(Click or tap to enlarge)
Hey! Who turned off the gravitational anomaly?!
The Magic Space Crystals, which had been mysteriously compressed into a thin plane until now, are now scattered throughout the stratosphere! It is possible that the gravitational field will return in some form, but it is likely to remain significantly weaker (or absent) in many areas.
On the technical side of things, this week has seen some major optimizations to the game. Firstly, I’m now using a much more efficient method of rendering the crystals, and this has simultaneously increased frame rate stability and decreased memory consumption.
I’ve also made some changes to the way that crystals are spawned and despawned. Some aspects of the system remain the same - distant crystals are either removed or relocated somewhere closer. However, I’m making the infrastructure more flexible, to allow greater variety of crystal distributions. Most significantly, I’ve changed when these tasks are performed.
In order to detect and manage out-of-range crystals, the game must examine each crystal individually, checking how close it is to the player, and removing or recycling it if appropriate. Whereas, this used to happen at the beginning of every physics tick, it now happens between frames. In other words, while the rendering thread is preparing and sending the frame’s drawing commands to the GPU, the logic thread is examining the proximity of the crystals to the player, and getting everything prepared for whenever computations begin for the next frame.
I also fixed a longstanding issue that was causing the Magic Space Orbs to physically interact with the ship in the moments before they were “collected”. This had been especially problematic when a large number of orbs pushed against the ship, obstructing it’s ability to turn or move.
Lastly the physics attributes and behaviors of the crystals have been reworked - they move and shatter a bit differently now. I hope you enjoy the effect. :)
Download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.
(Archived gamedev post from 2025-11-15)
| View the | previous gamedev post |
| Browse | all gamedev posts |
| View a | random gamedev post |
| Try | my video game demo |
| Follow and support my work | |
| Visit the | homepage |
Copyright © 1998-2025 Benjamin Flaming
All rights reserved.
This website does not use cookies.
Some 3rd-party music or video players
used here may set their own cookies.