Status Update, October 2023

Summary

• Shinmera: Released cl-theora 
• Shinmera: Released cl-turbojpeg 
• Shinmera: Released trivial-deprecate 
• Shinmera: Released "What is it with me?"
• Shinmera: Released new PromptFont version
• Shinmera: Finished CPU particle system in Trial
• Shinmera: Video playback support in Trial
• Shinmera: Improved loader system in Trial
• Shinmera: Fix rigged model loading in Trial
• Scymtym: Various fixes and improvements to 3d-spaces 

Some Details

Alright, as promised last time, I finally got around to finishing a bunch of stuff like the CPU particle system, and integrating the animations for Weiss:

As you may notice there's no collisions yet though, and that's what I've started working on now. The convex decomposition system is close to being complete, so I've begun with the integration and development of a workflow for that. A lot more of this will happen next month.

Getting the models loaded required a bunch of patches to existing systems, as well as finally figuring out a new asset and loader system in Trial that makes loading scene files in feasible. Scene files are important because they contain their own tree of objects that need to be represented in the engine's own scene tree. For instance, the Weiss model contains separate objects for the sword, eyeballs, and ponytail.

It's important that those objects don't get mushed together, as we will want to animate the eyes and sword and so on procedurally within the engine, so being able to address them separately is vital.

Anyway, there's still lots to do! There's no standard workflow for exporting or importing inverse kinematics, sound emitters, trigger volumes, and a lot more.

One thing I did finally get to though is video playback support!

Video support in Trial is something I'd been fretting over for many years. Video codecs are notoriously complicated and hard to implement, let alone implement in a way that allows them to be decoded efficiently while still leaving enough time over for the game to run. This is why a lot of games still rely on the proprietary Bink codec and tools, which are very easy to integrate, and decode very quickly. However, since it's proprietary, I obviously can't integrate it into Trial.

Fortunately I finally stumbled on the Theora codec, created by the Xiph group (of ogg, vorbis, opus fame). As with all of their projects they also provide a libre licensed reference implementation, so getting started with it is pretty easy. I wrapped the theorafile library by the FNA project in cl-theora, and then integrated it with Trial. Now video loading and streamed playback is easily possible:

I'm not yet sure what I'll be using videos for, maybe animated logos, or an intro animatic if the budget allows for it, but whatever the case, it's really good to finally have some video support in the engine.

Karlosz is off this and next month as he has to focus on university, so there hasn't been much progress on the NX port. I did start working on a better build system, but didn't have enough time to complete it.

Scymtym has been sidetracked from the convex decomposition work for a bit to fix and improve a bunch of the spatial query acceleration structures I had (badly) implemented in 3d-spaces, most importantly the kd-tree. Anyway, he's now back to work on the decomposition, so hopefully we'll have that library done by the end of next month.

Aside from all the code and game things, I've also completed a short comic. It's a very personal comic about intimacy and being ace (asexual), so whether you'll connect with it will vary a lot, but I'd appreciate it if you gave it a read anyhow.

And that's about it for this month I think. Of course, as always, there's a bunch of other things going on behind the scenes and lots of details, and lots of personal problems I'm going through, but I'll spare you the gory details.

Thanks a lot for your continued support and for reading these updates!

— Love, Shinmera ❤️