Status Update, November 2023

Summary

• Shinmera: Released machine-state
• Shinmera: Released cl-gltf v2
• Shinmera: Various improvements to debugging tools for Trial
• Shinmera: Various physics engine fixes and performance improvements
• Shinmera: Support for loading KHR_Rigid_Bodies scenes in Trial
• Shinmera: Support for optimising and converting images and videos in Trial
• Shinmera: Implement raycasting for all primitives (with huge thanks to 3b)
• Shinmera: Support for exporting models from Trial to Wavefront OBJ
• Scymtym: Various fixes and improvements to 3d-spaces
• Scymtym: Tuning parameters for convex-covering
• Scymtym: Parallelisation for convex-covering

Some Details

This was a rather frustrating month for me, a lot of really annoying issues blocked my way that I had trouble figuring out, and after figuring one out, another just popped up immediately. It's been three weeks in a row now that I thought I should take a week off but then didn't anyway, because I'm.... very good at this.

Anyway, pretty much the entirety of the month was spent dealing with collision and physics related issues, but I'm very happy to say that the engine now properly and stably handles collisions between all types of primitives, as you can see in this video:

Mastodon: https://mastodon.tymoon.eu/@shinmera/111464312394127769

What's really cool about this is that we support the KHR_rigid_bodies extension to glTF, which allows us to store and read out not just model data, but also physics data like colliders, weight, material, and so on. This extension also has a plugin for Blender, so all of the properties can be defined within Blender and directly exported to Trial. This avoids having to define all those properties in Trial, separate from the models, or inventing our own format and editing tool again.

What blender won't do for you though is automatically perform a convex decomposition of concave models. I've talked about this in previous entries, but it's working automatically in Trial now and is giving some really good results:

Youtube: https://youtu.be/SIl-FBtJv9g

You can also pre-bake this stuff with Trial so that it won't have to perform the decomposition at runtime, and instead caches it back into the same glTF file.

I also finally got around to updating Kandria to work with the latest Trial and Alloy sources, and released a couple of minor hotfix patches as well. This means you should be able to run Kandria from source again now if you're into that sort of thing!

The one thing I wanted to get to but haven't managed to yet is combining this rigidbody physics system with forward kinematic entities such as a player-controlled character. We have to add some special provisions for that kind of stuff, since the physics system can't be fully in control of the character and special physics need to be applied. I'm sure I'll get to that in December though, and I'm really excited to finally have Weiss run around the test level with proper collisions, being able to push around stuff!

Also in December Charles is returning to work some more on the Nintendo Switch port. If that goes really well we'll be able to get the Trial examples running on the Switch as a first demo!

Though honestly I should also really take some time off in December as well, so I don't want to promise too much. I've decided to force myself to stream games more regularly in the evenings again as a way to push myself to relax, hopefully I can at least keep that up.

I think I'll leave it here for the updates for this month. If you're interested in the nitty-gritty, you can always read the public commit logs of all the involved projects like Trial.

I hope you're staying safe and warm. It just started snowing today in Zürich, and I'm really enjoying seeing the little white coat on everything in the landscape.

— Love, Shinmera ❤️