Hello all! As you may have noticed, this is not my normal blog post website, that is because I finally made my own blog website! :D
Now this is still an alpha project, there are serious bugs and issues that need to be addressed before moving into beta. Me being impatient as I always am, I decided to start running the alphas on production both to get back to blogging, and to test my service.
Now that it is in a state that it can realistically be used, I can happily get back to blogging here :).
⮺ Yet Another Blog
That's where you are now! My blog uses my own in-house blogging solution as mentioned before, but I intend on making it widely available for all users. For now it is still hyper focused on personal blogs, soon I will make it to where bigger projects or teams can work on a single instance.
As I have been devoting monumenous amounts of time into this, I also felt like I wanted a break from only YAB.
Unfortunately I do not have any in-dev pictures of YAB, but since the project is open source, you can just go to a version you want to see and build it yourself.
⮺ Resonite
Yep, it's here. Neos 2! I could go on and on about Resonite, but I will just keep it mostly short. Resonite is Neos, except with a few key changes. None of those changes matter a whole lot to me and my gripes from both Neos and Resonite. Resonite is still massively single threaded and preforms absolutely abysmally on anything. For context. I have a balling system rocking a RTX 3090, AMD RX 6800 XT, etc, etc, and I get consistent 30 fps if anybody but me is in a world. Resonite also has a lot of worrying things in their TOS, so that's also a thing.
⮺ Launch
I am very unhappy with the launch as well. They seemingly launched Resonite in a massive rush ignoring obvious issues like a non-existent wiki,garbage tutorial world, unfulfilled Patreon rewards (which has been since rectified to be fair), and horrible asset optimization in default worlds. Overall, poor but not dog-shit.
⮺ Tutorial World
Here is a side-by-side of our mock-up and our (almost) finished release.
The in-game tutorial world for Resonite was so awful, so terrible, that me and a friend decided to make our own tutorial world for Resonite. Originally my vision was to have the user play though a medium sized adventure-game that would walk the user though everything, but as me and my friend talked with each other about our 'wants' from the project, this was scrapped entirely. Our world that exists now is sort of a walking sim style tutorial that walks the user though basic things about Resonite. While it does lack a lot of what I would like to introduce to users, it is better than the nothing we officially have from Resonite.
⮺ Modding
Nope! Not Resonite modding, but Resonite world modding. I recently got into a crazy about modifying existing game worlds with my own contraptions. I was inspired by an existing zombie game to make my own weapons for it for S&G. Normally in game worlds the creators of it lock down so that you can not spawn anything in, however there are always dozens of ways to spawn things in worlds. Often times one or more methods of spawning is not patched out by the creator(s). This zombie game was one of them.
Essentially my process was to smuggle out a weapon the game gives you, reverse engineer it, and stick the core functionality onto other things and weapons, then smuggle those weapons back into the game. So far I have made a grenade for this world, and an overpowered minigun, where-as the world only gives you a pistol. As world owner can shut this down at anytime, so I don't feel bad about modifying existing work, or adding my own spin onto things. It's not like I'm affecting other people anyways.
Oh also, I had been curious about how the world creator managed to have a nav-mesh in their world. As I myself was working on a drop-in navigation mesh system I wanted to see how they did it. I did some exploration using a mobility tool I smuggled into the world, and just as luck would have it, an open scene inspector! Not only that, but opened on the ZombieAI too! It was like I won the lottery.
After observing what I could (the default roles the user spawns in with can not interact with the panel) I had made a revelation. There isn't a navigation mesh. dun dun duuuun I wanted to really find out what was going on with the zombies, since they obviously were not reliant on some kind of existing pathways in the world. I observed the zombie behaviors for an uncomfortably long time of ~2 minutes. Based on what I had seen, the zombies used a simple look at user component, while walking forward. When the zombie hits a wall (raycast, speed check, or otherwise) the zombie would slowly turn either to the right, or a random direction about 90 degrees while also moving forward. This slowness in rotation makes it so that the zombie can not get stuck easily on most of the obstacles in the world, but still makes it look genuine. I was really impressed with how they pulled it off as the creator was one of the main reasons I started working on my own nav-system.