I have a few side accounts for roleplaying; feel free to reach out and interact with them: @PrincessNova@Sherbet@Clover
(Or just reach out if you're interested in my other characters I don't have accounts for, I guess?)
I have a private account for people I know well enough: @Maffi
Also check out https://novasquirrel.com/town/ which is my attempt at creating an open source roleplay/chat platform that's supposed to be like a modern, visual MU*; I'm on there pretty often.
It's open source and has a documented protocol, and is designed around the idea of collaboratively designing 2D maps with other players. You can use custom graphics for map tiles, and custom player graphics (if you can make a 32x32 doodle of a character, you can play as them!)
I've been working on it since 2017 so the software has had a lot of time to mature, but I've had a hard time helping it find its audience. If anyone knows how to reach people interested in lighthearted SFW furry #roleplay I'd really like to know. I'm also hoping to specifically establish fantasy themes if possible!
I think I'm realizing that it's actually really high priority to get this working well on phones and tablets! Luckily I already put in the effort to make it at least reasonably usable , but I didn't link to the touch UI version of the client anywhere since it's still a WIP experimental thing. I've fixed that now, but I'll definitely want to think about how I'd want to adapt the UI further.
Though even if I get the UI working great there's still the problem where phones don't necessarily keep web apps in open tabs running when the screen is off, which doesn't work too well with the whole model of a chat that deliberately does not maintain a history. Not sure what a good solution is here yet.
Tilemap Town is explicitly designed around the idea of presence being a meaningful thing, where if you're online you're likely actually there, and where you can chat and RP and have that be private to only the people who are actually present at a given moment. That means the obvious solution to a spotty connection (a server-side history) doesn't work.
I could probably build something where if you reconnect within a few minutes you can still see what happened in that time (as long as this is properly communicated) but I'm not sure if that's something people would want or benefit from.
Ideally I could just keep a connection open, but I'm not sure if that's something I can do without making an actual native app, which seems way out-of-scope unless it was simple like the 3DS client.
It's hard to tell what people need or want since I haven't really gotten feedback.
@syliph Yeah I was picturing something like that. That sounds like a pretty reasonable amount of time too? Like Pony Town doesn't even let you idle for more than 15 minutes normally.
🐭everyone we know in game dev circles is launching a kickstarter or has launched one and we got fomo......... I want money too!!!!! but we can't do a kickstarter x(
My fork has some cool features I haven't seen in other drivers yet, though TAD is supposed to get the main one I wanted (sound effects interrupting music channels) and just generally seems better designed?
I feel like the SNES's complexity gets exaggerated a lot (and having more features is generally actually a helpful thing) though audio does seem like one aspect where the #SNES does stick out.
Most other platforms are able to just directly play audio from the same large memory you run code from, but here you have to manage swapping stuff in and out if you have more audio related data than 64 KiB.
Though what SNES GSS and TAD do seems like a pretty reasonable way to handle it for most games, where you normally just keep samples and sound effects loaded during a whole game and only swap out the music sequence data.
@charlotte In this case the big difference is that the z80 in the Sega Genesis can access arbitrary portions of the game ROM all by itself, so you have the normal situation where you can just have as much audio data as you want and don't have to care too much.
I really want to see new mascot-focused media that's NOT horror. It really sucks to have the thing I'm most passionate about wrapped up in something uncomfortable more often than not.
Platformers are probably where I'm going to find the actually good sincere stuff, especially with the long history of platformer mascots that people still continue with sincerity, though it would be cool to see other genres too and things that aren't necessarily games
It's very cool that there's been My Little Pony roleplay on Second Life recently, but I wish it would stop getting scheduled in a way that overlaps major downtown events so I don't have to leave them early
Or the next one looks like it'll overlap some holiday related family stuff, which is less ideal (maybe I'll be able to hop on my laptop? mystery)
Maybe I should just ask if we can start having events that aren't consistently at 3 PM on Sunday
Okay the scheduling is specifically to make sure it's accessible to Europeans, which I can appreciate. I've been to lots of roleplay stuff where I felt like I couldn't properly participate because I'm in the Eastern time zone and I can't stay up to 3 AM when I've got work the next day.
I want to make game dev into a more social thing, but it's hard to find people wanting to talk about engine design and algorithms outside of an NES-specific context. Also a lot of people are very secretive anyway.
@slembcke I really like how your water wave simulation article invites you to go ahead and modify the code to see how it changes the result; that helps a lot with making it intuitive.
These are neat articles and I like seeing game dev stuff that's applicable to engineless games too. I didn't realize that custom allocators could help that much (though few of my projects have to take cache into account).
@slembcke It's a lot easier to just say I'm not using a game engine than to try to change what people think of when they hear "game engine"
If it now normally means a huge complicated codebase meant to support every kind of game, then my games definitely do not use one of those, and I definitely do not make those