In the Heavens - Demo 0.1.16

[Bobble68]

On a mysterious floating island, a silver dragon awakens...

demo image.png (185.42 KiB) Viewed 212801 times

demo image 2.png (18.54 KiB) Viewed 212801 times

Hi peoples of the Love forums! I present to you a game that I've been working on for the last... wow really 6 months? Huh.
I thought I would show off what I have already to see what people think! Currently, there is an extremely small questline, some movement mechanics, and a level builder (current working name for the engine is Dreamweaver!). Let me know what you think!

Some additional controls (not explained in game):

Left Alt - lock flight direction (so you can look around
B - Activate builder mode
F2 - Clear level (except for boxes)
F5 - Save level (except for boxes)
F8 - Load saved level (except for boxes. It's always boxes)

Middle click - change builder mode
Left click - place object/start polygon
Right click - select object of same type, or undo last vertex
Enter - finalise new polygon or changes

T (while in prop or talkative mode) - set default texture

Press arrow for latest version

OUTDATED VERSION - See later posts for newer versions

dragon.love

(29.33 MiB) Downloaded 907 times

[BrotSagtMist]

Yee interesting flying mechanic.
But as i progress FPS drops to unplayable.

[Rigachupe]

I liked this kind of gameplay. Flying, adventure and dragons?! Heck yeah!

The lags are only in few places further after first npc. Otherwise even on old laptop (10+ years) it goes well. This will be a very nice game when finished for löve2D. *thumbs up*

[Bobble68]

But as i progress FPS drops to unplayable.

The lags are only in few places further after first npc. Otherwise even on old laptop (10+ years) it goes well.

Hmm I'll have to look into that. The islands aren't particularly efficiently drawn, but I thought that would be something that would be constant.

[UnixRoot]

Yee interesting flying mechanic.
But as i progress FPS drops to unplayable.

Same here. It already lags in the first cave. Then, when I begin flying, I get seconds per frame instead of frames per second. Unplayable on my PC.

[BrotSagtMist]

Thing to note is that i have little CPU usage, like 40% only.
So this is either graphic card or ram.

[Hydrogen Maniac]

Wow, nicely done!

I really like the flying mechanics and I think you've found a good tone for the story. I didn't run into any performance issues altough I have a pretty beefy pc so maybe that's expected. I did however find it pretty hard to navigate when moving at top speed and would almost always end up crashing into the side of an island without really knowing where I had ended up. It's not a massive issue but maybe a waypoint system or a map would help to remedy this.

Best of luck with the full version!

[Bobble68]

It's not a massive issue but maybe a waypoint system or a map would help to remedy this.

Good idea, that'll be especially needed when I eventually add other islands. I quite like how it currently doesn't have a UI, so I'll see if I can add something diegetically.

Thing to note is that i have little CPU usage, like 40% only.
So this is either graphic card or ram.

Yeah it's almost certainly an issue with the way islands are drawn, I really need to find a new way of doing that. Currently they're canvases that are upscaled to give the pixelated effect, which works ok if you have a decent graphics card, but really isn't great. I might revert to my previous of masking a repeating texture, then see if I can make the polygon itself can be made to have the designed jagged edges.

If anyone has any other ideas I'm all ears!


Edit: I've put together what I hope is a more performance friendly version. It doesn't make the islands look pixellated at all, but I'll see if I can fix that if this fixes the lag. It currently performs worse on my pc as is, so idk if this works

[UnixRoot]

I might revert to my previous of masking a repeating texture, then see if I can make the polygon itself can be made to have the designed jagged edges.

If anyone has any other ideas I'm all ears!

You could use a Mesh and calculate UV coordinates outside the normal 0-1 range to get tiling. You could group multiple islands together in one bigger mesh to save draw calls. Meshes are really fast if you do it right.

Edit:



You see those trees? They're not sprites or quads, and it's not real 3D. All the trees you can see on screen are one big 2D mesh with repeating UV coordinates, so pretty similar to your 2D islands. It can be drawn in one single draw call.

To change the texture on the fly, I use an ArrayImage and its Z coordinate. So different textures per mesh are possible. If you don't need mip mapping, you could use a texture atlas instead, which is a little faster.

The mesh you're looking at right now has 8,000 vertices and renders at 1400+ FPS on a really crappy GeForce GT 710 office GPU.

And in your case it should be even faster, because you don't have to stream vertices in real time, and you don't have to do costly perspective calculations every frame.

[Bobble68]

You see those trees? They're not sprites or quads, and it's not real 3D. All the trees you can see on screen are one big 2D mesh with repeating UV coordinates, so pretty similar to your 2D islands. It can be drawn in one single draw call.

To change the texture on the fly, I use an ArrayImage and its Z coordinate. So different textures per mesh are possible. If you don't need mip mapping, you could use a texture atlas instead, which is a little faster.

The mesh you're looking at right now has 8,000 vertices and renders at 1400+ FPS on a really crappy GeForce GT 710 office GPU.

And in your case it should be even faster, because you don't have to stream vertices in real time, and you don't have to do costly perspective calculations every frame.

That sounds like it could work (if maybe a little complicated)! Would it let me do rotations on some of the physics islands like this? The game doesn't use a 'proper' pixelly style so it's kind of important.

question.png (75.39 KiB) Viewed 212515 times

Edit: Is there any examples to see this kind of thing in action?


Edit 2: Oh god I tried looking into this and this seems waaaaaaaaay beyond my skill level. If anyone could help me out with this, that would be greatly appreciated