(November 2024) Monthly WIP Screenshot Thread

Grenade Wall Destruction

I might add a debris particle effect to the wall when it disappears.

Promo Video

I’m trying to paste a newer video but their are not previewing.

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6 Likes

The current state of Unga Munga:

Still not fully happy with the interface design, but very happy with Gorilla Gui - my own Gui-system. The entire interface has now been migrated to Gorilla and making new custom controls is very easy. Note the brain visualization on the right: I have lines that vary in width now! The width indicates the weight of the neural connection.

In bottom right corner you see a bar chart that shows the top 10 of all species. Species is a concept in NEAT that allows the NEAT algorithm to try out different evolutionary solution for the given problem. This bar chart shows that there is indeed evolution going on - meaning that the concept for this game is working! Happy with that too.

In the bottom left corner you see the fitness criteria. The criteria are expressed in a sentence of pictograms: you can specify an action or a result, objects and a location. In the video the criterium is ‘move away from home’ (not all icons are correct in the video, that is a bug.) In the video you see just a single criterium, but you can specify up to five different criteria.

This month I think I will expand the number of actions the little guys can do, implement objects and tools they can use and expand the interface with more windows that will help you find out what is going on.

16 Likes

Adding complexity to the animation and movement on the server side. Picking tiles does not make them child nodes to animate but I use parent/child components on the entities and some math to handle hierarchies server side. To the clients, the tiles are all in world space.

Perhaps I over-engineered again, but I like the result :slight_smile:

11 Likes

Heavy rain along with the misty weather

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If you can add this `

` as an effect to the camera
It will be great

2 Likes

Ah, yes… the age of sword. Well known for its cameras…

Hey @Arifolth ,

The particle effect looks good. One thing to consider is that rain effects can sometimes appear unnatural when a character moves if they’re not set up correctly. In the video, the character is stationary while the camera rotates around it. It would be helpful to see how the effect behaves when the character moves around the game world, such as running forward/backward or left/right.

By the way, did you use a large sphere attached to the root node as the source of the particle emission? This approach consumes a lot of resources because it requires a large area of effect and a large number of particles. Usually the rain/snow particle effect follows the character node.

1 Like

Hey @Capdavon,
Following video demonstrates how the rain looks like while the player character is moving

Speaking of implementation details, I’m using a sphere, that is true, with the radius just enough to cover surroundings near the player.
It is initially attached to the root node, but when it is raining, sphere Local Translation is adjusted to player Node location, so it is kinda following player. No performance penalty this way.

3 Likes

Hey @carpenter,
As I understand, there is currently no GLSL shader for jme3 that you are talking about available as a library, so it will have to be developed from scratch.
While I like the idea, it seems quite complex to me, so I would rather spend my time on something more Java-related at the moment, so I would have more outcome. Personally, I find GLSL stuff to be the hardest to learn.

Those shaders from ShaderToys (https://www.shadertoy.com/) work almost directly on jME. Just little tweaks needed.

3 Likes

Yes, just need to take a note about the rendering pipeline and providing built-in functions and variables such as

void mainImage( out vec4 fragColor, in vec2 fragCoord )
fragCoord
iTime
iResolution

built-in functions like texture`, `noise`, and `smoothstep
And this is very good tutorial series and easy to follow

2 Likes

Yes, you can focus on mastering the engine, but believe me, you’ll reach a point when you want to beautify the scene rendering. Even though I’m not great at programming, I’ve experimented with creating shaders, especially stylized ones, and learned a lot by studying from simple Unity or Godot shader tutorials on youtube
If I did it you also can do it

2 Likes

@carpenter, @tonihele thank you for explanations.
You have totally convinced me to look into shaders.

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Good luck :slight_smile: They are difficult to start with but rewarding. I started my journey very similar to you, I was showcasing something entirely different and then got feedback that why I’m using Java’s 2D libraries to manipulate images when I have a 3D engine and shaders at my disposal… Saddened and in anger I spent two days writing this stupid shader… It was magnificent, it worked, it was fast… Stupid smart people and their feedback, why do they always have to be right :frowning:

5 Likes

Hi all,
I am working on writing a simple editor with java Swing. The main motivation is the absence of a proper tool to display/edit the Parameters, Textures & Colors of Materials of 3D objects at runtime. In my opinion, this lack makes it very difficult to detect bugs in the model loading tools and libraries. I’ve taken on @jayfella’s unfinished project and am steadily working to complete, improve, and enhance each component. My primary focus is on making the code more maintainable, clear, and straightforward. The completion and release of the project also depends on your help.

In parallel I am considering writing a template to expand the functionality of the SDK by integrating JFrame with custom Buttons and Input Fields, into the 3D scene visualization process, taking advantage of the ability to inject Controls, AppStates and Filters, without modifying the SDK source code.

You can see a preview of the result here

As far as I know, only 2 people in the community are able to maintain and update the SDK due to the steep learning curve of NetBeans libraries and this makes it unpopular discouraging possible contributors. Not surprisingly, many people like me preferred to write their own editor from scratch. I would suggest writing a guide and creating a video on how to compile/build/test/run the SDK if it does not already exist, before that knowledge is lost.

10 Likes

I hope you don’t count me as one of the people who understands Netbeans libraries :smiley: Since I do not. It is just code, like everything else. When I have to touch it, I can do it fairly easily as it is documented (to an extend…) and it is just Java.

To build, test, etc. the SDK, you can refer to this:

In short:

  • Fork/download the sources
  • ./gradlew run (gradlew.bat run on Windows)
3 Likes

I haven’t posted in a very long time.
I have started to cleanup my editor for an alpha release which I want to make available soon.
I resonantly started to add some build in models for the editor.
Here you can see some fish which are available to drag and drop in:

14 Likes

After a long halt im finally back on track working on the first boss of the game (crawling towards the demo):

decided it’d fit the hack’n’slash roguelike fantasy if bosses had insane design, e.g this guy wields a chainsaw-shotgun

9 Likes

Sneak peek into my next youtube upload. :shushing_face: :wink:

How is it related to jmonkey?
It’s used as promo for my jmonkey content.
The skills learned are DIRECTLY implemented into my jmonkey content.

The content will exercise fair use. I’m not affiliated to the IP shown above.

1 Like

It’s A ME! Pixelapp.

1 Like