Alright let's build a megastructure! I've been reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and can't resist adding a ring world to the game. Starting a thread for this one 🧵 (image by @alexjaybrady.bsky.social for inspiration) #gamedev #bevy

I realized that the frame rate of my game was going down the more I played. Let's debug!

The egui -> Bevy UI rewrite is complete! Quite happy that it was possible to reproduce the look and feel from before and even improve on it a bit :) #bevy #gamedev

Currently porting the GUI from egui to #bevy UI and quite happy with it so far! The only thing I'm missing is the ability to render arbitrary meshes as part of the UI. Image nodes are super useful. I'm using one to show the navball which is a 3D scene rendered to a texture. #gamedev

I switched to the Avian physics engine! Its excellent documentation made this a pretty simple process. The physics now run at a fixed rate, independent of the frame rate. This helps a lot with determinism and things keep their velocity, even if the rendering isn't fast enough. #bevy #gamedev

I added a hover mode to the spacecraft controller! It tries to keep the craft level at a fixed altitude so that the player can precisely maneuver across the ground. Oh and also it's now possible to load in any 3D scene with colliders, like this makeshift landing pad. #gamedev #bevy

Finally got around to adding oceans to the planets! It's just an additional opaque mesh on top of each terrain chunk. But changing the water's surface color depending on its depth is so simple yet so effective at faking actual translucency. #bevy #gamedev

Apologies for the lack of updates, I was chilling at the top of the highest mountain in the solar system #gamedev #bevy

One reason I enjoy shader programming is that at least bugs are entertaining

Currently writing a controller to enable some cool takeoff and landing modes. The idea is that the controller should make such maneuvers relatively easy and intuitive as long as the ship's construction makes them physically possible. #gamedev

Experimenting with some close-up terrain detail textures. I like how putting some green rocks on the closest moon to the gas giant ties the scene together :) #bevy #gamedev

Working on a new aesthetic for the spacecraft model. The technology in the game should be more of the "far future" kind. This will do for now. #gamedev

The new terrain system had one drawback: The generated lower detail chunks did not have enough texture detail. A quick fix would have been to just subdivide them more, but that quickly blows up the memory and we do not actually need the additional geometry.

I should stop taking screenshots on a bright screen in a dark room. But hey at least the brightness is somewhat appropriate for the distance from the sun.

I finally got to merge the new terrain system! Really happy with how it turned out. Now it's just a matter of writing a fancy position -> (elevation, color) function for every planet and moon. Here are some impressions of the icy moon.

Added texture generation! The compute shader now also writes out color data when it creates a terrain tile. Just adding some white colors for the cliffs already goes a long way. #bevy #gamedev

where is the "let me cook" wgpu setting

Added a readback step to copy the terrain data from the GPU in order to create colliders. This required a small patch in #bevy to allow for partial buffer reads: github.com/bevyengine/b... #gamedev

Even large terrain textures can't provide the resolution to give enough interesting detail. So here's the new approach: Procedurally generate terrain chunks on the GPU. It's faster and easier to work with. And look at the detail! #bevy #gamedev

something I made for a local pub quiz please enjoy

Here's the navball in action with a short explanation of how it was made. 1/3 🧵 #bevy #gamedev

Spent a lot of time with texture compression and improving the terrain shader. Looks almost acceptable now, but still a long way to go. Maybe ground scatter is next! #bevy #gamedev

I struggled quite a bit with the y-up coordinate system in #bevy until I realized that ...you can just rotate everything by 90 degrees without any issues. It feels much more natural as there is a lot of mathematical code and I use Blender, both of which use z-up.

I added an exhaust shader for the reaction control thrusters got control allocation working for translation and rotation! #bevy #gamedev

Experimenting with raymarching for the exhaust plume rendering. I also considered rendering it with a mesh or particles but now I'm convinced volumetrics are the way to go. #bevy #gamedev

The Eurovision is in the city where I live which means I can experience it the way it's supposed to be experienced: On TV at home

Flying through the rings. Featuring the new volumetric lights in #bevy! #gamedev

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation #bevy #gamedev

Proof of concept for the trajectory planning. Still needs a lot of polish but I'm happy to finally have this feature in some form :) #bevy #gamedev

Orbiting the sun. #bevy #gamedev

Laying the ground work for the maneuver planning in the map view. Namely a function to calculate the distance to an ellipse/hyperbola in screen space and the time calculation for the selected point. It's not the most exciting code to write but the feature will be great to have. #bevy #gamedev

Here's what the map view looks like. I just replaced the single-colored spheres with the planet's LOD variants. Now it's actually the same scene that the camera sees for the distant planets, just from a different angle and with some line gizmos on top. #bevy #gamedev

Me reading Bevy release notes: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me upgrading: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Another incredible release, congrats to the Bevy team and everyone who contributed! I'm also greatly honored that one of my humble planet renders got to be the cover image for this release 🥰

As the rings are made of larger particles I added a Mie scattering term to the lighting calculation. This increases the light intensity if the sun is right behind the medium, which is a common effect in (dust) clouds. I'm quite happy with how it looks :) #bevy #gamedev

Testing ring debris visuals. The CPU is screaming in pain though, so this will require some optimization. #gamedev

Finally got around to adding a texture for the gas giant! It's also fully procedural so that the cloud patterns can change over time. 🪐 #bevy #gamedev

The aliasing pattern on the rings was bothering me so I added a custom mipmapping implementation for the one-dimensional ring texture :) #bevy #gamedev

One fun thing in game development is that you get to do many things twice. The planet on the left is just a couple of meshes that look good from afar to save resources. The one on the right is the actual planet that one can land on. Or was it the other way around? Who knows! #bevy #gamedev

what it feels like working on this vs what it's really like

Working on integrating the terrain and atmosphere systems! The clouds now have proper lighting and cast a shadow on the terrain. The cloud texture is procedural which has the advantage that the weather can change over time. 🌤️ #gamedev #bevy #rust

I created a small application to generate planets and moons! It features shader hot reloading which speeds up the process of creating those quite a bit. 🪐 #bevyengine #gamedev

Progress! The new terrain rendering is now fully integrated. Next up is some cleanup work and then I'll be able to focus on other features again. #gamedev #bevyengine

And this is the terrain frustum culling in action. The closer bounding boxes (red, green, cyan, purple) belong to the shadow cascades and the yellow boxes are visible to the camera itself. The next step will be to actually hand this information to the render pass. #gamedev #bevy #bevyengine

Spent some time today putting the terrain tiles in boxes in preparation for frustum culling. In many cases only a fraction of the tiles are visible and we don't need to render most of them. So this will reduce the workload drastically.

It does not look like much but this is the first time the new terrain system runs in the game itself and not in a demo application. Getting the shadow and depth prepass working correctly was not easy but I'm super happy with the result.

Added a compute shader pipeline to generate the terrain textures, which makes it super easy to design new planets and moons. Next I'll create some more of those and then I can't wait to add the new terrain shader to the game. #gamedev #bevyengine

Quick demo of the atmosphere post-processing shader. It supports planetary rings and includes them in the lighting calculation. 🪐 #gamedev #bevyengine

about to emerge from the terrain rendering rabbit hole who would have thought that rendering a planet would be so much work. not me

I'm happy to announce something that's been keeping me busy for a while now: A spaceflight simulation game! It's made with @bevy.bsky.social and features a vast star system with realistic orbital mechanics. Stay tuned for regular development updates! 🚀 #gamedev #bevyengine #bevy #rustlang