe system where you can travel around planets! More on that in the next devlog probably. I already have though about the planet’s names, positions and stuff! pretty exiting!!

PD: In the mean time ive also being updating the engine at the same time to improve the physics system, which is a lot better right now!

JSP

Pre-ship checklist is complete! I’m so ready to ship the first version and start developing the campaign, which is the main thing of this game. I’ve actually started it a little bit, it now has an interior level system completely different to the gamemode system i had for the rest of the game, this is pretty exiting!

stuff that ive done before shipping

• Built the game for windows, took a little bit but performance is 1:1 and everything works perfectly, the only thing was that i had to change the backend of the audio engine to use something else but that was fairly quick!

• Reduced the size of the game MASSIVELY, it went from around 350MB to ~35MB, thats literally 10 times less!! managed to do this by compressing the audio files, although the change is almost unnoticeable, and also making the engine bake some textures on build time, just like real fancy engines do!

• Changed a bit the main menu/ campaing mode but for now it is all a placeholder

• Created a new itch.io banner

• Made the HELP menu show up by default, i dont really like this but i think its probably the best for people to rate it nicely, wont be in the final version…

• Added a input mode (another one) to the spaceship building mode that allows you to hover the attachment points and it will tell you with a little popup what category of part can go there

If you are rating my project, please ishowspeed i need this now in all fairness i hope people like my game! im not even close to finishing it lol

Right after this first ship i will work on updating the engine to support new features that the campaign mode will certainty need 100%, like a working physics engine, ive thought of porting what i currently have to use a new one i found and that is getting very popular called “Box3D”, we’ll see, byeeeeeee

Been working on fixing a couple things before shipping, the problem was all with windows and its super wierd api. most of these changes were done long ago but i forgot to devlog them lol

anyways, ive also published a demo video to see how it works if for some reason you dont own a steamdeck. i know this is not the most quality post but im a bit tired from all the work ive been doing on other projects. so, in a way, this project is completely finished!

JSP

• https://github.com/aloyak/JSP

• https://aloyak.itch.io/jsp?secret=nkYXIEVo8woJvblBQRYMIrWSFc

I feel like im getting very close to a first ever release and finally start with the campaign mode! I finished some polishing stuff and fixed a bit, i dont think the spacecraft builder mode is ready 100% but ill use it in the campaing mode either way so ill have to update it regardless

I’ve officially published the github repository where you can check out the huge amount of code this project already has lol. I’ve also created a new itchio page, this is the secret link (for feedback): https://aloyak.itch.io/jsp?secret=nkYXIEVo8woJvblBQRYMIrWSFc

added things:

• Published the github repo and the itchio page! With a lot of new screenshots and art. I’ve also added the source files of the textures (.xfc gimp files, including the itchio banners) as well as the 3D models I’ve made (in blender) which can all be found in the assets_src/ folder

• Added a way to delete different parts in the spaceship building mode

• Added a few new parts to the spaceship building mode, refactored the whole system to make it “easier” (not really) to add new parts and things

• Added a full README + LICENSE to the repo

• Added a new shader , it is the small fog that you see in the vide when building a spaceship in order to hide the lack of detail in the exterior, the shader fades out the more you look up so you can see the beautiful skybox

• Added load/saving to the spacecraft building game mode, you can now save your ship’s to load them later just like with planets and sandboxes

• Fix some memory management problems where i forgot to delete some pointers => no memory leaks or crashes!

I dont think this will be the last devlog before the first ship, but maybe, who knows right? Looking forward to you all trying my game! (the part that is done)

PD: 100 hours

ORIGIN ENGINE

Yippie! another update to the engine powering my game, i’ve added quite a lot of things but also managed to clean up some dead code in the way. The most excinting new thing is probably the new postprocessing layer system!

this is what ive added in the past 3 weeks:

• Postprocessing layer: you can now code different vertex & fragment shaders that drawn on top of the main buffer, you can stack as many as youd like in order to create many new cool effects

• spent hours trying to fix the sandbox editor’s rendering being completely broken, took about 3-4 days lol

• added new getters to camera like a directly inversed view matrix or setMat4() and setTexture() functions with shaders

• add localToWorld() and worldToLocal() to the transform class

• fixed specular lighting leaking to some dark areas

• fix handle untextured materials in model import

• added a built-in user settings save/load system based on json serialization

• refactor a part of the audio system to now have built-in fade ins/out, volume control and async background music

The biggest change coming up would probably be to develop a dynamic rendering system that allows me to use different cameras rendering at the same time, as I’ll probably need it for JSP

PD: this engine is being used for my current main project (almost 100 hours!), please check it out! JSP: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/14066

JSP

Can’t really express enough how much I enjoy making shaders, the look really good. i might make a video about it with the new hackclub video challenge, we might see, I’m kinda shy for these sort of things :))

Today’s devlog is pretty much to show only one thing. I’ve been doing some really small changes to UI, a few bug fixes but the important thing is the new Central Body system for the sandbox mode (the code is pretty rough right now but hopefully ill improve it), this now allows you to choose the central body that your planets will orbit around

So now, instead of having only the sun in the middle you can now select a BLACK HOLE instead, which i think its a lot cooler. Note that the whole black hole is completely done by a single glsl fragment shader, how cool is that? I’ve reused a small amount of code from the atmosphere shader and then researched a bit on similar projects

Apart from this I’ve also added a new “extra” option to allow the player to change the tint of the skybox, so you can create even weirder solar systems, any new suggestions on what else to add are welcome!

After this im gonna do a small refactoring change that is really stupid and needs to be changed in the entire code base, its just a small thing with the new language system

JSP

Worked on polishing and improving a few quality of life features and overall stability, also I took my time to translate every single text in the game to spanish, although the new dynamic language system should work for adding any new language fairly quickly. this is a very important change because doing this after the campaign would be a nightmare. language is also saved to settings

new stuff

• Added a dynamic language system and support for playing the game in spanish, if you want any new languages or help translate and thus be added to the credits please reach out

• Added a full credits panel where it shows all the licenses and 3rd party code/art used, AI disclosure and other stuff

• Fixed some weird seg faults when going back to main menu from the blueprint view

• Updated all icons, all of them were used in the sandbox game mode

• Added some new settings to the blueprint view inside the spaceship building game mode

What I wanna do now is to finally finish the spaceship sandbox finally but its taking longer than expected and it requires a lot of brainpower that many times is less appealing to do compared to playing persona 5 royal lmao.

Note: once the source code is published, sending feedback, playtesting or translating would maybe mean that i put you in the credits! fr i might need some help tho

JSP

I really enjoy creating and coding shaders and so i started adding some cool effects to the spacecraft editor, didnt really add any new parts but i think that what i added was pretty interesting. I’ve also been working on improving a bit the user experience and making things obvious to use without explaining anything, this is probably the most fun i had doing this project in a while :)

what was added

• Added “Blueprint” view for your spaceship, watch the video to see what it is! currently very early version tho

• Added a help window that changes based on the gamemode

• Added geometry center (blue) and center of mass (yellow) to the spaceship

• Small fixes to transition between movesets

• Added a border shader to mark the bounds of the building workspace

• Added a few icons that really need some improvement

The idea of the blueprint mode is to edit different things from the spaceship, and also to see the different stages of your little ship! more on this later, im not specially creative enough to write a lot today lol

Ill also probably add a dynamic cursor system but idk

JSP

Been working on the spaceship builder gamemode and its pretty fun! right now the system is very simple but solid. i had to model a couple test things and fix many bugs but it is going quite fast. The current system is a simple attachment-part system where each attachment holds up information about allowed part’s categories to attach and the normal vector of the attachment. Unfortunately removing parts is not really an option yet cuz i need to see how i will make that possible later on

summary on new features:

• started the actual spaceship building gamemode, currently it features just basic part placement logic

• small changes to sound effects and music (not shown in the video)

Apart from obvious structural changes, id also want to add some sort of customization to your spaceships, with different colors, flags, sigils idk. I dont want to make building a spaceship something hard but just a simple thing you do to have your own individual experience, obviously you wont be able to make some cursed stuff as it wont just fly into space without an engine, but the idea is that everything with enough parts should work

JSP

Unfortunately hackatime doesnt support blender so the ~2.5 hours i spent modeling the assembly building for the spacecraft editor sandbox will not count but its fine. I’ve also done some deep debugging to the engine as it now supports embedded materials even when they dont have any texture, before this change everything looked like a wierd artifact in black/purple colors (check out the second image if ud like to see it, its pretty in a way)

what was added/changed

• Created a not-final but decent model for the assembly building you will be creating your custom spaceship in

• Added first person camera control, that is used by this gamemode to get a different “perspective” on your awesome creation. you can toggle between the normal orbital view and the fp view

• some engine-level optimizations

This now means im FREE… to actually start developing the spacecraft building sandbox, so we are back to it lol. im hoping it doesnt take me that much but i still need to finish to understand how exactly i want this to be as this is probably the only shared code that the campaign game mode will use, so i better make it good as it “counts” double

PD: already said this, but the second screenshot is just so you comprehend what ive been struggling with for the past 48 hours :(

JSP

Huge progress!! (yes, really) I’ve made some cool stuff an this game now looks a lot more professional, these last changes we’re surprisingly fast and fun to do (finally for once lmao), although the following changes, most of them, are still work in progress. I’ve officially decided that I’m not gonna be updating the engine’s repository solely for this project as im a bit more focused on making my game work rather than making the engine reliable and well-structured for any usecase, even tho the engine will still recieve updates any way cuz i really need them for the game, but the main focus is to not suffocate the engine with specific jsp stuff.

new stuff

• audio system: custom imgui wrapper that lets me make sound effects for buttons on hover and press + background music system that lets me control simple fade out and transition to other songs, currently only in the main menu

• user settings: instead of making the same json slop ive made for the rest of the load/saving stuff, i made a fancy system that lives in the engine’s core and that lets you save any kind of settings a lot easier. user settings are now correctly saved when changed on user/settings.json

• created a simple intro text for the first run that explains a some information

• made the settings window accessible from anywhere, not tied to the main menu anymore

• FANCY TRANSITIONS between gamemodes, it now fades in/out to black with a little loading icon in the bottom right corner, this took longer than id like to explain unfortunately

• added a color history for the paint tool in the planet sandbox

• improved atmosphere UI controls in the planet sandbox

• fix water shader sometimes rendering on top of an atmosphere

As you might be able to guess, some of these changes weren’t really necessary but im sort of procrastinating so that i dont have to model the assembly building for the next game mode cuz i really suck at it and will be painful most likely

I’ve though of adding a “first person view” move mode to the spacecraft sandbox as it would be cool to see your creation from an engineer’s point of view and also because that way i already will have coded the controls for the campaign :))

JSP

Currently finishing the gravity sandbox gamemode! I still need to make quite a big change as im thinking of unifying the “gravity body” struct i use in the sandbox with the “planet component” i use in the rest of the game, so this will probably take a while but, for now, the sandbox game mode seems to be the next thing to be finished!

new stuff!

• the gravity sandbox now has gravity!!!! note that it is not super realistic nasa-level simulation, i was thinking of something a lot more arcade. this is very well reflected in the fictional scale (its around 1:100000), because games must be fun first, then realistic if possible

• separated the gravity sandbox file to hold the built-in planet’s registry in a different file (its around ~1300 lines of code rn lol, after the simplification…)

• added a nice destroy animation for the planets, improved the velocity tool and made the selection tool follow the planets

• the intro animation now locks into the sun, which is now the origin of the scene + changes to the style of the sun

• added trails to the planets in the simulation (that you can toggle, of course)

• small UI improvements

Whats next u say? applying the same load/save system that i used in the planet builder sandbox, only that now i wont have to create a vertex data to file system (yay)

Im also starting to 3d model in blender the “assembly building” where you will be able to build your spaceships in the other game mode, but im really bad at it so ill leave it for later, once the spacecraft builder game mode is finished i will probably ship the first version

JSP

I’ve officially finished the planet builder sandbox gamemode finally, probably will tweak a lot of things but the main stuff is done. i spent quite a lot trying to fix a problem with the depth texture that isnt even fixed right now lmao, quick explanation: distances are huge and so the depth texture loses a lot of precision, to combat this i decide to add reverse-z to the engine’s renderer but this didnt really solve the issue as it probably needs even more work adding an inifinite “far” plane or logarithmic depth but i think its fine for now, ill explain this more in depth with the next devlog on the origin engine.

new features

• added oceans to the planet builder, very simple for now but as a first version i think it works just fine, i spent at least 8 hours with this already lol, added basic controls to the ui to modify the shader’s uniforms and hopefully its good enough

• added loading/saving to the planet builder and to the sandbox, you can now save your projects using json serialization, a geometry-to-file algorithm and a texture-to file algorithm. note that the planets you create in the planet builder can also be used in the gravity sandbox

• added the terrain tool so you can now modify the geometry of your planet as you like, creating mountains, valleys or oceans

Next up is to finish the gravity sandbox gamemode, hopefully that should be a lot quicker as most of it is already done, but you know how this usually goes

HELP: if you have any ideas on how to make the depth texture more precise given the huge distances please let me know, theres not a lot of information out there