I guess there’s this Gruedorf thing, may as well participate and hopefully have motivation/accountability on this project.
I’m not working on a game yet, just a game engine that I have code named “Nebula 3” which is my 3rd complete re-write that I’ve named Nebula, probably my 10th rewrite of a game engine in total, over the course of something like 7 years or so, but this one is the final rewrite I’m sure.

Basically Nebula 3 is a 3D game engine that uses an ECS(Entity Component System) under the hood this time, which I got pre-canned in the form of Flecs. Flecs lets me focus less on how to store objects in the world and more on functionality, which is great because all my previous iterations had 3d functionality working, but not a very good method of storing entities in the world.

Currently in addition to the ECS, I have Lua scripting working, and I’ve implemented a basic OpenGL renderer for now, and I even have input binding, and text input working. With a working console even.
There is a separate rendering and update loops, with all Lua calls for the input being handled in the Update loop due to some quirks with the ECS system not liking things changing while it is running the systems.
In addition, Unicode support is a thing that actually sort of works too, character input is given as UTF-32, converted to UTF-8, then back to UTF-32 to render the text, tested with Japanese, only issue is switching fonts to support the characters needed.

I can’t show any screenshots as I found out that for some reason my full screen OpenGL window doesn’t show up in screenshots, so I guess I’ll need to implement in engine screenshotting capabilities, which was already planned, just moves the timeline up a bit.

Plus before the screenshots can be captured, I have another segfault to deal with, this time I believe caused by attempting to load things onto the GPU in the update thread, I need to queue items that need to be loaded to the GPU to be done on the render thread instead of the update thread. This was caused by re-arranging things to be done completely from Lua scripts instead of hardcoded C++.

Next steps include: fixing above mentioned bugs, working further on UI elements, and porting over old 3d rendering and model loading code from older projects,

The UI is planned to be “done” with an in-engine editor in a working state by the end of March 2021. With an in-engine console with console commands counting as an editor.

So in-between when I wrote that post and now, I’ve fixed my crashing, split the textures and fonts to load the data in the update thread, but load the textures to the GPU in the render thread, and added screenshot functionality to my engine.

So behold, I have an FPS counter which keeps track of how often the render thread runs per second, as well as a TPS (Ticks Per Second) counter which counts how often the update thread runs per second, locked at about 60TPS.
Also I have a console that has working text input.

I promise the texture rendering works too, I just was too excited from getting both my crashing issue and the new screenshot feature working that I decided I didn’t feel like throwing a texture in there.
I’d say today has been a productive day
Maybe next week I’ll have buttons and graphics to show off more of.

Missed a couple weeks, been busy with life things.

So far I decided to kind of temporarily scrap the schedule I had for my game engine, and just go forth and add in the 3d stuff right away instead of waiting, since that seemed a little bit more interesting than just doing lua bindings. So I ported all the mesh/model loading stuff I had from a previous iteration, then realized I need to add lua bindings for that too now…

I’ve added in the components to how I think I want to put meshes and models into my ECS, but I have not touched rendering stuff just yet, since well I want the lua scripts to be able to add the meshes/models to the scene, so the lua bindings must happen first.
In a week or two when I get around to finishing the lua bindings then I’ll have the fun task of testing all these lua bindings I’ve been adding, and fixing all the bugs that will inevitably spring forth.

Hopefully at that point I’ll be able to make a demo/test showing off the UI buttons which are yet to be tested, as well as the 3d model rendering.
I know the loading works from my previous iteration, I basically copy pasted the code from there.

For the model loading I use Assimp, which allows loading of pretty much any common format that I would want to use, along with loading in the animations. I haven’t bothered tackling animations yet in this iteration or any previous iteration, the skinning is a bit complicated for a first go, and I’ll need a way to keep track of animation frames/keyframes to play it back, so that’s very much an in progress thing.

Bout time for another update I think.
So I got the 3d movement and spawn/exit location picking working ish just after the last post, so now you can see what it’ll look like in game:

Yes movement works.

Then I also made the map look much better too with map zoom and scrolling buttons:

The reason I say the entry/exit location picking works-ish is because I’m not really satisfied with the location selection, basically right now it just chooses the tile, then loops through the tile to select the nearest “open” square, it does this because I didn’t bother to have it track which tiles have the spawn/exit values in them, so right now it’ll end up putting the player and the exit into the middle of a hallway.

You can see the player as the yellow circle on the above map, and the exit as the blue square.

I’ve thought about potentially having the map track/only update if you’ve seen an area, but that seems like potentially scope creep I don’t know that I care for, so I’ll probably look into that after I get enemies and combat working, since that’s like the next things required to make this actually be a game.

I think next time I’ll try to have more UI figured out, not sure I’ll do inventory, but at least the scrolling text showing what happened, or what is going on would be nice to have so I can potentially have debug printing in there instead of to console.

I may also see if I can set up a jenkins job to build this as well, since I already have a jenkins semi-working on my laptop, it has bad uptime, but if it works to build Linux, no problems there, then I might take a break from dev on this project to work on making a docker image to build windows builds from linux, which would be helpful so I can just press buttons to get both builds of this project. Since I plan on chunking this project out commercially prior to finishing up my game engine project.

I did some more lua bindings and added some console commands to my game engine, however that’s a bit less than exciting and I’m a bit less than excited about that.
So Instead of doing a lot of work on that and making good progress, I decided to forget about the rigorous schedule I had for that, and pick up and old project I had started in Godot.

I also don’t have much to mention on this other godot project, I spent most of a day going through some asset packs I have trying to find assets to help with the game.
It’s planned to be a mobile idle type game, where you have units that attack a boss, and the boss gradually gets higher and higher level, so your units needs to also get higher and higher level.

I do have a basic mockup of what it will look like for now:

I have yet to get any boss art made, and I’m planning to use some art from some asset packs I have for the units to make things simpler.
I’m hoping to do pixel art for the bosses, but I’m not used to doing pixel art at the size that I want the boss to be, so I might need to get creative. I’m a bit more used to making 16x16 or 32x32 pixel art.

My main goal for this game is to learn more about Godot in preparation for Godot 4.0, at which point I may just drop my own game engine entirely and switch to Godot. I specifically want to learn more about customizing the look and feel of the UI, as well as learn about saving and loading save games.

I’m also expecting to end up missing Gruedorf next week, I’ll probably post an update the week after, and hopefully have something significant.

Admittedly I don’t really have much new progress in terms of anything being completed, but I have started on a couple different items, one being build version numbers, including a version specified from Jenkins, the other being getting started on lighting.

For build versions I’m not entirely sure how I want to do it yet, I’ll probably have it be where a prefix is hardcoded in the repo (like 0.1.0.), that way each branch can have a different version number, and then append the jenkins job number and maybe a suffix depending on what kind of build it is (ie if its release/beta/debug/test/whatever, potentially with a different suffix if its a steam build or some special build like that.)

This method of having a prefix hardcoded in the repo does mean that I’ll need to remember to update it every time I bump the version number, either when I branch, update trunk, or when I tag a release, update trunk, but it is how we do it at my work currently and I don’t want to have to pass it into Jenkins, because I want the local builds to retain that number so you can tell what branch a local build was on.

The idea is that I’d get a version number from jenkins builds of prefix+job number+ suffix, like 1.1.0.799_beta or something like that, and then if I made a local build it’d be something like prefix+builduser+date+suffix like 1.1.0.coder2021621_debug so you can tell what branch/version tag you’re at, as well as the build date and that its a debug build.
I haven’t yet decided on the suffixes but I’ll probably do that after I get the jenkins/CMake all set up to put in the build numbers.

For the lighting work I’m planning to do a full PBR renderer, which means I’m now at the point of figuring out IBL (Image Based Lighting). I already have/had point lights implemented for my PBR renderer but no IBL yet, and apparently you need to have your lights have area in order to make it realistic, so I’m currently doing a ton of research on how to do all of this and I’m not even sure how to store the info needed for an area light, or what info is needed.

LearnOpenGL has a decent tutorial and sample code on getting started with IBL, however it only covers having a single global probe/HDRI environment map, which basically means you only get IBL from from the skybox. In order to make your environment look realistic with IBL, you need to set up local probes, which of course isn’t taught in that tutorial.

The basic process for local probes is to capture from all directions at an artist/level maker designated point, and then blend that with other probes and the environment map. Issues to this include: how often to update local probes, since dynamic objects will need them to be updated regularly, also how to actually pass the probes to the shader. I think I get in theory how to blend the probes together a little bit, basically by having an alpha in the local probes that cuts off at a certain distance, so where there’s alpha 1 you use local probe, alpha 0 use other probes. And then there’s some fancy business you can do with blending the probes, or just take the closest probe’s input.

Once I get IBL working with probes, it’ll basically put me at early UE 4 levels of lighting, I have realtime global illumination planned for later on, I’ve been debating if it’d be better to just do that and skip out on this probe nonsense but I am worried about how to handle things for lower end hardware, and it is my belief that I could pre-bake the local probes with non-dynamic objects and it may be acceptable for lower end hardware to simply not reflect dynamic objects, or just supplement with SSR (Screen Space Reflections) somehow, but of course that would probably involve more blending madness.

Also I’m nearing what I wanted for my 0.0.1 milestone, all that remains is engine build versioning, 3d lighting, some more editor console commands stuff, and scene saving/loading which I have yet to start. Once I get all the features implemented I’ll probably try to make some sort of simple game to test it all out since I haven’t tested half of it yet, I’m thinking breakout clone.

I did have a schedule planned for when I wanted the 0.0.1 milestone complete, which was like 3 months ago, but I pulled things into it from 0.0.2 milestone, like a lot of the 3d stuff got moved because it was more fun than other things, so I’m basically planning to just skip/ignore the schedule for now and go with the flow.

Gonna update here again since I fixed it:

So the answer to the problem was in how I was transferring data between my update and render threads, I had used the shaders before without issue so I wasn’t sure how it was not working.

See I send data between threads via loading up a RenderState with all the data needed to render meshes, etc. Well I added lights to that rather sloppily and forgot to add a line to clear out any lights added to the data, so the number of lights in the RenderState increased every frame, and apparently when you get hundreds to thousands of lights added in the same spot, it did that weird thing I was seeing before.

Part of what tipped me off is also that after maybe a minute or less the FPS would start dropping to nearly zero, and I figured it had to be something that was increasing or something every frame, and sure enough it was this leak causing the FPS drops as well as the rendering issue.

Problem Solved!

Now I’m thinking I’ll put IBL off to a different release, so I split off that to a different story, as well as spotlights, I’m going to leave “3d lighting” at point lights and wrap this up, so only scene saving/loading and version numbering remain, version numbering is part finished and just needs some Jenkins love and it should be finished. So close to the first milestone I wanted!

Some progress on versioning but I don’t think its totally finished yet, still want to take the version number and put it into the filename of the zip file that Jenkins spits out.

But on the saving/loading scenes front I’ve gotten a bit of progress, I chose a json library to use to save things out to json and started writing code.

Not sure yet if I like how the code is shaping up, but right now it makes most sense to me to have separate code paths for each scene saving/loading format, however I’m not sure I like that I have the separate formats in the SceneLoader specific code itself, or if I should have split it off to a separate utility to handle the specifics and I just broke the pieces up into different parts, so I’m sort of split on that since I suspect I"ll need to do the same shit for serializing other things should I need to do that, so we’ll see how that goes.

I chose the Pico Json library for doing the json, it’s a single header file json library, so easy to integrate and the API doesn’t seem to be too much pain to use.

Basically I just use a picojson::value() to refer to a value, and if I want that value to be a JSON object I just make it be a std::map<std::string, picojson::value> and if I want an array, its a std::vector<picojson::value>. This is nice because then I can just make maps and vectors as normal and it works, only issue is constantly wrapping everything with the picojson::value and I don’t tend to do the using C++ thing to use namespaces, so I type every little std:: or picojson:: out, and that seems like it’ll get to be a lot of duplicate typing, since I’m basically looking at having each entity be one JSON object, with keys for each component in my ECS, and then each component is also a JSON object, which keys for its values, which are sometimes also JSON objects.

And there’ll be arrays thrown in there in some places too

But yeah so that’s my progress, started on Scene Saving and chose a json library. now the boredom of typing out code to save/load every single component. and then I get to do that shit twice when I add the binary save/load.

Maybe I should get an intern. Or come up with a better way to serialize this stuff.

well I guess it’s about a week-ish since my last post, and for consistency I should probably post again.

Not much to talk about on the game engine front, been writing boring json saving/loading code as per usual.

But I started a new project! hopefully it won’t turn out like the last time I mentioned starting a new project in Godot and then stopped working on it pretty much that same week.

I’ve been playing a ton of Tales of the Neon Sea lately, got it free on Epic and boy is that a fun game. It’s got some very beautiful pixel art, and it’s a story based detective/mystery solving game, with all sorts of puzzles and such. it kind of reminds me of a point and click game, but it’s also a side-scroller, and has some really slick pixel art and pixel animations.

I don’t consider myself good at pixel art, I consider myself passable at it. But combine that with being reminded that pixel art in 3d with modern effects looks super cool, and being also passable at 3d modeling, I’m now in the process of throwing pixel art into 3d scenes in Godot and hoping it sticks.

This is one of those projects where I start diving into art first instead of any planning or story, which means its bound to die within a few eons, especially since I’m currently in the process of hand making normal maps for some of my tiles. Very tedious stuff, and I have no way of knowing if it’ll look cool or not.

On the front of making the pixel art go into 3d, I’m not entirely sure on the method I want to use, Godot does support just straight Sprite3D objects, which is basically a 2d sprite rendered in 3d space, and they can be animated like 2d sprites, and have the option to be billboarded. However there’s also this pretty slick addon for Blender I found called Sprytile which is free. Sprytile isn’t like, always the easiest to use or the fastest most intuitive, but it does let you make 3d models with pixel perfect textures, either applying the textures onto a pre-made model, or making models with the textures, and it supports tilesets. so you can basically make a regular old tileset, and then map that into 3d.

i’m hoping to combine that with hand drawn normal and roughness maps in Godot, to make some PBR-ish pixel art so I can do some cool 3d lighting and GI effects to hide the fact that my pixel art is bad.

So far I haven’t done much, but here’s a quick peek at what I’ve got with a mostly default Godot scene, and a couple Pixel art assets:

Both the pixel art assets are Sprite3D for now, and the floor is just a CSGBox for now, with a very reflective surface on it to show off the SSR. I’d put some reflection probes in but I’ve found they are kind of shitty for a direct mirror finish like this and work better with more uneven surfaces.

I think the plan for if I ever make a character for this is to make a 3d model and render it out as pixel art in Blender, but for now I’ll probably just use a box as the character and try to get some type of gameplay down. I’m hoping that with more of a point and click type interaction it should be simpler to do, maybe some side scrolling segments too, but hopefully I can get some kind of gameplay that consists of interacting with items, and maybe popping up panels to interact with for like, minigame type puzzles.

I think once I get a basic prototype with working gameplay, it’ll be easier to continue from there and come up with art and story once that’s there. That way hopefully instead of having scope creep from making a massive story and then burning myself out on having too many potential coding features, I’ll be able to go the other way, do the coding and add the features/puzzles or the ability to have puzzles and do interactions, and then I can do the story writing and actual game design stuff once I have features that sort of work, I think/hope that workflow will let me not get super burnt out, or at least I can call it quits sooner based on being bored of the mechanics themselves, instead of being bored of making art.

Yeah I decided not to do the mystery/detective/story based game for the crunchless challenge, because I’m not fast enough at writing to be able to write a story between now and november to implement.

So instead I decided to go with a dungeon crawler roguelike idea, basically inspired by Nethack and Ultima Underworld.
I figure if I can get world gen working then I can just make a crap ton of tiles and basic combat and boom there I go.

Also decided to use Raylib for this project, which I’d never used before, and I accidentally slipped yesterday and basically got a whole main menu, character creation screens all done, and some basic character stat generation working, although I haven’t figured out how to have the RPG combat work yet so I might need to rehash that at some point.

Working on doing the map gen now, basically I plan for it to be done using Wang tiles, I would do herringbone wang tiles but having never done wang tiles before I think it’s better to start off with basic square tiles and go from there.

Here have some screenshots of what I got together after work yesterday:

Maybe the only thing I need to update/change, is that the main menu uses keyboard input only to select the options, and everything else is mouse only, so I need to figure out how to allow both keyboard + mouse for everything, but tbh maybe going mouse for most things makes more sense.

Engine progress again

I’m back at in on the UI stuff for my game engine.

My september jam didn’t get very far, will probably pick it up again at some point, but I’ve been distracted by VR stuff again, and interested in potentially making my engine have OpenXR support sooner than planned, but of course I’ll need a working editor first, so I’m working on the UI pieces.

I added a combo box and a Text box to my UI widgets, I’m still trying to figure some things for the text box, since for some reason it isn’t working, but the combo box operates well as a dropdown.

And here’s an example of the problem, using the same input callback, my own console that I rolled myself captures every character input, but for some reason the Nuklear UI textbox only gets every 3rd or 4th character, and its unreliable which it gets.

Once I have those widgets all working properly I think it’ll be time to get an actual editor of sorts together, get model loading going, and then get onto the level saving/loading and asset packaging pieces.

Oh and I just noticed that if I sit in the engine long enough, the stupid thing segfaults.
My other project was to learn Vulkan in Rust, which I just might pick up instead of this engine since I’m running into so many memory issues.
Like I have no problem debugging mem issues, but it sure seems like I might have a higher chance of making a working engine if I go that route instead of this. But that would be another complete rewrite, and I’ve been enjoying this iteration. Not sure I feel like completely re-writing and starting from scratch in Rust, so we’ll see.

Tada, new project. again.
This time I’m working on an arpg first person dungeon crawler maybe open world type game. Something in the vein of Ultima Underworld.
Something with a 3d first person view but with plenty of UI stuff chonked next to it, like this (from Ultima Underworld):

The way I see it, this screen has a few basic parts:

• a set of action buttons on the left
• the 3d first person view with a compass, some animated aligator/dragons and enemy health meter gargoyle face
• inventory and equipment menu with health meters and a toggle to show stats.
• a text log that let’s you read text of what you’re investigating or interacting with.

So I have a quick mock-up I threw together in Godot:

I’m not quite there yet, I’m still figuring out what screen resolution I like, aspect ratios, UI layout, etc etc.
But I have:

• Action buttons on the left
  • Look/examine
  • Interact
  • Talk/Speak
  • Attack
  • Save/Load (the quill works great if I have the caption next to it, I think a floppy disk looks better if there is not, maybe will reuse quill for a map/quest log)
• 3d viewport with first person view
• some type of tabbed GUI on the right for eventual inventory, stats tracking, health/mp/whatever
• bottom area I plan to also add a text log so I can have shitty programmer art that looks like garbage but can still determine what it is.

For now I actually don’t have mouselook at all, I decided to try to go “old school” and ripped out mouselook in favor of letting the user click around on things, and they can use WASD to move forward and back, strafe/side step left and right, and then Q to rotate left and E to rotate right. I think that works out slightly better to let the user click on/interact with specific things in a scene, and hopefully will give it more of an older school vibe.

One thing I don’t know if I"ll implement is that Ultima Underworld does implement turning if your mouse is near the edges of the 3d viewport, that might also be worthwhile to implement so I may do that too, we’ll see.

I think next order of business is figure out world loading, kind of the menu flow from main menu, gameplay, and basic player save/load, then I"ll work out the stats/combat, and inventory/equipment pieces.

I think in the end I want to implement basic dialogue, inventory, and maybe a quest system, along with a stat based arpg system setup.

For style I know I want it to have crunchy pixels and I picked out a few different palettes from Lospec, so I’m hoping that if I limit myself to the same few palettes it’ll look somewhat okay, but if not then I guess it’ll probably be fine. So far I have one palette picked out for UI stuff, and one that I"m using to draw up some equipment in libresprite.
Here is some of that equipment textures/sprites work I did:

I think it would be cool to model some of it in 3d and then just map pixel art onto it as textures, but I might also just go with 2d sprites for some of it. I think monsters/creatures makes sense to be 2d sprites but it might depend on what it is.

I’m just gonna breeze in here this time and post that I made progress on adding a checkbox to my UI stuff for my game engine:

So that’s good, I can now have checkboxes! and each checkbox can have a label, can have the value be set/retrieved, etc.

The docs for Nuklear aren’t super precise on what specific ui widgets there are, and how to use them all, but i did find out that I think its also possible to get an “onClick” type action from it, so I’ll need to still set up bindings for that then I’ll be done with the checkbox.

So for now I have:

• labels
• Buttons
• windows
• “rows” which are basically a way to have a row of inputs in a window
• checkboxes

I think for a functional editor GUI I’ll still want/need at minimum:

• drop down menus
• textbox input
• radio buttons, possible I could just implement this with some horrible combination of logic and checkboxes
• scroll bars

And I think for a wishlist I would want but not require:

• file browser/picker/chooser
  • To let picking assets or script files
• color picker
  • to allow picking colors for things, this is mostly useless for now since I think my shaders don’t even support vertex colors or a blending/mixing color at all
• Sliders
  • gotta have these for anything that involves sliding, not sure I can think of an application in my MVP editor use case
• progress bars
• some sort of scene tree type deal

Progress is going slowly, but its progress on my main project nonetheless!
One thing I think I should probably do at some point is mock up what I want the editor to look like, since otherwise I could probably get stuck in GUI widget implementation hell, so having a MVP type thing would probably be good enough to get the workflow figured out to know when I can basically put a stop to implementing GUI items and get the editor GUI and functionality together

Really all that’s holding me back I think for now from having a “working” game is:

• No editor
• No ability to zip/package up data yet or “bake/package” it out

I think in theory it should be possible to have scripts that implement a basic game at this point but I just want to have an editor going first then do a game.
In all likelihood I could probably write up a basic breakout clone already that would mostly work.

More non-engine stuff

Okay I get it, I get distracted a lot. but this time I installed a new distro, and started another project(s).

New distro installed

I got bored with Debian, and remembered I left like 1500GB on one of my hard drives to install other distros, so i installed the Garuda with i3wm. I think it looks pretty slick:

It’s supposed to be good for gaming, and debian wasn’t bad at gaming it worked quit well, but this is supposed to be more up to date than stable debian, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

It’s arch based so I’ll need to test it for some time before I recommend it, I didn’t have too many issues with Arch, I ran it for probably 5-6 years before I needed to do a reinstall. Compared to Arch, Garuda’s first time setup is super smooth, came with everything I needed to set up my bluetooth headset already installed out of the box, all I had to do was turn bluetooth on and pair. Which is better than debian or Archlinux, Arch is notorious for needing lots of configuration, which is justified. Debian I only needed to install bluez and the other bluetooth tools and then it worked plug+play after that, this simply came with it pre-installed right out of the installer.

New project again 1

I decided while playing with a new linux distro I should play with learning something new and practicing something old. I hadn’t done a straight C program in a while, so I’m working on learning ncurses and plan to make some sort of (potentially simple) text based game/thing with that.

new project again 2

Aaand I’m also back into Godot, looking at making some sort of VR project or something. not sure yet but figured I may as well now that I have my VR headset set up again.

Eventually I expect to get back to my game engine, but just playing with new projects for now.

So I had my brother-in-law visiting for the past couple weeks, and he’s young and excited about game making, so I did what everyone does. started a new project with him to work on.
Just a godot project, don’t really have much on it to be honest, but maybe it’ll get there, that or it’ll just sit as another unfinished project.
Him being over distracted me from most of my other projects.

Engine progress has been pretty quiet.

I do however have quite the development at work, so I’m going to need to step up my note taking and organizing game. I prefer to handwrite my notes on paper, since that helps me both to remember what I wrote, and let’s me take notes off to the side while I’m presenting, sharing, or typing something else on my computer.

This does mean a couple things though:

1. My notes aren’t easy to search or sort
2. my handwriting is horrendous, so being able to read my own writing is sometimes difficult, or nigh impossible
3. if I want to convert it to text, then most standard out of box OCR things I would expect to not work very well.

I did look into something I’d heard of a bit called Rocketbook, as this looks to be the least expensive type of “smart notebook” starting at only about $34, and you get a notebook with sheets that can be erased with water as long as you use the special pens.
The issue, is their app’s OCR involves sending the scans to their servers, which in my mind is kind of a no-go. I want something that I know doesn’t create any type of security/privacy issue with what I’m working on, and will let me potentially use the solution for both work and for non-work things.

So basically I started a new project to train some ML models to do OCR on my handwriting. I took a intro to machine learning/AI class a long long time ago, and I’ve dabbled about with tensorflow in a past so it’s not all super new to me, but OCR is a somewhat complex topic and has multiple moving parts, so I’m following along with a couple of tutorials.

The gist of it is that you have to do two things (typically with two different models)

1. Detect where the text is
   • this usually spits out a bounding rectangle of each chunk of text in the image so that it can send a cropped image of just the text to the second model
2. recognize what each chunk of text actually is
   • this is what does the actual handwriting

There are actually pre-trained models you can find to do both steps, in fact there’s already a project using said models on Android to do the recognition completely on a phone, however those models are trained on computer printed/generated text, not handwriting, so I doubt they will be very accurate.
So my plan is to basically find models to do those things, and then create some sample writing data myself, so that I can train the models on my own writing instead of someone else’s. This is good because sometimes my words turn into squiggles when going quickly, so if I can write crap out, and then type it out so I know what it says, then feed it to the model, in theory I should be able to get some semblance of a working OCR model off my own handwriting.

I would need to likely find and train a detection model, and a recognition model. I plan to do that on desktop using python + jupyter lab (an in browser python editor/tool which is fairly nifty for data processing and can display matplotlib graphs and charts inline with the code blocks)

After that I need to convert each model to a tensorflow lite model that can be loaded by an Android app to run the models on a phone, so I could basically make an app to take a picture of a piece of paper or notebook page, and then turn it all into text.

I also haven’t decided what should happen for the images, I do sometimes have diagrams, and formatting is also a fun challenge, so I may have the app take the images and save them separate from the text, and/or I might have the images get put into a PDF along with the OCRed text data.

For now I’m following along with this tutorial. it seems fairly in depth on how to do things with explaining the code as you go, and is an easy format to just copy/paste into a jupyter notebook. This is just the handwriting recognition portion, and not the detection portion though, so I will likely need to figure out how to locate the text in the picture/page with a different model.
I’ve been eyeing a model called EAST for that, it seems more aimed at detecting text in the world and not on a page, but really I think that will just improve the robustness of the model for what I want.

So I guess it’s off to collecting a few thousand word/writing samples from myself to train this puppy on, tune in next time to see how long this project lasted!

And back to the Engine!

Got back to doing UI work on my engine, labels and buttons are now possible to be put into windows. They do overlap in the screenshot here, but I’m not sure I care for now, it’s working!
And the button even works (just logging stuff for now when pressed, but still, that’s progress!)

However there are cases now where I’ve noticed some odd/unreliable segfaulting, some involving EnTT type assertions and such, so I’m a little bit concerned about the reliability/stability. Again. But progress has been made. And good progress at that, I mean what more do you need for an editor than buttons and labels? Okay Text Input is a good next thing, and then checkboxes and radio buttons are probably also going to be on the list, maybe sliders too. But baby steps for now.

Other side projects

In other news I’ve started a little Rust project with SDL2 just for like, learning Rust and such.

I’ve also started making a Pixel Font.

And I’m still doing pixel art for my Godot jrpg procedural map generation side project.

Next steps

I think next steps are going to be

1. Add text input boxes
2. Add checkboxes
3. add radio buttons
4. try to fix up the reliability a little bit to make it more reliable

That’s all for now!

Side Project progress

I decided to spend more time making art instead of getting the proc gen all figured out, so I also made some item art:

Basically went a little bit overboard making random items, trying to have a variety of variants for each item. I do get that I could just do palette swapping or other shader tactics to get different colors, but I decided not to do that for now, this way all color variants are strictly using the dawnbringer 32 palette.

I also did some additional outdoor tileset art, but not much new since last post.

Proc gen

Not much progress to report on the proc gen front this time, trying to wrap my head around how to actually do the logic, it seems like it will be much slowly to generate than the wang tiles just because there are a lot of arbitrary things like “find the cell in the tilemap with the least amount of possible tiles” and stuff like that, which look like it’ll be a mess of looping through things, which is just making the generation time look insane.

I may mitigate some of that by trying to store a list of all the cells that haven’t had a tile put in yet, at least to prevent having to loop through all XxY cells in the tilemap for every iteration through, and instead just pick from the ones remaining. I’m trying not to think of the big o of whatever the result I end up with will be.

other stuff

I’ve tossed the idea around a little bit too of trying to learn Rust in some way, but not really wanting to add yet another side project, so I’ve been putting that off for now, but I may wind up pausing this side project for that side project, or similar, not really trying to write two engines, one in C++ and one in Rust, but maybe if I used the Rust engine to target DOS or something else like that? Who knows.

That’s all for now.

Side project progress

Going to jump right to the side project, nothing to report for the engine

Art

I’ve got a tileset I’ve been working on, forgot how fun it is to make a pixel art tileset:

The tileset has grass, dirt, sand, dirt/sand path, and paved path, trees, various buildings, and some mountains. It’s meant to have some tiles be on a layer over the top of the base ground layer, which may make the mapping a little bit complicated, but shouldn’t be too horrid.

I think I’m going for more of a jrpg type thing, or maybe sort of like a roguelike, I’m definitely leaning towards using some proc gen (discussed below) for creating maps/overworld, etc, and I’m thinking turn based will be best.

I’m also not aiming to have different heights/levels in the map, that’s just too complicated art wise and mapping wise, but I’m sure it can be faked with setting up tiles in a certain way.

Tech

So I’m planning on using proc gen to generate the map, instead of manually placing tiles, that’s nice because then I can use it to create:

1. Replayability, you can play the same game multiple times with different layout, different world, and different experiences
2. Larger worlds than I care to make manually, which is great because making large world maps, or lots of small interiors sounds like it could get very tedious, so this way I can make a larger world with more crap to do, without spending too much time on all the individual crap, I just make a tool that makes each type of crap and then another tool to tell the crap where to be crapped out at.

I plan to do at least some of this proc gen, for the world map at least, using Wave Function Collapse. You can see one sample implementation and what it does here but I’m planning to make my own implementation in GDScript (for now, maybe I’ll figure out GDNative later if that’s too slow) so that I can understand it, and potentially tweak it if needed.

The gist of wave function collapse (WFC) as was described in one of the several videos I watched on it, is that basically it’s like solving a Sudoku puzzle, you start with a few pre-chosen tiles, either randomly chosen or given to you, and then you go through all the other slots and you can narrow down the options remaining of what value/tile can go there, until either you get to only one possible tile, or as few as can be, then you just randomly choose on from the options that can be there at that tile, and then you update the rest of the slots with the options remaining.

The way you know what tiles can go next to each other is by defining the possible adjacent tiles to each tile, which if you look at the above github repo, can be done by providing a sample or “training” tilemap/texture, which let’s the algorithm know how/where to put different tiles in relation to each other.

One thing to note about WFC is that it is all based on local connectivity, how each individual tile connects to its neighbors, there is not really any stored/saved data about bigger picture things, which means you can very easily end up trying to make a generator to give you square rooms, but wind up getting non-square rooms, or other similar issues, simply because the WFC algorithm doesn’t really have any data on the inside vs outside of the room. This kind of difficulty can be solved though, by including a sample tilemap that uses a different tile for the interiors of each room, compared to the exteriors, that will keep the room interiors internal to the room and prevent the room from sprawling on.

How is WFC different from Wang Tiles?

Wang tiles are something I’ve done in the past and I think mentioned somewhere upwards on this chain, and I wanted to kind of mention how they seem similar at least in theory to WFC. WFC you define the possible adjacent tiles and try to pick a tile that can go in a spot that is adjacent to the others, based on edge connectivity.

In theory, you could probably combine WFC with Wang tiles and be totally fine, so what’s the difference between what I’m trying to do now and what I did before?

Previously, I did Wang tiles, which the ones I used were basically large blocks that were made up of many smaller tiles/pieces, in this case I’m trying to do WFC on those smaller pieces instead of having to make the tiles, and then manually create rooms/chunks with those tiles, I can just focus on making the little tiles, then piece them all together in an example map, and then let WFC do its thing from there.

Another difference between what I did earlier and what I"m doing now, is that previously I did not propagate any possible options through the map when generating a map, instead I defined the edges of my confined/finite map as being closed off, then randomly chose tiles to fit with that, and make sure that the connectivity of any other already placed tiles fit in with the connectivity of the tile chosen. Is there a reason you need to keep track of and propagate the possible tiles instead of just picking from pre-computed connectivity lists where you group all tiles with specific connectivities together? Not as far as I can tell, in fact I think having to propagate your options through would be slower computation wise, however, this lets you go through and find the tile with the lowest number of possible choices, and fill that in and propagate from there, so hopefully (and this is hopefully, I suspect it’s still possible) there will be fewer instances of the algorithm running itself into a corner where no tile exists that can fill a spot, which happened multiple times when doing Wang tiles, but meant in order to get more generation to work, I had to spend a ton of time manually creating new wang tiles to fill the connectivity combinations that I didn’t create yet, or deal with having a 4 way intersection wedged in there to not block off any paths.

I will say that doing the wang tiles I did before did mean I could just do random walk to make sure you could get from point A to point B by pre-defining the necessary connectivity without defining tiles for those slots yet, which let me create a traversable level from start to finish, but here for an overworld I think it should be possible to not run into too many cases where something would be untraversable, or if anything I can pre-define some parts of the overworld to make sure that things are traversable, but then just proc gen the rest.

Also in theory, with WFC I could make an infinitely generated overworld, and then generate each individual place on the fly. Which, that would be great and all but if I want like a classic story, and maybe some sort of sane leveling system, it may make sense to limit things a little bit to prevent things from getting too insane, although I’m not going to rule out quest and story proc gen just yet, but I think for a better experience for a jrpg type game, some intentional design is important instead of just letting proc gen go completely rampant.

Side quests though, that’s probably where I’ll let proc gen go because if the system generates towns/buildings/whatever, then the system can fill those with stuff, I’m not going to hand make everything that is like that. Proc gen for weapons, tools, items etc will probably also be useful.

Next Steps

Next steps on this project, I think getting the WFC actually working. I’ve rambled on about this, but so far I have a file in Godot that doesn’t do much, it stores out the adjacent tiles from a pre-canned 2d array so it knows how to connect things, but it hasn’t figured out how to use that to create anything just yet, and the propagation of options/narrowing down the options is going to be a little bit intense.

So far I’ve been enjoying making the tileset so that’s good, may make some sort of at least placeholder character for now, or maybe go through and make some items or ui features for later.

After the WFC generates the array of possibilities I think it’ll be a matter of getting it to create the TileMap and then putting that for someone to see, then making it so you can walk around in there, have collision, etc.

Engine Update

Been in a little bit of a rut with the engine where I just have a slog of things left to write, make bindings for, etc for the UI stuff.
So I haven’t been super excited to work on the engine between that and all the other crap going on, so I figured it may make sense to start a side project to do something to still do coding/crap but make it so I can come back to the engine with a fresh mind, like how I worked on that dungeon crawler ages ago for a few months.

Effectively nothing has been finished since last time other than making a Label class and lua bindings for it, and filling out the implementation using nuklear, but not testing it. Now I’m trying to do a button but not really excited about it.

New Side Project

So the new side project I decided to do literally 1 minute prior to writing this, basically I was just on my computer clicking around the browser windows as one does when supposed to be doing real work instead, and saw a GOG window that I had left open on the main store page, with a sliver of a screenshot of a game called Hero’s Hour on it. (not sure why that link looks like xn–<name>-nw6e to me but maybe that’s a preview only bug?

Opened it up and I saw the graphics and I thought to myself “making a little top down world map view RPG might be neat, maybe jrpg, maybe not, not sure. let’s open Godot” and so a game idea was born. that is currently only maybe 5 minutes old and will probably die about 5 hours from now.

Anyway figured I’d stop losing for that update, will try to write again next week on how long that new game idea survived.

New place

Took a bit longer to complete the move and get my desktop set up than expected, but had an unexpected funeral and road closure keeping me in a different state, so the one week I expected to not have any progress turned into 3 weeks.

Still trying to set up my office, need to set up the 3d printer and better route the ethernet cable from the kitchen on the first floor to my office in the basement. I got a 500ft spool of bulk ethernet cable to be able to route that around everything along the walls, and was going to 3d print brackets to hold it in place.

In order to better route the ethernet cable I’m designing some brackets to use to mount it to the wall so I can 3d print them off, figure since I’ve got a house now I may as well make use of the 3d printer to make things.

The bracket is basically just a half circle with a little hole for a nail to go through:

but I made it parametric in FreeCAD so I can change the size of the hole to fit different nails or screws, and the size of the arc to fit different size cables, or the thickness or overlap of the parts to make it more sturdy if needed. Learning FreeCAD has been good, and I think it might help if I wanted to make furniture or other things that may not be 3d printed, but require good design/planning ahead to make sure everything fits together. Blender is nice for 3d but not sure it’s really parametric in the ways I need to make physical objects.

Game Engine

The status on the game engine is pretty same-y same-y, still doing UI Lua bindings and stuff to try to get it to where I can at least add a single widget to a row and add that to a window.
Once I’m that far implementing other widgets shouldn’t be too bad since Nuklear pretty much pre-cans all the hard parts, so I’m hoping it should be smoother at that point, then once I’ve got a few widgets in I should be able to get some sort of editor UI going and then hopefully from there it’s a simple verifying the model loading stuff was ported properly, maybe dress it up a bit to make it easier to fit into the current framework of how meshes work, and then I should be set for the basics of things.

Then I’ll tackle animation, physics, audio, etc in some future milestone, but I could feasibly start making levels/logic/something once the UI/model loading stuff is in. UI styling might need to be done at some point to make it not look awful, but that’s a longer distance worry for now I think.