The sliders are just a vector3 and are pre-normalized. Once I have my numbers I want, I normalize this (make it length of 1), and build a new quaternion in global space using Quaternion(ijk, w). I then apply it to the box when I'm ready to rotate. I, J, and K are aligned with the X, Z, and Y axis in world space.

Thanks! That was a fun one :)

Honestly, I would love to do a colony sim in the vein of the C.S Lewis Space trilogy. Right now, I'm doing a simple game with a Subnautica style story - again set in the age of space travel. In the medium term, I do want to explore parables, so I'd be doing all sorts of time periods, characters, etc. A few of those might be entirely fictional worlds with non-human protagonists.

@@SDGGames Awesome!

Yeah, I'm still figuring out a lot of details, but I definitely want to start collaborating more and more. Right now, the best place to connect is Discord (I have a link in the video description), but I have email, etc. too if you want to connect that way. My current project is a short game I'm trying to complete in 3 months. I'll be posting updates as I go

That's a good point about hedonism. I think that the taboos of the 90s played a large part in the way the industry grew. It's almost impossible to make art if you don't value the medium, and the "games are evil, but I should make one so my kids have something to play" approach results in a mediocre product at best. I love games, and believe that they have great potential. I think that great artists see the best in the art medium, and use their tools to make something beautiful, regardless of what others are doing.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thanks, I initially recorded a much longer video, but decided to shorten the announcement for now. Mainly, a lot of prayer :) I accepted a call to full-time vocational ministry 13 years ago, and have been looking for my place to serve ever since. The past 5 years have been a slow process of me falling in love with this industry and deciding to work here. A major moment for me was the failed launch of No Man's Sky. People weren't just looking for a game, they were looking for a better world than this one. I saw the desperation amid the hype, and wanted to make a game that pointed toward Heaven. No game can be the destination itself, but games can a sign that points to real sources of hope. I've been giving each year a theme in my end-of-year review videos. 2024 is my year of completion, and I secretly hoped that it would mean I go full time, though I didn't tell anyone (even my wife 🤪). I've been praying over the industry, but I started praying for my place in it more and more, and eventually started fasting "until I'm a full time Christian game developer." 1.5 months later, I was laid off. TL:DR, the decision made itself once I was let go. I already knew about the CLIMB program, so I signed up, and got funded. It's scary, but I keep reminding myself that my dad owns the planet, and the safest place to be is in the center of His will.

It's definitely an issue with the system, but I wonder how many teachers actually understand these concepts themselves. If you get a degree in teaching, then you will never have the practical knowledge that comes from using math in a career. If you get a degree as an engineer or programmer, then you can make at least 3X a teacher's salary by not teaching. I feel like schools should welcome retired professionals to help teach the advanced concepts. Most of my college professors had a lot of experience in the workplace, and it showed. They were 10X easier to understand than the math professor because they were able to go beyond the theory and root the concepts in real projects they worked on. All that to say, the system is broken, but I don't think it's malicious. Just underfunded and overregulated

I'm using unit tests for large or complex systems. While it's technically possible to test everything, I find things like player controller easier to just test manually. For systems with clear jobs (for example, saving and loading, or game state transitions), I write the unit tests first, then fill out the function so the test passes. For big, messy systems, I'll often do a prototype first, then re-make that particular system with a Test-Driven Development approach. I've found that it's quicker to throw away the prototype than it is to try to find and fix all of the bugs in a first draft

It's a hard balance to strike. If you re-invent the wheel, then the math people get upset because the function doesn't match reality. But, if you don't study the math, the game engine functions don't make much sense. I'm not sure what the ideal solution would be...

Thanks! I'll have to revisit those games again :)

Good question! A lot of the advice would overlap with advice for healthy communication in general. If she's really excited, share the moment. "I clicked on this rectangle and a text box appeared" sounds silly, but a lot of game development breakthroughs aren't glamorous. If she's stressed/self critical, offer encouragement. Sid Meyer talks a lot about the "Valley of Despair" partway through development. The game WILL suck, probably for a long time. It takes a lot of faith and determination to make it through that phase to the other side. When she's thinking critically and looking for honest feedback, give it. Specific things like "Did you notice that that text box isn't aligned" is 100X more valuable than the generic "Yeah, it looks good." I usually ask my wife for one positive and one negative. I want to know that she likes it, but I also want to make it better. Also, this is a later in development thing, but if you have the ability, you should definitely try to bring her game to life in some way. Physical memorabilia is just so special, even a card with a drawing of her character on it (or something similar) would be pretty magical. I designed my own channel logo, and I keep asking my wife to get an Etsy shop to put it on a hat for my birthday :)

Thanks for the pointers. I'm probably going to keep this as a debugging feature for now, so performance doesn't matter (as I can run in Movie Maker mode which ignores framerate). I'll have to look into RPCs more, though. If I need to squeeze more out of the feature, there are definitely a lot of tweaks I can make. It's pretty poorly optimized right now, but it works well enough for the applications

@@SDGGames that's very valid, an OK enough solution now is far superior to a perfect solution never :)

Eventually, I might want to try something like that. The game template is my working starting point, so I'm trying to only include addons that are useful for my next project. Right now, I'm primarily trying to finish and release a game. After that, I'll apply all lessons learned to the game template so I can skip as much boilerplate as possible for the next one. Eventually, accessibility features, mod support, etc. would be a part of the project. I would want to fully revisit mod support again in Godot 4, I feel like there might be a better solution than what I had for Godot 3. So, not today, but yes, eventually

They're just an animatable body, and I rotated them with the lerp function. The trick is that the object origin is exactly where I want the rotation to happen, so I don't have to translate anything, just rotate. I did link the source code in the video description, if you want to take a further look. It's under player_elements/flipper.gd

Yup, pretty much 😅

I think templeOS support is the number 1 priority for Godot's development team right now...

That was the first approach. The problem is that the physics aren't deterministic, so I can pull a number off of the generator a frame early or late compared to the recording. If two events happen "simultaneously," they will trade numbers on different replays, causing events to diverge. Doom had the benefit of an in-house physics engine that could be shaped to fit the RNG tools. I'm using Godot's default physics, which don't appear to work exactly the same way twice.

@@SDGGames oh, I guess it went over my head during the vídeo, then. I thought you'd start by setting a look-up table (like in Doom) to drive the random number generator, só that's why I thought you hadn't tried it. Thanks for clarifying though! Also, very cool idea.

@@du0lol Yeah, I was relying on fixed-seed randomness, so no need for a LUT. The numbers are generated as they are consumed, but the state guarantees that the numbers are the same each time. If I wanted, I could print them to a table, and see what the next number would be.

Yeah, I think it was a timing issue. The physics engine determines when events happen, which determines the order in which numbers are consumed. I think Doom was simpler in its physics, I'm trying to work with a physics engine that I didn't write.

Fair enough! I think I would have spent more time making my own physics engine, though :)

@@SDGGames Another thing you could do for physics is just interpolate some samples of the position. Essentially your puppeteer code, but you only save the position/rotation every so often, and then you can linearly interpolate the state. This also applies to other values, so long as they are continuous values that are changing in small amounts over multiple frames like position and rotation. E.g. sudden changes in position, velocity, etc can break it and requires more samples at those points (when the instantaneous change happened). If something teleports, you obviously want that mechanic to be preserved, so deciding when you would interpolate something is definitely a factor to consider though it can be automatically determined in a number of ways such as testing if linearly interpolating the value would actually reproduce similar results during the recording stage (so you don't linearly interpolate stuff when it would produce visual discrepencies above some threshold) or simply manually specifying what things should be interpolated and which ones shouldn't. Things like the thruster animation can technically be ""interpolated"" too if you encode them as a continuous value, for example encoding the state of the thruster as a function of time (rather, you would be encoding the thruster animation in a way that allows you to interpolate time and derive the animation frame from the time). Obviously, this isn't necessary in this case because this is deterministic behaviour, plus it has a very low impact when it's not quite in sync, but, it does express how versatile interpolation can be for reproducing a lot of complicated game behaviours in a replay.

Yeah, the process of discovery is interesting. I haven't made a multiplayer game before, so I didn't have that tool in my toolbox yet. I believe that really old games did use captured inputs in their attract modes, which is why I started there.