DI MONTHLY #4: Distant Ambitions, Broken Dreams

Was it all for nothing?

We had plans, man. Big plans! But turns out, no matter how hard you try, you can't always get what you want.

Where Were We?

Some of you might be asking, where were we for the past three weeks?

So, Gamescom is coming up in a few weeks. For those who don't know, it's a big gaming convention held in Germany. Meanwhile, I live in Turkey. To be able to enter Germany, I need to acquire a special item called a “Schengen visa”, specifically because I'm Turkish.

I thought I had everything ready: official invitation letters from two European companies, a purchased exhibitor ticket, plane tickets, a hotel reservation… the works. So, I drove for six hours in a car with a broken AC in 42°C weather, and confidently handed the necessary items to the embassy.

It got rejected.

And no, it wasn't because I fucked up the application or anything. See, apparently, they believe that I was secretly planning to abandon game development to become an illegal kebab spinner in Cologne, and not come back to Turkey. That sounds ridiculous, because it kind of is, but the specifics they provided make a bit more sense.

1. I lack family ties in Turkey. I have a pair of borderline elderly parents, but the embassy argues that I should've had a wife and kids as well to have “stronger ties” to my home country. Ouch.
2. I lack a stable job in Turkey. I'm a freelancer who takes on contract work from foreign companies, and sometimes releases games on his own. Fair enough.
3. I lack financial ties to Turkey. Their only example was that I don't own a property here I'm renting out and earning from, which, I mean… yeah? How common is it to be a landlord, anyway? Do I really have to become what I despise the most, just so I can travel for work?
4. My previous Schengen visa wasn't actually used, despite actually getting it. Yeah, when I applied for the visa in 2019, it was given to me for mid-2020. I'll give you one guess as to what global event might have interfered with those travel plans.

So, the verdict is in: my intentions are deemed “dishonest”, and my Gamescom trip is cancelled. I'm not going to lie, it's a huge bummer. I was really looking forward to meeting people, making connections, and whatnot. It's one of the worst feelings to have to bail because of something so completely out of my control, but it's even worse to let the people who relied on me down.

Damn, That Sounds Rough

On top of the visa saga, a conga line of other bullshit decided to show up at my door, demanding my immediate attention. I'm talking about stuff like having to get immediate health tests done, only for the hospital to mess that shit up and leaving it to me to fix it by driving even more under the brutal heat. Wow, great!

In the end, our routine and most of our plans ended up being disturbed by all this chaos. Like, I had to stop posting on the blog, or even on the Discord, simply because I didn't have the time! Heck, for the next month's newsletter, I also had plans to make it into a travel log instead of a traditional newsletter, but now that's all been thrown out too.

For those who were looking forward to meeting me (like the folks at GameMaker) I'm sorry. Maybe at next year's Gamescom. Maybe at some other convention, like BitSummit. We will see.

Radium?

While I was busy with all the stupid bureaucracy bullshit, Cato was busy with our bespoke game engine, Radium, as it's shaping up to be a really nice little thing! In fact, I got him right here to ramble about what he's been up to.

Radiation Hazard

Hello. It's me, permanent guest columnist Catonator. Mors has asked me to write about Radium here. Because… Well, he doesn't have a lot to showcase at the moment. Except for The Device, but the effects of that will become apparent to everyone very soon. The day of reckoning is almost upon us.

Honestly, the engine has been making pretty good progress as of recent (if I do say so myself), and I've really been itching to autistically dump all my stupid tricks and technical bits onto you, dear unsuspecting faceless audience.

First off, I want to show you Markuplayer. My proudest achievement yet. Well, not really, but I think it's pretty cool for something I wrote in 2 days.

object root =
{
    int biteof = 87;
};

Markuplayer is not a YouTuber, and is instead a custom markup language used for our engine. It can be saved as text and binary, and is used for a bunch of editor files already. It may also end up being used for files in-engine, if a need arises.

JSON isn't always the best choice for a markup language. The language's standard is quite limited, and a lot of types we needed to save (say, 64-bit unsigned integers for example) needed to be stored as strings. Strings in C++ aren't exactly the nicest data structure to work with, so I wanted a more automated way of handling them. Secondly, JSON has no compressed binary format. It's always going to be a string, unless you write your own custom extension to the format. Which, you know, I did. Last and by far the worst, the JS in it stands for JavaScript. That's just horrific.

Audio tools in most engines suck. I've been abused by GameMaker for years by now (sorry, YoyoGames, I know we love each other but man is the audio system a nightmare), so for Radium I really wanted something as extensive as I need it to be, and that most of that adjustability comes from the tools, not the code.

So this is that. Most of the utilities to adjust the per-playback stuff is within the tool itself. The sounds themselves are called instruments, because, well, that's what they are. The sound system is built on top of a half-MIDI-half-tracker system that was intended to be used for sequenced music in the engine. It doesn't really work now, but maybe it will in the future…!

And finally, this is something that's still a bit of a work in progress. Games need a way to attach certain animation events to the animations, for stuff like particles, sounds and footsteps. This...requires a fairly extensive tool. This sucks. Tools development is a pain in the ass.

Nevertheless, there's a timeline for animation events that's bugged all to hell because the library isn't exactly full of excellent code. Third party additions, not even once. Now we can expertly time an ill-fitting fart noise to be played during the walk animation without needing to fumble about with code.

Anyway, I think that's it. I've been sitting on a bunch of topics related to the engine for months, trying to write up more extensive posts about them, and they all turn out to be shit. I think I might try to just write more surface level stuff from now on. If there's any specific questions you have related to game engines, please tag me on Bluesky and write a lengthy skeet berating me for not talking about your programming paradigm of choice and how it relates to the inner workings of the game engine. In all caps.

The Operius DX Mercy Patch

We've been watching you play. Yes, all of you. And we've noticed a recurring theme: Damn you guys are bad at this game.

See, while a part of me liked seeing you all suffer, the other, more responsible part, decided to throw you a bone. A new update is rolling out for Steam and itch.io around the August 8th or so, fixing a single tiny bug, and tweaking the balance of the game to be a little less brutal. Not significantly easier mind you, the game is still more challenging than the original, but a bit more forgiving as a whole (especially in the Switcher mode). Now get back in there, champ!

And no, don't ask when it's coming to Switch. We're not sure yet. Don't get surprised if it takes a month or two.

The Blog Gets an Upgrade

Despite being pretty busy last month, I managed to rework the blog a bit too.

The original idea with the news section was that instead of posting directly on social media, we would post there, and it'd automatically get crossposted to social media. The problem is that social media APIs are a pain in the ass. X's, for example, is completely incomprehensible, and probably not even free. Mastodon's is pretty straightforward, but the issue is that nobody really uses Mastodon. And Bluesky's sits somewhere in the middle.

Most of the code for that section was lazily duplicated from the blog as well. There's a core principle in programming that says “don't repeat yourself”, and with the news section we were going completely against that. I blame Cato for this.

So, here's what we're doing now: The old news section is gone. Instead, the new news section is an extension of the blog, with more longform posts, including these newsletters.

On top of that, we're also adding a new section called "Technical Posts", where we'll be writing about the inner workings of our games, Radium, and the like. You know, kind of like that one post we wrote about Operius DX's renderer, or Cato's brief above about his progress on Radium, but a bit more in-depth.

And the last section is called "Everything Else", where we'll be posting about anything and everything else, as usual. Don't expect any consistency, because you won't find any of that there, for better or worse.

What about the forum? Shhh, it's fine. Don't worry about it. It'll be okay.

Wiki...pedia???

This is completely unrelated, but apparently one of our past fan projects got a Wikipedia page??? If you're a massive Mors-head, then you know which one I'm talking about.

In the middle of all these constant setbacks, that was one thing that actually made me happy. You know, something I made 5 years ago is still resonating with people, still getting attention… And now it's deemed notable enough to be on Wikipedia? That's a massive honor. Thank you all.

Man, this is why I love making games. It makes all this constant barrage of bullshit I'm dealing with worth it.

The End

That's all I got for now. A bit more negative than usual, but eh, sometimes things just don't go as planned. Regardless, we're already focused on what's next, and we'll be back next month with more to share.

You know what they say: if all fails, you can always rely on Cato to deliver.

Distant Illusions out.

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