Lys
@lystingdangerously.bsky.social
Game director at Eridanus Industries, and lead developer of NEBULOUS: Fleet Command
Well, I successfully got the enemy AI to stop focusing on the flagship. Caught some rockets in the process...
October 31, 2025 at 2:38 AM
Well, I successfully got the enemy AI to stop focusing on the flagship. Caught some rockets in the process...
Gazing into the abyss of my AI mission prioritization system. I started my day trying to diagnose a strange behavior with the enemy AI and instead ended up making this AI state viewer. #gamedev
October 31, 2025 at 1:44 AM
Gazing into the abyss of my AI mission prioritization system. I started my day trying to diagnose a strange behavior with the enemy AI and instead ended up making this AI state viewer. #gamedev
No one ever tells you how much math there is in gamedev. I just spent *all day* figuring out the correct formulas to remap the UVs for the socket's damage mask to the individual modules of the scalable VLS launchers. At least it finally works.
Just ignore that we haven't made new textures yet.
Just ignore that we haven't made new textures yet.
October 23, 2025 at 9:31 PM
No one ever tells you how much math there is in gamedev. I just spent *all day* figuring out the correct formulas to remap the UVs for the socket's damage mask to the individual modules of the scalable VLS launchers. At least it finally works.
Just ignore that we haven't made new textures yet.
Just ignore that we haven't made new textures yet.
Still in there, 5 years later. Still don't really know why...
October 20, 2025 at 2:37 AM
Still in there, 5 years later. Still don't really know why...
The funny part is that the barrel needs to be squished to fit inside the mount space. I guess we'll see how this works for turrets with more significant barrel overhang, like the 450s...
October 14, 2025 at 7:56 PM
The funny part is that the barrel needs to be squished to fit inside the mount space. I guess we'll see how this works for turrets with more significant barrel overhang, like the 450s...
The most annoying part was accounting for the fact that smaller components fit in larger sockets, so the UVs stored in the socket need to be scaled accordingly. Here you can see the gray box takes up more space than the turret base. That took a little bit of napkin math but it worked in the end.
October 14, 2025 at 7:56 PM
The most annoying part was accounting for the fact that smaller components fit in larger sockets, so the UVs stored in the socket need to be scaled accordingly. Here you can see the gray box takes up more space than the turret base. That took a little bit of napkin math but it worked in the end.
Time for some more #gamedev #techart: Damage effects from the hull being mapped onto the turrets! Using the alternate UV map hack we came up with for the engine damage decals we can now make damage appear on components mounted on the hull as long as their material has the correct properties.
October 14, 2025 at 7:56 PM
After a whole season of harvesting and freezing tomatoes from our garden, it's finally time to make and jar some sauce. This pot is like 15 or 18 quarts and it barely fit half of them.
October 12, 2025 at 7:49 PM
After a whole season of harvesting and freezing tomatoes from our garden, it's finally time to make and jar some sauce. This pot is like 15 or 18 quarts and it barely fit half of them.
The engine bells are projected flat on the UV2 map, down onto the surface that contains them. This allows us to sample the same damage mask from the hull under each point on the bell, and doesn't require another hull segment with its own mask. This works for the small maneuvering thrusters too.
October 4, 2025 at 3:01 PM
The engine bells are projected flat on the UV2 map, down onto the surface that contains them. This allows us to sample the same damage mask from the hull under each point on the bell, and doesn't require another hull segment with its own mask. This works for the small maneuvering thrusters too.
More #gamedev tools for our singleplayer campaign: In order to balance the ammo economy, one must understand the ammo economy. We're about to start testing the third (of four) zones in the campaign, and testers were reporting how they were starting the feel the resource strain by the end of zone 2.
September 5, 2025 at 3:53 PM
More #gamedev tools for our singleplayer campaign: In order to balance the ammo economy, one must understand the ammo economy. We're about to start testing the third (of four) zones in the campaign, and testers were reporting how they were starting the feel the resource strain by the end of zone 2.
There's nothing quite like wasting an hour debugging a simple issue to make you spend the rest of your evening (and the next morning) making an in-game visual debugging viewer for your homebrew campaign scripting system so you can see the values being passed around in real time. #gamedev
August 23, 2025 at 3:50 PM
There's nothing quite like wasting an hour debugging a simple issue to make you spend the rest of your evening (and the next morning) making an in-game visual debugging viewer for your homebrew campaign scripting system so you can see the values being passed around in real time. #gamedev
Last night was my real playthrough of the first 8 missions of my campaign, and despite knowing everything that was going to happen and constantly stopping to fix bugs I actually enjoyed playing my own game for the first time in years. It helped me remember why I got into #gamedev in the first place.
August 11, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Last night was my real playthrough of the first 8 missions of my campaign, and despite knowing everything that was going to happen and constantly stopping to fix bugs I actually enjoyed playing my own game for the first time in years. It helped me remember why I got into #gamedev in the first place.
Maybe we should plant less cucumbers next season...
July 30, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Maybe we should plant less cucumbers next season...
This allows me to know how each texel is facing relative to the hit's normal and fade the brush appropriately. Now large explosions like reactor blooms won't toast the whole ship, only the side facing the explosion.
July 14, 2025 at 3:24 PM
This allows me to know how each texel is facing relative to the hit's normal and fade the brush appropriately. Now large explosions like reactor blooms won't toast the whole ship, only the side facing the explosion.
Another cool thing is that I can add another new map, which maps the UV coordinate to the model-space normal. Common normal maps for materials only represent perturbations from the vertex normal interpolated across the triangle, and can't be used for this.
July 14, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Another cool thing is that I can add another new map, which maps the UV coordinate to the model-space normal. Common normal maps for materials only represent perturbations from the vertex normal interpolated across the triangle, and can't be used for this.
The key ingredient of the system is a new map texture which maps each UV coordinate to the texel's position in model-space. This allows me to send hits to the compute shader as a 3D position rather than a UV coordinate, allowing me to calculate every texel's relationship to the hit.
July 14, 2025 at 3:24 PM
The key ingredient of the system is a new map texture which maps each UV coordinate to the texel's position in model-space. This allows me to send hits to the compute shader as a 3D position rather than a UV coordinate, allowing me to calculate every texel's relationship to the hit.
These always really bothered me, and I really didn't want the game to have such ugly artifacts in the campaign release, so I spent the last few days rewriting the system. I call the new system "Model-Space Damage Mapping", or MSDM. Damage can now be applied seamlessly, even across multiple meshes.
July 14, 2025 at 3:24 PM
These always really bothered me, and I really didn't want the game to have such ugly artifacts in the campaign release, so I spent the last few days rewriting the system. I call the new system "Model-Space Damage Mapping", or MSDM. Damage can now be applied seamlessly, even across multiple meshes.
I wrote the original NEBULOUS armor system in early 2021. It would sample the UV at the hit location and apply a damage brush to a mask. Obviously this could overlap faces on the other side of the ship, if nearby on the UV, and created ugly cutoffs/seams. It was very naive but it worked OK I guess.
July 14, 2025 at 3:24 PM
I wrote the original NEBULOUS armor system in early 2021. It would sample the UV at the hit location and apply a damage brush to a mask. Obviously this could overlap faces on the other side of the ship, if nearby on the UV, and created ugly cutoffs/seams. It was very naive but it worked OK I guess.