Notices by Rune Skovbo Johansen (runevision@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@sinbad @kr4ft3r Except for 2D (and 2.5D) platformers where you can truncate in Unity and have to swizzle in the Z=up engines.

Another year went by as an indie game developer and what do I have to show for it? A bit of a mixed bag of things, it turns out.

I've written my 2024 retrospective here (lots of pics and videos in this one):
https://blog.runevision.com/2025/01/2024-retrospective.html
#gamedev #indiedev #solodev

@sinbad Nice, "digital garden" is a neat term. And like that other article says, that used to be the norm!

I never went away from a hierarchically organized website myself (despite a blog side-offering). I think I've always been in the digital garden mindset and I always had trouble getting any kind of overview on other people's blog-centric sites.

@sinbad Haha, yeah :)
I think I'll keep getting comments comparing to Ministry of Silly Walks for as long as I keep working on this procedural animation...

I'm working on revamping the inverse kinematics algorithm for my procedural animation with focus on handling a variety of foot roll scenarios better. Results so far are promising, though far from done yet.

Only, I'm having an issue with snapping when the heel was the best target but can't reach anymore, so it tries to reach with the toe instead. It's not just a technical issue; I'm unsure how I even want it to work.
#ProcGen #GameDev

@sinbad @toerror Ok hear me out, you might be able to combine traits of multiple movement approaches.

If we call your current approach (the one I also described) for trerp, regular linear interpolation for lerp, and a spline/curve approach like @toerror described for curvp, then you could calculate separate "current positions" according to each of those and combine them like this:

combined_pos = curvp_pos + (trerp_pos - lerp_pos)

@sinbad @toerror I once came up with a movement approach that’s somewhere in between lerping and seeking. To make a point go towards a target spread over e.g. 10 frames you move it 1/10 of the remaining distance the first frame, 1/9 of the remaining distance the second frame, etc. This is fixed time (no swarm following) and does not have issues with sudden target movements.

@sinbad That said, I also can't see what's going on in fighting games or shmups that have bright particle effects all over the screen, so compared to certain audiences I'm on the more visually sensitive end.

@sinbad Nice effect! It's a little confusing to my eyes though. I think it's because:
- The shape of the rims of satchel are similar to the shape of the curved particle effects, and my eyes get confused what's what when it's all moving.
- It's hard to see there's any hole in the satchel, probably due to it not being shaded/dark inside it.
- The metal lumps move very fast in front of the satchel, then stop there abruptly while scaling down. The motion is too fast/disjointed for my eyes to track.

@sinbad Sure. Unity has been troubled. I think we can all agree on that. The question is more about whether they have any hope of a better future.

The backwards compatibility has been a God-sent while everything new has been in a messy state though. Not being forced to use those half-baked systems that keep being in flux. I think it makes sense to split Unity up into a version focused on the past and one on the future to allow for a cleaner break, like Epic does with every major version too.

@sinbad Yeah about those things (ECS vs classic components, multiple render pipelines) I don't think anything is resolved yet. It sounds like Unity 7 was the vision for that, and that, according to some people like Thomas Petersen, breaking backwards compatibility was a key part of making that actually viable. So I guess we'll see.

@sinbad Hmm, I'd say that depends on what exactly we're talking about. Many initiatives sure added a lot of friction when keeping backwards compatibility at the same time. But a lot of the work on scalability, performance and reliability has also immensely fortified Unity for the better. When discarding packages not being used, Unity 2022 (which is what I use) is snappier than previous versions have been for a long time, and at least some of that is due to work by such people you refer to.

@sinbad Sure, Unity is all about freedom, but it used to reign it in in its own ways. There used to be one physics system, one input system, one rendering pipeline (although highly configurable, but so is Unreal), etc. It's the keeping adding new systems while also keeping the old around that makes maintenance prohibitive. Having all that overlapping functionality wasn't always part of Unity's DNA and appeal (if only because it was once too young to have gotten there yet). The contrary, I'd say.

@sinbad Yeah but that's the short term perspective only.

@sinbad Right. But they had designed Unity 6 to last for a loooong time (a decade) exactly so that there was room to do breaking changes in Unity 7 without screwing over customers?

I agree with Thomas (based on my own experience working at Unity for 13 years) that there's so much cruft that it's hard to get anything done now and that nothing except breaking changes can fundamentally solve that.

I haven't followed Unity closely, but I understood many employees were excited to show the new direction of Unity 7 at Unite 2024 and it was generally well received?

But this has since been jeopardized because the new CEO doesn't want breaking changes?

AMA thread on Twitter with Thomas Petersen who worked at Unity until recently:
https://x.com/QAThomasNoUnity/status/1861321957502767282

Obviously people still working there might have more info, but can't necessarily say much.

@sinbad There’s also the smaller character limit to keep in mind.

I wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of my procedural animation to hand-authored animations on some models I bought. This is so I can better study what I need to improve.

When I got my comparison tool running for the first time, this is what I was greeted with! A bug with the step-height it seems. 😅
#ProcGen

@JulianOliver Discounting AI-hyped executives, most of us in the game industry find it awkward that the term we used since forever to refer to these innocent (but still often cool) processes, which are normally carefully crafted to produce consistent results, is now getting conflated with large models produced unethically and prone to bullshitting.

@JulianOliver I get the sentiment here. Due to hype, the term is used so widely that it's lost its meaning. But it's still ultimately better that most of these are based on simple cheap processes rather than the power hungry trained-on-stolen-data large models.