GPU Particle System

In the last few days I have been working on the new particle system for the AIO game engine. It is now possible to draw hundreds of thousands of particles with little to no impact on the CPU.

The individual particle positions, scaling and color are kept in a buffer on the GPU, which makes it possible to transform individual particles as needed.

I’m really happy with this so far and looking forward to create some actual effects with it.

Game Engine

a couple of weeks ago i started to work on a custom game engine for AIO.
i decicded to uses the Silk.net graphics framework, which is basically a low level wrapper for OpenGL/Vulkan.

What is already working:

  • glTF support for model import
  • Texture import
  • Skybox rendering
  • Anti-Aliasing
  • PBR Shader

What I’m doing right now:

  • Line Renderer
  • Particle System

TODO:

  • UI
  • Planet Shader

The UI will be based on ImGUI because Silk.net natively supports it and is already working.
It will be a lot of work to port everything over, but i’m very positive to get this done in the next few weeks.

All the networking code is already in a seperate library and should be quite easy to integrate.

I have also moved all the game assets in a seperate repo to make it easier to switch between rendering engines.

Overall it is a huge time investment and certainly you can argue that it would be better for the game to just stick with unity, and i agree, but Unity’s recent actions in trying to change their licensing model are leaving me with not much room for choice here.

IIrreparable raid failure

I just got informed by our hosting provider that the raid system has failed and a restore is not possible. Since i just got everything up and running again, this is not optimal and i am very curious why they have a raid system in the first place if they fail to recover data from it.

I hope that everything is online and working again by tomorrow.

0.7.32a

  • Fixed some issues that caused the player’s ship to jitter while warping.
  • Fixed thrusters; they now stop on docking.
  • Fixed a bug where a player’s ship would not save correctly if equipped with a certain number of installed modules.
  • Fixed an issue where damage was ignored if the attacker disabled the module in the first cycle.
  • Implemented a market auction bidding system.
  • Market auctions now have durations of 1, 3, or 7 days.
  • Mission items and kills should now be counted correctly.
  • Some missions are now repeatable.
  • Added a new mission titled “Cargo Transport.”
  • Added a new station.
  • Mission Points of Interest (POIs) are now on the Galaxy Map.
  • Added a track button to the mission window, which shows the progress of the tracked mission on the HUD and indicates a route to the mission’s target solar system on the galaxy map.
  • You will no longer spawn at your home station if you have logged out at a different station; logging out while in space is now also possible.
  • Asteroids now have an explosion animation.
  • Items now have a colored frame that indicates the quality of the item.
  • Added a “Bulletin Board” to the station’s menu, where you can view and accept available missions.
  • The UI font has been changed.
  • Some new UI icons have been added.
  • Ship speed control is now reactive to mouse input.
  • The “Auto Attack” ability should now work correctly.
  • Removed the jump cost for Stargates.
  • Renamed and relocated various objects in space.
  • The talent reset button is now working; you can refund single talents by right-clicking them.
  • Added some HUD indicators for various states.
  • Thrusters now increase their volume based on speed instead of pitch.
  • Added/changed some sound effects and music tracks.
  • The combat music now fades in and out appropriately according to your combat state.
  • The overview now highlights closer objects.
  • After changing the screen resolution, the Galaxy Map now scales correctly.

0.7.13a

  • Fixed a bug that would show damage numbers multiple times
  • Fixed a corrupt asset which caused laser visuals to break
  • Special characters in account passwords are now possible

0.6.21a

  • Fixed collisions with invisible objects
  • Fixed a bug that caused asteroids to spawn at very far distances.
  • Fixed a bug that caused pirates to spawn at very far distances.
  • Added missing icons for various objects.