...and, good grief, am I not ready for it!
I'm guessing that my quest through the Andromeda galaxy is going to slow way down.
Two days a week, a friend/colleague and I have been working our way through a college-level computer science curriculum - to refine some of the rougher edges of the knowledge we've cobbled together over the years, and formalize/validate the rest. It's been fun so far, and at times, pretty challenging.
I've got a four-year degree, so college courses aren't exactly daunting. But the toughest parts have been when I've had to tap knowledge that's nearly faded away - such as the high school math I learned over 20 years ago.
Algebra and geometry are mostly there. I use many aspects of those in my design work and game development. But parts of them, like factoring polynomials, look familiar to me, but I can't remember any of the actual rules. Trigonometry was a blur back when I took it originally, and calculus... forget about it (in my case, literally)!
We're in the midst of a calculus course now, and while a lot of it makes sense and is sort of coming back to me, I always struggle when we have to go back and start factoring again. That stuff used to be second nature to me, but without need of it for a couple of decades, it's only faintly there. It feels like running into an old acquaintance and not remembering their name, even though you used to see that person every day. It's sort of a bummer.
Anyway, we're getting through it. There are so many good resources for learning this stuff online, which weren't around back when I learned it the first time, I've got no excuse not to know it. Just the eternal lack of time, I suppose.
Up until recently, my nodes simulation had all the nodes colliding with each other with the same force, and each reacting the same way, regardless of size. I've tweaked that a bit now, so a node's size matters when it collides, and so the larger nodes can bully their way around (to some extent) while the smaller ones flit about in between.
It's a little hard to make out in this short GIF, but that's what's happening. Feeling pretty good about these changes!
Oh, and the nodes all look like single-celled organisms now.
Well, the Angara are growing on me now. I still really hate how they look, but their story is interesting- especially their relationship to the Kett.
Sigh.
Since I can't seem to just play a single game at a time anymore, I've begun working through The Artful Escape in between sessions of Mass Effect Andromeda.
And why not? It's on Game Pass, and it's new, interesting, and fun. It was right there, waiting for me to try!
Anyway, it's something a little outside my normal type of game - although so far, it's very minimally like a traditional music/rhythm game. I'm hoping that the "Simon Says" portions don't get too difficult, because I'd like to see it through.
The visuals are trippy. The story is silly and light. The music is loud. I'm into it!
This is sort of a little thing (pun intended) but I find the scale in Mass Effect Andromeda to be much more appreciable than in the original trilogy.
Once you establish Podromos on the first explorable planet, Eos, you get a really good sense of the sheer size of things with your ship touched down next to the newly bustling colony. The ship is huge, but is still dwarfed by the collection of portable structures and equipment around it. And that's all settled in a small valley in one section of Eos.
It's cool to see/hear the shuttles coming and going, and each pod is packed with all sorts of tech doodads that really lend the world a believability that Mass Effect 1-3, having been made for older hardware, didn't often achieve. Especially the first game, where outposts on alien worlds were almost always just one or two simple, boxy buildings that were devoid of nearly all decoration.
There is, perhaps, a little more intimacy in the previous games because of this limitation - even the camera hugs Shepard closer, and with a tighter FOV - so the grand views of Andromeda aren't without their faults.
I have to give credit where credit is due, though. Mass Effect Andromeda is often a pretty game, if nothing else.
I'm always on the fence as to whether or not I should use tile sets for my GameMaker game backgrounds, or if I should just use the objects which draw the background elements to do it instead.
I don't have pictures to share yet, but in my current project, I have a set of images that frame the edge of the play area. They are made up largely to look like natural rock formations, and so it'd be best if they aren't symmetrical left to right.
These graphics are the only part of the game that could realistically utilize tile sets, but I'm stuck as to whether or not I want to put the effort in to convert them to tiles. This scene will never change in the game, and there won't be multiple rooms that use the same tile set - it'll be once and done.
Still, having them as a tile set will make it much easier for me to make sure the patterns in the edge aren't repeated from one side to the other. And I will then let GameMaker handle whether or not to draw them, as opposed to either always drawing them, regardless of whether or not they're in the camera's frame, or rolling my own code to check. And then, on the off chance that I do end up needing to tile another room, I'll have them ready. Hmmm.
Well, I'll return to this soon I suppose. My dev time is just about up for the night, and there's a new season of The Great British Baking Show premiering on Netflix today. TV awaits!
Whenever I'm working on a programming project, I often get caught up in little optimization routines as I go. It's hard for me to just code things to work, and worry about making them work good later.
So today, I wrote some improvements to the way my game project renders stuff. Nothing too fancy - just some checks to make sure objects are within the camera view before rendering - but it felt good to test it and see that small bump in frames per second go up.
I'm hoping that as I remove more of the debugging code, much of which is very slow primitive drawing, I'll see another improvement as well. But I need to stay disciplined and just keep working on the actual game!
Just a quick progress screenshot, showing some minor improvements to this thing.
Now each node draws a line to where it is trying to go, and though you can't see it in the still shot, they all turn much more smoothly towards their goal as they make their way there.
I'm working on finalizing most of the attributes each node will have, as well as how much each can vary to make a node unique. More soon!
With Psychonauts 2 and Life Is Strange: True Colors finished, I'm back on Mass Effect Andromeda again.
I'm settling into a rhythm with this game now, and I don't hate it at all - running around planets and clearing out tasks to improve their viability is a bit mindless, but still fun. The lore of this game isn't as exciting as the original Mass Effect trilogy because all of those games is conveniently swept under the rug with this one.
There are definitely some things that bother me about this game though, particularly the graphics. I know I touched on this before, but I can't get over how weird some of the alien races look. Even the Asari (aside from Peebee) all seem to have this weird, dopey/sleepy look to them that grates on me.
Why do they all look like this? It's such a strange, pointless departure from the original games.
I still hate the Angara more, though. They look like the result of a bad plastic surgery.
