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Throw a wrench, change the galaxy.
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Mostly nebulae.
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Windows, dunno about others
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Design, Code, Writing
Art
Code
John Winder
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Chris Harvey
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Tom Francis
John Roberts
Galactic Zoom In Heat Signature
Heat Signature’s universe has been infinite since day 2 or 3, but until now you’ve only been able to see a meager 35,000 x 35,000 pixels of it at once. I knew at some point I wanted to let you see an overview of the part of space you’re in, a collection of vast gas clouds that I think is going to be called The Grove. But I wasn’t sure if this would have be a map mode or if we could zoom smoothly from one to the other. I’m still not sure if the latter is viable performance-wise, or even if it’s the right way to go, and the galaxy is ugly at the moment, but for what it’s worth I made it and here it is: (CPU warning, mega-GFY!)
I tweeted about how I approached this as I went, here are those tweets:
Today I try Galactic Zoom!
Attempt 1: make the room vast.
Failure: room size only goes up to 1 trillion pixels.
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
Attempt 2: change relative movement code to draw everything smaller and closer to the center for 'virtual zoom'.
Aborted: too much work.
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
Attempt 3: just delete the bit of code I wrote that stops you zooming out further than the room size.
Success!
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
Game dev lesson: always give up at the slightest sign of difficult work.
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
Also the answer was inside you all along. Because you wrote the code that's pointlessly screwing you.
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
Looks like the inhabited part of @HeatSig's universe will only need to be about 121 trillion pixels, and we can zoom as far as 5 quadrillion
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
Gonna cheerily ignore the occasional dips to 15 fps during the zooming process.
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
The flipside of "Everything takes longer than you think" in game development is that almost everything *adds* more than you think too.
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
I knew zooming out further would feel cool, but now that I have some of it in place I'm starting to realise how awesome it's going to be.
— Heat Signature (@HeatSig) April 11, 2015
I also added actual heat signatures for the first time!
More Heat Signature
Shaddap:
Awesome!
Mark:
“Title Finally Relevant”?
Alec Downing:
Hope this feature stays, really shows the vastness of the game. Also, very much like the name “The Grove”.
George:
Looks fantastic! And I agree that “The Grove” is a great name that will give me pleasant GTA: San Andreas flashbacks.
Zekiel:
Looks lovely!
TeaDrinker:
I would say that having heat signatures should be an unlockable thing, not present from the start. This way there could be an actual “Title Finally Relevant” achievement.
Bric3d:
It’s looking quite amazing !