This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
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Notes -
I made some progress with the background generation, but we're not quite there yet. What's happening now is that if the player moves off the current grid cell, more cells are generated, the old cells get copied from the shader memory, and normal textures are initialized from them, and assigned to the background sprites (this is when you see them turn pink). The new cells get assigned to the texture array that sits on the shader.
I've hit some issues on the way, as expected copying the textures from the GPU to the CPU slows things down, so I spread it out over a few seconds. This probably won't be enough though, because still have to shuffle the shader texture array around (if you move off-grid to the right, each cell in the array has to be moved left, and blank ones need to be created on to the right). Doing this on the CPU won't be feasible it would require 6 more GPU-CPU copies to read them and 9 more CPU-GPU copies to set them in their new positions, so I'll try to do the whole thing on the GPU. It's a lot of pixels to copy, but it should be a lot simpler code than the bug simulation, so I'm hoping I can do it in a single frame without affecting performance.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
No tinkering this week. Work, exercise, parenting. Still, thanks for asking!
How come you're doing all that low-level graphics stuff (I'm sure there's a more precise term, but I can't find it)? Shouldn't the engine handle that for you?
I wanted to persist the dead bugs into the background, even after I respawned them. Drawing directly to the background texture seemed like a straightforward solution, then you have one background sprite that can handle an infinite amount of dead bugs, and the engine takes it from there. The basic case of a single background cell was pretty easy, it's when I wanted to handle infinite scrolling that things started getting complicated.
Now that you mention it, I wonder if there isn't a built-in way to do it in the engine. Claude offered a few alternatives, but also said my idea is pretty solid, and after I mentioned infinite scrolling, even said it's probably the best way to handle it.
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