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off-road autonomous robot by @leila | Stardance
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leila
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[{"post_id": 79978, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 79978, "ts": "2026-08-13T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "ok so from here on we just started placing the robots at different places trying to show what they could do if the washboard didnt always destroy their runs Exhibition 1: Team Big Fish and THE HILL … for our first exhibition, the other team set up the robot before the hill and took some stabs and speeding their way over it. in the end, none of the attempts made it, but i have video of the third one where they got so close that one of the wheels drove onto the other side of the hill and kept the robot there, until their driver let go of the throttle and let it down. it was super cool!! Exhibition 2: Team 10 and THE HOOK finally it was time for my teammates magnum opus of the past two weeks to be revealed and truly tested, and that of course was THE CLIMB!!!! and by the climb i mean a big pink plastic hook on the end of a measuring tape roll taken out of its case that we lovingly call “the bomb” (because it WILL explode if not handled properly). like i said a while ago though, the climb didnt have enough force to pull up the robot, but thats fine! theres still partial points for hooking, so all this exhibition really was was the hook rising at an almost comedically slow pace, before i carefully drove the robot over to the bar (as to not fold over the tape from the velocity) and gingerly brought the hook down on it. and everybody clapped! Exhibition 3: Team Big Fish and THE DUNK aka they used their shooter. it was super cool actually! they have a whole system with conveyor belt squeezing balls forward from above a slanted metal sheet, with flywheels at the end that can block balls for storage purposes until the gate is opened and the conveyor belts are forwarded to shoot them! it was suprisingly good and consistent, shooting from behind the second-to-last line. i wish we could do that… its okay they dont have a climb so we’re better and that was pretty much it! this experience has been so incredibly helpful for my learning and for me in general, and it really was(😢) one of the most fun times of my life. i dont even think i could near catalogue how much fun i had and how many things i learned. i really cant put it into words. thank you lucas, carlos, jade, maanya, patrick, alfonso, and trina for making this what it was, and of course thank you big zrl for sponsoring my attendance. if you’re reviewing this project, i recommend looking at devlogs further down if you’re missing context. the photos should hopefully help see the progression as well (if i can get those uploaded…) i leave you with 3 photos: the state of the robot right before i turned it off for the last time, the absolute state of our whiteboard after we used for brainstorming, and a last minute photo of the hallway i knew i would never walk again. happy hack clubbing!"}, {"post_id": 79977, "ts": "2026-08-12T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "ladies, gentlemen, and my beautiful enbies * ITS TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *(ok so i admit this entry was written days later cause i had to go to school next day so my memory is foggy but! its still cool :3) basically the first half of the day (before everyone came in) was spent finalizing somethings we’d waved off earlier, like cable management and wiring in general, especially the motor wires were dangerously close to the suspension rods and a bunch of other things like that power and attaching the battery, since we really needed to keep the batteries charged properly to prevent the pi being underpowered and the battery needed to be held on with something a little less flimsy than straight up velcro 😭 THE GOD DAMN SET SCREWS HOLY TUNA THESE THINGS WILL NOT STAY TIGHT NO MATTER WHAT WE ARE NEVER GOING UP THAT HILL AGAIN ISTG (subtle foreshadowing) keeping the kill switch always accessible from the top and attaching it with a little more than tape and prayers making sure the wheels are attached properly and wont jut out weirdly as it has in the past, throwing the driving off balance as it getting the climb to actually work which is lowk a lost cause but we ball praying theres something we can do about the intake situation 😭🙏 among much more of course, the time eventually came when people started arriving (like alfonso, shoutout my goat) including a whole lot of parents. we started by showing them our robots as we made some final tweaks, like making sure the pi wouldnt fall off of our beautiful, incredibly complex attachment scheme (velcro mounting strips) until it finally happened… COMPETITION START‼️ so the way this ended up going is that each team alternated runs, usually getting progressively further (keyword usually …) Run 1: Team Big Fish (not us) their first run didn’t go too bad!! their ball intake was suprisingly functional (and by suprisingly i mean at all) (better than us tho) and they were almost able to get around the cones autonomously without hitting one! however, when it came to the washboard, it didnt really work out… their bot very quickly got stuck on a pipe and was ill equipped to unstuck itself, ending the first run. Run 2: Team 10 (US!!!!!!!!‼️!!!!!) also not too bad somehow!!!!!!!!!! of course there was no ball intake so we just drove over them, but we were able to slowly but surely get past the slalom with wide margins and very very slow turns in place. as for the washboard though, our run wasnt much better… i took the robot off of the ramp at the start rather fast, making sure to turn up the throttle limit in the hopes it would get us over a few obstacles. spoiler alert: it didnt. we pretty quickly just crashed into a full cinder block, bending the sheet metal base and unsurprisingly making it hard to continue the run! but whatever it was not too bad for a first attempt Run 3: Team Big Fish this one was probably their best! the ball intake was great, and they were able to carry them all through a perfect no-hit slalom! unfortunately, a similar fate to last time met them at the washboard. third times the charm hopefully… Run 4: Team 10 although the robot was slightly banged up now, it was still totally good to go! this slalom attempt was not nearly as graceful, and that certainly applies to the washboard too: i turned up the throttle limit more on the ramp and really just sent it, only to get stuck on top of that cinderblock instead of past it. fun stuff!"}, {"post_id": 79976, "ts": "2026-08-11T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "and i call it frickmas cause THE COMPETITIONS TOMORROW OMG OMG OMG OMG OK SO here’s what on the agenda: making sure the set screws dont destroy themselves on the field getting the climb attached and making sure it maintains enough torque to actually pull the robot figuring out some sort of system for intake lining up all the suspension to prevent it from getting stuck, damaging the metal, or crapping out on the washboard section making sure the pi mount, buck converter, code, suspension actuation, and every other subsystem actually work testing!!! lots of testing of all of everything!!!!!!! for the first one, my partner had already spent so long on the set screws so some testing was all it took to see that they were fine, and that was enough cause they were not really going to get any better. my other partner finally got around to actually finishing up the climb and attaching it to the front of the bot. good news: it hooks! bad news: it doesn’t even remotely pull back! luckily, the rules still gove points for hook but no lift, so we decided to leave it there since his effort could be best spent elsewhere with this little time left the intake system was determined to be pretty much a dud by the end of the day, cause of course cardboard couldn’t really carry anything, and we didn’t have time to design something better since the last system fully failed lining up the suspension was pretty easy, just took a bit of manual adjustment and a good amount of testing on the field each of these were kind of annoying to address but i have a feeling itll be rather important at the end of the day (which is basically how long until handling all the wiring and subsystems took us) lastly for the testing, we just drove like a bunch of times! honestly the runs went like okayish ig, we rarely made it past the washboard and of course NEVER made it over the hill ever since we did it first a couple weeks ago. otherwise though, the robot was stable the entire time and didnt have any weird glitches or hardware malfunctions (thank god we taped down the battery this time) so we were good(ish) to go! below is basically what our final robot is gonna look like (minus the climb)"}, {"post_id": 79974, "ts": "2026-08-10T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "OKAY it is time to get down to business we do NOT have much time. first order of business was looking at the TPU wheels reflect printed! they had come in while i was gone, and compared to our flywheels they were actually suprisingly good (although they lowk had their heads blown shmoove off (the tops were weirdly disconnected and ripped off)). most of all, our wheels were much too stiff and theirs were relatively soft, so we decided to go with theirs. we’d also gotten metal parts back from lucas; unfortunately, lucas’ parts were cut kinda incorrectly and for whatever reason the machine shop didn’t make them!! so, i spent today primarily trying to figure out how to do intake while one partner was working on (OF COURSE) retightening and loctite-ing the set screws and the other partner was working on finishing/testing the climb with a smaller motor he bought online over my hiatus. and by figuring out the intake, i mean taping a cardboard box to the bottom of the robot and letting it flap down while desperately PRAYING that the balls go in. i was also driving around a bunch trying to figure out why the robot was still really struggling to take turns, especially on the foam. eventually i had the insight that the friction on the wheels was simply too much, and Lucas came up with the idea of wrapping tape around the wheels to reduce it!! after that it was insane how well it drove and took turns, especially off of the foam floor. i lowk drove it around for like 45 mins straight it was so insanely fun to see something we made acting like a real machine, cause it was driving at a quality i could actually expect in like a real product! it was so cool and gratifying :3 of course i forgot to get a picture of video of it, which i have a feeling im gonna regret…"}, {"post_id": 79971, "ts": "2026-08-04T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "okay so like i said last entry ill be leaving for three days, which means that i had to finish up some things today! i decided at this point that we were not going to able to mount a plate in the front for the intake (rip that idea and the whole bunch of filament we wasted on it 😭) so i spent the entire day pivoting on that idea and making the articulated suspension!!!! this was a really cool idea i talked with carlos about for like an hour, although we were thinking about only servos for suspension. this time around, i modified those servo mounts to place the head of of the edge of the main plate and used a bit of kevlar string Trina donated (ty Trina!) and tied it to the servo head and around the wheels hub. this means that when the servo is drawn up, the string pulls on the wheel, compresses the spring, and brings the robot down. for context, there is an 8 inch height requirement* that we had yet to succesfully get under. by that i mean the robot was like 11in. so, to get around that, these servo mounts could effectively deactivate the suspension at will, not only making driving more stable in the ball collection phase, but also actually getting under the height requirement! (since it was only a starting height requirement, we were allowed to expand after) anyways i made one mount, tested it, it didnt fully work, designed another and printed two of them, codexed while that was printing, tested one (it worked perfectly), printed 2 more, codexed the code for different states and positions for the servos and configuration stuff ofc, assembled the rest, tested all 4 of them out at the same time, actually tied good knots, and it was done by the end of the day!! im really proud of finishing this subsytem in one day before i left, it was suprisingly fun to see the robot dancing and doing pushups as it drove. and honestly, i think today really gave me that feeling of how incredible it is to see something like this just come to life, the way i feel when i make progress on a good coding project. i lowk want a 3d printer now… maybe that radish jam money could really come in handy……."}, {"post_id": 79970, "ts": "2026-08-03T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "i am gonna be gone wednesday, thursday, and friday this week due to my schools orientation happening right before CalTech’s WiSTEM (which i am indeed going to :3), both of which are on weekdays. thus, with the intake challenge pushed even further to this wednesday (marking a full week delay), i will need to spend some time getting our existing systems to a good place and helping my partners with whatever they need over today and tomorrow before im gone. that being said, we did very little locking in today (hence calling it the dawn) because we had both a speaker and a tour!! Will Heltsley, former VP of Propulsion of SpaceX and an insanely knowledgable engineer, talked to us about different engineering concepts and some strategies for finding a stable job and a community of like-minded nerds that are fun to work beside. i asked a few questions about working with teams (because this program has shown me that it’ll be a very valuable skill to learn), especially since Will has done everything from working on a 3-person team to managing a group of 350 engineers. he was really helpful!! we also got to tour another startup, Forge Atomics, and it was awesome to see the inner workings of a company that is just getting of the ground! they had a really cool concept and i loved their mission, which in talking to one of the co-founders (Rex the goat) i learned was one of the most important things in finding a team that is going to work well: your missions need to align. also i learned from both mentors that, unless you plan on doing something research heavy like quantum computing, you should NOT get a PhD. guess what i want to do!"}, {"post_id": 79969, "ts": "2026-07-31T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "okay this day was an experience fs. the start of the day was relatively normal, i was working a bit on ball detection while my partners assembled the intake/outtake thingy, and all of a sudden the pi turns off . this happened before when the power draw was low and peripherals were connected, so i just took out the camera and turned it on. yup, works fine. ok so lets plug the camera in while its on and it turns off . odd, looks like its probably some random bug or connection issue, so i just unplugged it, reseated it, and restarted the Pi. and it doesnt even turn on. ok, well theres another port. idk whats going on, but maybe thatll fix it? nothing. theres spare cables, lets try those ig? nope. ok what the hell the camera must be broken, so lets try a spare camera. doesnt turn on. ok what the actual ****???? lets try it on their robot and then theirs doesnt turn on either . at this point i am positively destroyed and fuming, luckily we have some very good food coming from a place nearby called the melt, so hopefully having a nice gooey cheesesteak can help me calm down, lock in, and figure out whats going on. big mistake. an hour passes. the adults have put on a movie, a fast and furious movie. you dont feel delirious, nor subdued, but simply off. its almost as if you are both more aware of your environment and slowly less aware of yourself. an hour passes. the car noises are still going. focus was a lost cause. one adult is stretching on the floor. the other is sitting at a table, still watching. you’re on the floor too. you’re not getting anything done. it was a lost cause anyways. an hour passes. carlos is sleeping on the slanted wooden plank of the hill. jade is lying on the floor and staring straight up. somehow your partner is locked in. the car noises continue. you are two inches away from meeting God, before you start laughing. shes laughing too, as well as your partner. presumably at carlos. sanity was a lost cause, and you lost it four and a half hours ago. cant believe its somehow 3:30. long story short, we slowly went insane with tokyo drift in the background as i pulled my hair out from the pi frying our cameras and the movie making it hard to focus, while one of my partners locked in to an unprecedented level, one just watched the movie casually, and the rest of us went crazy for no particular reason at all. this was a wild day (hence why im writing this the day after) never eating at the melt again bruh 😭"}, {"post_id": 79968, "ts": "2026-07-30T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "I FORGOT TO PUT THE PRINT PLATE IN THE PRINTER YESTERDAY GOD DAMN IT 😭😭😭😭😭 its fine. ok so today was generally pretty mundane BUT!!! WE DROVE UP THE HILL LITERALLY ONCE!!!!! just on a whim my partner decided to go full power up the hill after my other partner had just loctited every set screw to see if we could make it, and we did!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! …….unfortunately……… nobody filmed it…………………………….. -# god damn it…………………………. it was really cool though! i think it represents that we’re really nearing a functionally useful robot and that were actually overcoming the challenges that have plagued us for like weeks anyways heres a picture of our bot looking super duper cool"}, {"post_id": 79967, "ts": "2026-07-29T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "so my GOATED teammate whose shall not be named figured out the TPU problem: the printer just wasnt strong enough to feed it in! i honestly have some doubt that that was THE problem, considering how easy the solution is (just unspool a bunch of filament onto the ground), but whatever we ball‼️ anyways the first third of today was spent working on that servo mount and arms CAD file i mentioned before as my partners finished up cutting the shafts and legs for the new tensioners. i also got the tensioners printed, but that was pretty quick since its just a few ~1x0.5” pieces the second third was spent doing the assembly for all the pieces, since we had to take apart each leg completely, and then go down the assembly line to put it together. i was responsible for putting on the tensioners and then the motors with these really handy alligator clips Carlos graciously gave us that allowed me to get short screws into holes that were far into the leg. then, once the motor is attached, my partner would attach the wheel and get the belt on there. i think he used some like dark magic cause the belt was really hard to get on before it was tensioned, idek how he did it now… my other partner would then put on the insert, bearings, and shaft for attaching the leg to the chassis. once we were done, we all spent some time getting the legs on the chassis but we didnt finish. i rushed to start the flywheel TPU print we designed a while ago before we left and spent the rest of the day on… THE SPACE X TOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! we got to go to spacex and have a little tour with one of patricks friends!!!!!!!!!! it was really really really cool, the facility was huge and we such a bunch of fuel tanks, satellites, an engine actively being built, and a phased antenna array. that last thing nerdsniped me so hard, and because Simon (one of our “tour guides”) was an engineer that worked on the Starlink user terminals (which also had the same type of antenna array as the Starlink satellites) i was able to ask a bunch of questions about it. apparently, they both have a bunch of antenna put together and arranged such that, by controlling the phase of the signal coming through each of the ~50 antennae, can focus on a narrow beam of EMF waves and effectively filter out signal to only a specific Starlink satellite in the sky. super cool!!!! no photo(s) cause we weren’t allowed to take any but its chill"}, {"post_id": 79966, "ts": "2026-07-28T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "the TPU arrived! guess what though: it lowk doesnt work with the X1c (our printer)!!!!!!! we refined the design for the flywheel a bit, but after figuring out the TPU settings in the printer, our test prints didn’t work at all. at some point, it just seems to run out of filament (usually before the first layer finishes) and leaves these dots of plastic where its supposed to be entirely filled in. no TPU ig!! my teammates spent most of the day figuring out where to cut holes for the tensioner and then actually drilling those holes for the eventual assembly (prob tomorrow). it looked really sucky cause the hacksaw is time-consuming and lowk rather annoying, especially when we need to cut 3 shafts into like 12 pieces, so thank you teammates that was very nice 🙏 i spent the whole rest of the day on the CAD for the articulated arms that we’re gonna have in front and on top of the entire robot, and i designed a servo mount that’ll keep the servos attached to the robot at the exact height we need them to be to make a plate that hits the ground, settles at a nice angle, holds the flywheels, and all the while still fits on the print bed. i tried to print one of those mounts but after like 5 prints that failed on the first layer, the only succesful print ran out of filament on the second to last layer 😭 its lowk chill though cause it looks kinda cool so im gonna keep it attached is the lowk awesome lowk cooked servo mount that i lowk made and printed lowk"}, {"post_id": 79965, "ts": "2026-07-27T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "GUESS WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the belt is skipping. turns out the belt needs to be tensioned to not yknow skip horribly. any real torque that the wheel experiences back on it, including the torque inherently present in turning with tank drive (which is really high cause we have really grippy wheels and their laid out in a rectangle), makes the belt slip on the teeth and not drive the tire at all, leaving the motor spinning but the robot not moving. basically, we’re gonna need a tensioner to slot into the legs. in other news, we still have to get intake/outtake working by friday hopefully. i’ve ordered TPU filament online and got on of my teammates to start on a design for a flywheel that has a PLA hub and TPU tire, maybe we’ll print it tomorrow? although one good thing about this is that the robot looks super cool awesome now (source: see below)"}, {"post_id": 79964, "ts": "2026-07-24T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "the parts came! literally all of today was spent assembling the drive system as my partners were drilling the holes and cutting the shafts for the wheels, pivots, and spring dowels. we’ve unfortunately found out that the belt drives skip kind of a lot, so hopefully this doesn’t cause issues with driving under torque when we get to that… (i swear if this is foreshadowing) we also went out to Reflect Orbital today!! seeing the mirrors was incredibly cool, and the material they made it out of felt really interesting. something about its very small thickness (2.8 microns!!) made it feel like it was barely on your finger if you weren’t looking at it. In addition, I talked to one of the software engineers (shoutout Alfonso) about how they get the software done, including things like: Double buffering updates (seemingly called ABing) to make sure that no update permanently breaks the system Using the Yocto project to make a custom Linux kernel for their embedded systems Monolithic applications vs. a more service based approach that also goes hand in hand with… Error handling and making sure that something like an illegal instruction won’t crash your expensive space satellite Testing with the ground-sat (all of the components on the real satellite connected together on a table in a room) and an approach that involves uploading the changed code to the ground-sat every night and running a whole test suite to make sure none of the changes broke anything and that they (hopefully) achieved what they were written for overall it was pretty damn cool you should check out Reflect :3 below is one of the legs, and as you can see theres a whole belt going from the motor to the wheel!"}, {"post_id": 79963, "ts": "2026-07-23T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "guess what THE BEARINGS AND SHAFTS GOT DELAYED!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY its fine. we spent today CADing and printing new designs for both the leg inserts and one piece of the rod-ends, and i think they’re in a pretty good place (for not having the actual components needed). I also did some testing with the ball/cone detection and came to the conclusion that it simply sucks and just isn’t good enough, so I got Codex to give me suggestions for an overhaul and I picked which approach would be the best to go for. The demo it produced for me using new shape detection and differentiating objects from its surroundings (in camera space) was so bad that I’ve decided on a completely different approach altogether: ML!! I got it to do another overhaul that would add a mode to the existing code that allowed camera snapshots to be taken and put in a folder with a press of a button on the controller. Then, it made a tool that could be run on my laptop that would bring the images up one by one, I would mark balls and cones on there, and then that data would be used to train an ONNX model (with ROCM acceleration on my Radeon 890M iGPU, of course) that could then be uploaded onto the Pi and ran as the new detection backend!! we’ll see if it works, cause I did all this at the end of the day and had no time to gather training data (of course i came up with this after two days of having very little to do)."}, {"post_id": 79949, "ts": "2026-07-22T00:00:00Z", "hours": 8.0169, "text": "7/21 - EVERYTHING GOT DELAYED VERY BAD NEWS: every single thing we needed to order for the drive train and suspension got delayed by a day 😭 anyways completely unrelated but the second competition is being moved to thursday, cause we cant drive through the course with literally 0 suspension the first 2 hours of today was spent rushing out an onshape sketch to get our metal legs cut by Lucas cause he (reasonably enough) wanted the drawing by 11 before he left the shop. i had to remember how to do drawings, with a lottt of help from carlos. unfortunately, i forgot the holes for the spring on the top so we’ll have to figure that eventually. i also forgot to put holes that would make screwing in the motor remotely possible but lucas the GOAT put those in for us. could not appreciate it more we might be lowk cooked now, cause the bearings say they’re gonna arrive thursday night so we may not even have the robot driving again until next week 😭😭 that being said we ball‼️ also ill be posting a devlog every weekday now cause i need to journal every day anyways attached below are 2 of the legs we got cut with the motors on them"}, {"post_id": 79948, "ts": "2026-07-22T00:00:00Z", "hours": 0.5692, "text": "7/22 - not much we can do about it much of today was spent moping about how everything would be arriving tonight (and of course the belts are arriving tomorrow night, one of the parts that is literally necessary to drive the thing at all). so much of today was spent just trying to design, cad, and otherwise figure out details for the legs before we actually had the components necessary to make them. i spent some time with one of my teammates figuring out where specifically the springs for the legs are gonna go, and he made a quick 3d printed rod-end that’ll hold in the shaft that acts as the spring dowel. we also planned out where we could put the legs’ pivot point on the chassis and just generally planned every element of assembly that we could. this also involved figuring out last second that i had no idea how we were gonna mount the springs and chassis on the leg at all and that my teammates didn’t know too much either, but its cool we figured it out and started the print by the end of the day 👍 attached: us figuring out where we’re gonna mount both the leg and the spring on the chassis and me drawing the top view of all the drive train stuff going on inside the leg (ignore my horrible handwriting its the board i swear)"}, {"post_id": 79960, "ts": "2026-07-20T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "almost all of today was spent discussing and weighing different suspension designs and drive train implementations, culminating us in finally buying some parts and basically finishing out our $1000 budget from the start of the program to the end of this week. we settled on the 4 independent legs early, so the options were between: mounting the motor on the chassis on the same pivot point as the leg itself mounting the motor on the chassis and using a u-joint articulated axle mounting the motor high up on the leg and using a belt drive eventually we arrived on that last option because the other ones didnt really pose a benefit that was worth the complexity they would introduce (especially the first one) towards the end of the day, we ordered all the parts we needed to install it hopefully over tomorrow and wednesday also! we finished printing the finalized(…) wheel design so now we have four rigidly attached and bead-locked wheels+tires!! turns out the robot is like significantly faster than we thought so uhhh throttle limit is gonna have to be pretty low for a bit. below is a sample of our mad drawings (mostly mine 😭) trying to figure out how the hell this thing is gonna work"}, {"post_id": 79959, "ts": "2026-07-17T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "my day was spent entirely on programming two things: the controls - i (codex) spent a bunch of time setting up: the tank controls to individually drive each motor making the motor channels and configuration set in environment variables, and making a shell script that loads those environment variables from a shell script, enters the py venv, and runs the program adding different modes/states to the program and a radial menu to switch between them (all in a TUI by the way) adding a throttle limit and button presses to change it on the fly adding a button to start driving and making it so that every unrecognized button press stops it as a safety measure it wasnt alllll codex tho, i came up with the all ideas for these and usually gave rather specific details for how i wanted them implemented i also worked on the ball detection , which mostly involved sitting down and just adjusting parameters until the detection was like maybe almost passable, adding (asking codex to) add new parameters when the existing ones didn’t encompass the mistaks the detector was making. needless to say this lowk took a while but we’re in a good place rn i think!!! we have a moving robot with some kinda maybe working ball detection, which is like half of the first phase (the easiest part). so were slightly cooked but still yay it works!!"}, {"post_id": 79958, "ts": "2026-07-16T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "ok sooooo turned out the wheels actually highkey sucked. the shaft was circular, so of course the motor didn’t rotate it well (its a d-shaft motor so its shaft output has a chunk taken out of it), but even once we added the d-shaft it just turned the hole circular by itself anyways 😭 luckily Lucas told us about these things called shaft hubs that dig in to the shaft with set screws and provide screw holes perpendicular to the shaft that can be a lot better at transferring the rotational power without yknow slipping. so we bought those on amazon ofc! but still the assembly went really well!! all the ports worked together, including the motor holes on the legs, and we were able to put the pi on top and connect all the electronics, eventually getting the motors actually moving while in the air by the end of the day! (with a lot lot of codexing ofc) this is what the robot btw!! its super duper duper cool isnt it :3"}, {"post_id": 79957, "ts": "2026-07-15T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "by that i mean we cut holes in a cardboard box, screwed the motors into them, stuck the wheels on, and codexed like no tomorrow until the motors somehow worked (THANK YOU SO MUCH LUCAS and also gpt luna), but our stupid dingy two-wheeled cardboard box actually moved! baby steps i swear ok but more important we’ve actually designed a metal base for the robot!! its literally a flat metal sheet with holes cut in it + 2 bent sheet metal pieces with motor holes cut out in them but! we learned about onshape a bunch more, the process of sheet metal modeling, and especially how to work with a machine shop. you heard that right, we’re getting our parts sent to a machine shop!!!! im really excited to see this piece come to life after we bumbled around on an onshape tab for like 3 hours trying to design it, i have a feeling its gonna be really cool. oh also were getting it tomorrow afternoon yay!!!! attached is that slightly cooked “robot”"}, {"post_id": 79956, "ts": "2026-07-14T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "luckily the tires were able to arrive this morning, so Jade (one of the adults at the program) brought them in and we got to designing + 3d printing wheels for them! luckily we have full access to a bambu lab x1 carbon here, so we took some lessons from Carlos (one of the mentors) in Onshape and tried to design a preliminary wheel. of course it didnt fit cause we have no idea how to use calipers seemingly, but the second attempt actually worked pretty well! you could try to turn the tire and stop the wheel, and it wouldnt move unless you put a lot of force. we left a shaft hole in it ofc so we can put it on the motors when we recieve them tomorrow. very awesome very cool!!"}, {"post_id": 79950, "ts": "2026-07-14T00:00:00Z", "hours": 4.4017, "text": "so i may have forgotten to make a project when we started this a week ago but! the motors and camera are all connected successfully to the pi and it has a gh repo set up with a Codex’d ball/cone detector that automatically drives the motors (or manually with a usb xbox controller clone). all we need now is for the sheet metal chassis we designed friday to arrive and the bidirectional ESCs we ordered to replace the small and kinda inconsistent generic ESCs we have now"}, {"post_id": 79955, "ts": "2026-07-13T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "we’ve finally formed our real groups! i got placed with two dudes, one my age and the other surprisingly young for the caliber of challenge we had ahead we also got $1000 to spend at our discretion for the next two weeks!!!!!🤑!!!!!!! we immediately made an amazon account and ordered some fundamental stuff, like: a controller! i just bought a cheap usb xbox controller clone, since we dont really need quality but we do need a reliable connection that works on startup. most importantly, motors!!!! this took a lot lot lot of deliberation (the whole day basically) and talking to our motors, but we eventually decided on these Maxynos planetary gear motors cause they have really good torque, theyre not too expensive, and we can easily buy some ESCs to connect to them. speaking off… ESCs and power distribution cables: this constisted of the motor speed controllers that were very specifically bought for their XT60 plugs, and then 3 splitter cables (2 2-way and 1 3-way) to distribute the power to each of the 4 motors and the pi as well. battery: at the advice of Lucas, one of our mentors who clearly knows a lot about projects like this, recommended Spektrum smart batteries so we bought a few of those + a brand smart charger for both teams 5V converter: to feed battery power to the Pi without literally kabooming it up (and to connect it in the first place). tires: we spent a lot of time on this decision! once again, lucas came in clutch suggesting rc car crawlers wheels because they have a lot of friction but also are very bendy. plus they have listed dimensions and a lip to attach a “bead-locked” wheel to, so we can just design our own wheel and put it in once it arrives and that was the day! whole lot of money spent for sure but its fineeeeeee (probably) (hopefully)"}, {"post_id": 79954, "ts": "2026-07-10T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "one of my partners had already been working on a ball detection demo over the last couple of days that worked with their laptop camera, so i (Codex) took some time to add a picamera2 backend along with the existing opencv2 one and getting the code actually uploaded to the pi. there were a bunch of issues with libraries and venvs and maintaining stable input and output to and from the pi, but eventually we got some kind of a demo working. we had to plug in the pi’s power supply in the corner of the room and partially covered by like 20 chairs, but the ball detection kind of almost maybe worked a bit! one problem was that they made the program assuming manual mouse input for initially cataloging the different colored balls under those lighting conditions, but that had to be removed because there was no good way to have mouse input and realtime monitor output for the pi *and we certainly wouldn’t have that on the course itself)"}, {"post_id": 79953, "ts": "2026-07-09T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "the start of the day was spent with all of us drawing our ideas for how we’d design a robot that could complete the course and then discussing what we drew, which was pretty helpful since i changed my design a few times based on what other people drew. i spent some time trying to get the IMX708 camera they bought to connect, which of course took the entire day 😭 the problem was that i was plugging it into port zero but the line in /boot/firmware/config.txt was dtoverlay=imx708 . of course it was supposed to be include cam0 to specify it was plugged into port 0 and not the apparent default of port 1(?!?). but whatever, i got the camera plugged in and showing stills by the end of the day"}, {"post_id": 79952, "ts": "2026-07-08T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "finished setting up the Pis (finally), despite the train of issues that tried to stop us: the first problem was that the college wifi required sign in, so setting it up headless wasnt working. i tried to use lynx , but the website required js on its sign-in page(??) so i couldnt do that. i tried to use my tether (basically a hotspot but without hotspot data) but wpa_supplicant wasn’t authenticating properly. i tried to use my real hotspot, but the wifi didn’t work with that either. on a whim i switched to 2.4GHz and WPA2 and it worked magically? of course rpi connect still didn’t work and ssh wasn’t allowed over my hotspot for some reason so i just had them buy us a monitor, reformatted with a desktop installed, and plugged in a usb mouse and keyboard to authenticate manually. of course ssh is blocked on the school wifi (what im using now), but rpi connect works enough. that was pretty much the entire day though, the only other thing i did was getting a git repository set up on the pi"}, {"post_id": 79951, "ts": "2026-07-07T00:00:00Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "we met each other, got a look at the course, and all drove the RC car through it one at a time. we also made accounts and signed up for Onshape and ChatGPT Plus, then Patrick showed us how to use Codex since that’s how we’ll be “coding” the entire project. another classmate and i then proceeded to spend the rest of the day setting up the Raspberry Pis that we’re going to use as our robots’ brains (we didn’t finish that day) attaached is a picture of that rc car"}]...
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Title: off-road autonomous robot by @leila | Stard Title: off-road autonomous robot by @leila | Stardance
Devlogs:
we met each other, got a look at the course, and all drove the RC car through it one at a time. we also made accounts and signed up for Onshape and ChatGPT Plus, then Patrick showed us how to use Codex since that’s how we’ll be “coding” the entire project. another classmate and i then proceeded to spend the rest of the day setting up the Raspberry Pis that we’re going to use as our robots’ brains (we didn’t finish that day) attaached is a picture of that rc car
finished setting up the Pis (finally), despite the train of issues that tried to stop us: the first problem was that the college wifi required sign in, so setting it up headless wasnt working. i tried to use lynx , but the website required js on its sign-in page(??) so i couldnt do that. i tried to use my tether (basically a hotspot but without hotspot data) but wpa_supplicant wasn’t authenticating properly. i tried to use my real hotspot, but the wifi didn’t work with that either. on a whim i switched to 2.4GHz and WPA2 and it worked magically? of course rpi connect still didn’t work and ssh wasn’t allowed over my hotspot for some reason so i just had them buy us a monitor, reformatted with a desktop installed, and plugged in a usb mouse and keyboard to authenticate manually. of course ssh is blocked on the school wifi (what im using now), but rpi connect works enough. that was pretty much the entire day though, the only other thing i did was getting a git repository set up on the pi
the start of the day was spent with all of us drawing our ideas for how we’d design a robot that could complete the course and then discussing what we drew, which was pretty helpful since i changed my design a few times based on what other people drew. i spent some time trying to get the IMX708 camera they bought to connect, which of course took the entire day 😭 the problem was that i was plugging it into port zero but the line in /boot/firmware/config.txt was dtoverlay=imx708 . of course it was supposed to be include cam0 to specify it was plugged into port 0 and not the apparent default of port 1(?!?). but whatever, i got the camera plugged in and showing stills by the end of the day
one of my partners had already been working on a ball detection demo over the last couple of days that worked with their laptop camera, so i (Codex) took some time to add a picamera2 backend along with the existing opencv2 one and getting the code actually uploaded to the pi. there were a bunch of issues with libraries and venvs and maintaining stable input and output to and from the pi, but eventually we got some kind of a demo working. we had to plug in the pi’s power supply in the corner of the room and partially covered by like 20 chairs, but the ball detection kind of almost maybe worked a bit! one problem was that they made the program assuming manual mouse input for initially cataloging the different colored balls under those lighting conditions, but that had to be removed because there was no good way to have mouse input and realtime monitor output for the pi *and we certainly wouldn’t have that on the course itself)
we’ve finally formed our real groups! i got placed with two dudes, one my age and the other surprisingly young for the caliber of challenge we had ahead we also got $1000 to spend at our discretion for the next two weeks!!!!!🤑!!!!!!! we immediately made an amazon account and ordered some fundamental stuff, like: a controller! i just bought a cheap usb xbox controller clone, since we dont really need quality but we do need a reliable connection that works on startup. most importantly, motors!!!! this took a lot lot lot of deliberation (the whole day basically) and talking to our motors, but we eventually decided on these Maxynos planetary gear motors cause they have really good torque, theyre not too expensive, and we can easily buy some ESCs to connect to them. speaking off… ESCs and power distribution cables: this constisted of the motor speed controllers that were very specifically bought for their XT60 plugs, and then 3 splitter cables (2 2-way and 1 3-way) to distribute the power to each of the 4 motors and the pi as well. battery: at the advice of Lucas, one of our mentors who clearly knows a lot about projects like this, recommended Spektrum smart batteries so we bought a few of those + a brand smart charger for both teams 5V converter: to feed battery power to the Pi without literally kabooming it up (and to connect it in the first place). tires: we spent a lot of time on this decision! once again, lucas came in clutch suggesting rc car crawlers wheels because they have a lot of friction but also are very bendy. plus they have listed dimensions and a lip to attach a “bead-locked” wheel to, so we can just design our own wheel and put it in once it arrives and that was the day! whole lot of money spent for sure but its fineeeeeee (probably) (hopefully)
so i may have forgotten to make a project when we started this a week ago but! the motors and camera are all connected successfully to the pi and it has a gh repo set up with a Codex’d ball/cone detector that automatically drives the motors (or manually with a usb xbox controller clone). all we need now is for the sheet metal chassis we designed friday to arrive and the bidirectional ESCs we ordered to replace the small and kinda inconsistent generic ESCs we have now
luckily the tires were able to arrive this morning, so Jade (one of the adults at the program) brought them in and we got to designing + 3d printing wheels for them! luckily we have full access to a bambu lab x1 carbon here, so we took some lessons from Carlos (one of the mentors) in Onshape and tried to design a preliminary wheel. of course it didnt fit cause we have no idea how to use calipers seemingly, but the second attempt actually worked pretty well! you could try to turn the tire and stop the wheel, and it wouldnt move unless you put a lot of force. we left a shaft hole in it ofc so we can put it on the motors when we recieve them tomorrow. very awesome very cool!!
by that i mean we cut holes in a cardboard box, screwed the motors into them, stuck the wheels on, and codexed like no tomorrow until the motors somehow worked (THANK YOU SO MUCH LUCAS and also gpt luna), but our stupid dingy two-wheeled cardboard box actually moved! baby steps i swear ok but more important we’ve actually designed a metal base for the robot!! its literally a flat metal sheet with holes cut in it + 2 bent sheet metal pieces with motor holes cut out in them but! we learned about onshape a bunch more, the process of sheet metal modeling, and especially how to work with a machine shop. you heard that right, we’re getting our parts sent to a machine shop!!!! im really excited to see this piece come to life after we bumbled around on an onshape tab for like 3 hours trying to design it, i have a feeling its gonna be really cool. oh also were getting it tomorrow afternoon yay!!!! attached is that slightly cooked “robot”
ok sooooo turned out the wheels actually highkey sucked. the shaft was circular, so of course the motor didn’t rotate it well (its a d-shaft motor so its shaft output has a chunk taken out of it), but even once we added the d-shaft it just turned the hole circular by itself anyways 😭 luckily Lucas told us about these things called shaft hubs that dig in to the shaft with set screws and provide screw holes perpendicular to the shaft that can be a lot better at transferring the rotational power without yknow slipping. so we bought those on amazon ofc! but still the assembly went really well!! all the ports worked together, including the motor holes on the legs, and we were able to put the pi on top and connect all the electronics, eventually getting the motors actually moving while in the air by the end of the day! (with a lot lot of codexing ofc) this is what the robot btw!! its super duper duper cool isnt it :3
my day was spent entirely on programming two things: the controls - i (codex) spent a bunch of time setting up: the tank controls to individually drive each motor making the motor channels and configuration set in environment variables, and making a shell script that loads those environment variables from a shell script, enters the py venv, and runs the program adding different modes/states to the program and a radial menu to switch between them (all in a TUI by the way) adding a throttle limit and button presses to change it on the fly adding a button to start driving and making it so that every unrecognized button press stops it as a safety measure it wasnt alllll codex tho, i came up with the all ideas for these and usually gave rather specific details for how i wanted them implemented i also worked on the ball detection , which mostly involved sitting down and just adjusting parameters until the detection was like maybe almost passable, adding (asking codex to) add new parameters when the existing ones didn’t encompass the mistaks the detector was making. needless to say this lowk took a while but we’re in a good place rn i think!!! we have a moving robot with some kinda maybe working ball detection, which is like half of the first phase (the easiest part). so were slightly cooked but still yay it works!!
almost all of today was spent discussing and weighing different suspension designs and drive train implementations, culminating us in finally buying some parts and basically finishing out our $1000 budget from the start of the program to the end of this week. we settled on the 4 independent legs early, so the options were between: mounting the motor on the chassis on the same pivot point as the leg itself mounting the motor on the chassis and using a u-joint articulated axle mounting the motor high up on the leg and using a belt drive eventually we arrived on that last option because the other ones didnt really pose a benefit that was worth the complexity they would introduce (especially the first one) towards the end of the day, we ordered all the parts we needed to install it hopefully over tomorrow and wednesday also! we finished printing the finalized(…) wheel design so now we have four rigidly attached and bead-locked wheels+tires!! turns out the robot is like significantly faster than we thought so uhhh throttle limit is gonna have to be pretty low for a bit. below is a sample of our mad drawings (mostly mine 😭) trying to figure out how the hell this thing is gonna work
7/22 - not much we can do about it much of today was spent moping about how everything would be arriving tonight (and of course the belts are arriving tomorrow night, one of the parts that is literally necessary to drive the thing at all). so much of today was spent just trying to design, cad, and otherwise figure out details for the legs before we actually had the components necessary to make them. i spent some time with one of my teammates figuring out where specifically the springs for the legs are gonna go, and he made a quick 3d printed rod-end that’ll hold in the shaft that acts as the spring dowel. we also planned out where we could put the legs’ pivot point on the chassis and just generally planned every element of assembly that we could. this also involved figuring out last second that i had no idea how we were gonna mount the springs and chassis on the leg at all and that my teammates didn’t know too much either, but its cool we figured it out and started the print by the end of the day 👍 attached: us figuring out where we’re gonna mount both the leg and the spring on the chassis and me drawing the top view of all the drive train stuff going on inside the leg (ignore my horrible handwriting its the board i swear)
7/21 - EVERYTHING GOT DELAYED VERY BAD NEWS: every single thing we needed to order for the drive train and suspension got delayed by a day 😭 anyways completely unrelated but the second competition is being moved to thursday, cause we cant drive through the course with literally 0 suspension the first 2 hours of today was spent rushing out an onshape sketch to get our metal legs cut by Lucas cause he (reasonably enough) wanted the drawing by 11 before he left the shop. i had to remember how to do drawings, with a lottt of help from carlos. unfortunately, i forgot the holes for the spring on the top so we’ll have to figure that eventually. i also forgot to put holes that would make screwing in the motor remotely possible but lucas the GOAT put those in for us. could not appreciate it more we might be lowk cooked now, cause the bearings say they’re gonna arrive thursday night so we may not even have the robot driving again until next week 😭😭 that being said we ball‼️ also ill be posting a devlog every weekday now cause i need to journal every day anyways attached below are 2 of the legs we got cut with the motors on them
guess what THE BEARINGS AND SHAFTS GOT DELAYED!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY its fine. we spent today CADing and printing new designs for both the leg inserts and one piece of the rod-ends, and i think they’re in a pretty good place (for not having the actual components needed). I also did some testing with the ball/cone detection and came to the conclusion that it simply sucks and just isn’t good enough, so I got Codex to give me suggestions for an overhaul and I picked which approach would be the best to go for. The demo it produced for me using new shape detection and differentiating objects from its surroundings (in camera space) was so bad that I’ve decided on a completely different approach altogether: ML!! I got it to do another overhaul that would add a mode to the existing code that allowed camera snapshots to be taken and put in a folder with a press of a button on the controller. Then, it made a tool that could be run on my laptop that would bring the images up one by one, I would mark balls and cones on there, and then that data would be used to train an ONNX model (with ROCM acceleration on my Radeon 890M iGPU, of course) that could then be uploaded onto the Pi and ran as the new detection backend!! we’ll see if it works, cause I did all this at the end of the day and had no time to gather training data (of course i came up with this after two days of having very little to do).
the parts came! literally all of today was spent assembling the drive system as my partners were drilling the holes and cutting the shafts for the wheels, pivots, and spring dowels. we’ve unfortunately found out that the belt drives skip kind of a lot, so hopefully this doesn’t cause issues with driving under torque when we get to that… (i swear if this is foreshadowing) we also went out to Reflect Orbital today!! seeing the mirrors was incredibly cool, and the material they made it out of felt really interesting. something about its very small thickness (2.8 microns!!) made it feel like it was barely on your finger if you weren’t looking at it. In addition, I talked to one of the software engineers (shoutout Alfonso) about how they get the software done, including things like: Double buffering updates (seemingly called ABing) to make sure that no update permanently breaks the system Using the Yocto project to make a custom Linux kernel for their embedded systems Monolithic applications vs. a more service based approach that also goes hand in hand with… Error handling and making sure that something like an illegal instruction won’t crash your expensive space satellite Testing with the ground-sat (all of the components on the real satellite connected together on a table in a room) and an approach that involves uploading the changed code to the ground-sat every night and running a whole test suite to make sure none of the changes broke anything and that they (hopefully) achieved what they were written for overall it was pretty damn cool you should check out Reflect :3 below is one of the legs, and as you can see theres a whole belt going from the motor to the wheel!
GUESS WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the belt is skipping. turns out the belt needs to be tensioned to not yknow skip horribly. any real torque that the wheel experiences back on it, including the torque inherently present in turning with tank drive (which is really high cause we have really grippy wheels and their laid out in a rectangle), makes the belt slip on the teeth and not drive the tire at all, leaving the motor spinning but the robot not moving. basically, we’re gonna need a tensioner to slot into the legs. in other news, we still have to get intake/outtake working by friday hopefully. i’ve ordered TPU filament online and got on of my teammates to start on a design for a flywheel that has a PLA hub and TPU tire, maybe we’ll print it tomorrow? although one good thing about this is that the robot looks super cool awesome now (source: see below)
the TPU arrived! guess what though: it lowk doesnt work with the X1c (our printer)!!!!!!! we refined the design for the flywheel a bit, but after figuring out the TPU settings in the printer, our test prints didn’t work at all. at some point, it just seems to run out of filament (usually before the first layer finishes) and leaves these dots of plastic where its supposed to be entirely filled in. no TPU ig!! my teammates spent most of the day figuring out where to cut holes for the tensioner and then actually drilling those holes for the eventual assembly (prob tomorrow). it looked really sucky cause the hacksaw is time-consuming and lowk rather annoying, especially when we need to cut 3 shafts into like 12 pieces, so thank you teammates that was very nice 🙏 i spent the whole rest of the day on the CAD for the articulated arms that we’re gonna have in front and on top of the entire robot, and i designed a servo mount that’ll keep the servos attached to the robot at the exact height we need them to be to make a plate that hits the ground, settles at a nice angle, holds the flywheels, and all the while still fits on the print bed. i tried to print one of those mounts but after like 5 prints that failed on the first layer, the only succesful print ran out of filament on the second to last layer 😭 its lowk chill though cause it looks kinda cool so im gonna keep it attached is the lowk awesome lowk cooked servo mount that i lowk made and printed lowk
so my GOATED teammate whose shall not be named figured out the TPU problem: the printer just wasnt strong enough to feed it in! i honestly have some doubt that that was THE problem, considering how easy the solution is (just unspool a bunch of filament onto the ground), but whatever we ball‼️ anyways the first third of today was spent working on that servo mount and arms CAD file i mentioned before as my partners finished up cutting the shafts and legs for the new tensioners. i also got the tensioners printed, but that was pretty quick since its just a few ~1x0.5” pieces the second third was spent doing the assembly for all the pieces, since we had to take apart each leg completely, and then go down the assembly line to put it together. i was responsible for putting on the tensioners and then the motors with these really handy alligator clips Carlos graciously gave us that allowed me to get short screws into holes that were far into the leg. then, once the motor is attached, my partner would attach the wheel and get the belt on there. i think he used some like dark magic cause the belt was really hard to get on before it was tensioned, idek how he did it now… my other partner would then put on the insert, bearings, and shaft for attaching the leg to the chassis. once we were done, we all spent some time getting the legs on the chassis but we didnt finish. i rushed to start the flywheel TPU print we designed a while ago before we left and spent the rest of the day on… THE SPACE X TOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! we got to go to spacex and have a little tour with one of patricks friends!!!!!!!!!! it was really really really cool, the facility was huge and we such a bunch of fuel tanks, satellites, an engine actively being built, and a phased antenna array. that last thing nerdsniped me so hard, and because Simon (one of our “tour guides”) was an engineer that worked on the Starlink user terminals (which also had the same type of antenna array as the Starlink satellites) i was able to ask a bunch of questions about it. apparently, they both have a bunch of antenna put together and arranged such that, by controlling the phase of the signal coming through each of the ~50 antennae, can focus on a narrow beam of EMF waves and effectively filter out signal to only a specific Starlink satellite in the sky. super cool!!!! no photo(s) cause we weren’t allowed to take any but its chill
I FORGOT TO PUT THE PRINT PLATE IN THE PRINTER YESTERDAY GOD DAMN IT 😭😭😭😭😭 its fine. ok so today was generally pretty mundane BUT!!! WE DROVE UP THE HILL LITERALLY ONCE!!!!! just on a whim my partner decided to go full power up the hill after my other partner had just loctited every set screw to see if we could make it, and we did!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! …….unfortunately……… nobody filmed it…………………………….. -# god damn it…………………………. it was really cool though! i think it represents that we’re really nearing a functionally useful robot and that were actually overcoming the challenges that have plagued us for like weeks anyways heres a picture of our bot looking super duper cool
okay this day was an experience fs. the start of the day was relatively normal, i was working a bit on ball detection while my partners assembled the intake/outtake thingy, and all of a sudden the pi turns off . this happened before when the power draw was low and peripherals were connected, so i just took out the camera and turned it on. yup, works fine. ok so lets plug the camera in while its on and it turns off . odd, looks like its probably some random bug or connection issue, so i just unplugged it, reseated it, and restarted the Pi. and it doesnt even turn on. ok, well theres another port. idk whats going on, but maybe thatll fix it? nothing. theres spare cables, lets try those ig? nope. ok what the hell the camera must be broken, so lets try a spare camera. doesnt turn on. ok what the actual ****???? lets try it on their robot and then theirs doesnt turn on either . at this point i am positively destroyed and fuming, luckily we have some very good food coming from a place nearby called the melt, so hopefully having a nice gooey cheesesteak can help me calm down, lock in, and figure out whats going on. big mistake. an hour passes. the adults have put on a movie, a fast and furious movie. you dont feel delirious, nor subdued, but simply off. its almost as if you are both more aware of your environment and slowly less aware of yourself. an hour passes. the car noises are still going. focus was a lost cause. one adult is stretching on the floor. the other is sitting at a table, still watching. you’re on the floor too. you’re not getting anything done. it was a lost cause anyways. an hour passes. carlos is sleeping on the slanted wooden plank of the hill. jade is lying on the floor and staring straight up. somehow your partner is locked in. the car noises continue. you are two inches away from meeting God, before you start laughing. shes laughing too, as well as your partner. presumably at carlos. sanity was a lost cause, and you lost it four and a half hours ago. cant believe its somehow 3:30. long story short, we slowly went insane with tokyo drift in the background as i pulled my hair out from the pi frying our cameras and the movie making it hard to focus, while one of my partners locked in to an unprecedented level, one just watched the movie casually, and the rest of us went crazy for no particular reason at all. this was a wild day (hence why im writing this the day after) never eating at the melt again bruh 😭
i am gonna be gone wednesday, thursday, and friday this week due to my schools orientation happening right before CalTech’s WiSTEM (which i am indeed going to :3), both of which are on weekdays. thus, with the intake challenge pushed even further to this wednesday (marking a full week delay), i will need to spend some time getting our existing systems to a good place and helping my partners with whatever they need over today and tomorrow before im gone. that being said, we did very little locking in today (hence calling it the dawn) because we had both a speaker and a tour!! Will Heltsley, former VP of Propulsion of SpaceX and an insanely knowledgable engineer, talked to us about different engineering concepts and some strategies for finding a stable job and a community of like-minded nerds that are fun to work beside. i asked a few questions about working with teams (because this program has shown me that it’ll be a very valuable skill to learn), especially since Will has done everything from working on a 3-person team to managing a group of 350 engineers. he was really helpful!! we also got to tour another startup, Forge Atomics, and it was awesome to see the inner workings of a company that is just getting of the ground! they had a really cool concept and i loved their mission, which in talking to one of the co-founders (Rex the goat) i learned was one of the most important things in finding a team that is going to work well: your missions need to align. also i learned from both mentors that, unless you plan on doing something research heavy like quantum computing, you should NOT get a PhD. guess what i want to do!
okay so like i said last entry ill be leaving for three days, which means that i had to finish up some things today! i decided at this point that we were not going to able to mount a plate in the front for the intake (rip that idea and the whole bunch of filament we wasted on it 😭) so i spent the entire day pivoting on that idea and making the articulated suspension!!!! this was a really cool idea i talked with carlos about for like an hour, although we were thinking about only servos for suspension. this time around, i modified those servo mounts to place the head of of the edge of the main plate and used a bit of kevlar string Trina donated (ty Trina!) and tied it to the servo head and around the wheels hub. this means that when the servo is drawn up, the string pulls on the wheel, compresses the spring, and brings the robot down. for context, there is an 8 inch height requirement* that we had yet to succesfully get under. by that i mean the robot was like 11in. so, to get around that, these servo mounts could effectively deactivate the suspension at will, not only making driving more stable in the ball collection phase, but also actually getting under the height requirement! (since it was only a starting height requirement, we were allowed to expand after) anyways i made one mount, tested it, it didnt fully work, designed another and printed two of them, codexed while that was printing, tested one (it worked perfectly), printed 2 more, codexed the code for different states and positions for the servos and configuration stuff ofc, assembled the rest, tested all 4 of them out at the same time, actually tied good knots, and it was done by the end of the day!! im really proud of finishing this subsytem in one day before i left, it was suprisingly fun to see the robot dancing and doing pushups as it drove. and honestly, i think today really gave me that feeling of how incredible it is to see something like this just come to life, the way i feel when i make progress on a good coding project. i lowk want a 3d printer now… maybe that radish jam money could really come in handy…….
OKAY it is time to get down to business we do NOT have much time. first order of business was looking at the TPU wheels reflect printed! they had come in while i was gone, and compared to our flywheels they were actually suprisingly good (although they lowk had their heads blown shmoove off (the tops were weirdly disconnected and ripped off)). most of all, our wheels were much too stiff and theirs were relatively soft, so we decided to go with theirs. we’d also gotten metal parts back from lucas; unfortunately, lucas’ parts were cut kinda incorrectly and for whatever reason the machine shop didn’t make them!! so, i spent today primarily trying to figure out how to do intake while one partner was working on (OF COURSE) retightening and loctite-ing the set screws and the other partner was working on finishing/testing the climb with a smaller motor he bought online over my hiatus. and by figuring out the intake, i mean taping a cardboard box to the bottom of the robot and letting it flap down while desperately PRAYING that the balls go in. i was also driving around a bunch trying to figure out why the robot was still really struggling to take turns, especially on the foam. eventually i had the insight that the friction on the wheels was simply too much, and Lucas came up with the idea of wrapping tape around the wheels to reduce it!! after that it was insane how well it drove and took turns, especially off of the foam floor. i lowk drove it around for like 45 mins straight it was so insanely fun to see something we made acting like a real machine, cause it was driving at a quality i could actually expect in like a real product! it was so cool and gratifying :3 of course i forgot to get a picture of video of it, which i have a feeling im gonna regret…
and i call it frickmas cause THE COMPETITIONS TOMORROW OMG OMG OMG OMG OK SO here’s what on the agenda: making sure the set screws dont destroy themselves on the field getting the climb attached and making sure it maintains enough torque to actually pull the robot figuring out some sort of system for intake lining up all the suspension to prevent it from getting stuck, damaging the metal, or crapping out on the washboard section making sure the pi mount, buck converter, code, suspension actuation, and every other subsystem actually work testing!!! lots of testing of all of everything!!!!!!! for the first one, my partner had already spent so long on the set screws so some testing was all it took to see that they were fine, and that was enough cause they were not really going to get any better. my other partner finally got around to actually finishing up the climb and attaching it to the front of the bot. good news: it hooks! bad news: it doesn’t even remotely pull back! luckily, the rules still gove points for hook but no lift, so we decided to leave it there since his effort could be best spent elsewhere with this little time left the intake system was determined to be pretty much a dud by the end of the day, cause of course cardboard couldn’t really carry anything, and we didn’t have time to design something better since the last system fully failed lining up the suspension was pretty easy, just took a bit of manual adjustment and a good amount of testing on the field each of these were kind of annoying to address but i have a feeling itll be rather important at the end of the day (which is basically how long until handling all the wiring and subsystems took us) lastly for the testing, we just drove like a bunch of times! honestly the runs went like okayish ig, we rarely made it past the washboard and of course NEVER made it over the hill ever since we did it first a couple weeks ago. otherwise though, the robot was stable the entire time and didnt have any weird glitches or hardware malfunctions (thank god we taped down the battery this time) so we were good(ish) to go! below is basically what our final robot is gonna look like (minus the climb)
ladies, gentlemen, and my beautiful enbies * ITS TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *(ok so i admit this entry was written days later cause i had to go to school next day so my memory is foggy but! its still cool :3) basically the first half of the day (before everyone came in) was spent finalizing somethings we’d waved off earlier, like cable management and wiring in general, especially the motor wires were dangerously close to the suspension rods and a bunch of other things like that power and attaching the battery, since we really needed to keep the batteries charged properly to prevent the pi being underpowered and the battery needed to be held on with something a little less flimsy than straight up velcro 😭 THE GOD DAMN SET SCREWS HOLY TUNA THESE THINGS WILL NOT STAY TIGHT NO MATTER WHAT WE ARE NEVER GOING UP THAT HILL AGAIN ISTG (subtle foreshadowing) keeping the kill switch always accessible from the top and attaching it with a little more than tape and prayers making sure the wheels are attached properly and wont jut out weirdly as it has in the past, throwing the driving off balance as it getting the climb to actually work which is lowk a lost cause but we ball praying theres something we can do about the intake situation 😭🙏 among much more of course, the time eventually came when people started arriving (like alfonso, shoutout my goat) including a whole lot of parents. we started by showing them our robots as we made some final tweaks, like making sure the pi wouldnt fall off of our beautiful, incredibly complex attachment scheme (velcro mounting strips) until it finally happened… COMPETITION START‼️ so the way this ended up going is that each team alternated runs, usually getting progressively further (keyword usually …) Run 1: Team Big Fish (not us) their first run didn’t go too bad!! their ball intake was suprisingly functional (and by suprisingly i mean at all) (better than us tho) and they were almost able to get around the cones autonomously without hitting one! however, when it came to the washboard, it didnt really work out… their bot very quickly got stuck on a pipe and was ill equipped to unstuck itself, ending the first run. Run 2: Team 10 (US!!!!!!!!‼️!!!!!) also not too bad somehow!!!!!!!!!! of course there was no ball intake so we just drove over them, but we were able to slowly but surely get past the slalom with wide margins and very very slow turns in place. as for the washboard though, our run wasnt much better… i took the robot off of the ramp at the start rather fast, making sure to turn up the throttle limit in the hopes it would get us over a few obstacles. spoiler alert: it didnt. we pretty quickly just crashed into a full cinder block, bending the sheet metal base and unsurprisingly making it hard to continue the run! but whatever it was not too bad for a first attempt Run 3: Team Big Fish this one was probably their best! the ball intake was great, and they were able to carry them all through a perfect no-hit slalom! unfortunately, a similar fate to last time met them at the washboard. third times the charm hopefully… Run 4: Team 10 although the robot was slightly banged up now, it was still totally good to go! this slalom attempt was not nearly as graceful, and that certainly applies to the washboard too: i turned up the throttle limit more on the ramp and really just sent it, only to get stuck on top of that cinderblock instead of past it. fun stuff!
ok so from here on we just started placing the robots at different places trying to show what they could do if the washboard didnt always destroy their runs Exhibition 1: Team Big Fish and THE HILL … for our first exhibition, the other team set up the robot before the hill and took some stabs and speeding their way over it. in the end, none of the attempts made it, but i have video of the third one where they got so close that one of the wheels drove onto the other side of the hill and kept the robot there, until their driver let go of the throttle and let it down. it was super cool!! Exhibition 2: Team 10 and THE HOOK finally it was time for my teammates magnum opus of the past two weeks to be revealed and truly tested, and that of course was THE CLIMB!!!! and by the climb i mean a big pink plastic hook on the end of a measuring tape roll taken out of its case that we lovingly call “the bomb” (because it WILL explode if not handled properly). like i said a while ago though, the climb didnt have enough force to pull up the robot, but thats fine! theres still partial points for hooking, so all this exhibition really was was the hook rising at an almost comedically slow pace, before i carefully drove the robot over to the bar (as to not fold over the tape from the velocity) and gingerly brought the hook down on it. and everybody clapped! Exhibition 3: Team Big Fish and THE DUNK aka they used their shooter. it was super cool actually! they have a whole system with conveyor belt squeezing balls forward from above a slanted metal sheet, with flywheels at the end that can block balls for storage purposes until the gate is opened and the conveyor belts are forwarded to shoot them! it was suprisingly good and consistent, shooting from behind the second-to-last line. i wish we could do that… its okay they dont have a climb so we’re better and that was pretty much it! this experience has been so incredibly helpful for my learning and for me in general, and it really was(😢) one of the most fun times of my life. i dont even think i could near catalogue how much fun i had and how many things i learned. i really cant put it into words. thank you lucas, carlos, jade, maanya, patrick, alfonso, and trina for making this what it was, and of course thank you big zrl for sponsoring my attendance. if you’re reviewing this project, i recommend looking at devlogs further down if you’re missing context. the photos should hopefully help see the progression as well (if i can get those uploaded…) i leave you with 3 photos: the state of the robot right before i turned it off for the last time, the absolute state of our whiteboard after we used for brainstorming, and a last minute photo of the hallway i knew i would never walk again. happy hack clubbing!...
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obliberry by @torkel | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-1 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-10-28T14:12:39Z", "hours": 173.0, "multiplier": 19.81, "payout": 3424, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Ship #2 first off super star project!! yippie :O for anyone new: obliberry is a fallout-inspired isometric game engine for hex-grid games, written in C++20 + OpenGL, with a visual editor, an ECS core, its own scripting language (ObSL), and single-file project packaging… since ship 1 it’s been a bunch of devlogs and ~170 hours. i think the engine went from “usable enough” to now that it’s running an actual (teeny-tiny) game on it now. changes new systems post processing : ping-pong effect chain with a full editor UI, custom fragment shader import, built-in ColorGrading / FilmGrain / Vignette, and a shader #include system with helper libs 3D collision : GJK-based detection, box/sphere/cylinder/rect/circle colliders, triggers, 32 layers + masks, billboard colliders so sprites can have colliders that line up with what you see, and script callbacks ( on_collision_enter , on_trigger_exit , …). hex movement respects colliders now sprite animation : animation assets with multiple named clips and per-frame durations, a full editor with live preview, SpriteAnimator scripting ( Play / Pause / Stop …) asset system : project-wide assets.json catalog instead of assets baked into every scene, lazy loading with dependency resolution, safer scene switching, and a migrator tool for old projects saves : generic key/value save data ( save_set / save_get / save_list …) stored per project, atomic writes persistent entities : SetPersistent(true) and it survives scene changes scripting (ObSL) Prop / PropEntity / PropUI : script properties that show up in the inspector per entity. no more Find() spaghetti Send / Broadcast / on_message : scripts can talk to each other now SetTimeout , collision-aware Transform.TryMoveTo , map editing from scripts, sounds that persist across scene changes, IsEditor() script wrappers are uuid-bound now so recycled entity ids can’t make a wrapper point at the wrong thing editor deleting entities is undoable now !!! full subtree snapshot + restore, and all undo commands are uuid-based so they survive ids being recycled map editor overhaul: brush sizes 1–8, Rect/Circle shapes, multi-select with bulk editing, actual hotkeys tons of UI gizmo fixes separate Logs / ObSL panels, camera focus on F, recent projects, live theme editor with font management exports now build a dependency manifest by walking the ObSL AST, so packages only contain what the project actually uses stability (less explosions, hopefully) unit test suite (GoogleTest + CTest) and ASan/UBSan builds. unsurprisingly this found bugs. many bugs 16-byte Core::UUID everywhere, safer entity destruction with on_destroy ordering, failed scene loads no longer nuke the scene you’re in, render-thread resource lifetime fixes, a thread-safety pass, and an audio engine cleanup with RAII genberally just a TON of bug fixes since last ship (including various crashes etc) DEMO!!!!! i made a tiny game demo in the engine and it has been the single best bug finder in existence most of the gizmo, pathing and audio fixes above happened because the demo tripped over them… try it out!!! I have learnt tons from this project… a lot of this has been fun and painfull… but it’s working!!! thank you all for reading :D !!!", "repo": "https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry", "demo": "https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry/releases"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-08-04T09:34:08Z", "hours": 270.0, "multiplier": 19.51, "payout": 5134, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "obliberry feels usable enough that i think its a good time for a first ship :) obliberry is a fallout-inspired isometric game engine for hex-grid games, written in C++20 with OpenGL, featuring a visual editor, an ECS core, its own scripting language, and single-file packaging/exports. this has all been rather challenging, but an incredibly fun learning project, especially regarding using modern C++, OpenGL, and making my own programming language it is still obviously not fully complete of course, but I think it’s in a rather good state :D", "repo": "https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry", "demo": "https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry/releases"}]...
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[{"post_id": 83728, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 83728, "ts": "2026-10-28T13:56:19Z", "hours": 0.31, "text": "Since i’m preparing for thy ship… the new demo i’ve been working on is now in the templates directory, so anyone can use it and try it, And i also published a new demo release for it! It is a short game with a small fetch quest and enemies where you have to help a guy get his car working… https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry/releases/tag/demo_0.0.9"}, {"post_id": 83697, "ts": "2026-10-28T12:40:52Z", "hours": 2.9658, "text": "audio cleanup and persistent sounds mostly audio , also got around to cleaning up the audio engine, added persistent sounds across scene changes, and fixed some ui stuff. changes audio the old AudioEngine had raw ma_sound* s and a whole separate map just to keep decoders and their buffers alive. cleanup was duplicated everywhere, so i moved it all into SoundInstance with RAII. sound, decoder and VFS bytes all get cleaned up together now music and sfx use the same type, stored as unique_ptr . StopMusicUnlocked went from a bunch of manual cleanup to basically m_CurrentMusic.reset() PlaySound2D takes an optional persist flag. scene changes now stop normal audio, while persistent sounds keep playing until they finish before this, audio just kept playing across scene switches whether you wanted it to or not. that’s fixed now w. the persistent flag scripting and packaging added IsEditor() so scripts can tell if they’re running in the editor or editor play mode (im using this for debugging stuff in the demo im working on :P ) PlaySound2D in ObSL accepts the new persist argument !!! bumped the ObSL submodule, ( which needed a fix in the script asset analyzer ) packaged scripts now initialize with the correct path for imports. this was hardcoded to assets/scripts before, which doesn’t work in packaged builds editor the Project Browser has an Audio section now for .mp3 and .wav files generalized the file-listing helper to accept multiple extensions, which the Scripts section uses too swapped the UI Hierarchy and Registry tab order. tiny change but it’s the order i actually use… ui fixed button hit-testing for nested UI elements. Update() wasn’t accounting for the position accumulated through the element hierarchy, even though Draw() already was the demo… ive been working on a new demo project, most of my time has been spent just messing around in that (and is how i’ve been discovering these issues) audio is in a much better place now… and the demo is looking pretty good…."}, {"post_id": 82916, "ts": "2026-10-26T07:20:46Z", "hours": 6.4836, "text": "rahhhh been working on the new… demo… and well, it found some things. mhm changes gizmos and transforms rewrote the entity gizmo so moving things under rotated or scaled parents actually works properly transforms now handle custom matrices and shear much better, including when reparenting made hierarchy updates more robust, added matrix support to scene files, and stopped rounding transform data on save gizmo undo is more consistent now, and the editor warns when a transform has shear pathing movement can now re-plan around blockers, and picks a nearby free hex if the destination is blocked scripts can set paths without drawing the path overlay, which is useful for enemies script messaging added Send , Broadcast and on_message so scripts can communicate with each other messages support basic values and are delivered through a queue on the main thread scripting and components SetTimeout now can forward arguments to callbacks point lights can be disabled, and particle emitters remember whether they’re active when saved added a bunch of smaller fixes around scene saving, prefab parenting and serialization obsl some separate ObSL updates too: variadic native functions, multiline comments, a formatter and fixes for nested calls. (not tracked here though) DEMO!!!!! im working on a new demo :0 oh and it is my birthday woaw"}, {"post_id": 81496, "ts": "2026-10-21T14:23:50Z", "hours": 7.1158, "text": "script properties & UUID types scripts can now declare properties that show up in the inspector and get saved per entity. also ripped std::string UUIDs out of most of the engine in favor of an actual Core::UUID type, plus some scripting additions and a few tests. changes script properties Prop(\"SpeedOrSomething\", 2.5) , PropEntity(\"TargetEntity\") and PropUI(\"MyRect\") for regular values, entities and UI elements properties show up under each script slot in the inspector, with appropriate controls and per-slot values values are only readable during top-level script execution, so store them in variables for use in hooks. Prop in a hook just returns the fallback saved as scriptProperties in scene JSON, omitted when empty property edits support undo, including live number/string editing. unused saved properties can be pruned with undo too.. ScriptSlot is move-only now Core::UUID replaced string UUIDs across the registry, UI, editor commands, project config, save directories and scripting with a 16-byte Core::UUID registry UUID lookups now use an index instead of looping through entities malformed UUIDs in files fall back to generated or nil UUIDs UI UUIDs are saved and restored, including nested elements. duplicate UI UUIDs are handled without crashing the loader savegame directories etc take a UUID directly scripting & UI script objects now have identity values and wrappers are readonly , along with various scripting result objects. came with an ObSL bump UI wrappers get SetParent(parent) and a uuid field. null reparents an element to the root UISystem::Reparent preserves ownership and prevents parenting an element under its own descendant new created scripts use fn on_update(dt) (I wrote on_update() last time …oops…) smaller stuff UndoManager::Execute returns whether the command applied script list shows filenames with Remove beside them tests and docs more tests and docs updated ofc… so u can reference entities in scripts without using Find() now!!!"}, {"post_id": 80249, "ts": "2026-10-16T21:56:07Z", "hours": 3.8333, "text": "uuid-bound script wrappers…, logger sinks…., and a pile of small editor stuff…. mostly scripting + logging plumbing this time, plus a couple of editor things I’d been wanting… changes script wrappers are uuid-bound now entity wrappers used to capture the raw runtime id, which is a problem if ids get recycled or the registry gets rebuilt. now every wrapper holds the entity’s uuid and resolves the live id on each call, so it keeps pointing at the right entity (or does nothing if it’s gone). new FindEntityByUUID(uuid) global and GetUUID() / .uuid on entity objects SetParent matches an entity object by uuid, a plain number is still a runtime id same treatment for UI wrappers: they resolve by uuid instead of name, so renaming or duplicate names don’t break them added FindUIByUUID , GetUUID() and Destroy() on UI elements, and SetImage / GetImage on images (acquires the texture through the scene asset scope like fonts do) still by name: FindUI , DestroyUI and the button state queries ( WasClicked / IsHovered / IsHeld ). UI scripting is still weird… work in progress i guess… logger sinks the old way was swapping the logger’s std::ostream for a stringstream that the UI panel also read from, which was a data race waiting to happen (logger thread writes, main thread reads). replaced it with actual sinks: ILogSink with ConsoleSink (stdout/stderr like before) and UILogSink (mutex -ed pending buffer the panel drains each frame) the editor and runtime both register a ConsoleSink , and the editor adds the UI sink on top, so the Logs panel is always there now instead of only when there’s no tty console panels color lines by severity now interpreter output goes through a small UiStream ostream into the ObSL panel, with stdout and stderr split (needed the bumped obsl, Interpreter takes both streams now…) ObSL panel clears when you enter play mode editor F focuses the camera on the selected entity, press it again to go back to the origin. its smooth…., ..panning cancels the focus keyboard pan only gets called when there’s actually input now.. editing a material in the inspector no longer mutates shared runtime-only materials. if it isn’t a catalog asset it gets cloned into assets.json first, and edits to catalog materials get “upserted” back to the catalog. “Clone Material” writes to the catalog too new scripts from the project browser come with an on_update stub instead of just a comment scripting runtime script top-level code now runs with the command buffer in “immediate” mode ( BeginImmediate / EndImmediate ), so registry writes at the top of a script apply right away instead of waiting for a flush that hasn’t been set up yet during init Hex_GetNeighbors wasn’t GC protecting its array while filling it, fixed…. grid tile textures a tile type with no texture used to fall back to hex_tex both when collecting dependencies and when loading scenes, which would pull in a texture that might not exist. now no texture means no texture… as it should… misc bumped obsl (new using alias feature, and err output stream settings) docs for all the uuid stuff, the F key, and the new UI/image methods… of course… oh also … new demo scene testin thingamabob im messing with…"}, {"post_id": 79544, "ts": "2026-10-14T15:18:47Z", "hours": 7.9614, "text": "map edit kinda overhauled changes map edit stuff the brush size is now 1 to 8 instead of 1 to 5. size 1 is one hex, size 2 is 7, size 3 is 19, etc. Ctrl +scroll also changes the size added Rect and Circle shapes alongside the brush. they work with Paint, Erase and Select. Rect uses opposite corners, Circle goes from a center out to the hex you release on. both apply on release paint previews are green, erase previews are red, and selection previews are yellow. selected tiles get a blue overlay added tool hotkeys: B for Paint, E for Erase and Q for Select Esc cancels a drag. Rect and Circle do nothing if cancelled, while a brush stroke gets reverted instead of leaving half the changes behind loading a map now prompts before discarding a dirty map, and successfully creating or loading a map clears the old undo history selecting and editing multiple tiles Select now supports click and drag, Shift +drag to add to the selection and Ctrl +drag to remove from it the toolbar shows the selection count and has Clear and Delete buttons. Delete removes all selected tiles in one undo step the Tile Editor can edit the type and walkability of the whole selection at once. when selected tiles differ, the controls show mixed values etc. material editing only appears when every selected tile shares a type. Override Current Type changes the material for every tile using that type, while Save as New Type assigns a matching type to the selection without changing every other tile using the old type brush strokes, Rect/Circle fills, deletes and bulk type or walkability changes are each grouped into one undo step. changing a type’s material itself is still not undoable…. the console…. logging now has a sink system, so the same formatted log messages can go to different outputs the editor now has separate Logs and ObSL panels. engine/application logs go to Logs now, and script stdout goes to ObSL the panels have Clear and Copy buttons and keep the latest 2000 lines. the UI sink buffers incoming logs under a mutex before the editor consumes them closing the editor closing the window now goes through a callback, so unsaved scene or project changes trigger the save/discard prompt instead of immediately closing removed the old global Esc -to-quit shortcut. ObSL’s CloseWindow() no longer closes the editor while in Editor mode. it logs that it was called instead. in the runtime, it still closes the window windows and smaller fixes enabled /MP for MSVC builds, and the editor/runtime targets use the Windows GUI subsystem so they don’t launch with a console window attached atomic file writes now write the byte buffer explicitly and retry Windows file replacement when it fails with access-denied or sharing-violation errors, for up to about 2 seconds a bit of cleanup around collision pair sorting, const-correctness and naming docs updated the editor guide and screenshot to cover the new tools, shapes, selection controls, shortcuts and undo behavior. blah blah …map editing is finally a lot less barebones…"}, {"post_id": 78861, "ts": "2026-10-11T19:54:19Z", "hours": 3.0197, "text": "uhhh changes dont nuke scene on failed load scene deserialization moved out of Scene::OnEnter into SceneManager::LoadScene , and now runs before the old scene gets torn down. if the new one fails, you stay in the old scene ( LoadSceneByPath returns a bool now) loading is stricter. missing map files, bad/out-of-range/cyclic parent values and broken UI sections fail the load instead of logging an error and limping on persistent entity migration happens before the swap too, so a failed asset acquire can’t leave you half in the new scene the editor’s LoadScene used to clear the current project before trying to load. now undo history and selection only get cleared once the load actually worked saving: map write failures now propagate instead of reporting success, and files get closed before the error check destroying entities DestroyEntity was recursive, now it’s iterative with a visited set. deep hierarchies, cycles and duplicate child entries no longer kaboom the stack or double delete, and children go first (wow that sounds dark) Reparent and SetParentDirect go through CanSetParent , which rejects cycles and stale parents, even if the existing hierarchy is already cyclic script DestroyEntity / entity.Destroy() now use RequestDestroy to tag the entity and its whole subtree instead of deleting immediately, so on_destroy runs before deletion. scene exit drains the destroy queue too, including entities tagged by exit hooks the script wrapper cache evicts an entity when it’s destroyed a dumb one…: the hot-reload cleanup list had on_exit in it twice and no on_destroy , so on_destroy GC roots never got released … the script system was holding raw ScriptComponent* across initialization, which dangles if a script spawns enough entities to grow the pool. it looks components up by entity ID now script runtime reinitialization after a scene change uses the VFS path and reruns setup, so using imports keep working from the mounted project ui undo UI elements have UUIDs now, and undo commands resolve them by UUID instead of holding raw pointers. removing an element captures the whole subtree plus its sibling position, so undo restores the hierarchy and order. renaming also updates the name index live. smaller fixes collision broadphase is a “spatial hash grid” now instead of checking every pair lightmap rebakes when ambient changes, and handles maps with no tiles atomic file writes use unique temp names so concurrent writers don’t trip over each other project changes wait for background asset loads to finish timeout timers are mutex-protected, and callbacks can schedule more timers without deadlocking SmallTask over-aligned captures fall back to the heap VFS::Resolve(\"..\") had UB from a std::mismatch that wasn’t bounded on the second range… PlayMusic stops, swaps and starts under the lock now instead of racing!!! tests wrote a pile of tests alongside all this: atomic writes, wrapper cache, hierarchy safety, map serialization, save concurrency, scene loading failures, script lifecycle, script modules, SmallTask and timeouts. expanded to the editor command, save game and VFS tests. so EVEN LESS explosions !!! Woo!"}, {"post_id": 78453, "ts": "2026-10-10T20:34:34Z", "hours": 4.7336, "text": "undo stuff + render lifetime fixes undo / redo the undo system relied way too much on runtime entity IDs and direct pointers into components. that works until an entity gets deleted, an ECS slot gets recycled, or a dense component pool moves stuff around… entity commands now store the entity UUID and resolve the current runtime entity when they execute / undo instead. this now applies to transforms, renaming, adding / removing components, script changes, component field edits and map painting. so older commands can still find the right entity even if it was deleted and later restored with a completely different runtime ID. deleting things is actually undoable now finally added proper undo for deleting entities. !!!!!! deleting an entity snapshots the whole subtree first, including components, UUIDs, names, hierarchy + sibling order, scripts, custom data and asset references. undo rebuilds the tree, reloads required assets, restores the UUIDs and puts everything back where it was. this also means edits from before the deletion still work afterwards, since those commands just resolve the restored entity by UUID. paste uses the same snapshot system now too, so undo / redo keeps the same pasted entity identities instead of creating unrelated ones every time. there are checks for conflicting UUIDs, missing parents, invalid hierarchies, missing assets etc. failed restores shouldn’t leave half-created entities behind. failed commands also no longer get added to undo history or wipe an existing redo chain. custom ObSL data custom script data needed special handling too. arrays / objects can share references or even be cyclic, so just copying ObSL::Value s wasn’t enough. there’s now a snapshot format that captures the object graph and rebuilds it through the interpreter + GC when an entity is restored. CustomDataComponent also roots stored ObSL values properly so GC-managed objects stay alive. runtime functions aren’t snapshotable though, so deletion just fails instead of restoring garbage. render thread lifetime stuff also did a pretty big pass over renderer resource lifetime, mostly because scene switching could unload resources while an already submitted frame was still using them. (this started because someone mightve pointed out a lil crash for me…) render commands now pin the meshes, materials, shaders and textures they need until that frame is done. same idea for UI textures and the editor viewport framebuffer. OpenGL objects also don’t call glDelete* from whichever thread destroys the C++ object anymore. textures, shaders, buffers, VAOs and framebuffers queue deletion for the render thread, while it actually owns the GL context. less bugs yay frame state + shutdown renderer state that can change while the render thread is behind is captured per frame now too, including clear color, post-processing and UI resolution / projection state. shutdown is also more deliberate now: worker threads stop first, background font loads finish, scripts stop, scenes/resources are cleared, renderer/UI resources shut down, then the remaining GL delete queue is processed while a context still exists. font loading uses tracked jthread s now too instead of detached threads. small things exporting now reports success / failure back to the editor and shows a little result popup instead of silently relying on the console. also added tests around delete / restore, UUID reuse, hierarchy restoration, script components, map edits, pasting, command failures and repeated undo / redo without leaking entities or asset references. so. .. . less explosions hopefully sorry if wording is weird.. character limit.."}, {"post_id": 78136, "ts": "2026-10-09T18:21:07Z", "hours": 3.2578, "text": "export dependencies + prefab asset loading redid how exporting figures out what needs to go into the package previously editor export was basically much closer to just packing the project directory. now it builds a dependency manifest first figuring out what to export export starts from the project + scenes and follows the things they reference: catalog assets used by entities, maps, UI and post processing map files attached ObSL scripts script using imports scenes loaded from scripts prefabs instantiated from scripts music / sound files material textures + shaders animation sheets shader #include s referenced scenes and prefabs get scanned too, dependencies keep chaining from there. it then generates a new filtered assets.json specifically for the package instead of sticking the entire project catalog in there. the actual project’s catalog is untouched. script analysis added a ScriptAssetAnalyzer which walks the ObSL AST without actually running anything. literal stuff can be narrowed down properly, including things like: PlayMusic(\"assets/audio/music.ogg\", 1.0) or even constant string concatenation… asset setters like SetTexture / SetFont get tracked too. if a texture or font ID is dynamic, export keeps that entire asset category. if a runtime file path for stuff like LoadScene , Instantiate , PlayMusic or PlaySound2D can’t be figured out, it falls back to keeping the eligible project files + full asset catalog. unknown / indirect calls are done the same too so simple projects get smaller exports, while weird dynamic scripting should still work… .pakignore still applies, and required files being missing or ignored is now an export error prefab assets also fixed prefabs properly interacting with the lazy asset system. instantiating a prefab now scans its components, acquires whatever catalog assets it needs, resolves their dependencies, and retains them in the scene before creating the entity. so a prefab can use an asset that wasn’t already referenced by the scene and it should just work. scene asset scopes got changed a bit for this too. instead of accumulating a new scope every time something acquires assets, they’re merged into one scene scope and duplicate asset references are ignored. also made prefab revert a little safer so the old entity isn’t destroyed unless the replacement prefab actually instantiated successfully. packaging / ci things editor packaging is stricter in general now. script dependency validation can fail the export, missing dependencies stop it, and PackageCurrentProject reports failure so the rest of the export doesn’t continue pretending everything is fine. shader includes are followed during dependency collection too, while the engine shader helpers still get bundled for runtime includes. also cleaned up CI a decent bit… also some more tests too for the packaging and script analysis lowk sorry for just posting an image of the logs idk how else to show it since it’s mostly backend / file stuff 😭"}, {"post_id": 77620, "ts": "2026-10-07T17:38:02Z", "hours": 3.62, "text": "more tests (more bugs) kept going with the unit tests the test suite now covers most of the important stuff, including: ECS / entity IDs / UUIDs serialization + hierarchies collision geometry, events and movement maps animation saves ObSL + some EngineLib bindings assets / asset lifetime VFS + packaged projects configuration editor undo commands also added a couple integration tests for audio and rendering (OpenGL tests are optional) finding things unsurprisingly this found some actual problems too. stale entity handles can no longer remove / access components from an entity that reused the same slot, and editor undo commands are a bit safer around entities or components disappearing. also fixed some hierarchy rotation decomposition weirdness, cleaned up VFS / package mounting state so old package data can’t leak into the next mount, and added a few other small null / cleanup checks around scenes and rendering resources."}, {"post_id": 76449, "ts": "2026-10-03T15:32:32Z", "hours": 3.1158, "text": "unit tests (& some fixes) uhhhh started adding actual unit tests… i was kinda putting it off but i gotta have it… set up GoogleTest + CTest and started covering some stuff ECS registry / generational IDs entity UUIDs entity serialization hierarchy / parenting collision events + movement blocking save games maps bugs bugs bugs… and unsurprisingly, writing tests immediately started exposing some smaller issues. fixed stale entity handles being able to mess with components belonging to a recycled entity slot, and cleaned up some hierarchy transform / rotation handling that wasn’t preserving transforms correctly in certain parenting cases. also tightened up a couple math helpers while testing them. im still gonna write even more tests.. its very needed at this point and will prolly help me find some more bugs i missed before…"}, {"post_id": 75890, "ts": "2026-10-01T14:46:00Z", "hours": 5.4794, "text": "uuids, collision layers, save settings, and other stuff bit of a mixed bag this time. mostly cleaning up some systems that were already there and filling in stuff I’d need… entity UUIDs entities have proper UUIDs now, separate from their normal runtime entity IDs. the regular generational ID still does all the normal ECS stuff, while the UUID is a stable identity that gets serialized with the entity. this mostly fixes how persistent entities work between scenes. previously I was deduplicating persistent entities by name , which was obviously not ideal since names aren’t actually identities. persistent entities + their children now keep their UUIDs when moving between scenes, and if the destination already has an entity with the same UUID it gets replaced by the carried-over one. two things can have the exact same name now without persistence randomly deciding they’re the same thing. normal prefab instances / newly created entities still get new UUIDs. collision layers colliders now have proper layers + masks. there are 32 collision layers, and every collider has: a layer a 32-bit mask of layers it accepts both colliders have to accept each other’s layer for the pair to interact. the same filtering is used for normal overlap events and movement blocking, so there isn’t a separate set of collision rules depending on which system happens to be asking. added editor controls for this too, including the layer selector, all 32 mask toggles, and select all / deselect all buttons because clicking 32 checkboxes individually sounds incredibly fun. scripts can also read / change the layer and mask now. collision-aware script movement also added Transform.TryMoveTo(x, y, z) to ObSL. unlike SetPosition , this checks whether the entity can actually occupy the destination before moving it. the normal hex movement system uses the same helper now too, so script-controlled collision-aware movement and normal movement go through the same path. direct SetPosition is still basically teleporting, which is intentional. also fixed on_collision_stay actually looking up the collision stay callback instead of the trigger stay callback. whoops. more save settings did some more work around the save system from the last update. saving can now be enabled / disabled per project, and projects can choose where save files go: Data Home , the normal OS application-data location Portable , relative to the executable both still use the project UUID underneath so different projects don’t start sharing save files because somebody named both of them game . these are editable from Project Settings now. also added a confirmation dialog when regenerating the project UUID since doing that changes which save directory the project looks at. the old saves aren’t deleted, the project just gets a new identity and stops finding them automatically. graphics config stuff changed packaged builds so graphics.json can live beside the executable and override the version inside the package. (i.e if someone decides to unignore the graphics config and package it) couple random fixes particle emitters now keep their actual live particle count, so GetAliveCount() in ObSL finally returns the real value instead of the completely useless placeholder it had before. fixed a prefab revert issue where the code was reading the prefab path from the component after destroying the entity. very intelligent. also made theme font loading a bit less fragile. missing / broken font files get logged and skipped instead of potentially taking the whole theme load down with them, plus some parsing cleanup. and updated another mountain of docs to match all the collision, persistence, save, prefab, post-processing and export changes."}, {"post_id": 73199, "ts": "2026-09-24T16:15:43Z", "hours": 7.0497, "text": "save system i wanted this to be pretty generic instead of the engine having some hardcoded idea of what a “player save” or whatever is, so the actual save data is ba sically just key/value storage that scripts can use for whatever they want!!! save data there’s now a SaveGameManager which keeps one active save in memory. save values can currently be: booleans numbers strings the file format is versioned and also stores a display name + created / updated timestamps. the actual save data itself doesn’t really care what the values mean. it is any key value pair that persists. there’s also locking around the active save since scripts can be running across multiple workers….. project UUIDs projects also have their own UUID now. it’s generated when the project is created or when a project that does not already have one is opened right now it’s mainly used to give each project its own save-data directory without name collisions but im sure its good to have outside that!!! save files the basic save file operations too create a new save write the current active save load a save delete a save list existing saves start a fresh unsaved “game” save filenames are generated from timestamps. the human-readable name stays inside the file, display names don’t need to also be valid / unique filenames. save_list() also gives creation + update timestamps, and saves are sorted by most recently updated. writes are atomic too, so it writes through a temporary file before replacing the real save instead of directly nuking the existing one and hoping for the best per-project save directories save data is stored outside the project itself in the normal OS application data home each project gets its own directory based on its UUID <data home>/obliberry/<project uuid>/saves/ projects with the same name don’t fight over the same saves.. (i have several projects just called “UntitledProject” lol) this is LocalAppData on Windows, Application Support on macOS, and XDG_DATA_HOME / ~/.local/share on Linux. both the editor and runtime configure the save manager when the project is loaded, and it gets reset again when the editor closes the project ! ObSL ObSL savedata enginelib intergration: basic data stuff: save_set(key, value) save_get(key) save_has(key) save_remove(key) save_clear() save_new() save file management: save_create(name) save_write() save_load(filename) save_delete(filename) save_list() save_list() returns an array with the filename, display name, creation time and last update time some cleanup also pulled the atomic file writing stuff into a shared OS file utility, so assets.json can use the same code instead of having its own implementation. bunch of formatting stuff too i still have to document this and do some more testingf but yeahhh"}, {"post_id": 71462, "ts": "2026-09-20T21:23:42Z", "hours": 6.445, "text": "asset system refactor + some editor stuff been wanting to redo how assets work for a while now. until now scenes carried the asset definitions with them, and loading scenes would keep throwing resources into the global resource manager. worked fine enough , but it also meant resources could kinda just accumulate forever.. i seperated them now!! assets.json projects now have a project-wide assets.json catalog. textures, shaders, meshes, materials, fonts, animation sets, etc. live there instead of getting serialized into every single scene. scenes / prefabs / UI / animations etc. just store resource IDs and the definitions live in one place besides making scene files considerably less bloated, this means saving a scene no longer serializes whatever random collection of resources happens to currently exist in the resource manager lazy asset loading having one project-wide catalog does not mean loading the entire project into memory. scene loading now scans for the resources that scene actually references and loads those from the catalog this includes stuff referenced by: entities maps / tile types UI post processing spritesheets / animators dependencies get resolved too so if something needs a material, its shader + texture get pulled in first. animation sets pull in their spritesheet texture, etc. etc. now the the resource manager should only contain what is actually being used asset lifetime stuff added SceneAssetScope for keeping track of what assets a scene has acquired. assets are retained while something needs them and can actually be unloaded once the last scope using them disappears so changing scenes repeatedly should no longer turn the resource manager into yummy more objects :O forever…. persistent entities reacquire the resources they need when moving between scenes too. there’s also handling for catalog entries being replaced / deleted while their old resource is still loaded. those can be marked stale and discarded safely once the old scene lets go of them instead of leaving weird zombie resources around. engine assets still stay around like normal. editor asset workflow the editor now goes through the asset catalog too. creating / importing / replacing / deleting things like: textures shaders meshes materials fonts animation sets updates assets.json instead of depending on scene serialization to preserve them…. supported editor selections / script setters can also acquire catalog assets on demand and attach them to the current scene’s asset scope old projects old projects obviously still have all their assets embedded inside their scene files, so I added an ob_asset_migrator tool. it can scan the old scenes and merge all of those definitions into a project-level assets.json . there’s: dry-run validation conflict detection optional removal of the old scene assets sections backups before it starts rewriting stuff uses backups because i dont trust myself enough .. might vaporize projects who knows… docs docs docs also updated a stupid amount of documentation for the new asset model … since of course.. there’s now a full assets.json format page covering the different asset types, dependencies, lazy loading, asset scopes, editor behavior and migration. updated the scene / prefab / animation / post-processing docs too since all of those previously described assets as being stored directly in scenes. also cleaned up the main README + docs index a bit and updated the feature list because quite a lot of it was outdated at this point…. theme presets also did some work on editor themes. split the built-in theme definitions out and added some interesting presets: Obliberry Dark ImGui Classic Dark Obliberry Light ew imagine using light themes… High Contrast Dark Haxxorman Green editable and all… tldr: resourcemanager is now longer an infintly growing landfill…"}, {"post_id": 70788, "ts": "2026-09-19T19:20:34Z", "hours": 1.5706, "text": "I will not elaborate"}, {"post_id": 70712, "ts": "2026-09-19T17:13:26Z", "hours": 3.3022, "text": "animation editor continued working on the animation system and made the editor UI…. animation editor there’s now a Sprite Animation Editor you can: choose the spritesheet texture edit rows / columns / spacing create, rename and delete clips toggle looping per clip edit individual frame indices + durations move frames up / down duplicate / remove frames expand / collapse the frame list also added range generation so adding a normal animation doesn’t make you manually enter every frame one by one….. theres also an Apply FPS to All Frames button ! preview added a live preview for the selected clip. you can play, pause and restart it woaw it shows the current clip frame and spritesheet index while it runs…. project browser integration animation assets are properly integrated into the project browser now too there’s an Animations section where you can create, import, edit and delete animation assets creating a new one lets you choose its path then opens it in the animation editor. the animation asset workflow is mostly usable from inside the editor :D erm even more enginelib changes for the new systen that i still have to document… ( Play() Restart() etc) some cleanup working on… some mostly const-correctness, explicit casts, ranges, include cleanup and some other small stuff etc etc.. god bless resharper c++ also cleaned up some EngineLib entity wrapper code around registry locking so it can create wrappers safely when the registry mutex is already held spritesheet used in video attached for testing is : https://opengameart.org/content/animated-butterfly"}, {"post_id": 70230, "ts": "2026-09-18T19:10:52Z", "hours": 6.3242, "text": "btw pls star on girhub animation clips / refactoring spritesheets …kinda refactoring the whole spritesheet animation thing already the first version worked, but having FPS / looping / frame ranges etc directly on the SpriteSheetComponent was gonna get pretty limiting cuz what if I wanted multiple animations for one sprite. it might sound stupid but for me it’s always worked to get a prototype working, then refactor/reimplement it. thats even what i did for this entire project early on, before it deleoped into a full on engine :D so now the spritesheet is mostly just the sheet + currently displayed frame, and animation playback is seperate animation clips working on proper animation sets + clips. an animation asset can have one spritesheet and multiple named clips, with each clip containing its own list of frames :D each frame also has its own duration now instead of the whole animation just sharing one FPS value, so stuff like holding a frame longer or doing irregular timing is possible without clips can loop independently too animator component added a separate SpriteAnimatorComponent which handles the actual playback state: animation asset initial clip autoplay current clip current frame inside that clip elapsed time playing state the normal SpriteSheetComponent is way simpler now… it just says what sheet + frame should currently be rendered (the animator updates that for it) animation assets animation sets are assets now under assets/animations/ they serialize separately and contain the spritesheet setup plus all the clips / frames / durations they are loaded through the normal asset system and registered in the ResourceManager scene serialization now keeps the animator config like the selected animation asset, initial clip, and autoplay editor stuff the sprite sheet inspector got reworked for the current thing but whole UI stuff isnt finished once an animator is attached it owns the sheet/frame instead of both systems trying to edit the same thing. I still need a proper UI for actually making / editing animation assets and clips though. i shall work on this next!!! (right now the backend is pretty much all ive done but its taken a lil longer than i thought… who wouldve thought adding cips cleanly would take this whole aah refactor) scripting EngineLib updates too SpriteAnimator in scripts can now do: Play(\"walk\") Restart(\"walk\") Pause() Resume() Stop() IsPlaying() GetClip() it is now based on named clips so i guess not anything flashy to show but… its stuff :)"}, {"post_id": 69178, "ts": "2026-09-16T15:19:06Z", "hours": 4.2144, "text": "spritesheets / animation finally … spritesheet support spritesheets added a new SpriteSheetComponent with: texture rows / columns optional row + column spacing start frame animation length FPS looping playing / paused state current frame basically the renderer can now render only a specific UV region of a texture animation also added a small sprite animation system that advances frames based on FPS and handles looping / stopping at the end etc etc animations also update while in the editor… might be annoying for some, might be less annoying for others.. but thats how i like it editor stuff you can pick the texture, set rows / columns and spacing, choose the start frame + animation length, change FPS, toggle looping / playback, scrub the current frame, restart the animation, etc. etc EngineLib scripts can inspect stuff like the current frame, frame count, FPS, rows / columns and texture, and can also change the texture/grid/animation, set frames, play, pause, restart and stop animations. Collider also has a proper EngineLib component wrapper instead of collision only being accessible through the callback hooks. right now that’s just getting / setting whether it’s a trigger, but it’s there. also added both Collider and SpriteSheet to the normal GetComponent , AddComponent , RemoveComponent , HasComponent , etc. obviously. some cleanup did a bit of registry / EngineLib locking cleanup while I was in there too, mostly around entity wrappers being created while the registry lock is already held. also fixed one very stupid collision callback typo where on_collision_stay was looking up the wrong hook… oops….. im also starting on documenting this stuff…. yep.. pain… spritesheet used in video attached for testing is : https://opengameart.org/content/animated-butterfly"}, {"post_id": 67894, "ts": "2026-09-14T06:13:59Z", "hours": 2.1764, "text": "collision callbacks scripts can do collision things now….!!! script collision callbacks ObSL scripts can now define collision hooks: on_collision_enter(other) on_collision_stay(other) on_collision_exit(other) on_trigger_enter(other) on_trigger_stay(other) on_trigger_exit(other) the other argument is a normal EngineLib entity wrapper, scripts can do stuff like check its name, components, etc. collision events get collected by the CollisionWorld , then dispatched to the relevant script instances afterwards. they’re also run through the existing script command buffer ofc 2D collider shapes are back too… added explicit 2D shapes alongside the 3D ones: Rectangle Circle so the full set is now: Box Sphere Cylinder Rectangle Circle rectangle / circle are flat shapes. which is nicer for sprites and other 2d things movement actually respects colliders hex movement now checks whether an entity can actually occupy its next tile before moving there. added a CanOccupy() collision query which builds the entity’s collider at the target position, it blocks the move if something solid is in the way. triggers don’t block movement. collision robustness stuff also did a bunch of smaller fixes around the collision added a shared collision tolerance instead of random 1e-6 s in different places AABB overlap now uses that tolerance too improved collider validation depending on the actual shape fixed gizmo world-to-local conversion to use the proper inverse transform more finite-value / clipping checks in the collider gizmo GJK Indeterminate results preserve the previous collision state instead of automatically counting as a collision p.s, heres a lil photo of my attempt at making syntax highlighting for obsl using textmate grammar… :D"}, {"post_id": 66845, "ts": "2026-09-12T19:22:05Z", "hours": 3.0608, "text": "collision system round 2 i guess ended up pretty much reworking most of the collision system….. the first version was still basically 2D, with separate box vs box / circle vs circle / box vs circle functions. that worked as a starting point, but it was gonna get annoying … so… it is 3D now. colliders ColliderComponent now supports: boxes spheres cylinders 3D offsets / dimensions triggers entity-space or billboard orientation billboard colliders follow the same camera-facing basis as billboard rendering, which means billboard sprites can still have colliders that actually line up with how they appear on screen. GJK got rid of all the individual boxVBox , boxVCircle , etc. collision functions and replaced them with support-mapped collision detection using GJK. each collider shape just provides a support point now, the intersection test doesn’t care what combination of shapes it’s checking. i dont fully understand the math completely yet.. but it kinda makes sense :D still no collision response / physics yet. this is just detection + events, i think ill prolly get it into EngineLib.. soon… events the CollisionWorld still tracks collisions between frames and generates: Enter Stay Exit trigger state is kept with the collision too. this is for EngineLib integration. scripts should be able to react to collisions / triggers like unity I have not gotten around to this yet though… collider gizmos also had to redo the collider gizmos now that colliders aren’t just flat 2D shapes anymore… its a lil janky but it works.. billboard cleanup while doing the billboard collider stuff I also cleaned up billboard rendering a bit billboards used to have their world transform temporarily modified by SpriteBillboardSystem before rendering. now the billboard matrix is generated when the entity is submitted to the renderer instead, so the actual ECS transform can stay as the real entity transform there’s now one shared billboard matrix helper used by both rendering and collision, which is considerably less cursed. um scripting integration next i guess.. if something dosent explode ! :D"}, {"post_id": 66200, "ts": "2026-09-11T21:27:55Z", "hours": 3.4236, "text": "collision stuff been working on a collider system. still pretty early and not hooked into EngineLib yet, but most of the basic backend + editor stuff is there planning to expose it to scripts in a similar way to how Unity handles collision callbacks / triggers, but that’s for later……. collision added a new ColliderComponent with: box and circle colliders offsets size / radius trigger support collision system currently handles: box vs box circle vs circle box vs circle collision normals + penetration depth ‘trigger’ collisions also added a CollisionWorld that keeps track of collisions between frames and generates Enter , Stay , and Exit events. mostly groundwork for when I hook this into EngineLib… collider editing colliders are editable from the editor theres a collider inspector widget for changing the shape, offset, size/radius, and whether it’s a trigger, plus a viewport gizmo for directly moving and resizing them collider edits also go through the undo system, because every new editor feature needs to become an undo/redo problem eventually……… :D other editor fixes entity copy/paste now copies the whole child hierarchy instead of only the selected entity pasted hierarchies keep their parent relationships added copy/paste to the entity and UI context menus fixed stale entity / UI selections after the thing being selected gets deleted fixed single-key shortcuts like V , T , R , etc. firing while Ctrl/Alt/Shift was held keyboard camera movement no longer fights with Ctrl/Alt shortcuts a few smaller include / cleanup things mostly collision work though. next step is probably getting the collision events into EngineLib and experimentiung w. it its still a bit jank of course but it works i guess :DDDDD"}, {"post_id": 65603, "ts": "2026-09-10T20:50:19Z", "hours": 4.8511, "text": "copy paste (kinda) also too much time fighting windows builds tried to get entity copy/paste working and it’s… janky. also ended up wasting a stupid amount of time just getting windows builds to actually build again because i lowk forgot again about how it wont let me pass paths as strings implictly as it does on every other damn os… changes copy/paste (wip, kinda broken) started on ctrl+c/ctrl+v for entities & ui in the editor it kinda works but is really janky and does not feel good to use, also tried implementing it in the context menu but its not workiong at all -.- other the windows fixes…. some resharper reccomendation inspection type shi but lowk its been a while since i logged soo yep"}, {"post_id": 64268, "ts": "2026-09-08T15:23:01Z", "hours": 3.8883, "text": "sllight hub overhaul redid the project hub screen and added recent projects tracking, since up to now opening anything meant going through a file dialog every single time… changes recent projects get tracked in a PROJECTHIST file (next to the editor executable) …dead simple format, one filepath per line, each pointing at a project’s .json . capped at 5 entries, oldest just get removed off the list. hub screen is basically remade two docked panels now instead of one. left panel is the same buttons as before (new project, open project, etc), right panel is the new recent-projects list, up to 5 entries since that’s all the history file holds. also removed some unused dead code i found… QoL type stuff i guess :D"}, {"post_id": 63577, "ts": "2026-09-07T14:25:37Z", "hours": 3.9417, "text": "too many post proc fx? followup to the post processing / shader experiments… changes shader includes shaders can #include \"rand.glsl\" etc and it resolves properly. it checks the project VFS first, then falls back to the engine’s own shader helper directory if it isn’t found there. engine shader helpers also get packaged into exported games under engine/shaders/ , so includes keep working at runtime. added a few helper include files: rand.glsl / auto_rand.glsl - seeded hash-based random, with auto_rand reseeding per frame from u_Time color.glsl - HSV conversion, lift/gamma/gain, contrast, saturation, and three-way color wheels commons.glsl - engine-provided uniform declarations so you don’t have to redeclare u_Resolution , etc. in every shader for engine-provided uniforms the helpers use #ifndef / #define guards, so auto_rand.glsl can include rand.glsl without causing double declarations if the effect shader or another include declare the same uniforms or includes. more built-in effects added a few more built-in post processing effects: ColorGrading - exposure, contrast + pivot, saturation, lift/gamma/gain, and shadow/midtone/highlight color wheels using color.glsl FilmGrain - chunky per-cell grain with u_GrainSize controlling the cell size Vingette - yes i know its mispelled. uniforms with Wheel in the name now get the wheel-style color picker instead of the regular color picker, since a normal RGB slider cleaned up effect registration used to have two separate lists, one for raw shader registration and one for the default effect chain. this meant adding an effect involved touching two different structs in two different places. merged those into one PPRegistration list with an inDefaultChain flag shader debug name added an actual m_DebugName field and made error messages / the material inspector fall back to it when there isn’t a real file path. docs wrote up some post-processing editor docs ….. i hate writing docs.. also .shader is now a valid extension for importing custom effect shaders, alongside .frag / .glsl trimmed down the miniaudio CMake config by disabling its examples, tests, and tools, along with Vorbis/Opus/FLAC support since i’m not using any of that…."}, {"post_id": 62331, "ts": "2026-09-05T17:14:14Z", "hours": 3.0172, "text": "shader preprocessing been working on a small shader preprocessor thing while also finishing up the final bits of post-processing right now the preprocessor is pretty simple, mostly just adding support for: #include #pragma once I haven’t actually needed it yet, I just kinda had the urge to make it… so now I have a shader preprocessor …? its pretty extendable and all though so usefull to have ig :)"}, {"post_id": 61599, "ts": "2026-09-04T16:12:18Z", "hours": 6.9642, "text": "more post processing!!!! this took way longer than i thought it would but uh whateveer. i think i still gotta fix some small things but its working pretty alright :D editor ui added a proper ui for post processing :) threw in an import button and stuff so you can load in fragment shaders as post proc fx you can edit the uniforms directly in the ui now stuff glsl uniform parser: wrote a very simple basic glsl uniforms parser. this is what makes the ui editing possible, but it also helps a ton with serialization so i don’t have to hardcode everything serialization: implemented saving and loading for post processing effects and also made post processing effects bound per-scene instead of being a global engine thing yay post processing funny effects shaders aaaaaaaah"}, {"post_id": 58126, "ts": "2026-08-30T14:12:01Z", "hours": 6.2431, "text": "experimenting with post processing working on a lil post-processing pipeline still very wip but im mostly just playing around with various shaders and stuff changes the pipeline PostProcessor is a simple “ping-pong” chain: scene renders to an off-screen FrameBuffer , then each enabled effect runs full-screen-triangle shaders bouncing between two ping-pong buffers, in whatever order they were added I’m working on a system via variants to get uniforms to be easily serializable and such, it seems to be working but I havent actually wired it into anything just yet. editor and runtime a lil bigger change than expected. i implemented a unified fbo for both editor/runtime rather than the weird jank i was doing before editor: scene renders into m_SceneFrameBuffer , post effects run, then it gets sent into the ImGui viewport image like before runtime: same scene framebuffer, same post effects, then PresentToScreen goes to the default framebuffer instead just some general cleanup for that ig crt shader i wrote a lil silly CRT looking shader to test it out as shown below, it’s cool but kind of useless, but very fun to play with!!!"}, {"post_id": 55765, "ts": "2026-08-27T19:09:56Z", "hours": 4.9358, "text": "custom meshes im trynna make it so you can draw your own custom 2d meshes in the editor its still a lil buggy but it’s mostly working, serializes and all that :) very fun…"}, {"post_id": 55022, "ts": "2026-08-26T13:27:21Z", "hours": 2.1303, "text": "ui editing gizmos!!!1 you can finally drag UI elements around in the editor (instead of typing position/scale values into the inspector) changes ui gizmo added a proper UI gizmo with resize handles and dragging support and that corners resize both axes, edges resize one axis dragging the body moves the element resizing from the top/left keeps the opposite edge anchored added a small drag deadzone so clicking doesn’t accidentally create an undo step UI transforms now go through TransformUIElementCommand , so they’re undo/redo -able also renamed the existing entity gizmo code and naming gets confusing otherwise… coordinate stuff the gizmo needed mouse coordinates relative to the viewport rather than the whole window, so added some better viewport coordinate handling for that… maybe a lil late ui editing mode buttons won’t randomly enter their hover/pressed states just because your mouse is sitting over them now in the editor beccause its a lil annoying when editing small optimization also fixed UIText and UIButton recalculating their text layout every frame when nothing changes feels nice :)"}, {"post_id": 54551, "ts": "2026-08-25T16:02:00Z", "hours": 2.53, "text": "hardening + performance stuff so this is kinda the continuation of the last log(s) where i was going through some old code kinda boooring but its important performance mainly been trying to get rid of unnecessary allocations and full scans stuff optimized ECS entity/component lookups and removal reworked hierarchy propagation to avoid unnecessary registry scans reduced allocations in scripting and UI command buffers cached script wrappers so they can be reused instead of constantly recreated improved UI lookups with a proper name index made particle/lightmap updates only rebuild when actually needed cached project browser directory scans capped the editor console and added clipping for large logs also did a bunch of smaller optimizations around scripting task scheduling and resource loading things thread safety went through a lot of the cross-thread stuff as well made ResourceManager access properly synchronized experimenting with the audio locking guarded FreeType access made window size and pending scene state thread-safe fixed some render thread / GL context handling basically trying to make all the multithreading stuff a little less “it seems to work” type stuff though alot of this probably wasnt actually causing any issues YET , it would be very hard to debug in the future if I didn’t try to fix it now so yeahh correctness fixed several out-of-bounds issues in VFS/package parsing made VFS path resolution properly stay inside the VFS root (oops…) fixed hierarchy reparenting allowing cycles fixed a few dangling references in hierarchy code fixed some component pool and packaged asset lifetime issues undo history now clears when loading a scene cleaned up a few map editor edge cases fixed text centering fixed the triangle mesh made engine context non copyable also updated the demo template while I was at it (since a recent movementcomponent update it wasnt behaving properly due to the addition of a new field) there are other small things i probably didn’t mention here too but it’s mostly all a collection of a bunch of small things im still testing this though and looking into a few other small things….."}, {"post_id": 53560, "ts": "2026-08-24T04:55:16Z", "hours": 7.8433, "text": "code cleanup & optimization currently going through a bunch of older code and fixing / optimizing things. prolly way too much to actually write about, and most of it is just boring small changes, bug fixes, and a lil cleanup big pr i guess soon idk"}, {"post_id": 51782, "ts": "2026-08-21T16:57:55Z", "hours": 3.4422, "text": "mostly windows fixes changes SetLightmap took a raw Lightmap* and just held onto it for the frame swapped it for a small value type the renderer copies out immediately instead… this sometimes caused crashes but seemingly only on windows?.. just my luck.. LightingSystem had the same issue, was writing back into ECS memory through a raw pointer from a GL init task. now creates the framebuffer/vao up front and just calls Invalidate() on them SubmitPersistent was also holding a raw pointer into caller-owned memory, now copies into the staging buffer like everything else does RenderBatch used to just silently not draw anything if a batch went over MAX_INSTANCES . now it chunks into multiple draw calls instead of dropping the whole thing InvalidateGLCache wasn’t resetting the dynamic instance buffers, only the VAO cache, so they could point at dead GL objects after a context loss actual windows fixes opening files tries to open via already existing file associationg, otherwise falls back to the “open with” dialog if there’s no default handler also the paths get normalized to backslashes now asset import for scripts and so just does a file copy now instead of going through the old import path"}, {"post_id": 51240, "ts": "2026-08-20T19:35:22Z", "hours": 4.2758, "text": "persistent entities… again kinda scrapped most of the first attempt at persistent entities and decided to redo it instead of setting persistence in the editor, I went with something closer to Unity’s DontDestroyOnLoad , where scripts explicitly mark entities as persistent. makes more sense and is a lot less weird around scene changes. (i.e this.SetPersistent(true); ) changes scripting added: entity.SetPersistent(true) entity.IsPersistent() persistence persistent entities are tagged before the scene unloads, serialized normally, then re-injected and reparented when the new scene loads. the persistence tag itself isn’t serialized, so it won’t accidentally end up saved into the scene dedup added some basic deduplication so persistent entities don’t get duplicated if the new scene already contains an entity with the same name. its name based for now… not very great, but good enough"}, {"post_id": 50497, "ts": "2026-08-19T17:37:31Z", "hours": 6.7433, "text": "persistent Entities been working on persistent entities via a tag.. the same idea as Unity’s DontDestroyOnLoad, except you mark entities as persistent in the editor instead of doing it through scripts (scripts can do it too though). everything keeps breaking or half-working help."}, {"post_id": 49249, "ts": "2026-08-17T22:47:10Z", "hours": 2.5156, "text": "more docs… and some bug fixes some small bugs that have been annoying me for a while finally got fixed… and I wrote more docs than I probably needed to…? or maybe too litte.. who knows changes entity selection actually clears now fixed an issue where clicking empty space in the viewport wouldn’t reliably clear the current selection. the pick-result handling was structured wrong, so the “nothing was selected” case basically never got handled properly. also explicitly clear the entity ID framebuffer attachment every frame so it doesn’t leave stale IDs around from previous frames. i knew this was broken, and figured the fix would be pretty simple for a while.. but i just kinda forgot to fix it.. oops…. fixed parent transforms during scene loading fixed a bug with parented entities getting their transforms messed up when loading a scene. the issue was that scene loading was using the same Reparent() logic as interactive editor reparenting. that function intentionally recalculates the local transform to preserve world position, which is what you don’t want when loading a transform that’s already been serialized correctly… was eepy when writing that i guess added Registry::SetParentDirect() for scene loading, which just sets up the parent/child relationship without touching the transforms. interactive reparenting still uses the old behaviour, so dragging entities around in the hierarchy still preserves their world position misc cleaned out some old commented-out code docs, docs, docs also wrote proper editor documentation section covering things like: editor concepts usage scenes prefabs components and some even have screenshots.. yes i know.. fancy the help button in the editor links to some of these pages now. i guess “figure it out yourself” wasn’t really an acceptable documentation strategy anymore…. i mean i had some docs.. but they weren’t that good for editor-usage and more technical stuff.. so yep.. also made the README headers slightly more obvious because people were still asking where the download link was …."}, {"post_id": 48754, "ts": "2026-08-17T08:58:43Z", "hours": 2.7114, "text": "scrips can change things on the map yippie changes scripting scripts can now modify maps through EngineLib added: Map_SetHexWalkable Map_SetTileType yes, i made sure changes to walkability properly update the map’s pathfinding data instead of leaving it with stale information… sanitizers added sanitizer builds…. got ASan + UBSan working through CMake, along with presets for testing… it has helped already :) timers SetTimeout : if a script created a timer and then the scene changed before it fired, the callback could still run against the old scene state. timers now use generations, so changing/reloading a scene invalidates any timers belonging to the previous scene. editor fixed another map editor bug where discarding unsaved changes didn’t actually discard them… it would clear the dirty state but leave the edited map in memory… i knew about this bug and fix for a while, but i kept on forgetting about it… but its finally done -.- also added an Edit button to script entries in the project browser so scripts can be opened directly (launches default app it detects for the file via ur os)"}, {"post_id": 47739, "ts": "2026-08-15T21:10:44Z", "hours": 1.0883, "text": "mostly ui stuff (and fighting windows wide chars) yay pretty ui editor ui theming ui blah blah idk what to call it kinda cleaned up some stuff into proper members so the ui state doesn’t get all weird and persistent when you close the theme window discarding changes: actually works now. closing the window used to revert colors but keep your staged font changes, which was dumb (didnt really cause issues since changes werent applied anyways unless you saved beforehand but still.) font role indicators: added a little visual thingamabob where the font list now shows a star next to whatever font is actively set as the body font (also font name is now rendered in its proper font) path tooltips: added a hover tooltip on the font list items that shows the full file path of the font also some placeholder stuff in the code for searching the customization menu i might be implementing soon windows compat std::filesystem::path everything: went through and switched out the raw std::string usage for font paths inside FontConfig , replacing them with std::filesystem::path . this was purely because my windows ci build was failing. i was passing raw char strings around and doing weird string conversions, which completely blows up on windows because it expects wide chars for paths and i didnt consider that when i was being lazy and doing silly conversions and stuff because i just wanted to pass ez pz to a c library. freetype & serialization cleanup: updated all the internal freetype helper functions ( GetFontName , etc.) and the json theme serializer to play nice with the new paths instead of passing raw char pointers kinda mostly just making it a lil more prettier"}, {"post_id": 47431, "ts": "2026-08-15T11:16:32Z", "hours": 9.0703, "text": "fighting with fonts font-management rabbit hole in the theme editor… still wip changes font management in the theme editor the theme editor now has a proper Fonts section import .ttf / .otf fonts directly from the editor assign fonts to roles like Body, Bold, Monospace, Icons, etc. merge fonts together so icon fonts can be stacked on top of regular fonts rename, delete, and change the size of fonts fontsets are now saved as part of the theme, so imported fonts persist across restarts the role system isn’t fully wired up yet currently Body is used as the default editor font and Monospace is used for the console. im still working on the whole font management system here and its very unfinished and kinda untested.. very WIP!!! hot-reloading the annoying part was getting font changes to work while the renderer is running on another thread. rebuilding the ImGui font atlas in the middle of a frame was… not ideal, and eventually resulted in an assertion. now font changes mark the atlas as dirty, and the editor waits for the render thread to finish before rebuilding the atlas at a safe point. not the prettiest solution, but it seems to be working.. kind of dpi & freetype also experimented with DPI handling for fonts and wrapped FreeType into a single shared instance instead of creating separate instances everywhere. still figuring out exactly how I want the DPI/font sizing stuff to behave, but it’s getting there. bug fixes while doing all of this I also ended up fixing a few unrelated things: fixed an old GUI rendering bug where text could stop rendering or become garbled because of a pointer race thanks to @staneko for helping test/report that one since I couldn’t reproduce it properly on my system fixed a weird compilation issue related to namespace escaping bumped the vendored ImGui version for some dynamic font-related fixes a few other small UI changes and cleanup still working on this, and the font management side definitely isn’t finished yet… most of this time was just spent trying to get it to half-work so.. yep.."}, {"post_id": 46512, "ts": "2026-08-13T19:50:30Z", "hours": 3.6469, "text": "…the default imgui theme first off, huge thanks for all the incredibly kind reviews on my last ship !!! most of this work was also inspired by someone pointing out that i was still using the default imgui theme. fairs… so i spent some time making the editor actually customizable and messing around with having some kinda-nice defaults :) editor ui & theming live theme editor: built a proper window to tweak colors, spacing, padding, rounding, etc. in real-time. semantic palettes: added a semantic color system so you can build out a theme from a small set of base colors, rather than manually adjusting every single internal imgui color enum (though you can still override individual colors if you need to). serialization: themes dump straight out to a theme.json sitting right next to the editor executable. undo/redo: the theme adjustments go through the undo/redo system! help menu: put in a placeholder help menu. turns out literally nobody likes reading docs, so i guess i gotta start explaining how to use the engine from inside the engine… not implemented yet though editor groundwork did a bit of backend cleanup as well. added an EditorContext for editor-specific state, separate from the runtime EngineContext (currently just used for theme stuff) started working on editor font support with a FontSet for things like Body, Bold, Monospace, and Icons, not implemented though the font stuff is mostly groundwork for now, but the theming system is actually working and makes the editor feel nice :D"}, {"post_id": 46257, "ts": "2026-08-13T11:34:55Z", "hours": 2.8147, "text": "scripts can schedule stuff for later Added SetTimeout to the scripting API changes SetTimeout SetTimeout(fn, ms) calls fn() after ms milliseconds. simple to call from obsl timers live in a plain std::vector<Timer> in a new Platform::Time namespace, polled once a frame from Scene::Update no threads, no async bs or whatever :) the callback itself is a SmallTask , which falls back to a heap allocation if the closure is too big to fit inline fine for this since timeouts aren’t really a hot path timeout callback fires from an arbitrary point in Update , so it gets its own ScriptCommandBuffer set up on the worker just for the duration of the call, then flushed right after also gc.add_root / remove_root the function around the callback so it doesn’t get collected while it’s sitting in the timer list waiting to fire Documented it in the api reference alongside the other Time functions also tiny UI tweak in the tile editor: it now warns “no tile types defined, no map will be visible!” instead of just “no tile types defined” was seeing people get confused about why a new map looked empty after trying to paint also small updates to docs in general and stuff but nothing super interesting"}, {"post_id": 40738, "ts": "2026-08-04T13:46:27Z", "hours": 0.7667, "text": "Lighting Fixes been fixing a few small things with the lighting system mainly fixed lights using the wrong entity transform I forgot to account for entity parenting when I implemented that… also added a per-scene toggle for enabling/disabling the lighting system"}, {"post_id": 40621, "ts": "2026-08-04T08:56:51Z", "hours": 3.7144, "text": "the repo is public been working on gettin things ready for that, mostly writing some docs and getting GitHub Actions set up so I can build and release cross-platform builds also did some small code cleanup / fixes while I was going through everything. changes github actions i setup a workflow to compile the project on linux, windows, and mac, and then publish a release (mac is untested but compiles). im real happy though that its actually compiling on all “major” platforms though docs finally wrote some actual documentation… there are a few files in the docs/ folder now and a proper README still a WIP obviously, but at least there’s something there… misc implemented create new map button i forgot about completely repo there is already a build published as a test of the github actions thingy, try it out if you want :D https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry"}, {"post_id": 39155, "ts": "2026-08-01T21:44:42Z", "hours": 3.0289, "text": "Bugs bugs bugs… I’ve been working on a demo project to both test the engine properly (looking for bugs and all), and also have something to actually show off made in my engine… this is the project you’ve been seeing in the last couple logs btw :) of course… since I’ve been using the editor for actual “work”, I have found a bunch of bugs. the biggest one being the entity ID situation… or.. disaster? changes the entity ID mess in the past, out of laziness… entity ID 0 was being used as both a real, valid entity handle and the “no entity / invalid” value depending on where you looked. which worked fine… mostly because of pure luck. the annoying part was that after working on this for a while I wasn’t even sure anymore if I was using 0 , -1 , or something else for invalid entities.. yep.. so I finally cleaned it up there is now a proper INVALID_ENTITY_ID constant, and entity index 0 is reserved for invalid entities. real entities now start from 1 . went through and replaced a bunch of random == 0 / != 0 checks across ECS, serialization, prefab handling, editor panels, and scripting bindings. project templates added support for multiple project templates. new project creation now scans the Templates/ folder instead of everything being hardcoded to “Default”. currently has: DemoProject Empty the demo project is mostly there to show off the newer UI/scripting stuff (the same demo as mentioned before), while Empty is just a completely blank scene. hierarchy & transforms fixed entity and UI reparenting. previously moving something to a new parent could randomly change its position because it was just applying the new local transform now reparenting keeps the world transform, so dragging things around in the hierarchy behaves properly UI & text rendering fixed a bunch of UI text issues. text now centers vertically using actual glyph metrics instead of a random offset I was “pretty sure” was correct it was not, in fact, correct button text now scales to fit inside the button fonts can now load directly from VFS memory instead of requiring a real filesystem path the VFS font loading one was something I completely forgot about when testing outside packaged projects… oops. packaging implemented .pakignore instead of a hardcoded ignore list, the packer now supports gitignore-style patterns in a .pakignore file and properly skips ignored folders/files also fixed a few smaller packaging issues while testing exported projects. misc a bunch of smaller things: map save/load dialogs now default to the project maps folder fixed scene switching bindings in editor play mode fixed a lightmap redraw bug font importer now only accepts .ttf / .otf added a small README with build instructions since im planning on publishing the repo soon (and writing all the docs… scary..) nothing super flashy this time.. but important"}, {"post_id": 38183, "ts": "2026-07-31T13:32:00Z", "hours": 0.8028, "text": "Windows Build The Windows build seems to be working.. I don’t have proper OpenGL passthrough in my VM… However, the Windows executable compiles perfectly in the VM and is running fine under Wine. so I consider that a win for now…"}, {"post_id": 37625, "ts": "2026-07-30T14:23:01Z", "hours": 1.56, "text": "working in a windows vm trying to get it to compile on windows… it is obviously going great… -.-"}, {"post_id": 36411, "ts": "2026-07-28T14:49:53Z", "hours": 3.1286, "text": "Entity Hierarchy & Scripting Integration finally caved & added actual parent/child relationships to entities changes entity hierarchy entities can now have a parent & children via a new RelationshipComponent . Registry::Reparent() handles moving an entity under a new parent, with cycle & self-parenting protection so you cant do anything silly like parenting an entity to its own descendant. TransformComponent now has a worldTransform alongside the existing local one, a new HierarchySystem systems that care about actual position (i.e AISystem ) read worldTransform now instead of assuming local == world. destroying an entity recursively destroys its children too & unlinks it from its parent’s child list scene serialization now saves & restores the hierarchy editor the Registry panel is a proper collapsible tree now instead of a flat list drag & drop reparenting, plus a right click menu for “Create Child”, “Detach”, & “Set Parent”. scripting pulled all the entity/component script bindings out into their own EngineLibRegistry.cpp module, they were kind of scattered around before & this makes them way easier to find & extend. scripts can now walk the hierarchy too (get children, etc), same module. added SetFont / GetFont bindings so scripts can assign or query a button’s font, small thing but script generated buttons wont have visible text without it :) misc cleanup small modernization stuff while i was in these files anyway: dropped redundant ternary parens, swapped a bunch of auto x = ...; if (x) into if-with-initializer, dropped some unnecessary global qualifiers, const-correctness fixes on UISystem::Update & UIRenderer::Flush . (yes i know the gizmos are offset and buggy, i kind of forgot to update the gizmo code after changing transforms :p )"}, {"post_id": 35110, "ts": "2026-07-26T10:28:41Z", "hours": 8.4342, "text": "Scripted UI, Map Workflow, & a Bunch of Bug Fixes alot of bug hunting… changes scripting & ui scripts can now actually interact with the UI system. added bindings for things like: creating UI buttons, text, rects, and images finding UI elements destroying UI elements these return wrapped objects with basic getters/setters for position, visibility, and button state map workflow spent a fair bit of time cleaning up the map editor flow. maps no longer get a fake default path on creation switching to the Map Editor tab now auto-creates a map (empty) if there isn’t one yet mapFilePath now stays project dir relative instead of randomly becoming absolute tile materials are now shared properly instead of silently duplicating state rendering & lifetime bugs i’ve been doing alot of testing recently, so i found alot of bugs… this was probably the biggest pain point. renderer submissions now keep materials and meshes alive for the frame instead of trusting the caller replaced the old Shader::Default() singleton hack with a real fallback shader (internalshaders base) fixed the lightmap quad so it keeps its own VAO and clears correctly when there are no lights fixed a Texture move bug that was double-deleting GL handles sometimes editor polish also cleaned up a bunch of editor behavior while I was in there. Ctrl+S now behaves correctly depending on whether editing a scene or a map scene loading now rebinds editor panels properly save/load dialogs now append file extensions automatically added more inline warnings in the inspector and panels (i.e if an entity has no material it will tell you it wont render) and ive probably forgotten something else … in summary ive just been testing out some UI/UX changed and hunting down bugs untill I feel it is ready to maybe start prearing some sort of demo :)"}, {"post_id": 33128, "ts": "2026-07-22T19:10:20Z", "hours": 2.6717, "text": "more ui ive been kinda sick so i aint really had the motivation to do a lot but ive been working more on the UI system im kinda tired so i dont really feel like writing more for now -.-"}, {"post_id": 31900, "ts": "2026-07-20T17:42:45Z", "hours": 4.6017, "text": "game UI Progress been continuing work on the UI system. changes UI made some good progress UI system currently have: font importing working texture support for UI elements basic text rendering a simple editor view panel for UI it’s still very much WIP editor right now it’s pretty basic, but it’s enough to start experimenting with how creating and editing UI might actually work inside the editor there’s still a lot left to do before I’d call it usable, but im making progress.. getting text working is painfull, and still unfinished.. but im workin on it…"}, {"post_id": 30701, "ts": "2026-07-18T14:27:23Z", "hours": 3.7628, "text": "UI Experiments since working on the particle system, I feel like it’s in a pretty good place for the current scope. I don’t really know what else I want to add to it right now, so I decided to finally start on something that’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time… a proper UI system. changes particles mostly just spent some time testing and polishing the particle system to make sure everything behaves properly I’m pretty happy with where it’s at for now UI started prototyping a custom UI system it’s very early, but I’ve got the basic rendering pipeline up and running currently working on: a UIElement system a dedicated UI renderer text rendering font loading using FreeType right now it’s mostly just enough to prove everything works, but it’s the foundation for the runtime UI system ive wanted for a long time the goal is for games made in the editor to be able to have their own UI, with everything exposed through EngineLib so scripts can create and interact with UI elements as well honestly, for now.. I was expecting it to go alot worse.. FreeType isn’t as bad as it seems once you get it working with GL The screenshot below dosent show much, but you can see the rendering of Text and rects, it also supports textured rects (which is what the text is currently using to render from a texture atlas)"}, {"post_id": 30249, "ts": "2026-07-17T17:50:34Z", "hours": 2.8864, "text": "More Particle work… been spending some time on the particle system… changes particles expanded the particle system quite a bit. currently supports: randomized size ranges randomized rotation configurable emitter shapes (support quad, circle, and soft circle) alpha and additive blending configurable render order (still kinda broken but im working on it) per-particle color over lifetime particle presets that can be saved and loaded (as JSON) also added an editor preview mode, so particles can be previewed while editing instead of only showing up in play mode renderer had to do a bit of renderer work to support all of this particles now use their own dedicated shader added support for per-instance colors during instanced rendering added an overlay render pass for effects that should render on top of the scene cleanup also did a some more project cleanup, splitting up my Utils header into multiple files.. nothing special though misc particle emitters can now be saved as reusable presets (some which will be shipped as defaults ofc) as suggested by @sol4r_on_hackclub cleaned up a few asset importing edge cases fixed a couple of packaging issues too I’m pretty happy with how the particle system is coming along :D"}, {"post_id": 29706, "ts": "2026-07-16T19:55:20Z", "hours": 0.9678, "text": "mostly just spent some time going through some old code.. nothing really important, but i’ve also replaced the placeholder assets.. with my own placeholder assets that i drew in GIMP, considering i probably do not have the rights at all to distribute the previous assets.. :)"}, {"post_id": 29523, "ts": "2026-07-16T14:38:59Z", "hours": 2.2728, "text": "Particles! :) Ive started working on a particle system. i have got the core pieces in place and it seems to be working nicely so far…. changes particles implemented the foundations of the particle system currently has: ParticleEmitterComponent ParticleSystem ParticlePool emitters currently support: configurable particle limits and emission rates randomized lifetimes and velocities “gravity” size over lifetime color over lifetime world space simulation materials obviously so far it’s all behaving pretty well… EngineLib next up is getting particles exposed through the EngineLib API so scripts can spawn and control emitter components we will see how it goes…"}, {"post_id": 29203, "ts": "2026-07-15T22:53:22Z", "hours": 6.2536, "text": "Editor QoL, Graphics Configs & Prefabs new devlog… mostly been focusing on editor ui and qol changes this time around. kinda tired of hardcoded settings for the graphics settings, so i finally built a proper interface for it, plus some prefab management stuff in the editor changes graphics settings i built a dedicated graphics configurator window in the window, for the current project ( GraphicsConfigEditor ). it hooks directly into the UndoManager using the command pattern ( GraphicsConfigUpdateCommand ) serializes everything out to graphics.json . added QuerySupportedSampleCounts which asks the active GL context ( before it gets handed to the render thread ) what MSAA sample counts it supports. the editor now dynamically generates the dropdown and snaps to a valid sample count (i.e 1, 2, 4, 8, 16). prefab management the editor now supports prefab management that i implemented earlier .. instead of directly writing it in the scene json file you can spawn entities directly into the scene from prefab json files you can revert a prefab, which wipes any local overrides and resets the entity back to whatever is saved in the file you can break a prefab, severing the link to the json file and turning it into a normal, standalone entity in the registry ui & editor cleanup spent some time making the editor less annoying.. in general the editor layout stops resetting itself , it now checks if imgui.ini exists on startup, and if it does, it skips rebuilding the default dockspace ripped the hardcoded hub drawing code out of the EditorLayer and made it its own state for the editor state machine refactored the config windows ( ProjectConfigEditor , SceneConfigEditor , and the new GraphicsConfigEditor ) to inherit from a base ConfigEditor class so its cleaner and easier to maintain.. fixed the script widget since the ui was kinda messy"}, {"post_id": 28584, "ts": "2026-07-14T22:27:14Z", "hours": 2.6136, "text": "the OpenGL State Machine Strikes Back… I spent the entire day trapped in hell: debugging a corrupted OpenGL state… it may not show up as tracked hours.. since most of it was just staring at various forms of text.. but it was painful. problem so since i turned the lightmap to run on gpu .. well… Whenever I transitioned from the editor ( MapEditState ) into Play mode, the map would turn into like a bunch of weird diamonds, and the corruption would persist indefinitely until I remounted the current project. because it only happened on state transition, i spent hours chasing ghosts in my state management code and scene cleanup routines… (in the end though i did make some changes to the cleanup routines, but between states rather than scenes.. so i guess i was halfway there?) the culprit It was the lighting pass… took me forever to figure it out, but i had the genius and definitely NOT a very late and obvious idea i shouldve had hours ago , to see if the issue happened when i turned off the lighting system. so i put some early returns in my lighting system functions and.. it didnt corrupt.. inside LightingSystem::Update() , the renderer was modifying global OpenGL state changing depth functions, blending modes, and texture bindings, but not restoring them to their original defaults properly When the engine swapped states, the next frame inherited this dirty, half configured state, causing the whole thing to become a mess. the fix I went through the lighting system and made sure the state changes are wrapped and properly restored through the render thread.. LightingSystem.h : Full GL state save/restore around the light pass. now explicitly backing up and restoring the FBO, program, VAO, blend state, draw buffers, clear color, viewport, and active texture. MapEditState.cpp : OnExit() now properly nulls out m_MapComp and m_CurrentGrid . OnEnter() and will refetch them from the current registry so it isnt holding onto outdated references. EditorLayer.cpp : Added a call to renderer->Clean() after state transfers to clear out stale VAO and mesh caches.(bc its multithreaded things go kinda weird but.. it works now) glad thats over with :D Also heres a fun peek of what ObSL can do with EngineLib, yes, it can make your entire map look like hell..! i am totally not going insane"}, {"post_id": 27998, "ts": "2026-07-13T23:29:33Z", "hours": 5.0142, "text": "GPU Lighting & Graphics Settings been doing a bit of rendering work again… mostly trying to optimize things. the biggest change is that I completely rewrote the lighting system previously all the point light calculations were happening on the CPU, and after doing some profiling (and spending way too long staring at compiler generated assembly annotations) it became pretty obvious that this was one of the bigger performance bottlenecks (well THE biggest excluding driver overhead) lighting now runs entirely on the GPU through shaders instead changes lighting rewrote the lighting system. lighting is now shader-based and runs on the GPU removed the old CPU-side lighting calculations moved engine shaders (like the base shader and lighting shader) into built-in InternalShaders (hardcoded string literals, it might seem messy but i prefer it like that) the internal shader change mostly exists because they’re pretty fundamental to the renderer. if they were treated like normal project assets and someone accidentally deleted them… well… suddenly nothing renders (unless they had setup their own shaders, which is fully supported!) and lighting completely falls over, also i prefer it to loading them from the filesystem anyways overall I’m pretty happy with how the new lighting system turned out graphics settings also started working on configurable graphics settings instead of baking them into the project, the engine now loads graphics settings from a separate JSON file. this doesn’t get packed into the .obpak , so users can tweak their graphics settings after exporting a game currently supports: resolution fullscreen MSAA (toggle + sample count) target FPS VSync it’s weirdly fun actually being back in OpenGL code again instead of just working with engine abstractions sometimes it’s nice to get back into the weeds.. even if its.. painfull :D"}, {"post_id": 27425, "ts": "2026-07-12T23:53:21Z", "hours": 7.5097, "text": "Performance & Zero Copy Assets been spending some time under the hood… this one’s almost entirely backend. no new features, mostly went through the render thread, asset pipeline, & a handful of ECS loops to squeeze out more performance. it was incredibly rage inducing at times.. but seeing the profiler diff against baseline.. i am satisfied.. almost at peace.. but was considering becoming a farmer & never touching a computer again.. mostly because i thought i’d messed up more than i did.. but.. im happy now. changes threading & ecs i’ve reinvented the wheel enough already… but had to redo how tasks are dispatched. ThreadPool used to take a std::function , which heap allocates if you capture more than a couple pointers. scripts dispatch through this every frame, so it added up. swapped it for a custom Task type a 56-byte inline buffer, no heap allocs swapped the pending-task counter to a lock free atomic decrement instead of a mutex on every completion… rendering been cleaning up how the main thread interacts with the render thread. the main & render threads used to awkwardly poll eachothers framebuffers. now theres a m_ReadyFrames deque main pushes a frame index, render pops it. much cleaner :) ImGui draw data is now reused in-place instead of allocating & freeing a fresh clone every frame (ive put off fixing that hack for a while so its nice to finally come around to it). instanced draws no longer store a vector<mat4> per draw call, transforms get appended into one giant staging buffer per frame now. added SubmitPersistent for things that already own a long-lived buffer (like the map tile renderer) to skip the copy entirely. swapped a bunch of unordered_map s for flat vectors in the texture/VAO/uniform caches for a handful of items, linear scan beats hashing. batched rendering also caches the last bound texture & color uniform so b2b batches sharing a texture dont rebind needlessly. added a zero-size window safeguard for Wayland so it stops wrecking the renderer when the window briefly reports 0x0 during resize (also turned vsync back on, weird syscall spam otherwise) assets & packaging added VFS::ReadVirtualView to hand out string_view s directly into memory instead of owned strings for packaged builds, ContainerReader now mmap s the .obpak file directly, uncompressed stuff (textures, uncompiled maps) gets handed right to the parser without a copy. also now move only, with a destructor that unmaps memory instead of holding a copied vector of chars scripting the script hot-reloader was doing a stat() syscall on every script file every frame . oops. now polls every 300 frames & caches resolved paths.. thought i already debounced this.. guess not.. the on_update & on_destroy work buckets used to be freshly allocated vectors every frame… now static , so they just clear & reuse capacity editor & ui finally ripped out the old in game debug UI ( GameUI.cpp ), it had fallen out of sync with the ECS anyway (used it for debug visuals while implementing the first version of the ecs.. then forgot about it) the editors inspector does all of this better now, so replaced it with a minimal FPS counter audio & map audio engine now sets an explicit period size (2048 frames) via miniaudio to cut IPC roundtrips to the audio daemon.. (this one was annoying to figure out.. god bless strace & gdb) the map’s visible transforms buffer is now double buffered, rebuilds write to the back buffer while the render thread reads the front, no race conditions. also swapped typeMats from an unordered_map to a flat vector nothing user facing changed this time, but frame pacing feels noticeably smoother (somewhat suprised), & the packaged build starts noticeably faster i know it could probably be a lot better, but im still a bit of a noob at C++, so this is one hell of a learning project"}, {"post_id": 26719, "ts": "2026-07-11T17:53:32Z", "hours": 3.9353, "text": "Undo/Redo …again! been working on the editor again the undo/redo system now covers a lot more than just gizmo transforms. but there’s still a few things left (entity creation/deletion mainly). changes undo/redo expanded the command system to cover most editor actions. currently supports: entity transforms adding/removing components adding/removing scripts editing project settings editing scene properties also fixed the undo/redo shortcuts so they only trigger once per key press instead of repeatedly firing while the keys are held… which is probably how they should’ve worked from the start map editor continued working on map editing. painting and erasing now properly integrate with the command system. also, an entire brush stroke is treated as a single undo step instead of undoing one tile at a time. also cleaned up a couple of edge cases while doing this, like preserving existing tile data and avoiding unnecessary commands when nothing actually changed. misc did a bit of cleanup around the editor while wiring everything together. centralized a few bits of duplicated UI logic cleaned up window title updates continued refactoring the command system the undo system is still unfinished, but it covers most of the important stuff and feels nice.. also.. still gotta fix some ui window-size stuff soon too but .. thats for later"}, {"post_id": 26228, "ts": "2026-07-10T21:54:28Z", "hours": 3.1872, "text": "Undo/Redo! :) been working on some editor QoL stuff again… the biggest addition this time is a proper undo/redo system. it’s still very early and pretty barebones, but having the foundations in place is nice changes editor commands implemented the beginnings of a proper command system for the editor instead of modifying things directly, editor actions now go through commands, which means they can be undone and redone currently supports: entity transforms movement rotation scaling adding components removing components (with the exception of ScriptComponent for now.. that’ll get its own custom command due to the way it works) also keeps a command history, and the usual shortcuts are hooked up now: Ctrl + Z : Undo Ctrl + Y : Redo its still pretty basic, but it works and feels nice to use. input for this, I added proper key-combination support to the input manager. things like: Ctrl + S Ctrl + Z Ctrl + Y can now be handled properly instead of manually checking modifier keys everywhere logging did a bit more cleanup to the logging system as well. the logger now goes through a proper interface instead of everything depending directly on one concrete implementation, which should make it a bit easier to swap things around later if I ever want to. mostly backend work again… but undo/redo is fire"}, {"post_id": 26050, "ts": "2026-07-10T17:12:54Z", "hours": 2.2128, "text": "editor polish still nothing super flashy.., mostly a bunch of small things changes window titles the editor now updates its window title based on what youre working on. it’ll now include things like the current project and scene, or map project loading cleaned up project loading a bit. the editor now properly syncs the loaded project configuration into the engine context instead of relying on stale data also added menu in the map editor that lets you save and load map files (create new is just placeholder for now) UI added a small helper for rendering framebuffer textures in ImGui without needing to remember to flip the UVs every time. and made the tile Editor use it also forgot to mention in the last log that i cleaned up the “project browser” ui a bit logging fixed up some more logging :)"}, {"post_id": 25892, "ts": "2026-07-10T11:51:37Z", "hours": 3.0564, "text": "Logging Cleanup replaced all the random std::cout / std::cerr calls scattered throughout the project with an actual logging system logging implemented a proper logging system. replaced std::cout / std::cerr throughout the engine added support for different log levels optional logging to a log file centralized all engine logging into one place thread safe !!!! nothing particularly flashy or fancy, but its cleaner, easier to work with, and generally just nice i probably should’ve done this a long time ago :)"}, {"post_id": 25509, "ts": "2026-07-09T20:30:56Z", "hours": 4.8756, "text": "Map Editing, Brushes, and a 4(?) hour ImGui Bug The map editor is finally coming together It’s still a bit… rough but it does feel nice to be able to paint a map in the editor I did, however, spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out why my click and drag “painting” wasn’t working… well.. ImGui was eating my inputs because it thought I was trying to drag the Scene View window around.. yeah.. changes map editor actually got the map editing tools working for real this time. the paint and erase tools actually place and remove tiles now instead of just being placeholder buttons added a brush radius slider, so you can paint in bigger hex rings added a preview outline that renders around your cursor so you can see before clicking toggling “is walkable” on a tile now properly syncs with the grid pathfinding editor ui spent some time making the tile palette and material editing.. work.. video explains better ngl im not good at describing ui stuff math laid some groundwork in the hex math system ( Lerp , CubeRound , and GetHexLine ) this is mostly for some future evil plans… still a WIP…"}, {"post_id": 25003, "ts": "2026-07-08T22:10:08Z", "hours": 0.7108, "text": "map editor preveiw ig kinda didnt have much time to do anything today but im working on the tile editor"}, {"post_id": 24426, "ts": "2026-07-07T23:37:55Z", "hours": 8.7589, "text": "editor rework & map editing groundwork been working on the editor again this update was mostly about cleaning up the editor architecture so I can actually keep adding features without everything turning into spaghetti. I also finally started laying the groundwork for proper map editing. changes editor reworked the editor state system. instead of instantly swapping between states, transitions are now deferred until a safe point during the update loop. this makes switching between Edit, Play, Map Edit, and the Hub a lot cleaner, and the editor now remembers which editing mode you were in before hitting Play. (i’ll admit… i was getting a bunch of weird, seemingly unexplainable crashes before eventually realizing my mistake was instantly switching states while things were still being updated/rendered…) also moved more UI responsibility into the individual states instead of having EditorLayer decide how everything should be drawn. map editor started putting together the map editor. currently i have: map hover and tile selection working placeholder Paint / Erase / Select tools the beginnings of a tile palette system a placeholder tile editor panel the actual editing logic isn’t implemented yet, but the foundations are there now :) asset picker ripped out the old “open a native file dialog for every asset field” flow. instead, the editor now lets you pick existing textures, meshes, materials and shaders directly from the ResourceManager , which is a lot nicer to work with and also avoids accidentally importing duplicate assets. (the old workflow would happily create a brand new object every time you imported something… which was fine for testing, but definitely wasn’t something i wanted to keep) rendering fixed a few editor rendering issues while i was at it. materials with invalid shaders now fall back to the default shader instead of silently disappearing fixed some edge cases with framebuffer entity picking currently unused, but functional shader hot reloading tests misc smoothed out editor camera movement and zoom added a few helper utilities for the map editor reorganized the editor UI code a bit doesn’t look massively different in screenshots, but makes future work alot easier/cleaner map painting is next ?.."}, {"post_id": 23641, "ts": "2026-07-06T18:38:19Z", "hours": 2.4394, "text": "Project Exporting been working on making projects exportable from the editor it’s now able to export a project to the selected folder, package all the assets into an .obpak , and then copy over the runtime so the exported project is runnable changes project exporting added export to the editor choose an output folder for the exported project packages the project into an .obpak copies the runtime into the export folder renames the runtime to match the project name (just 2 files for full project!, executable and .obpak) the whole process is pretty much one click now instead of manually packaging everything together. file dialogs refactored my entire filedialog implementation cuz it was kinda broken packaging did some more work on the packaging pipeline while implementing exporting and put it in the editor ui im pretty happy that its all working and i can actually export stuff, and run it feels cool :)"}, {"post_id": 23429, "ts": "2026-07-06T12:05:06Z", "hours": 4.1694, "text": "Project Packaging is Working been spending a lot of time working on project packaging, and it’s finally working now. the engine can now load projects directly from .obpak files, and I’ve got basic tooling to create them as well. the plan is to integrate the tooling i have now with the editor to “build” an obpak archive (i think its called an archive?) changes packaging implemented the full packaging/loading pipeline yippie :D currently the packer: pre-generates ASTs for ObSL scripts converts project, scene(s) and prefab(s) JSON into MessagePack bundles everything into a single .obpak container compresses the package with LZ4 assets like textures, audio and shaders just get copied into the package without any conversion runtime the engine can now load packaged projects directly instead of relying on loose project files. all of this goes through the VFS, so from the engine’s point of view it doesn’t really matter whether assets are coming from a folder or from an .obpak (i.e it can still load loose project files of course) tooling added command-line tools for packing and unpacking projects, i originally made it for testing but it’s actually pretty nice to work with so im probably keeping it. still probably things to polish, but it’s pretty satisfying seeing the engine load an entire packaged project properly pls ignore the lag in the video, i promise its not as terrible as it looks, its just that recording is pretty buggy for me"}, {"post_id": 23095, "ts": "2026-07-05T20:42:38Z", "hours": 3.8311, "text": "Project Packaging been working on a packaging format for projects. the goal is basically to package an entire project into a single container while preprocessing assets that make sense to preprocess. Also makes shipping a game made in the engine in the future alot easier / cleaner, and portable. changes packaging implemented the start of a proper project packaging system. currently it: parses ObSL scripts ahead of time and stores serialized ASTs instead of source code (basically very similar to some sort of a very very simple AOT compiler) converts project, scene and prefab JSON files into MessagePack stores media and other binary assets directly in the package optionally compresses package entries with LZ4 the idea is that the engine has less work to do at runtime since scripts don’t need parsing and JSON doesn’t need parsing either. and a single “package” file is alot cleaner in general for a finished game “build” package format also implemented the actual container format itself. different asset types are stored as different entry types (scripts, binary JSON, media, shaders, etc.), so the loader knows exactly how each asset should be handled. tools added standalone packaging tools as well for packing and unpacking projects, mostly for testing. still a work in progress, but the whole packaging pipeline is starting to come together."}, {"post_id": 22372, "ts": "2026-07-04T20:12:27Z", "hours": 5.1664, "text": "editor Gizmos! :DD this took a lot longer than I’d like to admit… but it’s finally working. changes gizmos got all gizmos working.. but had issues with rotation and scale at first figured out the issues with rotation/scaling ended up patching ImGuizmo at first to get things working, but after digging through the code I eventually figured out how to do it properly with the normal library translation, rotation, and scale gizmos all work now :)))))) honestly I learnt quite a bit just from messing around with the ImGuizmo internals.. but it was painful editor added a few more UI improvements as well. i.e billboard sprites now explicitly mention that rotation doesn’t do anything, instead of letting you wonder why nothing happens gizmos are one of those things I’ve been waiting on implementing.. but im finally happy to have them"}, {"post_id": 21565, "ts": "2026-07-03T16:19:30Z", "hours": 2.6169, "text": "actually working on the editor I’m finally getting around to actually implementing the editor ..it still looks pretty similar (well mostly the same) but most of the UI before was just placeholder. changes editor implemented a Project Settings window implemented a Scene Properties window made the component widgets actually do something now load textures assign scripts change material colors change meshes change shaders etc…. added an Add Component button added Remove buttons to components it works.. so thats good :D"}, {"post_id": 21208, "ts": "2026-07-03T00:51:55Z", "hours": 0.6447, "text": "ObSL Scripting Library Moved the scripting language into its own repository :) It’s now included in the engine as a library using git submodules and public headers instead of living directly in the engine source code Makes the project structure a lot cleaner .. for both projects ( ObSL can now be found at https://github.com/torkelicious/ObSL )"}, {"post_id": 21066, "ts": "2026-07-02T20:52:49Z", "hours": 5.9469, "text": "Script multithreading (and concurrency) scripts now run on other thread(s) :D this took a fair bit of cleanup, but it’s working. changes script workers moved script execution onto worker thread(s) worked on script worker concurrency dynamically clamp the number of active workers based on how many callbacks are actually running, so idle threads aren’t just spinning doing nothing garbage collection did some work on the GC as well. introduced external root tracking fixed a few issues around GC roots while getting multithreaded script execution working cleanup spent some time cleaning up a bunch of backend stuff while getting all of this working. build system updated CMake so all executables, scripts, and (project) templates are output to a single build/bin directory instead of being messy. multithreading yay :)"}, {"post_id": 20164, "ts": "2026-07-01T18:24:52Z", "hours": 3.945, "text": "ive been mostly messing around with getting the ObSL language to be thread-safe and refactoring some things, so I don’t have much to show but my end goal is to be able to get scripts to run concurrently and outside of the main thread"}, {"post_id": 19379, "ts": "2026-06-30T17:52:06Z", "hours": 4.6878, "text": "Editor & Scene Management been working on the editor mostly. changes ECS implemented generational ID masks for the ECS. this should prevents issues with stale entity references since IDs can now properly track generations instead of just relying on raw IDs. (i encountered this issue when testing multiple scenes in one project) scene manager fully implemented the SceneManager so it can actually be used by the editor & game layer. this allows the editor to properly load/save/validate/find and generally handle scenes through a unified API (goes for gamelayer aswell but it only really loads them) bug fixing spent a lot of time fixing various issues around: project folder management scene management loading / saving behaviour asset loading (cache was causing some problems on loading scenes but its all fixed now :D) mostly backend work but things are becoming a lot more stable and the editor foundation is starting to come together…."}, {"post_id": 18509, "ts": "2026-06-29T17:58:54Z", "hours": 7.6317, "text": "Namespace Refactor & Project Management Work Dependencies finally caused me to run into a namespace conflict after being lazy and unorganized… instead of being sane and just renaming one class.. I decided to refactor the entire project to use proper namespaces everywhere.. changes namespaces Refactored the entire codebase into proper namespaces project management / editor backend I don’t really have much visually to show this update since I’ve mostly been working on backend stuff. Working on: project management scene management VFS improvements editor saving/loading I’m using nativefiledialog-extended to work on proper file dialogs for saving and loading from the editor. Also been doing a lot of testing around project creation and loading. alot of this is in the hope i can get this working multi-platform and not just on linux (though i have yet to try and compile on another os) Things are working… for now… so progress :D"}, {"post_id": 17698, "ts": "2026-06-28T16:44:24Z", "hours": 1.5475, "text": "Editor Picking & Project Management because my EditorLayer uses a framebuffer, I can now utilize framebuffer color picking in the editor i updated the shaders to store an entity ID, so now I can click on entities directly in the editor scene view and it selects them. …and it’s pixel perfect :D changes editor layer added framebuffer based entity picking clicking entities in the scene view selects them!!!! selection is based on the exact pixel under the mouse (i mean to implement gizmos i first need to know what the hell my mouse is on) project management also started laying the groundwork for actual project management. now that I have some sort of VFS implemented, I’m working on a way to properly manage Projects instead of relying on the current setup. still figuring out the exact structure, but ive been working on setting up the Project class"}, {"post_id": 16940, "ts": "2026-06-27T14:41:38Z", "hours": 3.1197, "text": "VFS & Editor layer implemented a basic VFS (Virtual File System) . all asset loading is now routed through the VFS instead of directly loading files. this is mainly preparation for adding proper project management later instead of relying on a hardcoded project.json in the project root i was testing with changes VFS added a basic VFS implementation routed asset loading through the VFS the idea is that the VFS will make it easier to manage project assets and not have everything depend on hardcoded paths. editor layer still experimenting a bit with the editor placeholder UI. added: (new EditorCamera derived class of Camera ) camera panning in the editor viewport camera zoom toggling top-down / isometric perspective with keybinds the top-down view should be useful later when I add actual map editing stuff most of the editor UI is still just placeholder right now, I’m mostly testing layouts and figuring out how I want the editor to feel and look ImGuizmo also added ImGuizmo to the project since I’m planning to start implementing proper editor stuff soon.. …and well… you need gizmos… I’ve reinvented the wheel enough already, so using a proper gizmo library seems like the better choice :) (also integrates very nicely with ImGui)"}, {"post_id": 16309, "ts": "2026-06-26T15:23:43Z", "hours": 2.0242, "text": "Editor UI & Framebuffer Experiments i’ve started experimenting with the ImGui docking branch in the EditorLayer . (switched branch had some build errors blah blah blah but its all set up now) Implemented some placeholder editor UI to test out the docking stuff and get a feel for how the editor layout might end up being like changes editor layer placeholder UI using ImGui docking features testing editor panel layouts framebuffer implemented a framebuffer system for the editor viewport. the scene is currently rendering in the editorlayer via a frame buffer so it can fit in the little thingy (i forgot the name) while testing I noticed some resizing issues when running on my nvidia dGPU: the framebuffer resize works, but resizing the viewport can appear somewhat choppy? the framebuffer and docking setup seem to be working, so i guess this im close to actually start to build proper tooling :)"}, {"post_id": 15851, "ts": "2026-06-25T19:34:56Z", "hours": 4.3886, "text": "refactoring for editor foundation Refactored rendering and culling systems and made broader architectural changes to decouple the game from the application layer. Rendering & Culling Refactored frustum culling logic to be lil more performant and generally cleaner Cleaned up and improved parts of the rendering pipeline since i had alot of old unused code lurking in them since i switched to a multithreaded architechture Application Architecture the engine is now structured around an ApplicationLayer system. The core Application class now runs a single active ApplicationLayer Each layer exposes: Init Update Render Shutdown Game class refactor The Game implementation has been converted into a derived ApplicationLayer Game logic is now fully driven through the layer system instead of hardcoded to the application class (the different executable mains decide now) Editor Layer added a new EditorLayer Intended for a future scene editor application. (right now all it does is render a given scene on the screen) CMake changes reworked the project to generate multiple executables: obliberry_engine core engine executable (ig runtime) obliberry_editor editor application layer changes: Engine and core systems (i.e ObSL, Renderer, etc) are now compiled as libraries Executables link against shared engine libraries instead of duplicating code Editor executable links against engine modules summary Game logic is now layer-based Engine and tools are separated Editor can proceed independently from the game runtime"}, {"post_id": 15286, "ts": "2026-06-24T20:32:54Z", "hours": 3.7039, "text": "multithreading & rendering I think I got some form of multithreading working now. The renderer has been moved onto its own dedicated thread, separating rendering from the main engine thread :) Changes Rendering Thread Moved rendering execution to a separate thread (alot had to be refactored for this to work lol) Thread Safety i tried (imgui was a pain) Rendering Optimizations Added frustum culling to the renderer. big optimizeD? actual rendering (i.e gpu calls) is now seperated from the main thread :D …it looks like its working for now"}, {"post_id": 14758, "ts": "2026-06-23T23:48:42Z", "hours": 0.4239, "text": "I think i fixed most of the silly bugs from trying to make rendering thread safe, im still gonna double check some stuff and do some testing but moving rendering to its own render thread will be coming soon :))))"}, {"post_id": 14743, "ts": "2026-06-23T23:15:37Z", "hours": 1.1569, "text": "kinda reverted changes from the last log and tried again to convert everything to be thread safe before actually trying to run on a seperate thread… things are going.. interestingly"}, {"post_id": 14522, "ts": "2026-06-23T17:41:20Z", "hours": 0.8647, "text": "im trying to make the renderer run on another thread… few issues… cant see (entity) meshes?, and closing the window seems to cause a freeze…. :))"}, {"post_id": 14480, "ts": "2026-06-23T16:45:32Z", "hours": 1.2731, "text": "Been mostly just fixing some window rendering stuff Moved away from hardcoded resolution / aspect ratio and made it handle itself on the fly also removed the padding bars i had before so rendering actually takes up full screen New native engine binding in EngineLib too: Window_SetFullscreen (takes a bool) I’m planning on starting to work on making the engine multithreaded soon…"}, {"post_id": 14379, "ts": "2026-06-23T14:22:29Z", "hours": 0.8064, "text": "“project” file system prototype Started implementing support for engine project files instead of hardcoding a scene path like i was before for testing. The engine will now deserialize a project.json file containing configuration, includes: name Project name (unused for now) version Project version (also unused) start_scene Path to the scene the engine loads on startup Window configuration: width height title fullscreen while implementing this, I uncovered some unexpected behaviour related to fullscreen handling caused by how window sizing was previously managed. i spent time refactoring and fixing the window size logic to make fullscreen behaviour… work.. project loading is now starting to come together, less hardcoded stuff yippie (im planning on making an editor in the future so.. this is why)"}, {"post_id": 14345, "ts": "2026-06-23T13:22:42Z", "hours": 1.3275, "text": "Porting ECS systems to ObSL Fully ported the InteractionSystem to ObSL through EngineLib. Camera movement and player movement are now handled through dedicated ObSL scripts instead of being hardcoded ECS systems. This moves more gameplay logic into the scripting layer and makes systems easier to modify and iterate on :) Changes System Migration Ported InteractionSystem from ECS code to ObSL Basically Moved camera movement & player movement logic into ObSL scripts Interaction system is no longer hardcoded engine-side gameplay system New EngineLib Bindings Math / Hex Grid Math_WorldToHex Converts world coordinates into hex grid coordinates SetSelectedHex Updates the currently selected hex tile Camera Camera_SetZoom Sets the camera zoom level Window Window_GetHeight Gets the current window height Window_GetWidth Gets the current window width Input Input_IsKeyReleased Checks if a key was released Input_IsMouseDown Checks if a mouse button is currently held Input_IsMouseReleased Checks if a mouse button was released Input_GetMouseX Gets the mouse X position Input_GetMouseY Gets the mouse Y position Input_GetScrollX Gets horizontal scroll input Input_GetScrollY Gets vertical scroll input Please ignore the weird graphical artifacting in the attached video, my pc has been acting up recently :("}, {"post_id": 13950, "ts": "2026-06-22T22:00:49Z", "hours": 3.1867, "text": "more EngineLib work Implemented several improvements to the scripting and entity systems. changes prefab caching Added caching for prefabs to improve performance when repeatedly instantiating entities Entity Access in Scripts Added GetEntity , which returns the entity Object that the script is attached to. Added support for the this keyword in ObSL scripts. this is a wrapper around GetEntity() to provide direct access to the current entity custom components Added support for script-defined components: entity.AddCustomComponent entity.GetCustomComponent This allows scripts to attach and retrieve custom data/components without requiring engine side component definitions entity validation Updated all entity object calls (such as GetComponent ) to validate the entity before executing (in both native bindings & engine source code) Entity operations now check: registry.isValid(id) before accessing the entity. This prevents errors caused by accessing deleted entities during scenarios such as scene unloading/loading cleanup"}, {"post_id": 13774, "ts": "2026-06-22T16:02:35Z", "hours": 0.8908, "text": "EngineLib I may have forgotten to mention this in my previous log, but I also implemented an Instantiate method in EngineLib. Instantiate takes an entity definition as a JSON file (ig a prefab) and spawns the entity into the current scene. I also added scene related functionality to EngineLib: LoadScene Loads a scene from a given path GetCurrentScenePath Returns the path of the currently loaded scene"}, {"post_id": 13737, "ts": "2026-06-22T15:02:47Z", "hours": 3.4014, "text": "I’m using miniaudio to implement audio support in the game engine, with an AudioEngine class to abstract the audio functionality. I’ve also updated SceneProperties to include a new background_music property. This allows each scene to define a background music track (via filepath) that will automatically loop through the AudioEngine while that scene is active. It all seems to be currently working well, Next I’m starting to integrate audio functionality into EngineLib so that scripts can interact with the audio system. changes Added AudioEngine abstraction layer using miniaudio Added background_music support to SceneProperties (w. proper serialization/deserialization ofc) Implemented looping background music per scene"}, {"post_id": 13262, "ts": "2026-06-21T18:28:09Z", "hours": 2.735, "text": "EngineLib Script Integration I fully replaced the previously hardcoded PlayerMovementSystem with an ObSL script implementation using new EngineLib bindings. The movement logic is now handled externally through scripting instead of being directly implemented in C++. New EngineLib Bindings entity management Added bindings for basic entity operations: CreateEntity Creates a new entity Destroy Removes an entity HasComponent Checks whether an entity has a specific component RemoveComponent Removes a component from an entity global functions get_dt Retrieves delta time CloseWindow Closes the glfw window Input System Added script access to input handling: Input_IsKeyDown Checks if a key is currently held Input_IsKeyPressed Checks for a key press event Input_IsMousePressed Checks if a mouse button is pressed Input_GetMouseWorldPos Gets the mouse position converted to world space Movement / Hex Grid Functions Added bindings for interacting with movement components: GetSelectedHex Gets the currently hovered hex tile SetPathToHex Sets a movement target path for an entity with a MovementComponent Camera Added camera manipulation support: Camera_GetPosition Gets the camera position Camera_SetPosition Sets the camera position Camera_Move Moves the camera Camera_PanScreenSpace Moves the camera relative to screen space Camera_GetZoom Gets the current camera zoom Hex Rendering Added bindings for controlling grid visuals: ClearSelectionOverlay Clears the hex selection overlay ClearPathTarget Clears the path target visual marker ClearPathTarget is currently named poorly. It only clears the grid overlay visualization, not the actual movement target!!! summary Removed the old hardcoded PlayerMovementSystem Migrated player movement logic into script format Added engine bindings required for script-driven gameplay Camera movement, input handling, and hex selection now work through scripts Even more gameplay code can now be modified without recompiling the engine :)"}, {"post_id": 12232, "ts": "2026-06-19T23:34:06Z", "hours": 2.7347, "text": "I’ve got a good basis for the Engine integration library for the ObSL Scripting Language. In the attached video, I’m changing the player’s size using a ping-pong function (?forgot the name…), fully through an ObSL script ( ScriptComponent ) attached to the “Player” entity. The language now has support for the following through the EngineLib : Entity Objects Find GetName SetName GetComponent Components Transform SetPosition SetRotation SetScale GetPosition GetRotation GetScale (uses ObSL arrays) Point Light SetColor (Vec3) SetIntensity SetRadius MovementComponent GetIsMoving SetIsMoving SetTimePerStep MapStateComponent GetHasSelection GetSelectedHex GetPathToHex DirectionalTextureComponent SetIndex GetIndex PlayerInputComponent is still w.i.p. Tag Components currently don’t have any methods since they are only used as tags. Planned I’m planning to keep expanding the EngineLib api with more methods, such as: Has(component) AddComponent RemoveComponent(name or ref) Destroy(EntityID) GetEntityID(entity object ref)"}, {"post_id": 12030, "ts": "2026-06-19T16:56:29Z", "hours": 2.8408, "text": "I’ve got the scripting language integrating with the engine via a ScriptComponent on the player entity, seems to be working all good though I still have to implement the actual Engine library for everything… but I have simple scripts running on entities as components in the game engine, which went faster than I expected, so i’m happy with it :)"}, {"post_id": 11605, "ts": "2026-06-18T21:53:02Z", "hours": 15.6978, "text": "Drafting a readme for the scripting language before I plan on the Engine bindings"}, {"post_id": 9500, "ts": "2026-06-15T21:05:05Z", "hours": 6.1578, "text": "added switch statements, foreach-loop, objects, modules (imports), and a standard library to the scripting language"}, {"post_id": 8966, "ts": "2026-06-14T22:36:48Z", "hours": 2.3381, "text": "I’m working down my todo-list for the scripting language (ObSL). Right now i’ve got arrays implemented! i also made a method to define functions from the c++ source so that I can access c++ stuff (like std::chrono functions that im using for testing right now from the test.obsl script), and whatever other functions i want to have accessible, this will be very useful later on as I to integrate the scripting language with the game engine, as now i have an easy way to call functions already defined in the engine source code from the scripting language by just calling interpreter.bind_native(args blah blah); and then I can call the function from the interpreted scripts.. very useful :D"}, {"post_id": 8716, "ts": "2026-06-14T14:08:32Z", "hours": 2.1228, "text": "the scripting language now has some more mathematical operators and functions !"}, {"post_id": 8434, "ts": "2026-06-14T01:00:46Z", "hours": 2.25, "text": "The scripting language is now technically Turing complete, as i have added state environment (basically variables persist throughout the session), conditional branching via if / else statements basic repetition via while & for loops the screenshot below shows a fibonacci sequence & an example of the conditional branching w. looping . of course it’s not done yet though, i still have a lot of work ahead :)"}, {"post_id": 8361, "ts": "2026-06-13T21:59:28Z", "hours": 2.07, "text": "still working on parsing and implementing new nodes :)"}, {"post_id": 8255, "ts": "2026-06-13T18:48:40Z", "hours": 2.3453, "text": "Working on trying to implement a scripting language for my game engine… i’ve got a simple parser working, it definitely went faster than i expected. Going back and reviewing an old parser i made in C# a while ago helped a lot in this :)"}, {"post_id": 8113, "ts": "2026-06-13T15:24:08Z", "hours": 3.8419, "text": "I’d like Entities to be scriptable in a future editor application / in general without having to edit c++ source files of the editor to implement new logic systems for one entity, so i’m planning on implementing a very basic scripting language, the way i plan on it working is that you attach a script to an entinty as a component, and it will hold the actual game logic in that script, im not great at explaining with words but what im doing now is starting on implementing lexical analysis for a simple interpreter just to test things out, while I have written small interpreters before, alot of this is still new to me so I am learning along the way. the idea is that its just a very basic scripting language to interact with entities and the current scene, with basic apis for interacting with the current scenes ECS registry,we will see how it goes :)"}, {"post_id": 7654, "ts": "2026-06-12T19:56:36Z", "hours": 2.1944, "text": "I’m working on a simple map lighting system, which seems to be working alright. Also scene files now have background color information (which ends up getting wired into glClearColor), also implemented name field for entities because why not. I’m also messing around a bit with the UI since im not super experienced with ImGui but I like trying things out…"}, {"post_id": 7507, "ts": "2026-06-12T15:05:30Z", "hours": 2.1106, "text": "I’ve been focusing mostly on my scene serialization lately. First, I refactored the maps to remove the hardcoded TileTypes enum, which used to map 0 to grass and 1 to sand. Instead, I implemented a system where this is defined in the grid section of the scene’s json file. The “id” property is now a generic unsigned integer for the tile type, and the “texture” property references a specific asset loaded in the scene. I also added a “properties” section for the scene’s name and a “clear_color” array. This lets you dynamically change the window’s background color on the fly instead of always defaulting to a hardcoded black. Writing the new methods and sorting out the custom serialization logic took a bit of work, but it is working great now. also bumped the map file “version” to 2, even though the reading/writing of map files didn’t change at all, the usage of some bytes did kind of change (for the tiletype) so i felt it was fitting"}, {"post_id": 7189, "ts": "2026-06-12T00:17:40Z", "hours": 1.3681, "text": "i’ve been playing with loading in entities and meshes.. ignore the weird fps drops and generally low fps (compared to normally), screenshots and recordings loves messing with performance for some reason"}, {"post_id": 7135, "ts": "2026-06-11T22:23:21Z", "hours": 5.1658, "text": "i’ve implemented instanced draw calls alongside regular draw calls in my renderer, which currently im using instancing for drawing the map, I also implemented culling for the map depending on viewport and some other small optimizations, I also spent some time on fixing and improving my “Systems” and some general cleanup"}, {"post_id": 6799, "ts": "2026-06-11T12:20:56Z", "hours": 1.5519, "text": "Managed to fix the segfault.. Mesh::Upload was updating buffer data without binding its own VAO first, which polluted the global OpenGL state. When a new scene loaded, the driver tweaked out on the broken index bindings and crashed on the next draw call …"}, {"post_id": 6484, "ts": "2026-06-10T22:04:02Z", "hours": 1.4136, "text": "I’ve got saving scenes working fully now! ^-^, but an issue ive run into is a segmentation fault on switching scenes, I theorize that it’s due to me not cleaning up / reassigning things when I load in new meshes etc from the scene, thus leaving old pointers in the render queue which don’t exist anymore. This i will work on fixing next.. But for now I am quite happy that i have scenes loading and saving to json :)"}, {"post_id": 6400, "ts": "2026-06-10T19:22:44Z", "hours": 4.4556, "text": "I’ve got loading in scenes working pretty well, but I still have work todo before I can save them properly, im pretty tired already since i spent all day chasing a bug regarding render sorting and ended up refactoring a ton of stuff that i probably didnt have too as i was searching for the issue, but atleast the codebase is somewhat cleaner"}, {"post_id": 6187, "ts": "2026-06-10T12:05:48Z", "hours": 0.365, "text": "running some tests.. messing around with funny map generation shapes too but i dont know how i feel about them"}, {"post_id": 5958, "ts": "2026-06-09T23:43:23Z", "hours": 5.3872, "text": "rather than using another custom file format i decided to just use json to serialize scenes which is coming along rather nicely …"}, {"post_id": 5695, "ts": "2026-06-09T16:10:54Z", "hours": 2.3658, "text": "I’ve been restructuring the and moving things to run actual game logic via “Systems”. I’ve temporarily been testing this in a messy way directly in the scene class, but I’m planning on implementing maybe some sort of basic scripting language that can be used for game logic in entities as a Component w. accompanying systems ofc, so game logic can be defined outside of engine source files and serialized into a scene’s registry from a given file rather than the things im messing around with now. serialization of scenes is what im planning to implement next once im happy with how scenes are working, but i need to plan ahead alot. So for now I’m still going to focus on making sure my Scene implementation is good enough before I focus on implementing serialization and scripting etc, and I have alot to think about regarding the design and architecture of this thing that seems to have evolved into a Game Engine :)"}, {"post_id": 5539, "ts": "2026-06-09T10:55:05Z", "hours": 2.0847, "text": "working on getting Scenes implemented"}, {"post_id": 5225, "ts": "2026-06-08T22:43:53Z", "hours": 2.7831, "text": "I completely refactored my ECS into an actual proper entity component system and added a lil fancy inspector for entities/components in the UI, everything works with the new system :) Now that my ECS is properly implemented I’m going to start focusing on implementing proper Levels/Scenes rather than the mess I have right now in my “Game” class which I’ve been using for testing stuff (ignore the weird framedrops my screen recorder was tweaking out)"}, {"post_id": 4858, "ts": "2026-06-08T12:03:11Z", "hours": 0.5367, "text": "i made a npc (the red super mutant) that just wanders around"}, {"post_id": 4844, "ts": "2026-06-08T11:26:15Z", "hours": 0.9856, "text": "I’ve been having a bit of fun with player sprites (currently som fallout 1 super-mutant sprites i found online) and the renderer sorting sorting code to avoid the player appearing under the ground"}, {"post_id": 4599, "ts": "2026-06-07T23:21:51Z", "hours": 0.7331, "text": "I implemented reading from the previously saved map file, with some tests ofc :D please ignore the player flying away at the end.. as of the time of writing it was a sloppy bug which is already fixed"}, {"post_id": 4582, "ts": "2026-06-07T22:30:26Z", "hours": 1.5031, "text": "I’ve implemented saving the current grid to my own custom file format, and some tests to check that it’s working and all seems good.. but now, the real test is to see if I can load back in that file properly :)"}, {"post_id": 4281, "ts": "2026-06-07T15:19:30Z", "hours": 3.5969, "text": "I did a few things i made it highlight what hex the player is currently moving towards in white fixed a bug causing it to crash when i tried to use my dgpu (issue with my GLdebug class trying to load unavailable glDebugMessageCallback since my dgpu driver uses an older OpenGL version than my igpu and i kinda forgot to check if it the callback function was available BEFORE calling it.. .-.) refactored some of my Hex code to prepare for making some sort of system to load maps from files, so i generally cleaned up some stuff and opted for smaller datatypes for my needs (i.e using int16_t rather than ints for hex coords r & q, since that’s really all you need unless your map is massive) i also added some more fancy ui with imgui to play around with and generally just cleaned up some code… in short im basically preparing myself to implement some sort of map file loader w. accompanying filetype?"}, {"post_id": 3847, "ts": "2026-06-06T22:12:28Z", "hours": 1.7772, "text": "I managed to setup a basic ImGui window to control map generation, I also tried to optimize my rendering by fixing a sloppy bug i had in my batching implementation and caching transformation matrices per transform (dirty flag pattern) fps does seem stable :) (please ignore the video artifacting)"}, {"post_id": 3544, "ts": "2026-06-06T15:07:32Z", "hours": 11.2967, "text": "I redid almost everything with what i’ve learnt from trying the first time (ECS, ResourceManager & MeshFactory are basically the same though) I managed to implement A* pathfinding for the player movement. I got to render out the map with textures i made. tried to recreate movement like Fallout has, where you move the mouse to pan and click to move to a tile with stepping. The hex grid is reperesented via an odd-r offset layout."}, {"post_id": 2707, "ts": "2026-06-05T12:48:03Z", "hours": 1.4394, "text": "Experimenting with camera stuff and input, now i can zoom with the scrollwheel and i’m trying to get an isometric perspective working better"}, {"post_id": 2669, "ts": "2026-06-05T10:44:01Z", "hours": 1.9911, "text": "im getting a simple resource manager implemented :)"}, {"post_id": 2395, "ts": "2026-06-04T21:04:46Z", "hours": 3.0553, "text": "It may not look like much, but I’ve been working on implementing a form of an ECS , rewriting some stuff too. I kind of broke some camera stuff in the process which I’m going to fix soon, and actually get this stuff to be the correct perspective and such…."}, {"post_id": 2168, "ts": "2026-06-04T14:49:59Z", "hours": 3.0614, "text": "i’ve been experimenting with some stuff back and forth, now im working on testing basic “Player” movement with WASD"}, {"post_id": 1448, "ts": "2026-06-03T14:24:00Z", "hours": 2.3058, "text": "I’ve implemented proper debug logging for OpenGL, optimized rendering with a queue that sorts RenderCommands to avoid unnecessarily binding & unbinding, a basic InputManager class, and very basic materials."}, {"post_id": 1055, "ts": "2026-06-02T21:13:14Z", "hours": 1.5414, "text": "i’ve got a basic hex grid “map” rendering and working well"}, {"post_id": 890, "ts": "2026-06-02T16:46:10Z", "hours": 0.7936, "text": "Implemented a basic camera which im messing around with a bit to rotate (around) my mesh"}, {"post_id": 858, "ts": "2026-06-02T15:50:32Z", "hours": 1.3153, "text": "I now have textures working, and a basic “meshfactory”"}, {"post_id": 801, "ts": "2026-06-02T13:58:30Z", "hours": 2.4436, "text": "I’ve gotten transforms and basic rendering implemented of objects implemented via a “Mesh” class that gets passed to Draw() in the Renderer Class :)"}, {"post_id": 403, "ts": "2026-06-01T19:57:36Z", "hours": 0.2883, "text": "Setup basic GLFW Window boilerplate & CMake Project :)"}]...
|
Title: obliberry by @torkel | Stardance
Devlogs:
Title: obliberry by @torkel | Stardance
Devlogs:
Setup basic GLFW Window boilerplate & CMake Project :)
I’ve gotten transforms and basic rendering implemented of objects implemented via a “Mesh” class that gets passed to Draw() in the Renderer Class :)
I now have textures working, and a basic “meshfactory”
Implemented a basic camera which im messing around with a bit to rotate (around) my mesh
i’ve got a basic hex grid “map” rendering and working well
I’ve implemented proper debug logging for OpenGL, optimized rendering with a queue that sorts RenderCommands to avoid unnecessarily binding & unbinding, a basic InputManager class, and very basic materials.
i’ve been experimenting with some stuff back and forth, now im working on testing basic “Player” movement with WASD
It may not look like much, but I’ve been working on implementing a form of an ECS , rewriting some stuff too. I kind of broke some camera stuff in the process which I’m going to fix soon, and actually get this stuff to be the correct perspective and such….
im getting a simple resource manager implemented :)
Experimenting with camera stuff and input, now i can zoom with the scrollwheel and i’m trying to get an isometric perspective working better
I redid almost everything with what i’ve learnt from trying the first time (ECS, ResourceManager & MeshFactory are basically the same though) I managed to implement A* pathfinding for the player movement. I got to render out the map with textures i made. tried to recreate movement like Fallout has, where you move the mouse to pan and click to move to a tile with stepping. The hex grid is reperesented via an odd-r offset layout.
I managed to setup a basic ImGui window to control map generation, I also tried to optimize my rendering by fixing a sloppy bug i had in my batching implementation and caching transformation matrices per transform (dirty flag pattern) fps does seem stable :) (please ignore the video artifacting)
I did a few things i made it highlight what hex the player is currently moving towards in white fixed a bug causing it to crash when i tried to use my dgpu (issue with my GLdebug class trying to load unavailable glDebugMessageCallback since my dgpu driver uses an older OpenGL version than my igpu and i kinda forgot to check if it the callback function was available BEFORE calling it.. .-.) refactored some of my Hex code to prepare for making some sort of system to load maps from files, so i generally cleaned up some stuff and opted for smaller datatypes for my needs (i.e using int16_t rather than ints for hex coords r & q, since that’s really all you need unless your map is massive) i also added some more fancy ui with imgui to play around with and generally just cleaned up some code… in short im basically preparing myself to implement some sort of map file loader w. accompanying filetype?
I’ve implemented saving the current grid to my own custom file format, and some tests to check that it’s working and all seems good.. but now, the real test is to see if I can load back in that file properly :)
I implemented reading from the previously saved map file, with some tests ofc :D please ignore the player flying away at the end.. as of the time of writing it was a sloppy bug which is already fixed
I’ve been having a bit of fun with player sprites (currently som fallout 1 super-mutant sprites i found online) and the renderer sorting sorting code to avoid the player appearing under the ground
i made a npc (the red super mutant) that just wanders around
I completely refactored my ECS into an actual proper entity component system and added a lil fancy inspector for entities/components in the UI, everything works with the new system :) Now that my ECS is properly implemented I’m going to start focusing on implementing proper Levels/Scenes rather than the mess I have right now in my “Game” class which I’ve been using for testing stuff (ignore the weird framedrops my screen recorder was tweaking out)
working on getting Scenes implemented
I’ve been restructuring the and moving things to run actual game logic via “Systems”. I’ve temporarily been testing this in a messy way directly in the scene class, but I’m planning on implementing maybe some sort of basic scripting language that can be used for game logic in entities as a Component w. accompanying systems ofc, so game logic can be defined outside of engine source files and serialized into a scene’s registry from a given file rather than the things im messing around with now. serialization of scenes is what im planning to implement next once im happy with how scenes are working, but i need to plan ahead alot. So for now I’m still going to focus on making sure my Scene implementation is good enough before I focus on implementing serialization and scripting etc, and I have alot to think about regarding the design and architecture of this thing that seems to have evolved into a Game Engine :)
rather than using another custom file format i decided to just use json to serialize scenes which is coming along rather nicely …
running some tests.. messing around with funny map generation shapes too but i dont know how i feel about them
I’ve got loading in scenes working pretty well, but I still have work todo before I can save them properly, im pretty tired already since i spent all day chasing a bug regarding render sorting and ended up refactoring a ton of stuff that i probably didnt have too as i was searching for the issue, but atleast the codebase is somewhat cleaner
I’ve got saving scenes working fully now! ^-^, but an issue ive run into is a segmentation fault on switching scenes, I theorize that it’s due to me not cleaning up / reassigning things when I load in new meshes etc from the scene, thus leaving old pointers in the render queue which don’t exist anymore. This i will work on fixing next.. But for now I am quite happy that i have scenes loading and saving to json :)
Managed to fix the segfault.. Mesh::Upload was updating buffer data without binding its own VAO first, which polluted the global OpenGL state. When a new scene loaded, the driver tweaked out on the broken index bindings and crashed on the next draw call …
i’ve implemented instanced draw calls alongside regular draw calls in my renderer, which currently im using instancing for drawing the map, I also implemented culling for the map depending on viewport and some other small optimizations, I also spent some time on fixing and improving my “Systems” and some general cleanup
i’ve been playing with loading in entities and meshes.. ignore the weird fps drops and generally low fps (compared to normally), screenshots and recordings loves messing with performance for some reason
I’ve been focusing mostly on my scene serialization lately. First, I refactored the maps to remove the hardcoded TileTypes enum, which used to map 0 to grass and 1 to sand. Instead, I implemented a system where this is defined in the grid section of the scene’s json file. The “id” property is now a generic unsigned integer for the tile type, and the “texture” property references a specific asset loaded in the scene. I also added a “properties” section for the scene’s name and a “clear_color” array. This lets you dynamically change the window’s background color on the fly instead of always defaulting to a hardcoded black. Writing the new methods and sorting out the custom serialization logic took a bit of work, but it is working great now. also bumped the map file “version” to 2, even though the reading/writing of map files didn’t change at all, the usage of some bytes did kind of change (for the tiletype) so i felt it was fitting
I’m working on a simple map lighting system, which seems to be working alright. Also scene files now have background color information (which ends up getting wired into glClearColor), also implemented name field for entities because why not. I’m also messing around a bit with the UI since im not super experienced with ImGui but I like trying things out…
I’d like Entities to be scriptable in a future editor application / in general without having to edit c++ source files of the editor to implement new logic systems for one entity, so i’m planning on implementing a very basic scripting language, the way i plan on it working is that you attach a script to an entinty as a component, and it will hold the actual game logic in that script, im not great at explaining with words but what im doing now is starting on implementing lexical analysis for a simple interpreter just to test things out, while I have written small interpreters before, alot of this is still new to me so I am learning along the way. the idea is that its just a very basic scripting language to interact with entities and the current scene, with basic apis for interacting with the current scenes ECS registry,we will see how it goes :)
Working on trying to implement a scripting language for my game engine… i’ve got a simple parser working, it definitely went faster than i expected. Going back and reviewing an old parser i made in C# a while ago helped a lot in this :)
still working on parsing and implementing new nodes :)
The scripting language is now technically Turing complete, as i have added state environment (basically variables persist throughout the session), conditional branching via if / else statements basic repetition via while & for loops the screenshot below shows a fibonacci sequence & an example of the conditional branching w. looping . of course it’s not done yet though, i still have a lot of work ahead :)
the scripting language now has some more mathematical operators and functions !
I’m working down my todo-list for the scripting language (ObSL). Right now i’ve got arrays implemented! i also made a method to define functions from the c++ source so that I can access c++ stuff (like std::chrono functions that im using for testing right now from the test.obsl script), and whatever other functions i want to have accessible, this will be very useful later on as I to integrate the scripting language with the game engine, as now i have an easy way to call functions already defined in the engine source code from the scripting language by just calling interpreter.bind_native(args blah blah); and then I can call the function from the interpreted scripts.. very useful :D
added switch statements, foreach-loop, objects, modules (imports), and a standard library to the scripting language
Drafting a readme for the scripting language before I plan on the Engine bindings
I’ve got the scripting language integrating with the engine via a ScriptComponent on the player entity, seems to be working all good though I still have to implement the actual Engine library for everything… but I have simple scripts running on entities as components in the game engine, which went faster than I expected, so i’m happy with it :)
I’ve got a good basis for the Engine integration library for the ObSL Scripting Language. In the attached video, I’m changing the player’s size using a ping-pong function (?forgot the name…), fully through an ObSL script ( ScriptComponent ) attached to the “Player” entity. The language now has support for the following through the EngineLib : Entity Objects Find GetName SetName GetComponent Components Transform SetPosition SetRotation SetScale GetPosition GetRotation GetScale (uses ObSL arrays) Point Light SetColor (Vec3) SetIntensity SetRadius MovementComponent GetIsMoving SetIsMoving SetTimePerStep MapStateComponent GetHasSelection GetSelectedHex GetPathToHex DirectionalTextureComponent SetIndex GetIndex PlayerInputComponent is still w.i.p. Tag Components currently don’t have any methods since they are only used as tags. Planned I’m planning to keep expanding the EngineLib api with more methods, such as: Has(component) AddComponent RemoveComponent(name or ref) Destroy(EntityID) GetEntityID(entity object ref)
EngineLib Script Integration I fully replaced the previously hardcoded PlayerMovementSystem with an ObSL script implementation using new EngineLib bindings. The movement logic is now handled externally through scripting instead of being directly implemented in C++. New EngineLib Bindings entity management Added bindings for basic entity operations: CreateEntity Creates a new entity Destroy Removes an entity HasComponent Checks whether an entity has a specific component RemoveComponent Removes a component from an entity global functions get_dt Retrieves delta time CloseWindow Closes the glfw window Input System Added script access to input handling: Input_IsKeyDown Checks if a key is currently held Input_IsKeyPressed Checks for a key press event Input_IsMousePressed Checks if a mouse button is pressed Input_GetMouseWorldPos Gets the mouse position converted to world space Movement / Hex Grid Functions Added bindings for interacting with movement components: GetSelectedHex Gets the currently hovered hex tile SetPathToHex Sets a movement target path for an entity with a MovementComponent Camera Added camera manipulation support: Camera_GetPosition Gets the camera position Camera_SetPosition Sets the camera position Camera_Move Moves the camera Camera_PanScreenSpace Moves the camera relative to screen space Camera_GetZoom Gets the current camera zoom Hex Rendering Added bindings for controlling grid visuals: ClearSelectionOverlay Clears the hex selection overlay ClearPathTarget Clears the path target visual marker ClearPathTarget is currently named poorly. It only clears the grid overlay visualization, not the actual movement target!!! summary Removed the old hardcoded PlayerMovementSystem Migrated player movement logic into script format Added engine bindings required for script-driven gameplay Camera movement, input handling, and hex selection now work through scripts Even more gameplay code can now be modified without recompiling the engine :)
I’m using miniaudio to implement audio support in the game engine, with an AudioEngine class to abstract the audio functionality. I’ve also updated SceneProperties to include a new background_music property. This allows each scene to define a background music track (via filepath) that will automatically loop through the AudioEngine while that scene is active. It all seems to be currently working well, Next I’m starting to integrate audio functionality into EngineLib so that scripts can interact with the audio system. changes Added AudioEngine abstraction layer using miniaudio Added background_music support to SceneProperties (w. proper serialization/deserialization ofc) Implemented looping background music per scene
EngineLib I may have forgotten to mention this in my previous log, but I also implemented an Instantiate method in EngineLib. Instantiate takes an entity definition as a JSON file (ig a prefab) and spawns the entity into the current scene. I also added scene related functionality to EngineLib: LoadScene Loads a scene from a given path GetCurrentScenePath Returns the path of the currently loaded scene
more EngineLib work Implemented several improvements to the scripting and entity systems. changes prefab caching Added caching for prefabs to improve performance when repeatedly instantiating entities Entity Access in Scripts Added GetEntity , which returns the entity Object that the script is attached to. Added support for the this keyword in ObSL scripts. this is a wrapper around GetEntity() to provide direct access to the current entity custom components Added support for script-defined components: entity.AddCustomComponent entity.GetCustomComponent This allows scripts to attach and retrieve custom data/components without requiring engine side component definitions entity validation Updated all entity object calls (such as GetComponent ) to validate the entity before executing (in both native bindings & engine source code) Entity operations now check: registry.isValid(id) before accessing the entity. This prevents errors caused by accessing deleted entities during scenarios such as scene unloading/loading cleanup
Porting ECS systems to ObSL Fully ported the InteractionSystem to ObSL through EngineLib. Camera movement and player movement are now handled through dedicated ObSL scripts instead of being hardcoded ECS systems. This moves more gameplay logic into the scripting layer and makes systems easier to modify and iterate on :) Changes System Migration Ported InteractionSystem from ECS code to ObSL Basically Moved camera movement & player movement logic into ObSL scripts Interaction system is no longer hardcoded engine-side gameplay system New EngineLib Bindings Math / Hex Grid Math_WorldToHex Converts world coordinates into hex grid coordinates SetSelectedHex Updates the currently selected hex tile Camera Camera_SetZoom Sets the camera zoom level Window Window_GetHeight Gets the current window height Window_GetWidth Gets the current window width Input Input_IsKeyReleased Checks if a key was released Input_IsMouseDown Checks if a mouse button is currently held Input_IsMouseReleased Checks if a mouse button was released Input_GetMouseX Gets the mouse X position Input_GetMouseY Gets the mouse Y position Input_GetScrollX Gets horizontal scroll input Input_GetScrollY Gets vertical scroll input Please ignore the weird graphical artifacting in the attached video, my pc has been acting up recently :(
“project” file system prototype Started implementing support for engine project files instead of hardcoding a scene path like i was before for testing. The engine will now deserialize a project.json file containing configuration, includes: name Project name (unused for now) version Project version (also unused) start_scene Path to the scene the engine loads on startup Window configuration: width height title fullscreen while implementing this, I uncovered some unexpected behaviour related to fullscreen handling caused by how window sizing was previously managed. i spent time refactoring and fixing the window size logic to make fullscreen behaviour… work.. project loading is now starting to come together, less hardcoded stuff yippie (im planning on making an editor in the future so.. this is why)
Been mostly just fixing some window rendering stuff Moved away from hardcoded resolution / aspect ratio and made it handle itself on the fly also removed the padding bars i had before so rendering actually takes up full screen New native engine binding in EngineLib too: Window_SetFullscreen (takes a bool) I’m planning on starting to work on making the engine multithreaded soon…
im trying to make the renderer run on another thread… few issues… cant see (entity) meshes?, and closing the window seems to cause a freeze…. :))
kinda reverted changes from the last log and tried again to convert everything to be thread safe before actually trying to run on a seperate thread… things are going.. interestingly
I think i fixed most of the silly bugs from trying to make rendering thread safe, im still gonna double check some stuff and do some testing but moving rendering to its own render thread will be coming soon :))))
multithreading & rendering I think I got some form of multithreading working now. The renderer has been moved onto its own dedicated thread, separating rendering from the main engine thread :) Changes Rendering Thread Moved rendering execution to a separate thread (alot had to be refactored for this to work lol) Thread Safety i tried (imgui was a pain) Rendering Optimizations Added frustum culling to the renderer. big optimizeD? actual rendering (i.e gpu calls) is now seperated from the main thread :D …it looks like its working for now
refactoring for editor foundation Refactored rendering and culling systems and made broader architectural changes to decouple the game from the application layer. Rendering & Culling Refactored frustum culling logic to be lil more performant and generally cleaner Cleaned up and improved parts of the rendering pipeline since i had alot of old unused code lurking in them since i switched to a multithreaded architechture Application Architecture the engine is now structured around an ApplicationLayer system. The core Application class now runs a single active ApplicationLayer Each layer exposes: Init Update Render Shutdown Game class refactor The Game implementation has been converted into a derived ApplicationLayer Game logic is now fully driven through the layer system instead of hardcoded to the application class (the different executable mains decide now) Editor Layer added a new EditorLayer Intended for a future scene editor application. (right now all it does is render a given scene on the screen) CMake changes reworked the project to generate multiple executables: obliberry_engine core engine executable (ig runtime) obliberry_editor editor application layer changes: Engine and core systems (i.e ObSL, Renderer, etc) are now compiled as libraries Executables link against shared engine libraries instead of duplicating code Editor executable links against engine modules summary Game logic is now layer-based Engine and tools are separated Editor can proceed independently from the game runtime
Editor UI & Framebuffer Experiments i’ve started experimenting with the ImGui docking branch in the EditorLayer . (switched branch had some build errors blah blah blah but its all set up now) Implemented some placeholder editor UI to test out the docking stuff and get a feel for how the editor layout might end up being like changes editor layer placeholder UI using ImGui docking features testing editor panel layouts framebuffer implemented a framebuffer system for the editor viewport. the scene is currently rendering in the editorlayer via a frame buffer so it can fit in the little thingy (i forgot the name) while testing I noticed some resizing issues when running on my nvidia dGPU: the framebuffer resize works, but resizing the viewport can appear somewhat choppy? the framebuffer and docking setup seem to be working, so i guess this im close to actually start to build proper tooling :)
VFS & Editor layer implemented a basic VFS (Virtual File System) . all asset loading is now routed through the VFS instead of directly loading files. this is mainly preparation for adding proper project management later instead of relying on a hardcoded project.json in the project root i was testing with changes VFS added a basic VFS implementation routed asset loading through the VFS the idea is that the VFS will make it easier to manage project assets and not have everything depend on hardcoded paths. editor layer still experimenting a bit with the editor placeholder UI. added: (new EditorCamera derived class of Camera ) camera panning in the editor viewport camera zoom toggling top-down / isometric perspective with keybinds the top-down view should be useful later when I add actual map editing stuff most of the editor UI is still just placeholder right now, I’m mostly testing layouts and figuring out how I want the editor to feel and look ImGuizmo also added ImGuizmo to the project since I’m planning to start implementing proper editor stuff soon.. …and well… you need gizmos… I’ve reinvented the wheel enough already, so using a proper gizmo library seems like the better choice :) (also integrates very nicely with ImGui)
Editor Picking & Project Management because my EditorLayer uses a framebuffer, I can now utilize framebuffer color picking in the editor i updated the shaders to store an entity ID, so now I can click on entities directly in the editor scene view and it selects them. …and it’s pixel perfect :D changes editor layer added framebuffer based entity picking clicking entities in the scene view selects them!!!! selection is based on the exact pixel under the mouse (i mean to implement gizmos i first need to know what the hell my mouse is on) project management also started laying the groundwork for actual project management. now that I have some sort of VFS implemented, I’m working on a way to properly manage Projects instead of relying on the current setup. still figuring out the exact structure, but ive been working on setting up the Project class
Namespace Refactor & Project Management Work Dependencies finally caused me to run into a namespace conflict after being lazy and unorganized… instead of being sane and just renaming one class.. I decided to refactor the entire project to use proper namespaces everywhere.. changes namespaces Refactored the entire codebase into proper namespaces project management / editor backend I don’t really have much visually to show this update since I’ve mostly been working on backend stuff. Working on: project management scene management VFS improvements editor saving/loading I’m using nativefiledialog-extended to work on proper file dialogs for saving and loading from the editor. Also been doing a lot of testing around project creation and loading. alot of this is in the hope i can get this working multi-platform and not just on linux (though i have yet to try and compile on another os) Things are working… for now… so progress :D
Editor & Scene Management been working on the editor mostly. changes ECS implemented generational ID masks for the ECS. this should prevents issues with stale entity references since IDs can now properly track generations instead of just relying on raw IDs. (i encountered this issue when testing multiple scenes in one project) scene manager fully implemented the SceneManager so it can actually be used by the editor & game layer. this allows the editor to properly load/save/validate/find and generally handle scenes through a unified API (goes for gamelayer aswell but it only really loads them) bug fixing spent a lot of time fixing various issues around: project folder management scene management loading / saving behaviour asset loading (cache was causing some problems on loading scenes but its all fixed now :D) mostly backend work but things are becoming a lot more stable and the editor foundation is starting to come together….
ive been mostly messing around with getting the ObSL language to be thread-safe and refactoring some things, so I don’t have much to show but my end goal is to be able to get scripts to run concurrently and outside of the main thread
Script multithreading (and concurrency) scripts now run on other thread(s) :D this took a fair bit of cleanup, but it’s working. changes script workers moved script execution onto worker thread(s) worked on script worker concurrency dynamically clamp the number of active workers based on how many callbacks are actually running, so idle threads aren’t just spinning doing nothing garbage collection did some work on the GC as well. introduced external root tracking fixed a few issues around GC roots while getting multithreaded script execution working cleanup spent some time cleaning up a bunch of backend stuff while getting all of this working. build system updated CMake so all executables, scripts, and (project) templates are output to a single build/bin directory instead of being messy. multithreading yay :)
ObSL Scripting Library Moved the scripting language into its own repository :) It’s now included in the engine as a library using git submodules and public headers instead of living directly in the engine source code Makes the project structure a lot cleaner .. for both projects ( ObSL can now be found at https://github.com/torkelicious/ObSL )
actually working on the editor I’m finally getting around to actually implementing the editor ..it still looks pretty similar (well mostly the same) but most of the UI before was just placeholder. changes editor implemented a Project Settings window implemented a Scene Properties window made the component widgets actually do something now load textures assign scripts change material colors change meshes change shaders etc…. added an Add Component button added Remove buttons to components it works.. so thats good :D
editor Gizmos! :DD this took a lot longer than I’d like to admit… but it’s finally working. changes gizmos got all gizmos working.. but had issues with rotation and scale at first figured out the issues with rotation/scaling ended up patching ImGuizmo at first to get things working, but after digging through the code I eventually figured out how to do it properly with the normal library translation, rotation, and scale gizmos all work now :)))))) honestly I learnt quite a bit just from messing around with the ImGuizmo internals.. but it was painful editor added a few more UI improvements as well. i.e billboard sprites now explicitly mention that rotation doesn’t do anything, instead of letting you wonder why nothing happens gizmos are one of those things I’ve been waiting on implementing.. but im finally happy to have them
Project Packaging been working on a packaging format for projects. the goal is basically to package an entire project into a single container while preprocessing assets that make sense to preprocess. Also makes shipping a game made in the engine in the future alot easier / cleaner, and portable. changes packaging implemented the start of a proper project packaging system. currently it: parses ObSL scripts ahead of time and stores serialized ASTs instead of source code (basically very similar to some sort of a very very simple AOT compiler) converts project, scene and prefab JSON files into MessagePack stores media and other binary assets directly in the package optionally compresses package entries with LZ4 the idea is that the engine has less work to do at runtime since scripts don’t need parsing and JSON doesn’t need parsing either. and a single “package” file is alot cleaner in general for a finished game “build” package format also implemented the actual container format itself. different asset types are stored as different entry types (scripts, binary JSON, media, shaders, etc.), so the loader knows exactly how each asset should be handled. tools added standalone packaging tools as well for packing and unpacking projects, mostly for testing. still a work in progress, but the whole packaging pipeline is starting to come together.
Project Packaging is Working been spending a lot of time working on project packaging, and it’s finally working now. the engine can now load projects directly from .obpak files, and I’ve got basic tooling to create them as well. the plan is to integrate the tooling i have now with the editor to “build” an obpak archive (i think its called an archive?) changes packaging implemented the full packaging/loading pipeline yippie :D currently the packer: pre-generates ASTs for ObSL scripts converts project, scene(s) and prefab(s) JSON into MessagePack bundles everything into a single .obpak container compresses the package with LZ4 assets like textures, audio and shaders just get copied into the package without any conversion runtime the engine can now load packaged projects directly instead of relying on loose project files. all of this goes through the VFS, so from the engine’s point of view it doesn’t really matter whether assets are coming from a folder or from an .obpak (i.e it can still load loose project files of course) tooling added command-line tools for packing and unpacking projects, i originally made it for testing but it’s actually pretty nice to work with so im probably keeping it. still probably things to polish, but it’s pretty satisfying seeing the engine load an entire packaged project properly pls ignore the lag in the video, i promise its not as terrible as it looks, its just that recording is pretty buggy for me
Project Exporting been working on making projects exportable from the editor it’s now able to export a project to the selected folder, package all the assets into an .obpak , and then copy over the runtime so the exported project is runnable changes project exporting added export to the editor choose an output folder for the exported project packages the project into an .obpak copies the runtime into the export folder renames the runtime to match the project name (just 2 files for full project!, executable and .obpak) the whole process is pretty much one click now instead of manually packaging everything together. file dialogs refactored my entire filedialog implementation cuz it was kinda broken packaging did some more work on the packaging pipeline while implementing exporting and put it in the editor ui im pretty happy that its all working and i can actually export stuff, and run it feels cool :)
editor rework & map editing groundwork been working on the editor again this update was mostly about cleaning up the editor architecture so I can actually keep adding features without everything turning into spaghetti. I also finally started laying the groundwork for proper map editing. changes editor reworked the editor state system. instead of instantly swapping between states, transitions are now deferred until a safe point during the update loop. this makes switching between Edit, Play, Map Edit, and the Hub a lot cleaner, and the editor now remembers which editing mode you were in before hitting Play. (i’ll admit… i was getting a bunch of weird, seemingly unexplainable crashes before eventually realizing my mistake was instantly switching states while things were still being updated/rendered…) also moved more UI responsibility into the individual states instead of having EditorLayer decide how everything should be drawn. map editor started putting together the map editor. currently i have: map hover and tile selection working placeholder Paint / Erase / Select tools the beginnings of a tile palette system a placeholder tile editor panel the actual editing logic isn’t implemented yet, but the foundations are there now :) asset picker ripped out the old “open a native file dialog for every asset field” flow. instead, the editor now lets you pick existing textures, meshes, materials and shaders directly from the ResourceManager , which is a lot nicer to work with and also avoids accidentally importing duplicate assets. (the old workflow would happily create a brand new object every time you imported something… which was fine for testing, but definitely wasn’t something i wanted to keep) rendering fixed a few editor rendering issues while i was at it. materials with invalid shaders now fall back to the default shader instead of silently disappearing fixed some edge cases with framebuffer entity picking currently unused, but functional shader hot reloading tests misc smoothed out editor camera movement and zoom added a few helper utilities for the map editor reorganized the editor UI code a bit doesn’t look massively different in screenshots, but makes future work alot easier/cleaner map painting is next ?..
map editor preveiw ig kinda didnt have much time to do anything today but im working on the tile editor
Map Editing, Brushes, and a 4(?) hour ImGui Bug The map editor is finally coming together It’s still a bit… rough but it does feel nice to be able to paint a map in the editor I did, however, spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out why my click and drag “painting” wasn’t working… well.. ImGui was eating my inputs because it thought I was trying to drag the Scene View window around.. yeah.. changes map editor actually got the map editing tools working for real this time. the paint and erase tools actually place and remove tiles now instead of just being placeholder buttons added a brush radius slider, so you can paint in bigger hex rings added a preview outline that renders around your cursor so you can see before clicking toggling “is walkable” on a tile now properly syncs with the grid pathfinding editor ui spent some time making the tile palette and material editing.. work.. video explains better ngl im not good at describing ui stuff math laid some groundwork in the hex math system ( Lerp , CubeRound , and GetHexLine ) this is mostly for some future evil plans… still a WIP…
Logging Cleanup replaced all the random std::cout / std::cerr calls scattered throughout the project with an actual logging system logging implemented a proper logging system. replaced std::cout / std::cerr throughout the engine added support for different log levels optional logging to a log file centralized all engine logging into one place thread safe !!!! nothing particularly flashy or fancy, but its cleaner, easier to work with, and generally just nice i probably should’ve done this a long time ago :)
editor polish still nothing super flashy.., mostly a bunch of small things changes window titles the editor now updates its window title based on what youre working on. it’ll now include things like the current project and scene, or map project loading cleaned up project loading a bit. the editor now properly syncs the loaded project configuration into the engine context instead of relying on stale data also added menu in the map editor that lets you save and load map files (create new is just placeholder for now) UI added a small helper for rendering framebuffer textures in ImGui without needing to remember to flip the UVs every time. and made the tile Editor use it also forgot to mention in the last log that i cleaned up the “project browser” ui a bit logging fixed up some more logging :)
Undo/Redo! :) been working on some editor QoL stuff again… the biggest addition this time is a proper undo/redo system. it’s still very early and pretty barebones, but having the foundations in place is nice changes editor commands implemented the beginnings of a proper command system for the editor instead of modifying things directly, editor actions now go through commands, which means they can be undone and redone currently supports: entity transforms movement rotation scaling adding components removing components (with the exception of ScriptComponent for now.. that’ll get its own custom command due to the way it works) also keeps a command history, and the usual shortcuts are hooked up now: Ctrl + Z : Undo Ctrl + Y : Redo its still pretty basic, but it works and feels nice to use. input for this, I added proper key-combination support to the input manager. things like: Ctrl + S Ctrl + Z Ctrl + Y can now be handled properly instead of manually checking modifier keys everywhere logging did a bit more cleanup to the logging system as well. the logger now goes through a proper interface instead of everything depending directly on one concrete implementation, which should make it a bit easier to swap things around later if I ever want to. mostly backend work again… but undo/redo is fire
Undo/Redo …again! been working on the editor again the undo/redo system now covers a lot more than just gizmo transforms. but there’s still a few things left (entity creation/deletion mainly). changes undo/redo expanded the command system to cover most editor actions. currently supports: entity transforms adding/removing components adding/removing scripts editing project settings editing scene properties also fixed the undo/redo shortcuts so they only trigger once per key press instead of repeatedly firing while the keys are held… which is probably how they should’ve worked from the start map editor continued working on map editing. painting and erasing now properly integrate with the command system. also, an entire brush stroke is treated as a single undo step instead of undoing one tile at a time. also cleaned up a couple of edge cases while doing this, like preserving existing tile data and avoiding unnecessary commands when nothing actually changed. misc did a bit of cleanup around the editor while wiring everything together. centralized a few bits of duplicated UI logic cleaned up window title updates continued refactoring the command system the undo system is still unfinished, but it covers most of the important stuff and feels nice.. also.. still gotta fix some ui window-size stuff soon too but .. thats for later
Performance & Zero Copy Assets been spending some time under the hood… this one’s almost entirely backend. no new features, mostly went through the render thread, asset pipeline, & a handful of ECS loops to squeeze out more performance. it was incredibly rage inducing at times.. but seeing the profiler diff against baseline.. i am satisfied.. almost at peace.. but was considering becoming a farmer & never touching a computer again.. mostly because i thought i’d messed up more than i did.. but.. im happy now. changes threading & ecs i’ve reinvented the wheel enough already… but had to redo how tasks are dispatched. ThreadPool used to take a std::function , which heap allocates if you capture more than a couple pointers. scripts dispatch through this every frame, so it added up. swapped it for a custom Task type a 56-byte inline buffer, no heap allocs swapped the pending-task counter to a lock free atomic decrement instead of a mutex on every completion… rendering been cleaning up how the main thread interacts with the render thread. the main & render threads used to awkwardly poll eachothers framebuffers. now theres a m_ReadyFrames deque main pushes a frame index, render pops it. much cleaner :) ImGui draw data is now reused in-place instead of allocating & freeing a fresh clone every frame (ive put off fixing that hack for a while so its nice to finally come around to it). instanced draws no longer store a vector<mat4> per draw call, transforms get appended into one giant staging buffer per frame now. added SubmitPersistent for things that already own a long-lived buffer (like the map tile renderer) to skip the copy entirely. swapped a bunch of unordered_map s for flat vectors in the texture/VAO/uniform caches for a handful of items, linear scan beats hashing. batched rendering also caches the last bound texture & color uniform so b2b batches sharing a texture dont rebind needlessly. added a zero-size window safeguard for Wayland so it stops wrecking the renderer when the window briefly reports 0x0 during resize (also turned vsync back on, weird syscall spam otherwise) assets & packaging added VFS::ReadVirtualView to hand out string_view s directly into memory instead of owned strings for packaged builds, ContainerReader now mmap s the .obpak file directly, uncompressed stuff (textures, uncompiled maps) gets handed right to the parser without a copy. also now move only, with a destructor that unmaps memory instead of holding a copied vector of chars scripting the script hot-reloader was doing a stat() syscall on every script file every frame . oops. now polls every 300 frames & caches resolved paths.. thought i already debounced this.. guess not.. the on_update & on_destroy work buckets used to be freshly allocated vectors every frame… now static , so they just clear & reuse capacity editor & ui finally ripped out the old in game debug UI ( GameUI.cpp ), it had fallen out of sync with the ECS anyway (used it for debug visuals while implementing the first version of the ecs.. then forgot about it) the editors inspector does all of this better now, so replaced it with a minimal FPS counter audio & map audio engine now sets an explicit period size (2048 frames) via miniaudio to cut IPC roundtrips to the audio daemon.. (this one was annoying to figure out.. god bless strace & gdb) the map’s visible transforms buffer is now double buffered, rebuilds write to the back buffer while the render thread reads the front, no race conditions. also swapped typeMats from an unordered_map to a flat vector nothing user facing changed this time, but frame pacing feels noticeably smoother (somewhat suprised), & the packaged build starts noticeably faster i know it could probably be a lot better, but im still a bit of a noob at C++, so this is one hell of a learning project
GPU Lighting & Graphics Settings been doing a bit of rendering work again… mostly trying to optimize things. the biggest change is that I completely rewrote the lighting system previously all the point light calculations were happening on the CPU, and after doing some profiling (and spending way too long staring at compiler generated assembly annotations) it became pretty obvious that this was one of the bigger performance bottlenecks (well THE biggest excluding driver overhead) lighting now runs entirely on the GPU through shaders instead changes lighting rewrote the lighting system. lighting is now shader-based and runs on the GPU removed the old CPU-side lighting calculations moved engine shaders (like the base shader and lighting shader) into built-in InternalShaders (hardcoded string literals, it might seem messy but i prefer it like that) the internal shader change mostly exists because they’re pretty fundamental to the renderer. if they were treated like normal project assets and someone accidentally deleted them… well… suddenly nothing renders (unless they had setup their own shaders, which is fully supported!) and lighting completely falls over, also i prefer it to loading them from the filesystem anyways overall I’m pretty happy with how the new lighting system turned out graphics settings also started working on configurable graphics settings instead of baking them into the project, the engine now loads graphics settings from a separate JSON file. this doesn’t get packed into the .obpak , so users can tweak their graphics settings after exporting a game currently supports: resolution fullscreen MSAA (toggle + sample count) target FPS VSync it’s weirdly fun actually being back in OpenGL code again instead of just working with engine abstractions sometimes it’s nice to get back into the weeds.. even if its.. painfull :D
the OpenGL State Machine Strikes Back… I spent the entire day trapped in hell: debugging a corrupted OpenGL state… it may not show up as tracked hours.. since most of it was just staring at various forms of text.. but it was painful. problem so since i turned the lightmap to run on gpu .. well… Whenever I transitioned from the editor ( MapEditState ) into Play mode, the map would turn into like a bunch of weird diamonds, and the corruption would persist indefinitely until I remounted the current project. because it only happened on state transition, i spent hours chasing ghosts in my state management code and scene cleanup routines… (in the end though i did make some changes to the cleanup routines, but between states rather than scenes.. so i guess i was halfway there?) the culprit It was the lighting pass… took me forever to figure it out, but i had the genius and definitely NOT a very late and obvious idea i shouldve had hours ago , to see if the issue happened when i turned off the lighting system. so i put some early returns in my lighting system functions and.. it didnt corrupt.. inside LightingSystem::Update() , the renderer was modifying global OpenGL state changing depth functions, blending modes, and texture bindings, but not restoring them to their original defaults properly When the engine swapped states, the next frame inherited this dirty, half configured state, causing the whole thing to become a mess. the fix I went through the lighting system and made sure the state changes are wrapped and properly restored through the render thread.. LightingSystem.h : Full GL state save/restore around the light pass. now explicitly backing up and restoring the FBO, program, VAO, blend state, draw buffers, clear color, viewport, and active texture. MapEditState.cpp : OnExit() now properly nulls out m_MapComp and m_CurrentGrid . OnEnter() and will refetch them from the current registry so it isnt holding onto outdated references. EditorLayer.cpp : Added a call to renderer->Clean() after state transfers to clear out stale VAO and mesh caches.(bc its multithreaded things go kinda weird but.. it works now) glad thats over with :D Also heres a fun peek of what ObSL can do with EngineLib, yes, it can make your entire map look like hell..! i am totally not going insane
Editor QoL, Graphics Configs & Prefabs new devlog… mostly been focusing on editor ui and qol changes this time around. kinda tired of hardcoded settings for the graphics settings, so i finally built a proper interface for it, plus some prefab management stuff in the editor changes graphics settings i built a dedicated graphics configurator window in the window, for the current project ( GraphicsConfigEditor ). it hooks directly into the UndoManager using the command pattern ( GraphicsConfigUpdateCommand ) serializes everything out to graphics.json . added QuerySupportedSampleCounts which asks the active GL context ( before it gets handed to the render thread ) what MSAA sample counts it supports. the editor now dynamically generates the dropdown and snaps to a valid sample count (i.e 1, 2, 4, 8, 16). prefab management the editor now supports prefab management that i implemented earlier .. instead of directly writing it in the scene json file you can spawn entities directly into the scene from prefab json files you can revert a prefab, which wipes any local overrides and resets the entity back to whatever is saved in the file you can break a prefab, severing the link to the json file and turning it into a normal, standalone entity in the registry ui & editor cleanup spent some time making the editor less annoying.. in general the editor layout stops resetting itself , it now checks if imgui.ini exists on startup, and if it does, it skips rebuilding the default dockspace ripped the hardcoded hub drawing code out of the EditorLayer and made it its own state for the editor state machine refactored the config windows ( ProjectConfigEditor , SceneConfigEditor , and the new GraphicsConfigEditor ) to inherit from a base ConfigEditor class so its cleaner and easier to maintain.. fixed the script widget since the ui was kinda messy
Particles! :) Ive started working on a particle system. i have got the core pieces in place and it seems to be working nicely so far…. changes particles implemented the foundations of the particle system currently has: ParticleEmitterComponent ParticleSystem ParticlePool emitters currently support: configurable particle limits and emission rates randomized lifetimes and velocities “gravity” size over lifetime color over lifetime world space simulation materials obviously so far it’s all behaving pretty well… EngineLib next up is getting particles exposed through the EngineLib API so scripts can spawn and control emitter components we will see how it goes…
mostly just spent some time going through some old code.. nothing really important, but i’ve also replaced the placeholder assets.. with my own placeholder assets that i drew in GIMP, considering i probably do not have the rights at all to distribute the previous assets.. :)
More Particle work… been spending some time on the particle system… changes particles expanded the particle system quite a bit. currently supports: randomized size ranges randomized rotation configurable emitter shapes (support quad, circle, and soft circle) alpha and additive blending configurable render order (still kinda broken but im working on it) per-particle color over lifetime particle presets that can be saved and loaded (as JSON) also added an editor preview mode, so particles can be previewed while editing instead of only showing up in play mode renderer had to do a bit of renderer work to support all of this particles now use their own dedicated shader added support for per-instance colors during instanced rendering added an overlay render pass for effects that should render on top of the scene cleanup also did a some more project cleanup, splitting up my Utils header into multiple files.. nothing special though misc particle emitters can now be saved as reusable presets (some which will be shipped as defaults ofc) as suggested by @sol4r_on_hackclub cleaned up a few asset importing edge cases fixed a couple of packaging issues too I’m pretty happy with how the particle system is coming along :D
UI Experiments since working on the particle system, I feel like it’s in a pretty good place for the current scope. I don’t really know what else I want to add to it right now, so I decided to finally start on something that’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time… a proper UI system. changes particles mostly just spent some time testing and polishing the particle system to make sure everything behaves properly I’m pretty happy with where it’s at for now UI started prototyping a custom UI system it’s very early, but I’ve got the basic rendering pipeline up and running currently working on: a UIElement system a dedicated UI renderer text rendering font loading using FreeType right now it’s mostly just enough to prove everything works, but it’s the foundation for the runtime UI system ive wanted for a long time the goal is for games made in the editor to be able to have their own UI, with everything exposed through EngineLib so scripts can create and interact with UI elements as well honestly, for now.. I was expecting it to go alot worse.. FreeType isn’t as bad as it seems once you get it working with GL The screenshot below dosent show much, but you can see the rendering of Text and rects, it also supports textured rects (which is what the text is currently using to render from a texture atlas)
game UI Progress been continuing work on the UI system. changes UI made some good progress UI system currently have: font importing working texture support for UI elements basic text rendering a simple editor view panel for UI it’s still very much WIP editor right now it’s pretty basic, but it’s enough to start experimenting with how creating and editing UI might actually work inside the editor there’s still a lot left to do before I’d call it usable, but im making progress.. getting text working is painfull, and still unfinished.. but im workin on it…
more ui ive been kinda sick so i aint really had the motivation to do a lot but ive been working more on the UI system im kinda tired so i dont really feel like writing more for now -.-
Scripted UI, Map Workflow, & a Bunch of Bug Fixes alot of bug hunting… changes scripting & ui scripts can now actually interact with the UI system. added bindings for things like: creating UI buttons, text, rects, and images finding UI elements destroying UI elements these return wrapped objects with basic getters/setters for position, visibility, and button state map workflow spent a fair bit of time cleaning up the map editor flow. maps no longer get a fake default path on creation switching to the Map Editor tab now auto-creates a map (empty) if there isn’t one yet mapFilePath now stays project dir relative instead of randomly becoming absolute tile materials are now shared properly instead of silently duplicating state rendering & lifetime bugs i’ve been doing alot of testing recently, so i found alot of bugs… this was probably the biggest pain point. renderer submissions now keep materials and meshes alive for the frame instead of trusting the caller replaced the old Shader::Default() singleton hack with a real fallback shader (internalshaders base) fixed the lightmap quad so it keeps its own VAO and clears correctly when there are no lights fixed a Texture move bug that was double-deleting GL handles sometimes editor polish also cleaned up a bunch of editor behavior while I was in there. Ctrl+S now behaves correctly depending on whether editing a scene or a map scene loading now rebinds editor panels properly save/load dialogs now append file extensions automatically added more inline warnings in the inspector and panels (i.e if an entity has no material it will tell you it wont render) and ive probably forgotten something else … in summary ive just been testing out some UI/UX changed and hunting down bugs untill I feel it is ready to maybe start prearing some sort of demo :)
Entity Hierarchy & Scripting Integration finally caved & added actual parent/child relationships to entities changes entity hierarchy entities can now have a parent & children via a new RelationshipComponent . Registry::Reparent() handles moving an entity under a new parent, with cycle & self-parenting protection so you cant do anything silly like parenting an entity to its own descendant. TransformComponent now has a worldTransform alongside the existing local one, a new HierarchySystem systems that care about actual position (i.e AISystem ) read worldTransform now instead of assuming local == world. destroying an entity recursively destroys its children too & unlinks it from its parent’s child list scene serialization now saves & restores the hierarchy editor the Registry panel is a proper collapsible tree now instead of a flat list drag & drop reparenting, plus a right click menu for “Create Child”, “Detach”, & “Set Parent”. scripting pulled all the entity/component script bindings out into their own EngineLibRegistry.cpp module, they were kind of scattered around before & this makes them way easier to find & extend. scripts can now walk the hierarchy too (get children, etc), same module. added SetFont / GetFont bindings so scripts can assign or query a button’s font, small thing but script generated buttons wont have visible text without it :) misc cleanup small modernization stuff while i was in these files anyway: dropped redundant ternary parens, swapped a bunch of auto x = ...; if (x) into if-with-initializer, dropped some unnecessary global qualifiers, const-correctness fixes on UISystem::Update & UIRenderer::Flush . (yes i know the gizmos are offset and buggy, i kind of forgot to update the gizmo code after changing transforms :p )
working in a windows vm trying to get it to compile on windows… it is obviously going great… -.-
Windows Build The Windows build seems to be working.. I don’t have proper OpenGL passthrough in my VM… However, the Windows executable compiles perfectly in the VM and is running fine under Wine. so I consider that a win for now…
Bugs bugs bugs… I’ve been working on a demo project to both test the engine properly (looking for bugs and all), and also have something to actually show off made in my engine… this is the project you’ve been seeing in the last couple logs btw :) of course… since I’ve been using the editor for actual “work”, I have found a bunch of bugs. the biggest one being the entity ID situation… or.. disaster? changes the entity ID mess in the past, out of laziness… entity ID 0 was being used as both a real, valid entity handle and the “no entity / invalid” value depending on where you looked. which worked fine… mostly because of pure luck. the annoying part was that after working on this for a while I wasn’t even sure anymore if I was using 0 , -1 , or something else for invalid entities.. yep.. so I finally cleaned it up there is now a proper INVALID_ENTITY_ID constant, and entity index 0 is reserved for invalid entities. real entities now start from 1 . went through and replaced a bunch of random == 0 / != 0 checks across ECS, serialization, prefab handling, editor panels, and scripting bindings. project templates added support for multiple project templates. new project creation now scans the Templates/ folder instead of everything being hardcoded to “Default”. currently has: DemoProject Empty the demo project is mostly there to show off the newer UI/scripting stuff (the same demo as mentioned before), while Empty is just a completely blank scene. hierarchy & transforms fixed entity and UI reparenting. previously moving something to a new parent could randomly change its position because it was just applying the new local transform now reparenting keeps the world transform, so dragging things around in the hierarchy behaves properly UI & text rendering fixed a bunch of UI text issues. text now centers vertically using actual glyph metrics instead of a random offset I was “pretty sure” was correct it was not, in fact, correct button text now scales to fit inside the button fonts can now load directly from VFS memory instead of requiring a real filesystem path the VFS font loading one was something I completely forgot about when testing outside packaged projects… oops. packaging implemented .pakignore instead of a hardcoded ignore list, the packer now supports gitignore-style patterns in a .pakignore file and properly skips ignored folders/files also fixed a few smaller packaging issues while testing exported projects. misc a bunch of smaller things: map save/load dialogs now default to the project maps folder fixed scene switching bindings in editor play mode fixed a lightmap redraw bug font importer now only accepts .ttf / .otf added a small README with build instructions since im planning on publishing the repo soon (and writing all the docs… scary..) nothing super flashy this time.. but important
the repo is public been working on gettin things ready for that, mostly writing some docs and getting GitHub Actions set up so I can build and release cross-platform builds also did some small code cleanup / fixes while I was going through everything. changes github actions i setup a workflow to compile the project on linux, windows, and mac, and then publish a release (mac is untested but compiles). im real happy though that its actually compiling on all “major” platforms though docs finally wrote some actual documentation… there are a few files in the docs/ folder now and a proper README still a WIP obviously, but at least there’s something there… misc implemented create new map button i forgot about completely repo there is already a build published as a test of the github actions thingy, try it out if you want :D https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry
Lighting Fixes been fixing a few small things with the lighting system mainly fixed lights using the wrong entity transform I forgot to account for entity parenting when I implemented that… also added a per-scene toggle for enabling/disabling the lighting system
scripts can schedule stuff for later Added SetTimeout to the scripting API changes SetTimeout SetTimeout(fn, ms) calls fn() after ms milliseconds. simple to call from obsl timers live in a plain std::vector<Timer> in a new Platform::Time namespace, polled once a frame from Scene::Update no threads, no async bs or whatever :) the callback itself is a SmallTask , which falls back to a heap allocation if the closure is too big to fit inline fine for this since timeouts aren’t really a hot path timeout callback fires from an arbitrary point in Update , so it gets its own ScriptCommandBuffer set up on the worker just for the duration of the call, then flushed right after also gc.add_root / remove_root the function around the callback so it doesn’t get collected while it’s sitting in the timer list waiting to fire Documented it in the api reference alongside the other Time functions also tiny UI tweak in the tile editor: it now warns “no tile types defined, no map will be visible!” instead of just “no tile types defined” was seeing people get confused about why a new map looked empty after trying to paint also small updates to docs in general and stuff but nothing super interesting
…the default imgui theme first off, huge thanks for all the incredibly kind reviews on my last ship !!! most of this work was also inspired by someone pointing out that i was still using the default imgui theme. fairs… so i spent some time making the editor actually customizable and messing around with having some kinda-nice defaults :) editor ui & theming live theme editor: built a proper window to tweak colors, spacing, padding, rounding, etc. in real-time. semantic palettes: added a semantic color system so you can build out a theme from a small set of base colors, rather than manually adjusting every single internal imgui color enum (though you can still override individual colors if you need to). serialization: themes dump straight out to a theme.json sitting right next to the editor executable. undo/redo: the theme adjustments go through the undo/redo system! help menu: put in a placeholder help menu. turns out literally nobody likes reading docs, so i guess i gotta start explaining how to use the engine from inside the engine… not implemented yet though editor groundwork did a bit of backend cleanup as well. added an EditorContext for editor-specific state, separate from the runtime EngineContext (currently just used for theme stuff) started working on editor font support with a FontSet for things like Body, Bold, Monospace, and Icons, not implemented though the font stuff is mostly groundwork for now, but the theming system is actually working and makes the editor feel nice :D
fighting with fonts font-management rabbit hole in the theme editor… still wip changes font management in the theme editor the theme editor now has a proper Fonts section import .ttf / .otf fonts directly from the editor assign fonts to roles like Body, Bold, Monospace, Icons, etc. merge fonts together so icon fonts can be stacked on top of regular fonts rename, delete, and change the size of fonts fontsets are now saved as part of the theme, so imported fonts persist across restarts the role system isn’t fully wired up yet currently Body is used as the default editor font and Monospace is used for the console. im still working on the whole font management system here and its very unfinished and kinda untested.. very WIP!!! hot-reloading the annoying part was getting font changes to work while the renderer is running on another thread. rebuilding the ImGui font atlas in the middle of a frame was… not ideal, and eventually resulted in an assertion. now font changes mark the atlas as dirty, and the editor waits for the render thread to finish before rebuilding the atlas at a safe point. not the prettiest solution, but it seems to be working.. kind of dpi & freetype also experimented with DPI handling for fonts and wrapped FreeType into a single shared instance instead of creating separate instances everywhere. still figuring out exactly how I want the DPI/font sizing stuff to behave, but it’s getting there. bug fixes while doing all of this I also ended up fixing a few unrelated things: fixed an old GUI rendering bug where text could stop rendering or become garbled because of a pointer race thanks to @staneko for helping test/report that one since I couldn’t reproduce it properly on my system fixed a weird compilation issue related to namespace escaping bumped the vendored ImGui version for some dynamic font-related fixes a few other small UI changes and cleanup still working on this, and the font management side definitely isn’t finished yet… most of this time was just spent trying to get it to half-work so.. yep..
mostly ui stuff (and fighting windows wide chars) yay pretty ui editor ui theming ui blah blah idk what to call it kinda cleaned up some stuff into proper members so the ui state doesn’t get all weird and persistent when you close the theme window discarding changes: actually works now. closing the window used to revert colors but keep your staged font changes, which was dumb (didnt really cause issues since changes werent applied anyways unless you saved beforehand but still.) font role indicators: added a little visual thingamabob where the font list now shows a star next to whatever font is actively set as the body font (also font name is now rendered in its proper font) path tooltips: added a hover tooltip on the font list items that shows the full file path of the font also some placeholder stuff in the code for searching the customization menu i might be implementing soon windows compat std::filesystem::path everything: went through and switched out the raw std::string usage for font paths inside FontConfig , replacing them with std::filesystem::path . this was purely because my windows ci build was failing. i was passing raw char strings around and doing weird string conversions, which completely blows up on windows because it expects wide chars for paths and i didnt consider that when i was being lazy and doing silly conversions and stuff because i just wanted to pass ez pz to a c library. freetype & serialization cleanup: updated all the internal freetype helper functions ( GetFontName , etc.) and the json theme serializer to play nice with the new paths instead of passing raw char pointers kinda mostly just making it a lil more prettier
scrips can change things on the map yippie changes scripting scripts can now modify maps through EngineLib added: Map_SetHexWalkable Map_SetTileType yes, i made sure changes to walkability properly update the map’s pathfinding data instead of leaving it with stale information… sanitizers added sanitizer builds…. got ASan + UBSan working through CMake, along with presets for testing… it has helped already :) timers SetTimeout : if a script created a timer and then the scene changed before it fired, the callback could still run against the old scene state. timers now use generations, so changing/reloading a scene invalidates any timers belonging to the previous scene. editor fixed another map editor bug where discarding unsaved changes didn’t actually discard them… it would clear the dirty state but leave the edited map in memory… i knew about this bug and fix for a while, but i kept on forgetting about it… but its finally done -.- also added an Edit button to script entries in the project browser so scripts can be opened directly (launches default app it detects for the file via ur os)
more docs… and some bug fixes some small bugs that have been annoying me for a while finally got fixed… and I wrote more docs than I probably needed to…? or maybe too litte.. who knows changes entity selection actually clears now fixed an issue where clicking empty space in the viewport wouldn’t reliably clear the current selection. the pick-result handling was structured wrong, so the “nothing was selected” case basically never got handled properly. also explicitly clear the entity ID framebuffer attachment every frame so it doesn’t leave stale IDs around from previous frames. i knew this was broken, and figured the fix would be pretty simple for a while.. but i just kinda forgot to fix it.. oops…. fixed parent transforms during scene loading fixed a bug with parented entities getting their transforms messed up when loading a scene. the issue was that scene loading was using the same Reparent() logic as interactive editor reparenting. that function intentionally recalculates the local transform to preserve world position, which is what you don’t want when loading a transform that’s already been serialized correctly… was eepy when writing that i guess added Registry::SetParentDirect() for scene loading, which just sets up the parent/child relationship without touching the transforms. interactive reparenting still uses the old behaviour, so dragging entities around in the hierarchy still preserves their world position misc cleaned out some old commented-out code docs, docs, docs also wrote proper editor documentation section covering things like: editor concepts usage scenes prefabs components and some even have screenshots.. yes i know.. fancy the help button in the editor links to some of these pages now. i guess “figure it out yourself” wasn’t really an acceptable documentation strategy anymore…. i mean i had some docs.. but they weren’t that good for editor-usage and more technical stuff.. so yep.. also made the README headers slightly more obvious because people were still asking where the download link was ….
persistent Entities been working on persistent entities via a tag.. the same idea as Unity’s DontDestroyOnLoad, except you mark entities as persistent in the editor instead of doing it through scripts (scripts can do it too though). everything keeps breaking or half-working help.
persistent entities… again kinda scrapped most of the first attempt at persistent entities and decided to redo it instead of setting persistence in the editor, I went with something closer to Unity’s DontDestroyOnLoad , where scripts explicitly mark entities as persistent. makes more sense and is a lot less weird around scene changes. (i.e this.SetPersistent(true); ) changes scripting added: entity.SetPersistent(true) entity.IsPersistent() persistence persistent entities are tagged before the scene unloads, serialized normally, then re-injected and reparented when the new scene loads. the persistence tag itself isn’t serialized, so it won’t accidentally end up saved into the scene dedup added some basic deduplication so persistent entities don’t get duplicated if the new scene already contains an entity with the same name. its name based for now… not very great, but good enough
mostly windows fixes changes SetLightmap took a raw Lightmap* and just held onto it for the frame swapped it for a small value type the renderer copies out immediately instead… this sometimes caused crashes but seemingly only on windows?.. just my luck.. LightingSystem had the same issue, was writing back into ECS memory through a raw pointer from a GL init task. now creates the framebuffer/vao up front and just calls Invalidate() on them SubmitPersistent was also holding a raw pointer into caller-owned memory, now copies into the staging buffer like everything else does RenderBatch used to just silently not draw anything if a batch went over MAX_INSTANCES . now it chunks into multiple draw calls instead of dropping the whole thing InvalidateGLCache wasn’t resetting the dynamic instance buffers, only the VAO cache, so they could point at dead GL objects after a context loss actual windows fixes opening files tries to open via already existing file associationg, otherwise falls back to the “open with” dialog if there’s no default handler also the paths get normalized to backslashes now asset import for scripts and so just does a file copy now instead of going through the old import path
code cleanup & optimization currently going through a bunch of older code and fixing / optimizing things. prolly way too much to actually write about, and most of it is just boring small changes, bug fixes, and a lil cleanup big pr i guess soon idk
hardening + performance stuff so this is kinda the continuation of the last log(s) where i was going through some old code kinda boooring but its important performance mainly been trying to get rid of unnecessary allocations and full scans stuff optimized ECS entity/component lookups and removal reworked hierarchy propagation to avoid unnecessary registry scans reduced allocations in scripting and UI command buffers cached script wrappers so they can be reused instead of constantly recreated improved UI lookups with a proper name index made particle/lightmap updates only rebuild when actually needed cached project browser directory scans capped the editor console and added clipping for large logs also did a bunch of smaller optimizations around scripting task scheduling and resource loading things thread safety went through a lot of the cross-thread stuff as well made ResourceManager access properly synchronized experimenting with the audio locking guarded FreeType access made window size and pending scene state thread-safe fixed some render thread / GL context handling basically trying to make all the multithreading stuff a little less “it seems to work” type stuff though alot of this probably wasnt actually causing any issues YET , it would be very hard to debug in the future if I didn’t try to fix it now so yeahh correctness fixed several out-of-bounds issues in VFS/package parsing made VFS path resolution properly stay inside the VFS root (oops…) fixed hierarchy reparenting allowing cycles fixed a few dangling references in hierarchy code fixed some component pool and packaged asset lifetime issues undo history now clears when loading a scene cleaned up a few map editor edge cases fixed text centering fixed the triangle mesh made engine context non copyable also updated the demo template while I was at it (since a recent movementcomponent update it wasnt behaving properly due to the addition of a new field) there are other small things i probably didn’t mention here too but it’s mostly all a collection of a bunch of small things im still testing this though and looking into a few other small things…..
ui editing gizmos!!!1 you can finally drag UI elements around in the editor (instead of typing position/scale values into the inspector) changes ui gizmo added a proper UI gizmo with resize handles and dragging support and that corners resize both axes, edges resize one axis dragging the body moves the element resizing from the top/left keeps the opposite edge anchored added a small drag deadzone so clicking doesn’t accidentally create an undo step UI transforms now go through TransformUIElementCommand , so they’re undo/redo -able also renamed the existing entity gizmo code and naming gets confusing otherwise… coordinate stuff the gizmo needed mouse coordinates relative to the viewport rather than the whole window, so added some better viewport coordinate handling for that… maybe a lil late ui editing mode buttons won’t randomly enter their hover/pressed states just because your mouse is sitting over them now in the editor beccause its a lil annoying when editing small optimization also fixed UIText and UIButton recalculating their text layout every frame when nothing changes feels nice :)
custom meshes im trynna make it so you can draw your own custom 2d meshes in the editor its still a lil buggy but it’s mostly working, serializes and all that :) very fun…
experimenting with post processing working on a lil post-processing pipeline still very wip but im mostly just playing around with various shaders and stuff changes the pipeline PostProcessor is a simple “ping-pong” chain: scene renders to an off-screen FrameBuffer , then each enabled effect runs full-screen-triangle shaders bouncing between two ping-pong buffers, in whatever order they were added I’m working on a system via variants to get uniforms to be easily serializable and such, it seems to be working but I havent actually wired it into anything just yet. editor and runtime a lil bigger change than expected. i implemented a unified fbo for both editor/runtime rather than the weird jank i was doing before editor: scene renders into m_SceneFrameBuffer , post effects run, then it gets sent into the ImGui viewport image like before runtime: same scene framebuffer, same post effects, then PresentToScreen goes to the default framebuffer instead just some general cleanup for that ig crt shader i wrote a lil silly CRT looking shader to test it out as shown below, it’s cool but kind of useless, but very fun to play with!!!
more post processing!!!! this took way longer than i thought it would but uh whateveer. i think i still gotta fix some small things but its working pretty alright :D editor ui added a proper ui for post processing :) threw in an import button and stuff so you can load in fragment shaders as post proc fx you can edit the uniforms directly in the ui now stuff glsl uniform parser: wrote a very simple basic glsl uniforms parser. this is what makes the ui editing possible, but it also helps a ton with serialization so i don’t have to hardcode everything serialization: implemented saving and loading for post processing effects and also made post processing effects bound per-scene instead of being a global engine thing yay post processing funny effects shaders aaaaaaaah
shader preprocessing been working on a small shader preprocessor thing while also finishing up the final bits of post-processing right now the preprocessor is pretty simple, mostly just adding support for: #include #pragma once I haven’t actually needed it yet, I just kinda had the urge to make it… so now I have a shader preprocessor …? its pretty extendable and all though so usefull to have ig :)
too many post proc fx? followup to the post processing / shader experiments… changes shader includes shaders can #include "rand.glsl" etc and it resolves properly. it checks the project VFS first, then falls back to the engine’s own shader helper directory if it isn’t found there. engine shader helpers also get packaged into exported games under engine/shaders/ , so includes keep working at runtime. added a few helper include files: rand.glsl / auto_rand.glsl - seeded hash-based random, with auto_rand reseeding per frame from u_Time color.glsl - HSV conversion, lift/gamma/gain, contrast, saturation, and three-way color wheels commons.glsl - engine-provided uniform declarations so you don’t have to redeclare u_Resolution , etc. in every shader for engine-provided uniforms the helpers use #ifndef / #define guards, so auto_rand.glsl can include rand.glsl without causing double declarations if the effect shader or another include declare the same uniforms or includes. more built-in effects added a few more built-in post processing effects: ColorGrading - exposure, contrast + pivot, saturation, lift/gamma/gain, and shadow/midtone/highlight color wheels using color.glsl FilmGrain - chunky per-cell grain with u_GrainSize controlling the cell size Vingette - yes i know its mispelled. uniforms with Wheel in the name now get the wheel-style color picker instead of the regular color picker, since a normal RGB slider cleaned up effect registration used to have two separate lists, one for raw shader registration and one for the default effect chain. this meant adding an effect involved touching two different structs in two different places. merged those into one PPRegistration list with an inDefaultChain flag shader debug name added an actual m_DebugName field and made error messages / the material inspector fall back to it when there isn’t a real file path. docs wrote up some post-processing editor docs ….. i hate writing docs.. also .shader is now a valid extension for importing custom effect shaders, alongside .frag / .glsl trimmed down the miniaudio CMake config by disabling its examples, tests, and tools, along with Vorbis/Opus/FLAC support since i’m not using any of that….
sllight hub overhaul redid the project hub screen and added recent projects tracking, since up to now opening anything meant going through a file dialog every single time… changes recent projects get tracked in a PROJECTHIST file (next to the editor executable) …dead simple format, one filepath per line, each pointing at a project’s .json . capped at 5 entries, oldest just get removed off the list. hub screen is basically remade two docked panels now instead of one. left panel is the same buttons as before (new project, open project, etc), right panel is the new recent-projects list, up to 5 entries since that’s all the history file holds. also removed some unused dead code i found… QoL type stuff i guess :D
copy paste (kinda) also too much time fighting windows builds tried to get entity copy/paste working and it’s… janky. also ended up wasting a stupid amount of time just getting windows builds to actually build again because i lowk forgot again about how it wont let me pass paths as strings implictly as it does on every other damn os… changes copy/paste (wip, kinda broken) started on ctrl+c/ctrl+v for entities & ui in the editor it kinda works but is really janky and does not feel good to use, also tried implementing it in the context menu but its not workiong at all -.- other the windows fixes…. some resharper reccomendation inspection type shi but lowk its been a while since i logged soo yep
collision stuff been working on a collider system. still pretty early and not hooked into EngineLib yet, but most of the basic backend + editor stuff is there planning to expose it to scripts in a similar way to how Unity handles collision callbacks / triggers, but that’s for later……. collision added a new ColliderComponent with: box and circle colliders offsets size / radius trigger support collision system currently handles: box vs box circle vs circle box vs circle collision normals + penetration depth ‘trigger’ collisions also added a CollisionWorld that keeps track of collisions between frames and generates Enter , Stay , and Exit events. mostly groundwork for when I hook this into EngineLib… collider editing colliders are editable from the editor theres a collider inspector widget for changing the shape, offset, size/radius, and whether it’s a trigger, plus a viewport gizmo for directly moving and resizing them collider edits also go through the undo system, because every new editor feature needs to become an undo/redo problem eventually……… :D other editor fixes entity copy/paste now copies the whole child hierarchy instead of only the selected entity pasted hierarchies keep their parent relationships added copy/paste to the entity and UI context menus fixed stale entity / UI selections after the thing being selected gets deleted fixed single-key shortcuts like V , T , R , etc. firing while Ctrl/Alt/Shift was held keyboard camera movement no longer fights with Ctrl/Alt shortcuts a few smaller include / cleanup things mostly collision work though. next step is probably getting the collision events into EngineLib and experimentiung w. it its still a bit jank of course but it works i guess :DDDDD
collision system round 2 i guess ended up pretty much reworking most of the collision system….. the first version was still basically 2D, with separate box vs box / circle vs circle / box vs circle functions. that worked as a starting point, but it was gonna get annoying … so… it is 3D now. colliders ColliderComponent now supports: boxes spheres cylinders 3D offsets / dimensions triggers entity-space or billboard orientation billboard colliders follow the same camera-facing basis as billboard rendering, which means billboard sprites can still have colliders that actually line up with how they appear on screen. GJK got rid of all the individual boxVBox , boxVCircle , etc. collision functions and replaced them with support-mapped collision detection using GJK. each collider shape just provides a support point now, the intersection test doesn’t care what combination of shapes it’s checking. i dont fully understand the math completely yet.. but it kinda makes sense :D still no collision response / physics yet. this is just detection + events, i think ill prolly get it into EngineLib.. soon… events the CollisionWorld still tracks collisions between frames and generates: Enter Stay Exit trigger state is kept with the collision too. this is for EngineLib integration. scripts should be able to react to collisions / triggers like unity I have not gotten around to this yet though… collider gizmos also had to redo the collider gizmos now that colliders aren’t just flat 2D shapes anymore… its a lil janky but it works.. billboard cleanup while doing the billboard collider stuff I also cleaned up billboard rendering a bit billboards used to have their world transform temporarily modified by SpriteBillboardSystem before rendering. now the billboard matrix is generated when the entity is submitted to the renderer instead, so the actual ECS transform can stay as the real entity transform there’s now one shared billboard matrix helper used by both rendering and collision, which is considerably less cursed. um scripting integration next i guess.. if something dosent explode ! :D
collision callbacks scripts can do collision things now….!!! script collision callbacks ObSL scripts can now define collision hooks: on_collision_enter(other) on_collision_stay(other) on_collision_exit(other) on_trigger_enter(other) on_trigger_stay(other) on_trigger_exit(other) the other argument is a normal EngineLib entity wrapper, scripts can do stuff like check its name, components, etc. collision events get collected by the CollisionWorld , then dispatched to the relevant script instances afterwards. they’re also run through the existing script command buffer ofc 2D collider shapes are back too… added explicit 2D shapes alongside the 3D ones: Rectangle Circle so the full set is now: Box Sphere Cylinder Rectangle Circle rectangle / circle are flat shapes. which is nicer for sprites and other 2d things movement actually respects colliders hex movement now checks whether an entity can actually occupy its next tile before moving there. added a CanOccupy() collision query which builds the entity’s collider at the target position, it blocks the move if something solid is in the way. triggers don’t block movement. collision robustness stuff also did a bunch of smaller fixes around the collision added a shared collision tolerance instead of random 1e-6 s in different places AABB overlap now uses that tolerance too improved collider validation depending on the actual shape fixed gizmo world-to-local conversion to use the proper inverse transform more finite-value / clipping checks in the collider gizmo GJK Indeterminate results preserve the previous collision state instead of automatically counting as a collision p.s, heres a lil photo of my attempt at making syntax highlighting for obsl using textmate grammar… :D
spritesheets / animation finally … spritesheet support spritesheets added a new SpriteSheetComponent with: texture rows / columns optional row + column spacing start frame animation length FPS looping playing / paused state current frame basically the renderer can now render only a specific UV region of a texture animation also added a small sprite animation system that advances frames based on FPS and handles looping / stopping at the end etc etc animations also update while in the editor… might be annoying for some, might be less annoying for others.. but thats how i like it editor stuff you can pick the texture, set rows / columns and spacing, choose the start frame + animation length, change FPS, toggle looping / playback, scrub the current frame, restart the animation, etc. etc EngineLib scripts can inspect stuff like the current frame, frame count, FPS, rows / columns and texture, and can also change the texture/grid/animation, set frames, play, pause, restart and stop animations. Collider also has a proper EngineLib component wrapper instead of collision only being accessible through the callback hooks. right now that’s just getting / setting whether it’s a trigger, but it’s there. also added both Collider and SpriteSheet to the normal GetComponent , AddComponent , RemoveComponent , HasComponent , etc. obviously. some cleanup did a bit of registry / EngineLib locking cleanup while I was in there too, mostly around entity wrappers being created while the registry lock is already held. also fixed one very stupid collision callback typo where on_collision_stay was looking up the wrong hook… oops….. im also starting on documenting this stuff…. yep.. pain… spritesheet used in video attached for testing is : https://opengameart.org/content/animated-butterfly
btw pls star on girhub animation clips / refactoring spritesheets …kinda refactoring the whole spritesheet animation thing already the first version worked, but having FPS / looping / frame ranges etc directly on the SpriteSheetComponent was gonna get pretty limiting cuz what if I wanted multiple animations for one sprite. it might sound stupid but for me it’s always worked to get a prototype working, then refactor/reimplement it. thats even what i did for this entire project early on, before it deleoped into a full on engine :D so now the spritesheet is mostly just the sheet + currently displayed frame, and animation playback is seperate animation clips working on proper animation sets + clips. an animation asset can have one spritesheet and multiple named clips, with each clip containing its own list of frames :D each frame also has its own duration now instead of the whole animation just sharing one FPS value, so stuff like holding a frame longer or doing irregular timing is possible without clips can loop independently too animator component added a separate SpriteAnimatorComponent which handles the actual playback state: animation asset initial clip autoplay current clip current frame inside that clip elapsed time playing state the normal SpriteSheetComponent is way simpler now… it just says what sheet + frame should currently be rendered (the animator updates that for it) animation assets animation sets are assets now under assets/animations/ they serialize separately and contain the spritesheet setup plus all the clips / frames / durations they are loaded through the normal asset system and registered in the ResourceManager scene serialization now keeps the animator config like the selected animation asset, initial clip, and autoplay editor stuff the sprite sheet inspector got reworked for the current thing but whole UI stuff isnt finished once an animator is attached it owns the sheet/frame instead of both systems trying to edit the same thing. I still need a proper UI for actually making / editing animation assets and clips though. i shall work on this next!!! (right now the backend is pretty much all ive done but its taken a lil longer than i thought… who wouldve thought adding cips cleanly would take this whole aah refactor) scripting EngineLib updates too SpriteAnimator in scripts can now do: Play("walk") Restart("walk") Pause() Resume() Stop() IsPlaying() GetClip() it is now based on named clips so i guess not anything flashy to show but… its stuff :)
animation editor continued working on the animation system and made the editor UI…. animation editor there’s now a Sprite Animation Editor you can: choose the spritesheet texture edit rows / columns / spacing create, rename and delete clips toggle looping per clip edit individual frame indices + durations move frames up / down duplicate / remove frames expand / collapse the frame list also added range generation so adding a normal animation doesn’t make you manually enter every frame one by one….. theres also an Apply FPS to All Frames button ! preview added a live preview for the selected clip. you can play, pause and restart it woaw it shows the current clip frame and spritesheet index while it runs…. project browser integration animation assets are properly integrated into the project browser now too there’s an Animations section where you can create, import, edit and delete animation assets creating a new one lets you choose its path then opens it in the animation editor. the animation asset workflow is mostly usable from inside the editor :D erm even more enginelib changes for the new systen that i still have to document… ( Play() Restart() etc) some cleanup working on… some mostly const-correctness, explicit casts, ranges, include cleanup and some other small stuff etc etc.. god bless resharper c++ also cleaned up some EngineLib entity wrapper code around registry locking so it can create wrappers safely when the registry mutex is already held spritesheet used in video attached for testing is : https://opengameart.org/content/animated-butterfly
I will not elaborate
asset system refactor + some editor stuff been wanting to redo how assets work for a while now. until now scenes carried the asset definitions with them, and loading scenes would keep throwing resources into the global resource manager. worked fine enough , but it also meant resources could kinda just accumulate forever.. i seperated them now!! assets.json projects now have a project-wide assets.json catalog. textures, shaders, meshes, materials, fonts, animation sets, etc. live there instead of getting serialized into every single scene. scenes / prefabs / UI / animations etc. just store resource IDs and the definitions live in one place besides making scene files considerably less bloated, this means saving a scene no longer serializes whatever random collection of resources happens to currently exist in the resource manager lazy asset loading having one project-wide catalog does not mean loading the entire project into memory. scene loading now scans for the resources that scene actually references and loads those from the catalog this includes stuff referenced by: entities maps / tile types UI post processing spritesheets / animators dependencies get resolved too so if something needs a material, its shader + texture get pulled in first. animation sets pull in their spritesheet texture, etc. etc. now the the resource manager should only contain what is actually being used asset lifetime stuff added SceneAssetScope for keeping track of what assets a scene has acquired. assets are retained while something needs them and can actually be unloaded once the last scope using them disappears so changing scenes repeatedly should no longer turn the resource manager into yummy more objects :O forever…. persistent entities reacquire the resources they need when moving between scenes too. there’s also handling for catalog entries being replaced / deleted while their old resource is still loaded. those can be marked stale and discarded safely once the old scene lets go of them instead of leaving weird zombie resources around. engine assets still stay around like normal. editor asset workflow the editor now goes through the asset catalog too. creating / importing / replacing / deleting things like: textures shaders meshes materials fonts animation sets updates assets.json instead of depending on scene serialization to preserve them…. supported editor selections / script setters can also acquire catalog assets on demand and attach them to the current scene’s asset scope old projects old projects obviously still have all their assets embedded inside their scene files, so I added an ob_asset_migrator tool. it can scan the old scenes and merge all of those definitions into a project-level assets.json . there’s: dry-run validation conflict detection optional removal of the old scene assets sections backups before it starts rewriting stuff uses backups because i dont trust myself enough .. might vaporize projects who knows… docs docs docs also updated a stupid amount of documentation for the new asset model … since of course.. there’s now a full assets.json format page covering the different asset types, dependencies, lazy loading, asset scopes, editor behavior and migration. updated the scene / prefab / animation / post-processing docs too since all of those previously described assets as being stored directly in scenes. also cleaned up the main README + docs index a bit and updated the feature list because quite a lot of it was outdated at this point…. theme presets also did some work on editor themes. split the built-in theme definitions out and added some interesting presets: Obliberry Dark ImGui Classic Dark Obliberry Light ew imagine using light themes… High Contrast Dark Haxxorman Green editable and all… tldr: resourcemanager is now longer an infintly growing landfill…
save system i wanted this to be pretty generic instead of the engine having some hardcoded idea of what a “player save” or whatever is, so the actual save data is ba sically just key/value storage that scripts can use for whatever they want!!! save data there’s now a SaveGameManager which keeps one active save in memory. save values can currently be: booleans numbers strings the file format is versioned and also stores a display name + created / updated timestamps. the actual save data itself doesn’t really care what the values mean. it is any key value pair that persists. there’s also locking around the active save since scripts can be running across multiple workers….. project UUIDs projects also have their own UUID now. it’s generated when the project is created or when a project that does not already have one is opened right now it’s mainly used to give each project its own save-data directory without name collisions but im sure its good to have outside that!!! save files the basic save file operations too create a new save write the current active save load a save delete a save list existing saves start a fresh unsaved “game” save filenames are generated from timestamps. the human-readable name stays inside the file, display names don’t need to also be valid / unique filenames. save_list() also gives creation + update timestamps, and saves are sorted by most recently updated. writes are atomic too, so it writes through a temporary file before replacing the real save instead of directly nuking the existing one and hoping for the best per-project save directories save data is stored outside the project itself in the normal OS application data home each project gets its own directory based on its UUID <data home>/obliberry/<project uuid>/saves/ projects with the same name don’t fight over the same saves.. (i have several projects just called “UntitledProject” lol) this is LocalAppData on Windows, Application Support on macOS, and XDG_DATA_HOME / ~/.local/share on Linux. both the editor and runtime configure the save manager when the project is loaded, and it gets reset again when the editor closes the project ! ObSL ObSL savedata enginelib intergration: basic data stuff: save_set(key, value) save_get(key) save_has(key) save_remove(key) save_clear() save_new() save file management: save_create(name) save_write() save_load(filename) save_delete(filename) save_list() save_list() returns an array with the filename, display name, creation time and last update time some cleanup also pulled the atomic file writing stuff into a shared OS file utility, so assets.json can use the same code instead of having its own implementation. bunch of formatting stuff too i still have to document this and do some more testingf but yeahhh
uuids, collision layers, save settings, and other stuff bit of a mixed bag this time. mostly cleaning up some systems that were already there and filling in stuff I’d need… entity UUIDs entities have proper UUIDs now, separate from their normal runtime entity IDs. the regular generational ID still does all the normal ECS stuff, while the UUID is a stable identity that gets serialized with the entity. this mostly fixes how persistent entities work between scenes. previously I was deduplicating persistent entities by name , which was obviously not ideal since names aren’t actually identities. persistent entities + their children now keep their UUIDs when moving between scenes, and if the destination already has an entity with the same UUID it gets replaced by the carried-over one. two things can have the exact same name now without persistence randomly deciding they’re the same thing. normal prefab instances / newly created entities still get new UUIDs. collision layers colliders now have proper layers + masks. there are 32 collision layers, and every collider has: a layer a 32-bit mask of layers it accepts both colliders have to accept each other’s layer for the pair to interact. the same filtering is used for normal overlap events and movement blocking, so there isn’t a separate set of collision rules depending on which system happens to be asking. added editor controls for this too, including the layer selector, all 32 mask toggles, and select all / deselect all buttons because clicking 32 checkboxes individually sounds incredibly fun. scripts can also read / change the layer and mask now. collision-aware script movement also added Transform.TryMoveTo(x, y, z) to ObSL. unlike SetPosition , this checks whether the entity can actually occupy the destination before moving it. the normal hex movement system uses the same helper now too, so script-controlled collision-aware movement and normal movement go through the same path. direct SetPosition is still basically teleporting, which is intentional. also fixed on_collision_stay actually looking up the collision stay callback instead of the trigger stay callback. whoops. more save settings did some more work around the save system from the last update. saving can now be enabled / disabled per project, and projects can choose where save files go: Data Home , the normal OS application-data location Portable , relative to the executable both still use the project UUID underneath so different projects don’t start sharing save files because somebody named both of them game . these are editable from Project Settings now. also added a confirmation dialog when regenerating the project UUID since doing that changes which save directory the project looks at. the old saves aren’t deleted, the project just gets a new identity and stops finding them automatically. graphics config stuff changed packaged builds so graphics.json can live beside the executable and override the version inside the package. (i.e if someone decides to unignore the graphics config and package it) couple random fixes particle emitters now keep their actual live particle count, so GetAliveCount() in ObSL finally returns the real value instead of the completely useless placeholder it had before. fixed a prefab revert issue where the code was reading the prefab path from the component after destroying the entity. very intelligent. also made theme font loading a bit less fragile. missing / broken font files get logged and skipped instead of potentially taking the whole theme load down with them, plus some parsing cleanup. and updated another mountain of docs to match all the collision, persistence, save, prefab, post-processing and export changes.
unit tests (& some fixes) uhhhh started adding actual unit tests… i was kinda putting it off but i gotta have it… set up GoogleTest + CTest and started covering some stuff ECS registry / generational IDs entity UUIDs entity serialization hierarchy / parenting collision events + movement blocking save games maps bugs bugs bugs… and unsurprisingly, writing tests immediately started exposing some smaller issues. fixed stale entity handles being able to mess with components belonging to a recycled entity slot, and cleaned up some hierarchy transform / rotation handling that wasn’t preserving transforms correctly in certain parenting cases. also tightened up a couple math helpers while testing them. im still gonna write even more tests.. its very needed at this point and will prolly help me find some more bugs i missed before…
more tests (more bugs) kept going with the unit tests the test suite now covers most of the important stuff, including: ECS / entity IDs / UUIDs serialization + hierarchies collision geometry, events and movement maps animation saves ObSL + some EngineLib bindings assets / asset lifetime VFS + packaged projects configuration editor undo commands also added a couple integration tests for audio and rendering (OpenGL tests are optional) finding things unsurprisingly this found some actual problems too. stale entity handles can no longer remove / access components from an entity that reused the same slot, and editor undo commands are a bit safer around entities or components disappearing. also fixed some hierarchy rotation decomposition weirdness, cleaned up VFS / package mounting state so old package data can’t leak into the next mount, and added a few other small null / cleanup checks around scenes and rendering resources.
export dependencies + prefab asset loading redid how exporting figures out what needs to go into the package previously editor export was basically much closer to just packing the project directory. now it builds a dependency manifest first figuring out what to export export starts from the project + scenes and follows the things they reference: catalog assets used by entities, maps, UI and post processing map files attached ObSL scripts script using imports scenes loaded from scripts prefabs instantiated from scripts music / sound files material textures + shaders animation sheets shader #include s referenced scenes and prefabs get scanned too, dependencies keep chaining from there. it then generates a new filtered assets.json specifically for the package instead of sticking the entire project catalog in there. the actual project’s catalog is untouched. script analysis added a ScriptAssetAnalyzer which walks the ObSL AST without actually running anything. literal stuff can be narrowed down properly, including things like: PlayMusic("assets/audio/music.ogg", 1.0) or even constant string concatenation… asset setters like SetTexture / SetFont get tracked too. if a texture or font ID is dynamic, export keeps that entire asset category. if a runtime file path for stuff like LoadScene , Instantiate , PlayMusic or PlaySound2D can’t be figured out, it falls back to keeping the eligible project files + full asset catalog. unknown / indirect calls are done the same too so simple projects get smaller exports, while weird dynamic scripting should still work… .pakignore still applies, and required files being missing or ignored is now an export error prefab assets also fixed prefabs properly interacting with the lazy asset system. instantiating a prefab now scans its components, acquires whatever catalog assets it needs, resolves their dependencies, and retains them in the scene before creating the entity. so a prefab can use an asset that wasn’t already referenced by the scene and it should just work. scene asset scopes got changed a bit for this too. instead of accumulating a new scope every time something acquires assets, they’re merged into one scene scope and duplicate asset references are ignored. also made prefab revert a little safer so the old entity isn’t destroyed unless the replacement prefab actually instantiated successfully. packaging / ci things editor packaging is stricter in general now. script dependency validation can fail the export, missing dependencies stop it, and PackageCurrentProject reports failure so the rest of the export doesn’t continue pretending everything is fine. shader includes are followed during dependency collection too, while the engine shader helpers still get bundled for runtime includes. also cleaned up CI a decent bit… also some more tests too for the packaging and script analysis lowk sorry for just posting an image of the logs idk how else to show it since it’s mostly backend / file stuff 😭
undo stuff + render lifetime fixes undo / redo the undo system relied way too much on runtime entity IDs and direct pointers into components. that works until an entity gets deleted, an ECS slot gets recycled, or a dense component pool moves stuff around… entity commands now store the entity UUID and resolve the current runtime entity when they execute / undo instead. this now applies to transforms, renaming, adding / removing components, script changes, component field edits and map painting. so older commands can still find the right entity even if it was deleted and later restored with a completely different runtime ID. deleting things is actually undoable now finally added proper undo for deleting entities. !!!!!! deleting an entity snapshots the whole subtree first, including components, UUIDs, names, hierarchy + sibling order, scripts, custom data and asset references. undo rebuilds the tree, reloads required assets, restores the UUIDs and puts everything back where it was. this also means edits from before the deletion still work afterwards, since those commands just resolve the restored entity by UUID. paste uses the same snapshot system now too, so undo / redo keeps the same pasted entity identities instead of creating unrelated ones every time. there are checks for conflicting UUIDs, missing parents, invalid hierarchies, missing assets etc. failed restores shouldn’t leave half-created entities behind. failed commands also no longer get added to undo history or wipe an existing redo chain. custom ObSL data custom script data needed special handling too. arrays / objects can share references or even be cyclic, so just copying ObSL::Value s wasn’t enough. there’s now a snapshot format that captures the object graph and rebuilds it through the interpreter + GC when an entity is restored. CustomDataComponent also roots stored ObSL values properly so GC-managed objects stay alive. runtime functions aren’t snapshotable though, so deletion just fails instead of restoring garbage. render thread lifetime stuff also did a pretty big pass over renderer resource lifetime, mostly because scene switching could unload resources while an already submitted frame was still using them. (this started because someone mightve pointed out a lil crash for me…) render commands now pin the meshes, materials, shaders and textures they need until that frame is done. same idea for UI textures and the editor viewport framebuffer. OpenGL objects also don’t call glDelete* from whichever thread destroys the C++ object anymore. textures, shaders, buffers, VAOs and framebuffers queue deletion for the render thread, while it actually owns the GL context. less bugs yay frame state + shutdown renderer state that can change while the render thread is behind is captured per frame now too, including clear color, post-processing and UI resolution / projection state. shutdown is also more deliberate now: worker threads stop first, background font loads finish, scripts stop, scenes/resources are cleared, renderer/UI resources shut down, then the remaining GL delete queue is processed while a context still exists. font loading uses tracked jthread s now too instead of detached threads. small things exporting now reports success / failure back to the editor and shows a little result popup instead of silently relying on the console. also added tests around delete / restore, UUID reuse, hierarchy restoration, script components, map edits, pasting, command failures and repeated undo / redo without leaking entities or asset references. so. .. . less explosions hopefully sorry if wording is weird.. character limit..
uhhh changes dont nuke scene on failed load scene deserialization moved out of Scene::OnEnter into SceneManager::LoadScene , and now runs before the old scene gets torn down. if the new one fails, you stay in the old scene ( LoadSceneByPath returns a bool now) loading is stricter. missing map files, bad/out-of-range/cyclic parent values and broken UI sections fail the load instead of logging an error and limping on persistent entity migration happens before the swap too, so a failed asset acquire can’t leave you half in the new scene the editor’s LoadScene used to clear the current project before trying to load. now undo history and selection only get cleared once the load actually worked saving: map write failures now propagate instead of reporting success, and files get closed before the error check destroying entities DestroyEntity was recursive, now it’s iterative with a visited set. deep hierarchies, cycles and duplicate child entries no longer kaboom the stack or double delete, and children go first (wow that sounds dark) Reparent and SetParentDirect go through CanSetParent , which rejects cycles and stale parents, even if the existing hierarchy is already cyclic script DestroyEntity / entity.Destroy() now use RequestDestroy to tag the entity and its whole subtree instead of deleting immediately, so on_destroy runs before deletion. scene exit drains the destroy queue too, including entities tagged by exit hooks the script wrapper cache evicts an entity when it’s destroyed a dumb one…: the hot-reload cleanup list had on_exit in it twice and no on_destroy , so on_destroy GC roots never got released … the script system was holding raw ScriptComponent* across initialization, which dangles if a script spawns enough entities to grow the pool. it looks components up by entity ID now script runtime reinitialization after a scene change uses the VFS path and reruns setup, so using imports keep working from the mounted project ui undo UI elements have UUIDs now, and undo commands resolve them by UUID instead of holding raw pointers. removing an element captures the whole subtree plus its sibling position, so undo restores the hierarchy and order. renaming also updates the name index live. smaller fixes collision broadphase is a “spatial hash grid” now instead of checking every pair lightmap rebakes when ambient changes, and handles maps with no tiles atomic file writes use unique temp names so concurrent writers don’t trip over each other project changes wait for background asset loads to finish timeout timers are mutex-protected, and callbacks can schedule more timers without deadlocking SmallTask over-aligned captures fall back to the heap VFS::Resolve("..") had UB from a std::mismatch that wasn’t bounded on the second range… PlayMusic stops, swaps and starts under the lock now instead of racing!!! tests wrote a pile of tests alongside all this: atomic writes, wrapper cache, hierarchy safety, map serialization, save concurrency, scene loading failures, script lifecycle, script modules, SmallTask and timeouts. expanded to the editor command, save game and VFS tests. so EVEN LESS explosions !!! Woo!
map edit kinda overhauled changes map edit stuff the brush size is now 1 to 8 instead of 1 to 5. size 1 is one hex, size 2 is 7, size 3 is 19, etc. Ctrl +scroll also changes the size added Rect and Circle shapes alongside the brush. they work with Paint, Erase and Select. Rect uses opposite corners, Circle goes from a center out to the hex you release on. both apply on release paint previews are green, erase previews are red, and selection previews are yellow. selected tiles get a blue overlay added tool hotkeys: B for Paint, E for Erase and Q for Select Esc cancels a drag. Rect and Circle do nothing if cancelled, while a brush stroke gets reverted instead of leaving half the changes behind loading a map now prompts before discarding a dirty map, and successfully creating or loading a map clears the old undo history selecting and editing multiple tiles Select now supports click and drag, Shift +drag to add to the selection and Ctrl +drag to remove from it the toolbar shows the selection count and has Clear and Delete buttons. Delete removes all selected tiles in one undo step the Tile Editor can edit the type and walkability of the whole selection at once. when selected tiles differ, the controls show mixed values etc. material editing only appears when every selected tile shares a type. Override Current Type changes the material for every tile using that type, while Save as New Type assigns a matching type to the selection without changing every other tile using the old type brush strokes, Rect/Circle fills, deletes and bulk type or walkability changes are each grouped into one undo step. changing a type’s material itself is still not undoable…. the console…. logging now has a sink system, so the same formatted log messages can go to different outputs the editor now has separate Logs and ObSL panels. engine/application logs go to Logs now, and script stdout goes to ObSL the panels have Clear and Copy buttons and keep the latest 2000 lines. the UI sink buffers incoming logs under a mutex before the editor consumes them closing the editor closing the window now goes through a callback, so unsaved scene or project changes trigger the save/discard prompt instead of immediately closing removed the old global Esc -to-quit shortcut. ObSL’s CloseWindow() no longer closes the editor while in Editor mode. it logs that it was called instead. in the runtime, it still closes the window windows and smaller fixes enabled /MP for MSVC builds, and the editor/runtime targets use the Windows GUI subsystem so they don’t launch with a console window attached atomic file writes now write the byte buffer explicitly and retry Windows file replacement when it fails with access-denied or sharing-violation errors, for up to about 2 seconds a bit of cleanup around collision pair sorting, const-correctness and naming docs updated the editor guide and screenshot to cover the new tools, shapes, selection controls, shortcuts and undo behavior. blah blah …map editing is finally a lot less barebones…
uuid-bound script wrappers…, logger sinks…., and a pile of small editor stuff…. mostly scripting + logging plumbing this time, plus a couple of editor things I’d been wanting… changes script wrappers are uuid-bound now entity wrappers used to capture the raw runtime id, which is a problem if ids get recycled or the registry gets rebuilt. now every wrapper holds the entity’s uuid and resolves the live id on each call, so it keeps pointing at the right entity (or does nothing if it’s gone). new FindEntityByUUID(uuid) global and GetUUID() / .uuid on entity objects SetParent matches an entity object by uuid, a plain number is still a runtime id same treatment for UI wrappers: they resolve by uuid instead of name, so renaming or duplicate names don’t break them added FindUIByUUID , GetUUID() and Destroy() on UI elements, and SetImage / GetImage on images (acquires the texture through the scene asset scope like fonts do) still by name: FindUI , DestroyUI and the button state queries ( WasClicked / IsHovered / IsHeld ). UI scripting is still weird… work in progress i guess… logger sinks the old way was swapping the logger’s std::ostream for a stringstream that the UI panel also read from, which was a data race waiting to happen (logger thread writes, main thread reads). replaced it with actual sinks: ILogSink with ConsoleSink (stdout/stderr like before) and UILogSink (mutex -ed pending buffer the panel drains each frame) the editor and runtime both register a ConsoleSink , and the editor adds the UI sink on top, so the Logs panel is always there now instead of only when there’s no tty console panels color lines by severity now interpreter output goes through a small UiStream ostream into the ObSL panel, with stdout and stderr split (needed the bumped obsl, Interpreter takes both streams now…) ObSL panel clears when you enter play mode editor F focuses the camera on the selected entity, press it again to go back to the origin. its smooth…., ..panning cancels the focus keyboard pan only gets called when there’s actually input now.. editing a material in the inspector no longer mutates shared runtime-only materials. if it isn’t a catalog asset it gets cloned into assets.json first, and edits to catalog materials get “upserted” back to the catalog. “Clone Material” writes to the catalog too new scripts from the project browser come with an on_update stub instead of just a comment scripting runtime script top-level code now runs with the command buffer in “immediate” mode ( BeginImmediate / EndImmediate ), so registry writes at the top of a script apply right away instead of waiting for a flush that hasn’t been set up yet during init Hex_GetNeighbors wasn’t GC protecting its array while filling it, fixed…. grid tile textures a tile type with no texture used to fall back to hex_tex both when collecting dependencies and when loading scenes, which would pull in a texture that might not exist. now no texture means no texture… as it should… misc bumped obsl (new using alias feature, and err output stream settings) docs for all the uuid stuff, the F key, and the new UI/image methods… of course… oh also … new demo scene testin thingamabob im messing with…
script properties & UUID types scripts can now declare properties that show up in the inspector and get saved per entity. also ripped std::string UUIDs out of most of the engine in favor of an actual Core::UUID type, plus some scripting additions and a few tests. changes script properties Prop("SpeedOrSomething", 2.5) , PropEntity("TargetEntity") and PropUI("MyRect") for regular values, entities and UI elements properties show up under each script slot in the inspector, with appropriate controls and per-slot values values are only readable during top-level script execution, so store them in variables for use in hooks. Prop in a hook just returns the fallback saved as scriptProperties in scene JSON, omitted when empty property edits support undo, including live number/string editing. unused saved properties can be pruned with undo too.. ScriptSlot is move-only now Core::UUID replaced string UUIDs across the registry, UI, editor commands, project config, save directories and scripting with a 16-byte Core::UUID registry UUID lookups now use an index instead of looping through entities malformed UUIDs in files fall back to generated or nil UUIDs UI UUIDs are saved and restored, including nested elements. duplicate UI UUIDs are handled without crashing the loader savegame directories etc take a UUID directly scripting & UI script objects now have identity values and wrappers are readonly , along with various scripting result objects. came with an ObSL bump UI wrappers get SetParent(parent) and a uuid field. null reparents an element to the root UISystem::Reparent preserves ownership and prevents parenting an element under its own descendant new created scripts use fn on_update(dt) (I wrote on_update() last time …oops…) smaller stuff UndoManager::Execute returns whether the command applied script list shows filenames with Remove beside them tests and docs more tests and docs updated ofc… so u can reference entities in scripts without using Find() now!!!
rahhhh been working on the new… demo… and well, it found some things. mhm changes gizmos and transforms rewrote the entity gizmo so moving things under rotated or scaled parents actually works properly transforms now handle custom matrices and shear much better, including when reparenting made hierarchy updates more robust, added matrix support to scene files, and stopped rounding transform data on save gizmo undo is more consistent now, and the editor warns when a transform has shear pathing movement can now re-plan around blockers, and picks a nearby free hex if the destination is blocked scripts can set paths without drawing the path overlay, which is useful for enemies script messaging added Send , Broadcast and on_message so scripts can communicate with each other messages support basic values and are delivered through a queue on the main thread scripting and components SetTimeout now can forward arguments to callbacks point lights can be disabled, and particle emitters remember whether they’re active when saved added a bunch of smaller fixes around scene saving, prefab parenting and serialization obsl some separate ObSL updates too: variadic native functions, multiline comments, a formatter and fixes for nested calls. (not tracked here though) DEMO!!!!! im working on a new demo :0 oh and it is my birthday woaw
audio cleanup and persistent sounds mostly audio , also got around to cleaning up the audio engine, added persistent sounds across scene changes, and fixed some ui stuff. changes audio the old AudioEngine had raw ma_sound* s and a whole separate map just to keep decoders and their buffers alive. cleanup was duplicated everywhere, so i moved it all into SoundInstance with RAII. sound, decoder and VFS bytes all get cleaned up together now music and sfx use the same type, stored as unique_ptr . StopMusicUnlocked went from a bunch of manual cleanup to basically m_CurrentMusic.reset() PlaySound2D takes an optional persist flag. scene changes now stop normal audio, while persistent sounds keep playing until they finish before this, audio just kept playing across scene switches whether you wanted it to or not. that’s fixed now w. the persistent flag scripting and packaging added IsEditor() so scripts can tell if they’re running in the editor or editor play mode (im using this for debugging stuff in the demo im working on :P ) PlaySound2D in ObSL accepts the new persist argument !!! bumped the ObSL submodule, ( which needed a fix in the script asset analyzer ) packaged scripts now initialize with the correct path for imports. this was hardcoded to assets/scripts before, which doesn’t work in packaged builds editor the Project Browser has an Audio section now for .mp3 and .wav files generalized the file-listing helper to accept multiple extensions, which the Scripts section uses too swapped the UI Hierarchy and Registry tab order. tiny change but it’s the order i actually use… ui fixed button hit-testing for nested UI elements. Update() wasn’t accounting for the position accumulated through the element hierarchy, even though Draw() already was the demo… ive been working on a new demo project, most of my time has been spent just messing around in that (and is how i’ve been discovering these issues) audio is in a much better place now… and the demo is looking pretty good….
Since i’m preparing for thy ship… the new demo i’ve been working on is now in the templates directory, so anyone can use it and try it, And i also published a new demo release for it! It is a short game with a small fetch quest and enemies where you have to help a guy get his car working… https://github.com/torkelicious/obliberry/releases/tag/demo_0.0.9
Ships:
obliberry feels usable enough that i think its a good time for a first ship :) obliberry is a fallout-inspired isometric game engine for hex-grid games, written in C++20 with OpenGL, featuring a visual editor, an ECS core, its own scripting language, and single-file packaging/exports. this has all been rather challenging, but an incredibly fun learning project, especially regarding using modern C++, OpenGL, and making my own programming language it is still obviously not fully complete of course, but I think it’s in a rather good state :D
Ship #2 first off super star project!! yippie :O for anyone new: obliberry is a fallout-inspired isometric game engine for hex-grid games, written in C++20 + OpenGL, with a visual editor, an ECS core, its own scripting language (ObSL), and single-file project packaging… since ship 1 it’s been a bunch of devlogs and ~170 hours. i think the engine went from “usable enough” to now that it’s running an actual (teeny-tiny) game on it now. changes new systems post processing : ping-pong effect chain with a full editor UI, custom fragment shader import, built-in ColorGrading / FilmGrain / Vignette, and a shader #include system with helper libs 3D collision : GJK-based detection, box/sphere/cylinder/rect/circle colliders, triggers, 32 layers + masks, billboard colliders so sprites can have colliders that line up with what you see, and script callbacks ( on_collision_enter , on_trigger_exit , …). hex movement respects colliders now sprite animation : animation assets with multiple named clips and per-frame durations, a full editor with live preview, SpriteAnimator scripting ( Play / Pause / Stop …) asset system : project-wide assets.json catalog instead of assets baked into every scene, lazy loading with dependency resolution, safer scene switching, and a migrator tool for old projects saves : generic key/value save data ( save_set / save_get / save_list …) stored per project, atomic writes persistent entities : SetPersistent(true) and it survives scene changes scripting (ObSL) Prop / PropEntity / PropUI : script properties that show up in the inspector per entity. no more Find() spaghetti Send / Broadcast / on_message : scripts can talk to each other now SetTimeout , collision-aware Transform.TryMoveTo , map editing from scripts, sounds that persist across scene changes, IsEditor() script wrappers are uuid-bound now so recycled entity ids can’t make a wrapper point at the wrong thing editor deleting entities is undoable now !!! full subtree snapshot + restore, and all undo commands are uuid-based so they survive ids being recycled map editor overhaul: brush sizes 1–8, Rect/Circle shapes, multi-select with bulk editing, actual hotkeys tons of UI gizmo fixes separate Logs / ObSL panels, camera focus on F, recent projects, live theme editor with font management exports now build a dependency manifest by walking the ObSL AST, so packages only contain what the project actually uses stability (less explosions, hopefully) unit test suite (GoogleTest + CTest) and ASan/UBSan builds. unsurprisingly this found bugs. many bugs 16-byte Core::UUID everywhere, safer entity destruction with on_destroy ordering, failed scene loads no longer nuke the scene you’re in, render-thread resource lifetime fixes, a thread-safety pass, and an audio engine cleanup with RAII genberally just a TON of bug fixes since last ship (including various crashes etc) DEMO!!!!! i made a tiny game demo in the engine and it has been the single best bug finder in existence most of the gizmo, pathing and audio fixes above happened because the demo tripped over them… try it out!!! I have learnt tons from this project… a lot of this has been fun and painfull… but it’s working!!! thank you all for reading :D !!!...
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