kyle

kyle

@kyle-making-stuff.bsky.social

Hi, I’m making a game called Filamentum. Check it out at https://filamentum.space/

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While I was trying to convince myself to get out of bed this morning, I pictured a honey badger wearing bright red booty shorts and a hoodie with the drawstrings pulled tight just absolutely destroying a huge snake. I don’t know why.

Alright, I need help from fellow #space #game lovers. Two screenshots here of the same galaxy tuned differently. Which one looks better and why did you pick that one? #gamedev #indiedev #filamentum

I’m also using the dust as a sight-line management mechanism, since the galaxy is tiny by galaxy standards and star apparent brightness falloff is skewed. The galaxy is composed of scalar field functions for star density, dust, gas, and temperature. Metallicity is derived from dust/gas. Systems

are generated according to the values of those fields at their locations. I’m applying some extra modifications to metallicity to make for more interesting exploration, too. Those fields are evaluated as needed, so infinite resolution.

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won’t be visitable because your fictional FTL drive can’t lock on to them. This keeps the set of stars you can actually visit in a reasonable range for a game. The dust is far thicker than it should be. This is mostly a resolution constraint - it’s a 256x44x256 volumetric texture in the shipped

game. If I made it more proportional, you start seeing the aliasing. Better GPUs could render it analytically to infinite resolution, but I’m trying to keep the game accessible, especially in a world where few can afford to upgrade.

On the off-chance any actual astronomers find this: The galaxy is approximately 7,000ly in diameter and only contains about 50,000 stars at G-class or above. I’ve taken a lot of liberties to make the sky from inside the galaxy look “right” given those constraints. In the game, M and K class stars

I really like this shot of galactic dust, too. It shows a lot of the systems I've been working on playing together really nicely. #filamentum #gamedev #space #indiedev

Love it when a good algorithm comes together. This is just a debug view, but this algorithm now works on an entire planet on the fly, producing plausible erosion artifacts in real-time on normal PC hardware. (the rivers need work, of course.) #terrain #gamedev #indiedev #filamentum #space #game

I #make other stuff too. Here’s a tiny step stool I made for my kid so she can reach the bathroom sink and we can get the giant step stool out of the tiny bathroom. Made it out of white oak scraps from another project! #woodworking

Made a quick test harness for my #terrain #development, then spent a little too long making it pretty. No regrets. Gotta fix those weird spikes though. #gamedev #indiedev #space #game #filamentum

Oh hey, I forgot about social media again. Anyway, here’s my planet. It has plate tectonics, erosion, a climate model, ocean currents, wind, etc. Oh, and if you go digging you’ll find geologically mostly-correct rock strata. #gamedev #space #game #filamentum

Does anyone read long-form blog style posts about #gamedev anymore? I was thinking about starting one about my space game but I’m skeptical that anyone would read it.

Working on improving the look of the gas giants in my #space #game. Fixing up the terminator line and adding backscatter really did a lot. #gamedev #indiedev #astronomy

I switched to realistic scaling in my #space #game and then found this M-class star with huge gas giants orbiting closely. It made for a really dramatic shot. Kind of in disbelief that I made this! #gamedev #indiedev

Starting to be able to make interesting shapes now. The cool part is that since it's all in-engine, I could store the cage mesh rather than the final mesh. Detailing can be built out of explicit features rather than baked into the mesh. #indiedev #gamedev #space #scalarfield

Did I really need to recreate Blender in my game engine? No, probably not. But it's pretty cool. Maybe you can see where this is going... #gamedev #indiedev #space #game

Playing around with a starship drive plume effect. It's not really based on real physics or anything, but it's meant to invoke feelings of magnetically contained fusion...? #space #gamedev #physics #vfx

Kinda forgot about bsky there for a minute but my game engine has a full custom physics engine now. I don't know why I'm not just using bullet, but this has been fun. At least it's a tight integration with the engine... #gamedev #space #physics

Just basic shadow volumes, a super old technique. But it's a unique situation (one light source, only spherical shadow casters) so it's a cheap way to boost fidelity a *lot*.

I've been hard at work on the space game. Planet generation isn't quite there yet, but the progress is fun. #proceduralgeneration #gamedev #space #galaxy #planets

Great progress today. You can now focus on an individual star, and see it in detail. When you're focused on a star, the galaxy gets rendered to a cubemap and used as a skybox. Totally seamless. Next up is a nice corona effect on the stars... #gamedev #space #proceduralgeneration

Problems: - compositing doesn't really work; dust behind it is obscuring it - didn't finish the accretion disk so it looks funky - the actual black hole part isn't even black lol - needs a photon sphere - flickery cuz the raymarching is crude

Solutions: - just incorporate it into the galaxy raymarching shader tbh - finish the accretion disk, give it some color, some noise details - render an opaque black unlit sphere there - do the thing (give it a photon sphere) - probably would be fixed by incorporating it into the galaxy raymarching