Search found 93 matches

by TOGoS
Fri Mar 08, 2024 8:05 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet
Replies: 101
Views: 19501

Re: Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet

There is something I want to put forward to you, while you are working on planets and map generation: The availability of used map generation functions to mods. If I understand correctly, this is already possible. Mods can query the 'noise layers' for the surface at any time, using LuaSurface#calcu...
by TOGoS
Fri Mar 08, 2024 5:34 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet
Replies: 101
Views: 19501

Re: Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet

Oh this makes me very happy. The purpose of the new programmable noise system was to allow exactly these sorts of things. We just needed someone with a bit of patience to put it all together! I mean, the ridge function is in there for exactly the purpose that you put it to . (When I first mentioned ...
by TOGoS
Fri Dec 29, 2023 6:06 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #390 - Noise expressions 2.0
Replies: 69
Views: 13872

Re: Friday Facts #390 - Noise expressions 2.0

The hope I had when I created the terrain noise system was that someone, someday, would take the idea and extend and polish it, which it seems you have. It's a slight bummer to lose compatibility with the old Lua noise expression definitions[1] (a goal of that design was to an AST-based common-denom...
by TOGoS
Fri Nov 10, 2023 4:32 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #384 - Combinators 2.0
Replies: 327
Views: 44255

Re: Friday Facts #384 - Combinators 2.0

without having to close the GUI and hunt for the information in a nearby power pole tooltip. Now that you mention it, that was some unnecessary friction. Decider combinator 2.0 I may still pine for Mindustry-esque programmable computers, but this maybe accomplishes about the same thing, and with mo...
by TOGoS
Sat Oct 21, 2023 2:42 am
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #381 - Space Platforms
Replies: 209
Views: 41863

Re: Friday Facts #381 - Space Platforms

Thrusters should definitely accelerate/decelerate the platform, not just "move" it. The video where the thrusters turn off and the platform stop moving looks downright weird. And I imagine that slowly getting one of those things up to speed would just feel a lot more satisfying and interes...
by TOGoS
Sat Sep 23, 2023 3:00 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #377 - New new rails
Replies: 217
Views: 49332

Re: Friday Facts #377 - New new rails

Very neat!

But now my "only build tracks on every third space" technique is obsoleted!

Alright guys, good work; now it's time to add mountains and non-euclidean caves and train tunnels.
by TOGoS
Sat Sep 16, 2023 6:29 am
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology
Replies: 364
Views: 55601

Re: Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology

> Quality Good idea. I think it will make the game a little more interesting. I don't mind the idea of randomness at all, and like that it's something I could choose to ignore, but then later choose to mess with it because it's an interestingly different way to play the game. The names are fine. > D...
by TOGoS
Thu Nov 10, 2022 6:19 am
Forum: General discussion
Topic: Performance optimization - post your saves
Replies: 412
Views: 243574

Re: Performance optimization - post your saves

Am I missing something there? You are not. Due to the terrain generator's nature as a massively SIMD virtual machine, it does not support lazily-evaluated function calls or if-else chains, meaning that every subexpression needs to be evaluated for each point on the map. Adding procedure delimiters ...
by TOGoS
Thu Jun 24, 2021 4:20 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #366 - The only way to go fast, is to go well!
Replies: 100
Views: 67894

Re: Friday Facts #366 - The only way to go fast, is to go well!

[...] Functional Reactive Programming for their UI code (and things like the building code), as these complex state interactions / asynchronous actions are exactly the kind of use case for this paradigm. [...] So, what is FRP ? Here is the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional...
by TOGoS
Wed Jul 22, 2020 5:51 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #356 - Blueprint library for real
Replies: 123
Views: 55407

Ah, burnout!

I know the burnout feeling! I think a lot of it has to do with losing focus and not really knowing what to work on anymore. Having a partner (your kid, in this case) who approaches the project from another angle (like developing content, just playing it, or getting on your case about inefficiencies ...
by TOGoS
Fri May 08, 2020 4:44 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #346 - He who does nothing, breaks nothing
Replies: 47
Views: 20300

Re: Friday Facts #346 - He who does nothing, breaks nothing

note: this assumes walkable tiles draw transitions over non-walkable ones, in case you are thinking of creating a mod with new terrain type that player won't be able to walk on. Oh right. That's why I couldn't get my 'mountain' tiles working. There's an implicit assumption in the engine that the on...
by TOGoS
Mon Apr 27, 2020 7:42 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #344 - Tile transition collisions & Team Steelaxe speedrun record
Replies: 59
Views: 24849

Re: Friday Facts #344 - Tile transition collisions & Team Steelaxe speedrun record

Speaking of tile transition collisions, has anyone ever tried to make "solid" tiles (representing, say, a rock), that is not traversable, but should be drawn in over other tiles, such as grass? I had been trying to make this work for a while but was running into quite a bit of trouble. Fis...
by TOGoS
Fri Feb 07, 2020 7:13 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #333 - Terrain scrolling
Replies: 40
Views: 19643

Re: Friday Facts #333 - Terrain scrolling

Neat. Back in the 90s (when I first started trying to program games) cutting down the number of pixels drawn to the screen was super important, so basically every attempt to write games started with me writing a class that figured out which parts needed to be updated, and leaving everything else alo...
by TOGoS
Fri Nov 29, 2019 3:50 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #323 - Animated water
Replies: 54
Views: 24243

Re: Friday Facts #323 - Animated water

The reflections are what makes it look super cool. I want more details about how that works! Even if it's just: now every sprite has a reflected version that masked by the reflection texture. But can any tile do reflection?
by TOGoS
Sat Oct 19, 2019 4:49 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Friday Facts #317 - New pathfinding algorithm
Replies: 70
Views: 32628

Re: Friday Facts #317 - New pathfinding algorithm

programaths wrote: ↑
Fri Oct 18, 2019 11:44 am
TOGoS, from conveyor belts to treadmills...there is only a step!
<biters-on-belts.gif>

Thanks for the well-wishes everybody!
by TOGoS
Fri Oct 18, 2019 1:01 pm
Forum: Modding help
Topic: Speed up custom map generation
Replies: 16
Views: 4212

Re: Speed up custom map generation

Either the forum doesn't notify me when there's a new reply or I'm missing something basic about how to use it. Anyway... I'll give it a try. But in order to achieve the result shown in my pictures, I'd have to do some basic vector calculations. Is it possible to get the x and y component of the dis...
by TOGoS
Wed Oct 02, 2019 6:33 pm
Forum: Resolved Problems and Bugs
Topic: [TOGoS] [0.17.66] Text-box graphical glitch
Replies: 1
Views: 2401

Re: [TOGoS] [0.17.66] Text-box graphical glitch

I think what we're seeing is a tiny scrollbar. This should be fixed in 0.17.70. Thanks for the report!
by TOGoS
Wed Oct 02, 2019 6:32 pm
Forum: Resolved Problems and Bugs
Topic: [TOGoS] [0.17.66] bad prompt position with focus on LuaGuiElement textfield
Replies: 2
Views: 2485

Re: [TOGoS] [0.17.66] bad prompt position with focus on LuaGuiElement textfield

The TextBox code is surprisingly complicated, so this took a while to fix. Should work more properly in 0.17.70, though. Thanks for the report!
by TOGoS
Fri Sep 06, 2019 3:32 pm
Forum: Modding help
Topic: Speed up custom map generation
Replies: 16
Views: 4212

Re: Speed up custom map generation

It might be possible to do something like this using spot noise. Spot noise returns a value indicating the closeness to the nearest of many points from an internally-generated list. If you took several spot noise expressions (using different lists of points, which you'd get by providing them with di...
by TOGoS
Fri Aug 23, 2019 2:26 pm
Forum: Modding help
Topic: map_gen_settings and autoplacers
Replies: 19
Views: 19621

Re: map_gen_settings and autoplacers

Two of those have associated noise expressions, `probability_expression`, and `richness_expression`. Those are the two fundamental noise equations that are used in placing resources by the C++ version of `on_chunk_generated`. To override those two properties for a specific surface you can change th...

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