Neuro Sama Survivors-like

[hard moth]

Currently, I am coping with no Neuro this week by attempting to develop a fan game with the subathon start as the deadline. A self-induced game jam if you want to call it that. The idea is basically like any other survivors-like but you play as Vedal with Neuro tagging along. My plan is to have Neuro also deal damage to you to make things more interesting.

While I have planned to make the game by myself, if anyone wants to help, that would be great. Art, music, lore, etc.

Here is how far I've gotten for now

[grim wind]

oh nice it's a 2 character type game

[mystic verge]

A Way Out (of Vedal's PC)

[grim wind]

Escaping the prison that is vedal's pc, truly a masterpiece

[cyan fern]

how does the bottles work? do the player aim with the mouse or vedal throws them at the nearest enemy?

[jovial gull]

The idea seem interesting so far

[cyan fern]

i know neuro attacks works similar to the whip in vampire survivors, is the bottles like the magic wand or the runetracer without the bounce effect?

[hard moth]

Aim with mouse. Same with Neuro's attacks. Everything points towards the mouse for now.

Ill probably have the bottles deal splash damage to make up for their low fire rate

[cold egret]

you should make Neuro have an upgrade where she dual-wields like in Snuffy's dnd stream

oh wait nevermind, I just realized she's already dual-wielding

[hard moth]

Progress update

Now you can die

[hard moth]

So I need a name for my game
And some upgrade ideas
If anyone can suggest that would be great

currently I've just thought of a gymbag drone that goes around killing enemies

[grim wind]

You could make some skills from collab partners, for example onigiri can be a skill that randomly throws onigiris at enemies, the sprite for it you can decide, i thought of a normal onigiri with horns

[hard moth]

Possibly, though that could arise complications when I add the collab parter as a playable character

[grim wind]

I didn't know you were gonna add collab partners as characters, then maybe not

You can make a rocket skill, like the stream with vedal playing the project space game, it shoots rockets

[hard moth]

inuke6000 that homes on enemies

[grim wind]

I think inuke6000 could be more like a clear screen of enemies item

It's a nuke afterall

It has a rare drop chance with bosses or specific enemies, i dunno

[hard moth]

Progress update

Upgrades but they do nothing

[grim wind]

nice, i like the creativity with the programming socks

[cold egret]

what if you make an ability where Vedal controls a truck that's fast and kills anything it drives over, but you can't control it and it just goes random directions because Vedal's too drunk

[hard moth]

Got some of the upgrades to work

What max level Neuro looks like

I think I can get a demo uploaded by tomarrow. Just gotta polish the art and make more enemies.

[hard moth]

Table of all possible current upgrades.

I cheated and gave myself like 20 swarm drones just to see what it would look like

I haven't put a cap on how many you can get

[hard moth]

Ok nice I think I can get demo uploaded in a couple hours.

[novel prairie]

@hard moth care to create a github with the source code? i'd love to help before the gamejam to improve my godot skills a bit

[hard moth]

Sure! Ill do that as soon as Ive uploaded the initial demo.

[hard moth]

damm forgot I didn't download export templates for Godot 4.2

taking forever

[hard moth]

Welp that took literally forever but finally finished downloading

[hard moth]

https://discord.com/channels/574720535888396288/1187783250307989555

[novel prairie]

neuro keeps killing me. pls fix.

[hard moth]

So idk how to explain it properly, but Neuro being able to kill you is a feature
Its to ~~simulate the authentic Neuro collab experience ~~ balance the fact that the enemies only target Neuro. This makes it so that lvling Neuro is much better then lvling Vedal. By having Neuro able to damage you, it makes it less optimal to invest too much on lvling Neuro.

@novel prairie
I've uploaded the source code to github: https://github.com/KotgeDev/Neuro-Adventures

My code is a mess so feel free to ask any questions.

[cold egret]

I'm no expert at coding, but wouldn't it be pretty easy to just make it so that enemies target whoever's nearest? And then you can make it so that either Neuro doesn't damage Vedal or there's a keybind to stop Neuro from attacking

[hard moth]

I definetly can, I just found it funny Neuro could kill you and added a bit of challenge so I just left it there

[cold egret]

Oh ok, fair lol

[arctic siren]

You have unlocked new role

[novel prairie]

i know, i was joking

theres some bugs that i found & i also have some QoL features

likely gonna do a pr

[grim wind]

I really need to play this game

But i have been very busy lately

[novel prairie]

same, wont add anything today
i go from work to zzz

[grim wind]

So true

[hard moth]

Im gonna re do some art prob today

[grim wind]

I just remembered, did you do any of the ideas i gave you?

[hard moth]

Oh yah rockets are on the list

[grim wind]

Niceeee

[grim wind]

ok just tried the game before going to sleep and the gaslight ability neuro has is the best idea ever, it killed because there is no healing items anywhere for me to recover and neuro keeps getting hit even when she has damage x100 but i still love the skill, very fitting

[novel prairie]

Gaslight ability increases speed??? wtf are you talking about

[grim wind]

you are just wrong

[hard moth]

I plan on adding cookies and definetly-not-greggs (for copyright reasons) as health items

But yes gaslight is like the only way of damage negation rn

[grim wind]

if you add more damage negation skills later it would be good if gaslight stays with the strongest effect, as there is the downside of damaging your collab partner it should have the most chance to negate damage unlike the others

[hard moth]

https://kotgedev.notion.site/49d38be1cf77473c845807b16c6c2a72?v=53b54afd0b424adf91373cdd17823fa3

If anyone wants to track my progress on the game

[hard moth]

#livestream-chat message
Evil weapon idea I guess

[viral talon]

I've did some things
https://github.com/CreepyCatMeow/Neuro-Adventures
Mostly UI, but I made it so the enemy tracks who's closest

[novel prairie]

The main idea is enemies targetting neuro, and you protecting her

[hard moth]

Im outside rn so I can't check, but thank you very much!

Like darkeew said the enemies are supposed to target neuro. When I meant better enemy targeting I meant being able to avoid obstacles.

Sorry, I probably should have been more clear in my notion

Ill re-write the Notion to be more clear as soon as I return home.

[cold egret]

there should be an option when you level up to heal by some amount

maybe like 50% max hp or something

so you need to choose whether to play risky and get an upgrade or to play safe and heal but potentially do worse later on due to lacking an upgrade

I've finally gotten a chance to play it btw, and it's super fun!

it really ramps up in difficulty fast

oh, I just had another possibly cool upgrade idea

maybe an upgrade called "roast" or something that ambiently damages enemies around her and slightly lowers their attack, but has a chance of affecting Vedal too so you have to be extra careful when using it

[novel prairie]

ill be trying to add QoL features (health count, current level, etc)

and add global upgrades, which will affect xp, healing amount and something else

more xp max 3
more healing max 2

5% increase per xp level
12% healing

[hard moth]

You might want to wait until tomarrow for adding upgrades, im going to rework some stuff so adding new damage modifer upgrades is easier (rn you have to edit neuro.gd or vedal.gd to add them which is combersome. You should be able to just create an upgrade object.

The QoL features would be great

[novel prairie]

create a db with upgrades, and a single script that sorts them all
neuro_upgrades

dmg upgrades
health upgrades
collab_upgrades
dmg upgrades
health upgrades
global_upgrades
idk

it would first check the sub upgrade, apply it and send it to the parent upgrade

[hard moth]

Yah im going to make upgrade_manager.gd take care of everything upgrade related. It already does to some extent but not fully

[viral talon]

made a pull request

[hard moth]

Thank you for the update! This looks very cute (The exp animations are also awesome!)

[grim wind]

I love this

[hard moth]

Also thanks for the improved AI navigation, I didn't even know NavigationAgent2D existed

[novel prairie]

btw monsters clip inside neuro, making her unable to kill them

[hard moth]

I've just updated the upgrades to do something like this. All the upgrades are now managed by upgrade_manager.gd

I've also updated my Notion and github Readme

The Github readme should contain most of the information needed to create new upgrades and new characters

I think ill focus on the art for a while, its very inconsistent and not up to my standards. Feel free to make any updates to the code, I probably won't be touching it until i've finished my sprite rework.

[novel prairie]

alright

ill get on pc rn, see a way to do the QoL stuff

[viral talon]

I'm going to do some music/sound stuff

[cold egret]

oh I was just about to say I wanted to try to do that

you probably should though, I don't really have much experience with sound stuff

[viral talon]

music for the farm

[hard moth]

Don't know much about music but this sounds awesome I like the change up in the middle

[hard moth]

More music shouldn't hurt, feel free to try if you want

[cold egret]

will do, I may also try sound effects although I have even less experience with that

[hard moth]

I would like to give appropriate credits to anyone that contributed, so if you have specific requests (Such as a link to your social media) please do tell me.

Until then I will use your discord name

This is an example credit scene I've come up with (I pretty much copied what Holocure is doing)

All characters belong to Vedal987
Credits
| Programmers | Kotge, CreepyCat, Darkeew
| Illustrators | Kotge
| Sound Effects | Aetherleaf
Music
| Song: the Farm | CreepyCat

Again, if you have anything you wish to add or change please tell me.

@viral talon are you OK with your song being licensed under CC BY 4.0 Deed ? (Anyone can use the song given that it is credited to you)

If not, and you want a specific license, please tell me as I will update the github page accordingly. Currently all art is under CC BY 4.0 Deed

[viral talon]

Sure

[hard moth]

Here is how the game looks as of now (With the improved UI and music from CreepyCat)

[hard moth]

I've got permission to use Anny Holocure art by arronon so I might add her to the game as a Collab Partner sometime soon. Though, sprite rework is a priority.

( I found out Anny's community is also working on a survivors-like, so I got some sprites from them )

Anny will be the next collab partner to add, and Evil Neuro the next AI to add.

So you can play the game with any of the following configurations:

Vedal + Neuro
Vedal + Evil
Anny + Neuro
Anny + Evil

[cold egret]

ok this is my very first sound effect and I just made it using a random free software that I found, but I think it might be ok as some sort of hit sound or something

I was thinking it could be used for when Neuro hits something, but you can use it for whatever you want

I hope it's ok :D

[hard moth]

Sounds good!

[cold egret]

I'm glad :D

[left garnet]

this is soo cool

[hard moth]

Updated tile sprites and made some roads

@viral talon thank you for the audio updates! Pull request has been merged

[hard moth]

I just realized you also added a collection range amplifier upgrade called "Shock Magnet". A very appropriate name, I say.

[hard moth]

I made this the sound of Neuro slicing for now

Also @viral talon is there a particular reason you use

audioSystem = $"/root/AudioSystem"

to get AudioSystem

instead of using

Audiosystem (The name of the Autoload) ?

Just curious

[hard moth]

Took forever but got pathfinding to work with the fences. I just made Neuro & all enemies into node2Ds instead of CharacterBody2Ds because they kept getting stuck on the corners...

This means the enemies will sometimes look like they're going through the fences but uh lets just say they're doing parkour or something

[viral talon]

IDK, my gdscript knowledge is not the greatest
I'm doing what makes the engine not scream at me

[hard moth]

Ahh ok make sense, mine isn't that great either so I thought it was some kind of way to make the script faster

[vernal hollow]

i think using the autoloaded namespace is faster. tho i don't think it actually makes much if any difference in real world scenarios

[cold egret]

made a sound effect for when something gets hit by Vedal's rum, I hope it's good

[cold egret]

I'm thinking of also trying to help make the options menu, although I haven't used godot much before and I've never used github before so it will probably take a while

[cold egret]

did you somehow add the music and sfx without using audio nodes? I'm trying to make volume sliders but I can't find the nodes to change them to the correct buses

sorry if I'm missing something obvious here, like I said I'm pretty new to godot

[viral talon]

the audio system has two audio buses connected to the music and sfx

you should be able to set the volume of the music and sfx buses separately\

[cold egret]

I only see one bus for the master volume, although I do see in the script that you set the volume for the music a couple times

I feel like either I have an outdated version or I'm looking at the wrong thing

if you already assigned the music and sfx to separate buses though I don't have to do what I'm trying to do, which makes creeating the actual sliders a lot easier

[hard moth]

Sounds good! Will add soon.

[viral talon]

the buses are initialized when the audio channels are created

so
var music_bus = "music"
var sound_bus = "soundfx"

[cold egret]

oh ok

is there some sort of "var master_bus" for master volume as well?

or ig would that be the audioSystem thing?

[viral talon]

wait a minute

add these lines at the top of the ready functions in the audioscript
AudioServer.add_bus()
AudioServer.add_bus()
AudioServer.set_bus_name(1,music_bus)
AudioServer.set_bus_name(2,sound_bus)

[cold egret]

wait, audioscript?

I see the menu script and the hud script but no audio script

[hard moth]

I think audiosystem.gd takes care of all audio, so probably that

[cold egret]

I see the variable audiosystem, I assume you're talking about that?

so I add those lines above it?

well, that makes it say "unexpected identifier in class body" so I probably did something wrong

sorry if I'm being really dumb, this is my first time programming with other people and like I said I barely know how to use godot

[hard moth]

So in Godot, the _ready() function is the one that runs whenever a node has entered the scene tree

audiosystem.gd is an autoload, which means its added to the scene tree at the very start and available anywhere with the name Audiosystem

So something like this I assume?

[cold egret]

oh, I see

I was trying to add those lines around where all the variables were made

[hard moth]

Yah the function calls needs to be made within a function body

[cold egret]

oh wait there are so many more scripts than I realized

ohhhhh scripts are different from scenes, I only saw the two scenes of the menu and the actual game and was looking at the scripts of those

[hard moth]

audiosystem.gd and globals.gd are "Autoloads" https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/singletons_autoload.html

So you can't tell from looking at just menu and game scenes if they are loaded or not

you'll have to go to Project Settings -> Autoload

[cold egret]

I see

[cold egret]

man, I've been completely misunderstanding everything lol

[hard moth]

Btw would it be possible to make sfx for Neuro "slicing" (maybe something that sounds like a sword swish) and Vedal "throwing" (Maybe just air whoosh sound idk.)

The current sfx work great for something being hit but I think it will be more consistent to have sounds for the weapons firing ( At least thats what Holocure does I think )

[cold egret]

I was thinking about that, but I thought it might be too annoying to have so many sounds going off even when they aren't hitting anything

[hard moth]

I think it will be fine, since in survivors like games you're hitting an enemy most of the time

[cold egret]

lol, makes sense

I'll do that :D

[hard moth]

I only recently found about this but you can check which stuff are in the scene tree by going to the remote tab when running a game

Found it quite useful for debugging and seeing what the hell is happening in my game.

[cold egret]

oh, cool!

thanks for the tip :D

just made this really quick, I think something like this would be good for neuro slicing?

[hard moth]

Just a sec, ill try it on

[cold egret]

the sfx software I currently use is pretty limiting btw, so if anyone knows a good free sfx designer please tell me about it

[hard moth]

what are you currently using?

The only sound program I know is audacity

[cold egret]

I'm currently using sfxr

I don't think audacity can make sound effects? afaik it's more for audio mixing and mastering

idk though, I haven't used audacity much

[hard moth]

Yah no I don't think at least without recording sounds first

[cold egret]

yeah

[hard moth]

Hmm, is it possible to make it more "metalic" (?)

[cold egret]

I'm just about to try out bsfxr, which seems to basically be sfxr but better

[cold egret]

not with sfxr from what I've seen, like I said it's very limiting

hopefully I can do it with bsfxr

oh wait nvm it's bfxr not bsfxr lol

[cold egret]

ok, it's still difficult to make things sound metallic in bfxr, but I think this is at least better than the last one

I'll try to improve it but is that the type of sound you want?

[hard moth]

Yes! I think this style fits more

[cold egret]

ok, I'll send an improved version soon :D

^ I think this one is good, I may be able to improve it a bit more but this is basically the final version

now time to try make a throwing sound, hopefully this one will be easier

[hard moth]

Ok I tested both and I think this might be more suitable for the game because the metallic sound on the other one is better but maybe too strong

Test

[hard moth]

I just realized I also accidentaly recorded the stream audio

[cold egret]

oh ok, I was worried about that

[cold egret]

for a second I thought you added dialogue in the game

I might try to make the metal sound quieter and less drawn out but like the second version, and hopefully it will be the best of both worlds

I'll do that and the throwing sfx tomorrow though, right now it's time for me

[hard moth]

The farm is looking more like a farm now. While I want to add a small pond and a barnhouse, going to focus on enemies for a while. Will resprite the previous enemies and add at least one more enemy type, and a boss (Archer Elf from the Snuffy Collab, which this map is based on.)

[hard moth]

( Development of this game will be put on hold for the duration of the game jam, as I will be participating )

[cold egret]

do you want the metal sound to be drawn out after the swish or about the same length as the swish?

basically do you want it like this?

or this

the overall sound will be the same length as the short one in the end, I just want to know if you want the non-metal sound to be shorter than the metal sound or the same length as it

also, I made a little throwing sfx example, do you think something like this would be good for vedal's attack?

btw, how do I update to the newest version without just downloading the entire thing again from github

[vernal hollow]

if you use github desktop it will allow you to incrementally download updates. otherwise you'd have to download the whole thing

[cold egret]

I am on desktop, how do I incrementally download the updates?

github's UI is confusing lol

[vernal hollow]

thats not what i meant. "Github Desktop" is a program that you have to download

it allows you to push changes and pull changes (i.e. upload and download to repositories)

[cold egret]

ohh, I see

[cold egret]

I just had a thought, it would be really cool to have a multiplayer co-op mode where one person plays as neuro and one person plays as vedal

idk how difficult multiplayer would be to implement though

[hard moth]

Yes, this is perfect!

[cold egret]

great! do you want any changes or is it already good as is?

[hard moth]

I think the throw is good as is

[cold egret]

ok, awesome!

[hard moth]

For the metalic swish I actually just really like the first version, its a good balance between the metalic and swish sounds

So ill probably stick to using that

[cold egret]

oh ok, cool!

[hard moth]

Soo my other personal project that I have been working on ~~is ~~ was a multiplayer game, and I have decided to scrap it because the multiplayer was too hard to implement... I got everything working with WebRTC but there is so much issues like the connections not working, lag, etc. Maybe its because I used WebRTC but I have no confidence in making multiplayer games for now

[cold egret]

yeah, I expected multiplayer would probably be difficult. maybe Creepycat or someone else knows how to do multiplayer, if not that's fine, the game is great with just singleplayer anyways :D

[cold egret]

by the way, three things
1: is something like this a good sound for when you press menu buttons?

2: what sound effects should I work on next?

3: this is a little off topic, but I just saw your neuro example fighting game, are you planning to continue working on that or is it abandoned? just out of curiosity

[hard moth]

I think it will be perfect as a sound for selecting the different upgrades (Or menus, ill test it out)

[cold egret]

ok, great!

[hard moth]

I'm not too familiar with game sound design, so in all honesty I have no idea what sounds I even need, so its really up to you.

Possibly a buzzing sound for the swarm drones?

[cold egret]

ok, I think I'll next make a sound for when the player characters get hit, and then maybe a buzzing sound :D

[hard moth]

Its for if anyone who wants to use my sprites to make a game, and the demo is an example of how the sprites might be used.

[cold egret]

oh, I see

well, hopefully somebody ends up using them, a neuro fighting game sounds like it could be a lot of fun

[cold egret]

it's hard to tell, but I think there's a glitch with the shock magnet + programming socks allowing the exp items to give exp without being used up, basically allowing you to have infinite exp

[cold egret]

also, do you think something like this is good for when a player character gets hit?

[hard moth]

sounds good! Will try fixing bug / adding stuff once game jam is over

[cold egret]

ok, cool!

good luck on the game jam!

[hard moth]

Game jam over will prob start work on this in maybe a day or two. Need to rest.

[cold egret]

ok!

I played your game jam game, it was really good :D

[hard moth]

Couldn't have done it without the team! Definetly the highest quality game jam game i've worked on.

[cold egret]

out of curiosity, what parts of it did you work on?

[hard moth]

Development, mainly

(the programming)

[cold egret]

Yeah yeah, but what parts did you code?

[hard moth]

Some of the puzzels (like the safe / painting code), room layout for each iteration, the character animation tree (which anim plays at what time), and the item pickup / inventory system are prob what I mainly did.

[cold egret]

Oh wow, you did a lot!

[hard moth]

I think I did the least out of the three main programmers

[cold egret]

Lol, I guess there was a lot of work to go around

[cold egret]

Happy new year btw!

[cold egret]

btw I made a volume slider but I can't add my code to the actual thing because I don't have write access or something

do I need to do something on my end or can you give me whatever access I need

[hard moth]

Im outside rn but I think you need to create a fork, and then request a pull request which then I can accept

[cold egret]

ok I created a fork but idk how to create a pull request

[hard moth]

Never actually made a pull request myself but there is: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests/creating-a-pull-request

I hope it works

[cold egret]

I think I did it

I did it in a different way from the documentation you sent but I think it worked

[hard moth]

Ill check as soon as I have returned

[cold egret]

ok! I hope it worked and I hope my code is good lol

[hard moth]

I've tested it, and it seems to work

Short to-do checklist for me to work on:

Resprite the knight enemy
Add a boss
Fix exp collection bug
Merge exp when multiple are together into higher lvl exp for less lag
destroy projectiles after a while for less lag

[cold egret]

I was thinking, it could be cool to have the final boss be Hiyori, who wants to test if Neuro is worthy to take her place as an ai vtuber

btw, I made this song and I think it could be good as a menu theme, it's not as good as I would like it to be but idk how to improve it

[hard moth]

Possibly for another map, like an ARG-themed one. The farm map I'll have enemies and bosses from the Snuffy RPG collab.

[hard moth]

Possibly to ominous for a rather bright game

[hard moth]

Goblin & Soldier resprite finished! Will make one more enemy and boss afterwards prob.

[cold egret]

ok, that makes sense

[cold egret]

yeahh, I tried to make it sound brighter but I just can't lol

[cold egret]

I'll try to make a new one that's a lot more bright and lively

[grim wind]

Oh nice, that looks more like the enemies from snuffy collab, very fitting

[hard moth]

RIP Kobolds

[hard moth]

Maybe Ill make a "Kobold Wave" where a bunch of Kobolds attack you at once, and if you kill all but one, the remaining one will become your friend. Lore-accurate to the Snuffy Collab.

But then maybe thats a bit tad too complicated for a reference not much people will get.

[hard moth]

Last enemy. Now only the boss left and I'm done with the first phase of the Farm map

[tired pendant]

@hard moth interesting game... can i be a playtester?

[hard moth]

Sure, almost done w the first phase of map one. Hopefully ill have it done by the end of the week.

[cold egret]

made a sound for the swarm drones buzzing, I hope it's good :D

[hard moth]

Sounds good!

[hard moth]

Was busy last couple days so sadly couldn't make any progress. Hopefully this week I can get some stuff done.

[hard moth]

WIP boss

[hard moth]

Boss sprites finished! Now just have to code everything in ...

[hard moth]

If anyone wants to know the exact character / upgrade / enemy stats, I made https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HjTPrJ9Ydi2nDiBkyGYCrZPJoQSajxKDmwmcfcJ3JDI/edit?usp=sharing

[hard moth]

I got uh marches? patterns? whatever you call these working.

[hard moth]

knight wall

[hard moth]

I think I fixed this bug

[cold egret]

great!

[hard moth]

What I have until now. Exps now merge into a gold exp, and there are separate upgrades called swarm upgrades that increase the stats of all drones so you can do a Swarm-focused run.

[hard moth]

Ok welp that video doesnt play

[hard moth]

Hoping this uploads properly

Only the boss is left to implement... but the problem is I can't seem to beat my own game, so I can't get as far as the boss stage

[cold egret]

There are a lot more upgrades now, so maybe an upgrade that allows players to choose from more upgrades in the future would be good

so the upgrade lvl1 might increase the number of upgrade options from 3 to 4, then lvl2 from 4 to 5, and then maybe lvl 3 allows players to pick two upgrades in one level

[hard moth]

Maybe, or I can prob go with the Holocure approach of boxes / chests(?) containing a random upgrade. Maybe a gymbag you can open?

I prob should also implement some way to upgrade any existing weapon of choice. (Basically the Anvils from Holocure)

The easiest solution to allowing more upgrades would be an upgrade that increases exp you get from a single exp. No need to implement anything fancy, just modify a couple values.

Boss progress. I think I can have a playtest version out soon.

So I will be looking for playtesters

[hard moth]

@viral talon do you want to make a music for the archer bossfight? If your busy nvm

And @cold egret it you want to make a sfx a "swish" sound for the arrows firing would be great

Side note: I think I found a bug where a sfx doesnt play sometimes. Idk if its a bug or im just def...

[cold egret]

I noticed that too, but I thought it might just be the music drowning out the sound of the sfx

[cold egret]

ok, will do!

[tired haven]

I could consider playtesting at some point

[cold egret]

I already play this pretty often, so ig I'm already sort of a playtester

[cold egret]

made an arrow swish sound, is this good?

also I made another menu type sound, maybe for when the player clicks on an upgrade or a button in the main menu

[hard moth]

Both are great! Ill try em now

[hard moth]

I think the game is ready for some playtesting

[tired haven]

Ok cool. I'd prefer to test when I'm on my powerful PC physically though, gaming trough remote desktop really doesn't work.

[hard moth]

oh Im going to see if the web version works first

so that people don't have to worry about downloading a random exe

ill have it uploaded soon so you can test whenever you want

[tired haven]

I'd approximate I'll be back on my PC physically in around 4 hours

Then I can look into testing

[tired haven]

I'm on the way back to my PC physically. Should be less than an hour now

[hard moth]

Pinging since you said this

Link to those who wish to playtest: https://kotgedev.itch.io/neuro-adventures

[tired haven]

Let me just save that one

But I'm pretty sure if I started it on this remote connection the remote connection would die immediately.

It's already dying anyway

[hard moth]

Take your time, im not in a rush

[tired haven]

Does it have an exe version in case it doesn't run well in browser for some reason

[hard moth]

I can make one rn

If there are too much enemies at once it becomes a bit laggy but i'm not sure how to solve the problem

[tired pendant]

yay

[tired haven]

Oh cool. It's better to have an exe for those who can't get the browser version to run

[tired pendant]

but im busy 😭 im trying to backup something because a website is about to shut down

[tired haven]

If it has anything to do with Neuro, send it to me too so I can keep another backup. I don't care what it is

[tired pendant]

its only for my discord bots

[tired haven]

Oh ok nevermind then

[hard moth]

I've uploaded an exe version to the itch page

[tired haven]

Ok good. That could be useful

[hard moth]

So I think Adesi was able to make lots of enemies spawn without lag for IndieCure and I think ill take a look into that. But then I think I may be to dum to implement it for this.

[tired haven]

I think how many enemies a game can handle mainly depends on the optimization and threadcount of the game

[hard moth]

Using A* pathfinding on all enemies probably doesn't help with my lag issue

Maybe I should just ditch navigation and have them all phase through walls

But then again Im not doing the pathfinding every frame and the lagg happens even for "marches" where the enemy only goes in one direction without using pathfinding

[tired haven]

Could it be your hardware?

Like the GPU

[hard moth]

I have a GTX 1060 (laptop) so it should be able to handle 2d video games good enough...

[tired haven]

I've used a 1060 3GB desktop on an old system. It's pretty terrible. And even on this system I'm pretty sure 2D games do sometimes lag (this thing has an RTX 4070 Ti)

I'm back on my main PC now, so I'll be trying out the game soon. I haven't actually played this genre of games before, so that'll be interesting

[viral talon]

https://github.com/KotgeDev/Neuro-Adventures/pull/4
Have them go through walls when you can't see them

Turns out A* has a weakness where it doesn't like calculating paths that are very far away

[hard moth]

Thats actually pretty smart! Hav to but will update tom as soon as I can

[tired haven]

The main bottleneck might just be threadcount on the CPU. There is no proper fullscreen mode, at least on the exe version. The "say it back" upgrade is very much an easy way to quickly end your run.

But the game overall is pretty fun

I would like if the game had an FPS counter.

Is this supposed to happen (I have HP in the bars, but it shows a game over screen)

[tired haven]

I feel like there's a very noticeable delay in collecting a collectible and the UI updating to account for this, so it often feels like the values on the UI are different from the actual values.

The game need either multithreading or serious optimizations, preferably both.

I really like the soundrack. It's really good.

There seems to be a bug, where healing items sometimes don't heal you, or don't update the UI to show the new HP value

The bug with healing could also be that the healing from the chicken bake is incorrectly applied to Neuro

The "credits" button has no function or it doesn't work

[tired haven]

So the game definitely needs multithreading and optimizations to fix the lag issue.

[tired haven]

By the way, if you ever add multiplayer for some reason, I can provide a server, at least for testing purposes. I have some useless compute power sitting around doing nothing.

[cold egret]

yeah nobody's done anything with that yet

[tired pendant]

lag is inevitable

[tired haven]

It does lag a lot, but why is it Windows 7?

Windows 7 was deprecated years ago.

But it really shouldn't be lagging that much, especially on my i7-12700K. It can sometimes have huge lagspikes even on that, partially because it can't use all 12 cores.

[vernal hollow]

can't web apps do multithreading?

[tired haven]

We're using the exe version

[vernal hollow]

then... do some multithreading to use more cores

[tired haven]

The developer hasn't came back yet

[vernal hollow]

[tired haven]

But I've already said the game needs multithreading, so hopefully it gets implemented in a later version

[vernal hollow]

tho... looking at how the game itself looks like. i doubt it actually needs multithreading just yet

[tired haven]

It's probably good to add multithreading early. The game in it's current state lags massively on an i7-12700K

[vernal hollow]

but that shouldn't be a issue with multithreading...

[tired haven]

It's using 100% of one core (10%CPU)

There's a screenshot from my CPU graphs a bit above

[vernal hollow]

i don't really think multithreading would even be possible or help. there are likely other optimizations that are possible

[tired haven]

It's highly likely. But the lag seems to come from how many enemies need to be computed, so just parallelize the enemy calculations

[vernal hollow]

well.. but that not something Kotge can really do. since its using the navigation agent native component

tho maybe there are other ways..

one thing could be just putting all the ai logic itself off the main thread so it atleast doesn't stutter

[tired haven]

Well, who knows. But I see just too many games not be able to utilize all of my CPU's available power

[vernal hollow]

well.. not every game can do it because it just doesn't make sense in many cases

and sometimes its impossible

[tired haven]

I fell like it would be completely possible and make some sense here to use at least more than 1 thread

[vernal hollow]

well yeah in this case it would make sense. but i just meant generally in gaming

[tired haven]

Some games like Miinecraft would really benefit from multithreading. Minecraft's biggest bottleneck is single-threading

[vernal hollow]

pretty sure minecraft has multithreading

[tired haven]

Nope, it doesn't

[vernal hollow]

i'm 99% sure it does

[tired haven]

At least the Java version. Bedrock does, but Java doesn't

So Bedrock edition does have multithreading, but the Java edition 100% does not

[vernal hollow]

java does tho...

i'm literally looking at java change logs that say they improved multi-threading

literally a setting in minecraft java

[tired haven]

Java edition vanilla does not do multithreading during normal gameplay, although it might use 100% CPU to load the game and chunk generation. The game logic itself doesn't have multithreading. You can even confirm this by looking at task manager with the CPU graph set to show logical processors. Anyway, I'm moving onto a remote connection. Will take like 15 minutes or more.

[vernal hollow]

but i guess it doesn't matter anyway... but.. all i wanted to say is that multithreading isn't easy to implement and can cause more problems than it solves

[tired haven]

I know that multithreading can cause issues, but when implemented correctly, it can give a many times improvement to performance

[hard moth]

Ok welp I am now awake

[tired haven]

I wrote some feedback, which is somwhere up there

[hard moth]

Yah I've accidentally applied the visual update incorrectly to Neuro, fixed it though now.

[tired haven]

Cool

[hard moth]

No function for now

[hard moth]

Definetly, hopefully I can figure out how. Optimization is not one of my strengths

[tired haven]

If a game lags on my really high end PC, it usually means there's something wrong somewhere.

[hard moth]

and yes I have not much of a clue how to implement multithreading in Godot, and my only experience of it was it crashing Godot. Probably a skill issue on my part though

I think I should look into why the lag is happening before trying multithreading. It can't be just using too much navigation agents as the game lags even when I spawn in enemies that don't rely on it.

[tired haven]

For me it clearly shows it's a CPU thing.

[hard moth]

I'm a bit clueless when it comes to low level stuff, but does that indicate it has to do with too much calculations?

[tired haven]

It does

[hard moth]

Does the GPU do calculations for the graphics? So this isn't a rendering problem?

[tired haven]

It is using GPU processing, at least according to task manager

I know a lot about computers, especially low-level stuff, so feel free to ask me anything

[hard moth]

My understanding of low level hardware stuff boils down to
CPU: Calculations
GPU: Graphics Calculations

[tired haven]

There is a bit more to it than that, but that's how it's usually configured

[hard moth]

Ill try comparing FPS with and without CreepyCat's optimization update to see if the many Navigation agents were causing the lag

[tired haven]

I would really like an FPS display to be toglleable in the settings

The GPU is often also utilized for computation in some professional applications, such as AI and machine learning, simulating real-world phenomena and doing really intensive math stuff in parallel

And sometimes the CPU is also used for rendering graphics.

And then there's all the co-processors, but that is getting a little complex if I start explaining co-processors

[hard moth]

so without the optimization update its constantly 60FPS with it dropping to 50 when there are lots of enemies

attempting now with the update

[tired haven]

What kind of hardwasre do you have?

[tired haven]

That's a pretty old CPU. Mine is much newer but also shows massive frame drops. If it runs on that, it should also run on most newer systems.

So if you get it running well, it should run well on most modern systems

For multithreading, you should make it so it calculates the threadcount available to the processor and sets that as the maximum threadcount, and maybe lets the user reduce the limit.

Otherwise, it will try to allocate nonexistent threads and crash

Or just assume a certain threadcount and not use more than that and not run on less than that

If the threadcount is hard-coded

Basically the threadcount should be dynamic with what hardware it's being run on

[tired haven]

Are you doing anything right now?

[hard moth]

Was doing something else but will test update rn

[tired haven]

Ok

[hard moth]

hmm, it seems to be about the same but sometimes its 61 FPS so I think there is some improvement

[tired haven]

I think if your monitor is 60Hz and the game has Vsync, it's just the usual Vsync readjustment

Othrewise your game has not just the performance issue, but also the potential to eat someonse's entire CPU running like way too many frames compared to their refresh rate

But if it's running 60FPS usually, it probably has Vsync. You should make the game have more control over the target framerate, such as making it possible to disable Vsync and set your own max FPS, or just have an unlimited framerate if you want

Also, did you add an FPS counter?

Ok cool

I'd like to have that. When will you make a build with that available?

[hard moth]

I can export what I have rn

[tired haven]

Ok sounds good

[hard moth]

Btw if you have godot installed the project is open-sourced so you can run the latest version always: https://github.com/KotgeDev/Neuro-Adventures

[tired haven]

I don't have godot, but I've been thinking of looking at how it works at some point. Maybe I'll do that, who knows

But if I do, I'll just do that once I'm physically on my PC

[tired pendant]

im on an intel celeron with 8gb ddr3 ram

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1067638175478071307/1191650686811779122/Fumo_egg_smol.gif?ex=65a6362f&is=6593c12f&hm=c041fa25b4033f659b067b8366388d399c426c0eb2199d0ebe147ca998031427&

[hard moth]

Ok so I updated the exe

It should now have an fps counter that updates every second

[tired pendant]

bruh????

no way that was the cause of the lag

[hard moth]

I am not sure what causes your lag

Did you try the exe or browser version?

[tired pendant]

oh alright

[tired pendant]

exe

[hard moth]

The exe version is now has the new AI update so maybe it will work, idk.

[tired pendant]

cant reach double digits

buh

[tired haven]

Those specs do explain the massively low framerate though

[tired pendant]

i mean something like this wouldnt lag my pc to begin with

but its godot ;-;

[tired haven]

It even lags on my i7-12700K, so I'd say it just needs a massive amount of optimizations (It's a CPU bottleneck)

And currently single-core

[hard moth]

ok i hav work now but once im done ill focus on trying to optimize. Still unsure what the issue is

[tired haven]

I don't know either, but you could try making dynamic threadcount multithreading

That could give it more CPU to work with

It runs decently fine (at least at the start) on this underpowered laptop I'm remoting from

Once I get back to my main PC, I'll check if it has Vsync or if it's limited to 60 FPS

Also, you should implemet a lot of graphics related settings. Like fullscreen mode. And borderless windowed, changing resolution and such.

Do you plan on keeping the game singleplayer, or do you want to add a multiplayer mode?

[hard moth]

Probably singleplayer. Not sure how multiplayer would work, and last time I tried multiplayer I gave up as I couldn't reduce the latency enough for the game to be playable.

Though like if someone wants to add a multiplayer mode, they can

[tired haven]

Ok, just thought about the fact that I could provide a server for that.

I just happen to have too much unused processing power

[tired haven]

I might have come up with how a multiplayer mode would work: Each player controls a character on the server. Each cahracter spawns enemies on the serverside, which have their data sent to the players on the serve. The players' clients then simulate the enemy pathfinding, with the server only needing to update the enemy position and pathfinding like once or a couple times in a second. Each player has their data sent to the server, which contains their position and velocity, which is simulated by each player's client until on the next update interval, it gets the player data and updates the data the players have. Each projectile gets sent to the server to then be sent to the players once, to give the players all the information they need to simulate it's trejectory, accounting for the calculated client-server-client latency. The map for this should also be bigger than the singleplayer map, to allow for more players to fit on the map. Since Neuro's sword slash is predictable, all the players' clients need to know is what level the ability is on, and what interval it's on during the update timeframe, to allow the players to simulate it on their end. The enemy spawning per player makes the amount of enemies scale based on playercount, but enemies shouldn't spawn on other players. This makes for a good multiplayer experience, while minimizing the amount of transferred data.

There, that should be everything you would need to make a good and efficient multiplayer mode.

Any thoughts?

[hard moth]

Erm, I think ill focus on polishing singleplayer for now, at least.

[tired haven]

Yeah, just keep that in mind if you do make a multiplayer mode. (I didn't even realize how long it is until near the end)

Anyway, I'll tell you if I get more ideas.

Also, did you know many of the upgrades are unbalanced? For example, the "say it back" upgrade basically guarantees you lose pretty soon

[hard moth]

For that you just have to make sure you are never aiming towards Vedal

[tired haven]

Are Neuro's attacks aimed by the cursor too? If so I didn't notice

[hard moth]

Yes the same both towards cursor

[tired haven]

But if you can't aim towards Vedal, how are you supposed to get past walls of enemies?

[hard moth]

I should re write the guide maybe to make this more clear

[tired haven]

There's a guide? I did not know of that either

[hard moth]

Below the web ver of the game

Like the description

On itch page

[tired haven]

Interesting. The issue with not aiming towards where Vedal is, is that that is (relative to Neuro's position) the direction you're moving, so if enemies come in the way, you pretty much have to either shoot towards them, causing damage, or back up trough Neuro's attacks, also causing damage.

Which also makes you lose quickly

[hard moth]

Basically you have to move in some sort of circular motion so enemies are never in front of you

[tired haven]

A circular motion like that later in the game is pretty much impossible, since there's just too many enemies spawning right where you're going.

A motion like that is actually a good strat early game

[hard moth]

Definetly gets harder to do later

[tired haven]

Also if you're doing that, you need to sometimes go trough gaps in the enemies, but even if Vedal gets trough, often Neuro will end up hitting the enemies. Sometimes the hitboxes feel too large.

[hard moth]

all hitboxes should be smaller then the sprites, so maybe a bug. Ill check it out

Or make it (even) smaller

[tired haven]

It also feels like things like the cookies become pretty much a neccecity

[hard moth]

Yah Im thinking of having a low chance be on by default

[tired haven]

That sound like a possible fix, so you aren't just guaranteed to lose if you don't find those upgrades fast enough

This is another really interesting project I've found. There's a lot of interesting suff on this Discord server. I do like helping with any Neuro-related projects I can

I also have a couple projects of my own, mostly modding games to have Neuro content. I made the Portal 2 mod Vedal played

Sometimes I end up doing some crazy stuff

One of the craziest ones is probably my Evil TTS

I made it to generate voice lines for Portal 2

[hard moth]

I still need to watch the full portal2 Vod, only really watched the part Vedal got bankrupt

[tired haven]

The voice lines aren't in that version, although it already has most features. The voice lines aren't out yet, since it takes quite a while to generate those. They are coming in v2.0.0, the current one (that Vedal played) is 1.1.0, which is the last 1.x branch version

The 2.0.0 version will also have basic co-op support

The part where Vedal got bankrupt was really funny

I was watching the whole time when Vedal was playing. I watched pretty much the entire subathon

It was fun to watch Vedal find many of my little hidden secrets and references

Although the lore makes no sense, but who cares

The mod is called "Portal 2 Neuro-Sama reskin mod" by the way, if you want to look for it

Anyway, are there any features you want to add specifically.

[hard moth]

Hav never actually played Portal, but will check out Vedals gameplay

[tired haven]

Ok. If you don't have specific features you would like to implement, how about implementing some must-have settings, like the graphics stuff, and make the FPS counter have a toggle in the settings. The current settings menu doesn't really have what I'd expect a game to have

[hard moth]

Oh, for my game? Rn after making the fixes probably an option to choose diff characters

[hard moth]

And this too

[tired haven]

Oh ineteresting. You could do that too.

Good. I really want a proper fullscreen mode. The aspect ratio with the taskbar at the bottom bothers me

Because the game doesn't fill the edges of the window

What characters do you plan on adding? Evil is an obvious choice, but what others?

[hard moth]

Anny and Evil for now

[tired haven]

Ok. I guess that's two pretty obvious characters to add based on the two previous characters

Are you still having trouble getting it to run without lagging like crazy?

[hard moth]

Outside rn but last time I tested it was 60 fps fairly consistantly

[tired haven]

Did you play far into the game or just started it?

In my experience, it becomes more laggy the longer the game goes on. I also felt like the lag persisted trough runs slightly, which would indicate a performance leak of some kind

Basically the longer it was on, the more lag I felt

[hard moth]

I think soo too, ima try work on it when im back

~2hrs

[tired haven]

I'll be back on my PC in around 3 hours maybe, until then remote desktop

Then I'll test what framerate I get. If it's smooth and the Vsync is correctly set-up, it should be 165 FPS, otherwise, if it's 60, the Vsync feature is wrong, otherwise, if it's random, the game isn't optimized well enough

[tired haven]

I'd recommend you add a way to access the settings, at least for volume (but preferably the whole menu(once there is one)), from the pause menu. It's quite difficult to adjust the volume when there's no music or other reference, like on the main menu

[tired haven]

Also, add more specific volume controls for specific types of sound alongside the main volume, like most games have

So sound effects and music seperately, also effected by the main volume

[vernal hollow]

That's not how multi threading really works in most engines and games. You can dispatch as many threads as you want windows will handle the actual physical thread allocation. You can dispatch 20 threads even if the user only has 6 physical threads

Also I got a pretty high end PC too and it doesn't really lag. Tho there are single frame drops that probably are caused by calling something too many times or iterating a big list or spawning a shit ton of nodes at once. Atleast that's the first things that should be looked for

This game should run totally fine on a single core there isn't much going on. So there is a bigger issue hidden somewhere that's causing the issues

[tired haven]

Oh yeah, I forgot windows is there in between the program and the hardware. I was thinking too low-level

[hard moth]

High amounts of lag only seems to occur near end-game so maybe I'm not deleting some stuff that needs to be freed, and those are taking away processing power ?

[tired haven]

Maybe that also carries over once the run ends, because I feel like the game lags a lot more when I finish a long run and start a new one

[vernal hollow]

i don't think you are doing anything like that...

[hard moth]

wierd... the previous scene should be wiped. The autoload is the only thing that isn't ever wiped

[tired haven]

Weird indeed. Could there be something engine-level that could be taking longer the longer the game is running. Or even something doing that in the main code

In code something that creates a list of things and iterates trough all of them could cause time-based performance loss

[vernal hollow]

i don't see anything in the profiler that would cause issues or stutters in
1st image is before the latest pull request.

tho i'm definitely seeing some orphan nodes that aren't freed and are just gonna keep increasing with each restart. (tho i doubt that would cause any issues...)

here is how my resource monitors look like in my game maybe there is something wrong.... (tho i also use a lot less nodes in general..)

[tired haven]

This Weuron didn't notice the active window changed

I guess it just isn't a proper window somehow

Vsync works correctly

But there are some framedrops

Like immediately after starting the game. Could the enemy spawning operation be causing the lag?

[vernal hollow]

the lag is probably the navigation mesh being build for the first time

not the enemies itself

[tired haven]

Interesting

[hard moth]

Its even more apparent on the web build. I guess a loading screen can "fix" that

Gonna play my game bunch of times to see if there are any other issues and get started on the smaller fixes

[tired haven]

If you could try avoiding fully restarting the game, you could also see if there's a resource leak.

[hard moth]

Here is my checklist for now:

• Change retry button to unpause button
• Show time survived
• Add number descriptions on some upgrades such as dual strike
• Make Filter Upgrade more powerful
• Chance for cookies and greggs without upgrade

And later:

• Working options menu with options like fullscreen, sfx, music, etc.
• Anny & Evil Neuro
• Character choice
• Shadows
• HUD rework

[tired haven]

Seems like a list

[hard moth]

I'm still yet to understand how your game works Gonna set some time hopefully to read through it.

[tired haven]

An enemy spawned on top of me. It was a part of an enemy formation, so maybe those don't account for player position

Enemies or enemy formations might be able to spawn while the game is supposed to be paused. The "gymbag drone" upgrade shows up as lv1, even though it does not have levels

Healing items should not be collectable while the character associated is full HP

[hard moth]

Those should be implemented too, thanks

[tired haven]

Just trying to help in any way I can. And I like playing this

[hard moth]

Erm, anyone know what the ms stands for?

[tired haven]

milliseconds (0.001 seconds)

[hard moth]

so higher it is, the more time it took for that frame?

[tired haven]

Yes

it should be something around 16.6 at most for 60, and less for higher framerates

I think, I don't remember exactly

Time spent in menus might be counted towards enemy strenght gain

[hard moth]

wdym by enemy strength gain?

[tired haven]

The enemies become stronger variants over time, which seems to be counted from time in menus and gameplay (although this is a slight assumption of how the game determines when to start spawning stronger enemies)

[hard moth]

Oohh good observation

I forgot that timers created from create_timer don't turn off when the tree is paused, have to do that manually

I can fix that now

[tired haven]

I just spent some time in the pause menu while explaining ms, and much stronger enemies started spawning

[hard moth]

Ok so from testing, the high lag spikes only seem to occur when there are enemy formations. I've spawned in nearly a thousand enemies almost instantly and there is no lag. But if I use too much formations, even 300 enemies can cause the fps to drop to 30

[tired haven]

Oh interesting. I don't think I felt as much lag this time.

[hard moth]

The version I posted shouldn't have much lag until the very end when I spawn in 2 formations at once, I think.

I only use one formation per phase for that version

but rn im stress testing by spawning in as much enemies as possible

and even 3 formations cause significant drops to fps (~150 enemies) while I can spawn in 1000 enemies without lag just fine if I don't use formations

Which is wierd, because formations don't use Navigation agents and should technically use less processing

So I think I may have messed something up with the formation programming.

[tired haven]

So maybe the formation code is just bad or has an issue somewhere

[hard moth]

prob

[tired haven]

That's probably the next area to look at

I feel like for some reason, many applications I see use the same 1 core everything else uses. I don't know if that's up to the applications or if that's windows maybe moving the less intensive applications to a different core/cores while the main cores or whatever are taken up by the intensive application.

It has a couple possible explanations

[vernal hollow]

there is a parameter you have to set for it to also pause with the tree

[hard moth]

yah forgot to do so... I wish that was the default...

[vernal hollow]

yeah...

[tired haven]

It's interesting how small this game's filesize is. It's only a 100MB for a single executable game, which means this is one of the few games I've seen that are completely embedded, alongside minesweeper

[hard moth]

This single line (Movement) seems to be the cause of the high lag in formations. If I turn movement off, I can spawn in 20 formations with no lag.

[vernal hollow]

that doesn't make sense...

[hard moth]

8 formations, and each have like 24-50 so ~350 enemies

but if I spawn in 1000 enemies with no formation, which uses navigation & A* pathfinding I get 60fps no drops

I am confused, to say the least.

[tired haven]

Is it updating a lot of memory values during that operation? That could definitely cause RAM bottlenecking speedwise

[vernal hollow]

that doesn't make sense...

the non-march method still uses velocity

[hard moth]

The non march version does more work...

The other difference between the two is that march-enemies are added as a child to the march, while non march enemies are added as a child to the EnemySpawner

[tired haven]

Would it work faster if the marches had their own threads?

Although that wouldn't matter if it's RAM speed

[hard moth]

No clue, but considering non-marches work fine I should be able to get the marches to also work

[tired haven]

where is "march_direction" coming from?

[hard moth]

its set by the parent march node

[tired haven]

Could it be reading that from some slow memory like ram every time it uses it, instead of having it in some place where it would make sense, like the CPU's L1

Or just reading it in seperately every time

[hard moth]

The lag still happens if I replace march_direction with a constant

[tired haven]

Does this code get ran for every enemy in the formation seperately, as I think the most it should have to do is move the formation enemies, and most of them have identical movement, so couldn't you just copy that to every enemy that's supposed to move the same way?

[vernal hollow]

stop blaming it being single threaded...

[tired haven]

I'm simply thinking of solutions. Since I have so many cores, multithreading comes to mind easily

[hard moth]

I can run a thousand nodes if I just use the EnemySpawner instead of formations so the problem is really with the formations

[tired haven]

What differences does the logic for the formations and normal enemies have

[hard moth]

Mainly this

But then I turned off and made the logic equal.. the problem still happens

[tired haven]

If there are differences, even hidden ones, those should be focused on first.

Is the movement applied to formations differently?

[vernal hollow]

tbh i'm out of ideas... i can't replicate the issue. i stay above 160 fps at all times

[hard moth]

Ok nvm, if too much enemies are spawned and on-screen at once, there is still lag.

So maybe formations just suffer more as I'm spawning all the enemies in, instantaneously.

[tired haven]

Could be. Maybe moving the enemies is where the real issue is

[vernal hollow]

having a lot of enemies on screen will cause issues regardless of the code

thats just a rendering limitation i also ran into

[tired haven]

I't shouldn't be rendering for me at least. A 4070 Ti should handle this quite well

[vernal hollow]

it is tho

4070 TI doesn't mean anything if the engine itself struggles with the overdraw

i got a 4080 lol

[hard moth]

Ok welp I think it may be rendering, even with the EnemySpawner, 300 enemies cause drops to 3 fps if all 300 enemies are in screen at the same time

I think I just noticed it more with the formation spawner because for those a lot of enemies spawn at once and are instantly visible

[tired haven]

Maybe try culling out things that aren't visible, if you aren't doing that already

[hard moth]

wdym?

[tired haven]

Just make them not render

[hard moth]

If they aren't visible they don't cause any issues

[tired haven]

Like things offscreen

[hard moth]

so I can have 1000 enemies and no lag as long as they aren't in the screen

[tired haven]

Oh ok, so it might already be doing that

[vernal hollow]

the engine already does that

[tired haven]

Ok cool. I just didn't know that

Sometimes I think too low-level

But could it be that the CPU is doing too much, when it has to tell the GPU where to put all of the graphics, since I definitely saw full core utilization from the game

[hard moth]

Ok welp lag spike happen regardless whether the enemies are in screen or not for the formations

8 marches (300 enemies)

[tired haven]

Maybe the formations are fully rendered, even if only one of the enemies is on-screen

[hard moth]

Nvm.. this is also true of non-formation enemies

I think the game just can't handle too much enemies at once.

[vernal hollow]

makes sense with the kind of setup you have

[hard moth]

I think ill just keep the enemy count relatively low for now

[vernal hollow]

like node setup

[tired haven]

Maybe the enemy code needs optimizations

[vernal hollow]

nah. the game just can't handle that many nodes

each enemy has like 10 nodes

[hard moth]

Say what does IndieCure do? I saw like a mass renderer

[vernal hollow]

so.. 300 enemies are like 3000 nodes

[vernal hollow]

i'm using the renderingserver to manually render sprites on screen and the physics server to give them collision so you can get damaged.
my game can handle about 3000 enemies rightnow. without my shitty collision avoidance code probably around 8k

there are still some issues with my approach tho. like when you kill a enemy it sometimes registers the damage twice. killing or damaging a completely unrelated enemy

[tired haven]

If you want to fix this (for now) by keeping the enemycount low, you need the lategame to have less, but stronger enemies, that possibly should in return give more XP, to account for the decreased enemycount

[hard moth]

I think ill prob keep my current setup and make sure to not have too much enemies at once, I feel like ill have to write my game from scratch again if I want to reduce lag for high enemy counts

[hard moth]

prob this yes

[vernal hollow]

you could just have both systems technically...

the manual rendering way for simple enemies that just case the player and have those in high amounts while also have stronger more complex enemies be just nodes

thats atleast how i'm planing to handle my game systems

[hard moth]

Will think about it, seems like a good idea

At least for the slimes since they appear every stage and are simple & small enough to have them phase through fences

I go now don't think Neuro stream today again

[tired haven]

Ok, will you give an updated exe soon though? If you can't now, it's fine

[hard moth]

didn't make any changes... (Just a lot of testing) will update everything tom

[tired haven]

Ok then

[hard moth]

After my list of changes I think ill go draw for a while (Like icons for upgrades, and a cover image.)

[tired haven]

Ok, sounds cool

[cold egret]

wow, this has suddenly become very active

[tired haven]

For some reason, when I appear at a project like this, it tends to become more active.

[hard moth]

Halfway done...

[tired haven]

Ok cool. Keep going I guess

[hard moth]

list completed... now to drawing sprites

[tired haven]

Are you going to update the exe?

I want to play with these changes to see how well they work

[hard moth]

Tomarrow yes after a bit more testing to see if my changes actually work

[tired haven]

Oh ok, I guess I'll wait. Just tell when you update it

[tired haven]

Is the update coming soon?

[hard moth]

Hopefully in a couple hours

[tired haven]

Oh cool. I'll be able to test it immediately probably

Let me know once it's out

[hard moth]

Ok publishing newest exe

updated UI

and shadows

[tired haven]

Cool. I'll try it soon

[hard moth]

file uploaded

[tired haven]

I have it now. I'll play it as soon as possible

[tired haven]

The new version stutters A LOT. And it's extremely noticeable

Pausing seems to work now

You can't fully see the HP bars from under the UI

The stutter could be Neuroling using 3 GB of RAM though, I'll check

Oh nevermind the stutter was Just the experimental Neurolings Java 21 build with a memory leak

Not picking up items when HP full works

This exists. (the continue button on the game over screen)

I might have just found the most broken bug ever

You can just keep playing. Just press the continue button over and over and over again, making the game super extremely confused

Neuro has literally 0 HP, but I can just keep playing, since the restart button is a continue button

[tired haven]

It's absolutely the most broken thing I've ever seen

[cold egret]

I'm guessing the death menu and the pause menu are the same, so when Kotge put the continue button in the pause menu it also went into the death menu

[tired haven]

I think that is definitely what happened

[cold egret]

should be pretty easy to fix, then

[tired haven]

Since the menus were originally identical, it made sense to use the same one, but now it completely breaks the game

[hard moth]

Yah erm thats what happened

Have to sleep rn but will fix it as soon as possible

Shouldnt be too hard to fix

[tired haven]

Now there just exists a hacker build that lets you play forever

[cold egret]

could be useful for playtesting tbh, that way you can test stuff without worrying about dying? Idk

[tired haven]

The gymbag drone still shows as lv1

[hard moth]

For that I just set health of both characters to 1000

[cold egret]

oh yeah, makes sense

[cold egret]

the drone is always level 1, because it just gives you more when you select it

[hard moth]

Unsure how to "fix" that since the mechanism I use to have gymbag drones a repeatable upgrade is to sey level back to 1.

[tired haven]

Yeah, so it shouldn't show a level at all

[cold egret]

that's fair

[hard moth]

Maybe I can have different text for upgrades with infinite levels

[tired haven]

That sound like a solution

Both at 0 HP

And now there's no enemies

This build is just way too broken

[hard moth]

Fixed the continue button thing and now re-designing the upgrade UI

Have 12 icons to draw

[tired haven]

Cool. Maybe once that update is available, I'll be able to play the game again. Also, will you make the HP bars fully visible again, it's kinda annoying to have something obscure them. You could just move them down a little, so they aren't covered by the big gearwheel with a number in it

In that screenshot, it looks like the HP bars are still covered slightly.

[hard moth]

Ill try maybe making them longer, I kind of want them to appear as if coming out of the gears

[tired haven]

Well, try to make it possible to see if they are full, which is quite difficult currently. Maybe make them change color when they are full?

[hard moth]

Hmm, ill try that

[tired haven]

It just gives the player a good way to tell if they have full HP, which, even if the heals can't be collected when you're at full HP, is important to know, so you can maybe try to stragesize your heals

The more possible ways to create strategy, the better a game usually is to play

Fun fact, the game's window isn't interactable to the Neurolings

I have no idea if that is because of a bug with the Neurolings or a weird property of this specific game

Any idea why that would be broken like that?

[hard moth]

Unsure.. maybe something to do with Godot

[tired haven]

I haven't seen any other Godot programs or games, so it could be, but why wouldn't it just use the Windows native window system. It could also be an issue with window titles, as the shimeji software defines interactive windows based on widow title.

[hard moth]

No clue, title should be Neuro Adventures!

[tired haven]

That's what it shows too. It should work, but for some reason it doesn't. Is the window defined in a weird way somehow, like in a nonstandard mode?

Maybe you should talk with The Clown to figure out what's going on here. He's the one that makes modifications to the shimeji jar to make it more capable for the Neurolings project. He might know how this works.

Anyway, I'm just tracking down bugs in the Neurolings jar, so I really want to know what is going wrong here with this window

Maybe it would even be possible to fix, who knows.

Well, if you feel like fixing it, just go ask someone in the desktop neurons thread. This is currently marked as a bug anyway, so it might be fixed anyway.

I'm out of ideas for fixing it for now

You can keep doing whatever it is you're doing, it's not a huge bug anyway.

I think something that should be fixed soon is the game forcing it's graphics to be in 16:9, and causing black bars when the aspect ratio isn't perfect

And there not being a proper fullscreen mode

For the black bars issue, either make it scale the aspect ratio, or make the bars some color more close to the game's colors, like the ground color. For the fullscreen issue, add a toggle in the settings or a button (like f4 with Undertale) to change to fullscreen mode

This is what the black bars look like (highly overdone with a nonsensible window aspect ratio just to have it very clearly visible)

But that could technically be what the game looks like to someone with a widescreen monitor

[tired haven]

I figured out the bug, the window isn't being set as the active window, so the shimejis consider it interactive only, when it's the only window on screen

Or maybe it might be if there isn't another window on screen at some point during it's existance

Yes, it's the latter one

It might be something with how the window is created

But at least I found out something about this bug.

Or how the window is made active

But I think it has something to do with the game itself, or it's engine

You could probably look into it if you want

The bug might also be just randomly not there, that is also a possibility, as it seems very inconsistant

I'm actually very confused about how this bug behaves, but it could be a bug with the game. Not that important though, just very extremely interesting.

I'd say prioritize the aspect ratio stuff and fullscreen support over fixing a little bug with shimeji interaction.

[hard moth]

Ill implement the perspective settings and stuff prob once the icons & cover image is done

[tired haven]

Ok, sounds good

I'll play the game more once the build with the fixed game over screen is available.

[hard moth]

Icons

[hard moth]

After drawing the cover image, and adding settings, which hopefully I can all do today, Ill request another round of playtests

[tired haven]

Alright then. Let me know when it's done

[hard moth]

Idk how broken this is but I made this

[tired haven]

That's either very broken or completely underpowered, depending on if it can kill you in one hit.

[hard moth]

I guess you can be 1 hit killed if you accumulated enough damage

[tired haven]

That might just make it quite useless then, the most it should be allowed to do is bring you to 1 HP

[hard moth]

Hmm ill test it out

[tired haven]

Ok then

Did you add something to the HP bars to show when they are full yet?

[hard moth]

planning on some sort of glow if possible, or if not just a different color

[tired haven]

Ok, that sounds like a good solution

[cold egret]

that sounds very high risk high reward, interesting

I think it'll be pretty good, since it'll essentially mean that, if I'm any good at math, Vedal will only take damage after taking 1000 hits on average

that said it does mean that since the damage is coming all at once he won't be able to heal in between, so he'll also sort of artifically have less health

[hard moth]

New cover image. First time trying landscape pixel art so took forever but I think it looks ok.

[tired haven]

I think it looks good with the game's artstyle. Could maybe be better, but I think it works

[hard moth]

might add Neuro's sword to the side but unsure. Ill experiment a bit

[tired haven]

That could work

But maybe just one sword is a little generic, so adding two swords would work better

As Neuro has two of them

[hard moth]

I was thinking Neuro is on the side, and only the right sword is shown, will have to draw first and see if it looks good

or I could just cross the two swords in the middle

[tired haven]

Oh, I was thinking something a bit different. That sounds good too

Are you gonna make the new exe soon

[hard moth]

Once im done with the resolution settings and adding glow to health when full, I am thinking.

[tired haven]

Are you adding fullscreen?

[hard moth]

Yah

[tired haven]

Well, make sure it can work in borderless windowed, so the Neurolings can render on top

[hard moth]

Will attempt

After that and some testing, I think I will "release" the game. Like, make a proper devlog & trailer video.

Doesn't mean i'll stop updating it, but does mean ill let everyone know a full game loop is playable.

[tired haven]

For testing, the Neurolings application could be helpful to check if they can render on top and other regular window stuff

[hard moth]

last time I tried Neurolings it just didn't work.. I think its because I don't have the proper Java ver. but idk

[tired haven]

I can help with the Java stuff

[hard moth]

I think im just too lazy to try installing the Neurolings again

I can prob figure out the issue if I work on it enough

[tired haven]

The easiest way to check Java is "java -version" in CMD. Then tell me what version it shows

[hard moth]

I have an open- source ver

[tired haven]

It should work the same

[hard moth]

openjdk version "17.0.7" 2023-04-18

[tired haven]

Ok, you can get the latest test build then

#1174291909066375199 message it works on all JDKs from 11 to 21

The old one used Java 8

[hard moth]

thanks, will look if I download

[tired haven]

It's not hard, the download has the whole package. It is a test version, but it runs well, the best Java 21 compatible so far,the previous one had a major memory leak

Anyway, did you add some glow to the HP bar when it's full?

[hard moth]

my next goal along with windows settings

[tired haven]

Ok. Sounds good, as that feature seems kinda important

Let me know once there's a build or changes

[hard moth]

@viral talon Do you think you can make a music / or have one already that fits this image? Like something relatively calm but ready for battle. Again if you are busy feel free to decline, I do have some placeholder music.

[hard moth]

Options Menu in progress....

[tired haven]

Is it going to be accessible from the pause menu?

[hard moth]

yes

[tired haven]

Cool. It's just like it should be. Will you add a toggle for Vsync and/or the FPS counter?

[hard moth]

No idea what Vsync is, but yes for the FPS counter and also a Timer

[tired haven]

Vsync is the application automatically limiting it's FPS to the monitor's refresh rate

Or the name of the technology used for that

[hard moth]

Well I can add options for that I guess

[tired haven]

Cool, not everyone wants their framerate artificially limited

[hard moth]

Ok updates pushed!

Even the web version this time

[tired haven]

Ok, I think I'll get it and look at it as soon as I can

I just found where it saves stuff. (probably settings)

Saving the settings is a pretty good feature

[hard moth]

Oh yes that was a pain to implement

Thought I had to do something complicated but found a very simple way to do it

apparently it still works for the web version (The saving)

[tired haven]

Interesting. The path is C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Godot\app_userdata\Neuro Adventures!

[hard moth]

That should be correct

On the godot side its user:// so its easy to find

[tired haven]

Just make sure that if you add more or change it to make the new version capable of reading and converting saves as many versions back as possible

You could probably use the save to also save a high score for time survived

[hard moth]

I realized, yah, if I add another setting entry then unless I manually delete the save it doesn't work...

Well I can prob just change the name

saved_options_v2

Does mean the previous settings will be forgotten

[tired haven]

You could automatically check if there are old settings if there aren't ones for the current version

[hard moth]

I think I can do that

[tired haven]

Cool. It sounds like a useful feature for especially while the game keeps getting constant updates

[hard moth]

Forgot to mention, the full health visual effect can be turned on in the options

I had it off by default because personally I like the color being the same for full health and not

[tired haven]

Ok. I just came up with the possibility of having some kind of leaderboard, if you want to do that. I could store the data for that if you add it

[hard moth]

Hmm, maybe if I make an infinite version? Because right now you can "win" the game by killing the boss

or you mean like the amount of time it took to win, like for speedrunning

[tired haven]

So that's why the enemies stopped in the broken build at one point? I do mean time survived

[hard moth]

Probably

[tired haven]

So if you add that as a feature, I can store the leaderboard itself, a leaderboard server host shouldn't be that heavy to run

And my PC is always (pretty much) online too, so it's a good candidate

As long as it's designed so that it only accepts the packets that contain leaderboard data, not some random files from random sources

And leaderboard requests

But if the packets are just text that has it's formatting checked and if they match, it either returns the leaderboard data or adds the data to the leaderboard log, it should work

It should just be a txt or something internally. That could be mirrored to my E : and F: drives for redunduncy

I kinda have an idea of how something like that would work internally

It would be listening to requests on a port, then when it receives one, it checks if it matches the format it should be and if it does, it does what it's told to do when it gets that kind of packet, either read a preset amount from the leaderboard and return it to whoever made the request, or add the packet's data to the leaderboard data

Sound doable?

[hard moth]

If that can be done with websockets, probably

[tired haven]

I think ports might be websockets, not sure though

Ports are a 16 bit value attached to something to determine what it interacts with when received. (I think)

I think you should definitely look into doing that. It sounds like a cool feature to have

[cold egret]

no master volume option?

[tired haven]

Yeah, that should exist

But it doesn't

[cold egret]

I even already made one, granted it's pretty bad but still

[tired haven]

Maybe it'll be added at some point

[drowsy siren]

here from the game-jam channel to post some feedback.
It's a fun Neuro game overall though had a few points of feedback as someone with too many survivors-like hours and a sudden urge to essay.

Difficulty & progression:
There are way more defensive upgrades than offensive, unusual for a survivors-like. The only additional weapon is the drones making build diversity difficult. It’s hard to avoid getting cornered when having few ranged options and slow attack rate. The expected feeling of being more powerful than enemies never came.
I think of survivors-likes as power scaling arms races. Winning means eventually being more powerful than the enemy weather that means defeating them very fast or mitigating their damage with healing/defense/mobility. In either direction of offense and defense, I feel like I could never come close to even matching enemy power level. Therefore, it feels like enemy frequency and toughness scales too fast. Another related thing is that I don’t know the end condition. This affects play approach since in some survivor-likes you have to defeat bosses to win so they highly encourage offensive upgrades.

Movement:
Movement feels slow and awkward because Neuro follows your movement. Since enemies go for Neuro, it makes her feel more important to pay attention to even though the camera is focused on Vedal. When moving vertically, Neuro gets very close to the edge of the screen where enemies spawn. All together, camera and movement makes it harder to aim, dodge, and collect gears. In a specific case, it’s hard to make precise movements like through enemy line waves.

Upgrades:
Say It Back too restrictive. Cannot aim forward without taking a hit making it hard to avoid running into enemies.
DM Allegations relatively large effect compared to other upgrades with a downside that seems too drastic for being so random.
Many healing & defense upgrades seem unnoticeably small.
Swarm upgrades appears as a choice when having no drones.
Drones can go off screen making it feel like they disappeared.

Overall a great Neuro game though a bit frustrating mechanically as a survivors-like. The art and sound are good and thematically expected for a Neuro fan game. Though the farm music is a bit strange and a bit annoying, it works.

[tired haven]

I agree with most of that, as I've experienced a lot of those.

Especially the points about the movement and the say it back upgrade

[cold egret]

it seems the main problems people have with the game just come from lack of balance and feeling unpolished, so maybe after the first boss is finished we should work on balance and quality of life as the next priority

[hard moth]

Thanks for the feedback! Im definetly going to try add more offensive upgrades, have at least two in plan rn. Say it back and the DM allegations upgrades ill also try balancing. Unsure what to do for better movement, but hopefully I can think of something

[cold egret]

maybe you could add a keybind to swap who you're controlling, so like maybe you have programmer socks on vedal so you want to control him to get him away from the enemies, but then the enemies are still close to neuro so you swap to neuro and take them out

the one you're not controlling would just have the ai neuro currently has, so it would basically be the same thing but possibly with some cool new strategies

[hard moth]

Hmm... an upgrade that allows you to temporarily control Neuro..
Maybe "Drilling" ?

[viral talon]

sorry for the wait
was quite buzy this week

[hard moth]

Its perfect! Ill add it as soon as im home

Ill either be uploading the next update today, or 4/5 days from now. Going somewhere for 3 days starting tomarrow so wont be able to work during that time. (Its most likely going to be 4-5 days from now unlikely ill get everything done today )

My current todo list (For the next update only):

• 2 more weapons
• Less enemies near the end (for both less lag and difficulty)
• balancing for Say it Back and DM allegations.
• Higher stats on healing & defence for starting levels

[hard moth]

I now feel like animating the starting screen... this fits so well.

[cold egret]

I was thinking of it more as just a base game mechanic, but I guess it could work as an upgrade as well

[hard moth]

Could be like cookies where its a base mechanic but upgrades give more control

[cold egret]

yeah, maybe

[hard moth]

Oh btw can you try making a nuke explosion sfx

[cold egret]

ok, so just a really long explosion?

[hard moth]

Erm maybe like 1.5 sec or somewhere around that

[cold egret]

ok

[hard moth]

Like maybe something like a flash bang / high pitch sfx and the an explosion right after

[cold egret]

oh, isn't the high pitch sound usually after the explosion?

[hard moth]

Planning on making a inuke9000 upgrade that drops nukes at an interval at random enemies

[hard moth]

Actually, im not sure at all.

Never heard a nuke go off

[cold egret]

I'll just try a couple different sounds and see what you like :D

[hard moth]

Ok maybe a "falling" sound + explosion afterwards might work, because Neuro is launching it from a rocket.

Idk really ill jus wait to hear the examples

[cold egret]

oh, that'll probably change things but I already made some quick examples, one sec

they're all the same explosion sound, only the high pitched sounds are different

[hard moth]

Away rn sadly so cant check, but will do in a couple hours!

[cold egret]

ok!

I think I'll try make a couple more now that I know that it's launched from a rocket

[hard moth]

Ok so i quickly took a listen before im busy and I like the explosion part, unsure about the high pitch.

[cold egret]

ok, do you want one with no high pitch at all then? or should I change the high pitch in some way

for reference this is the explosion on its own, no high pitch

[cold egret]

I also just made this version with a falling sound instead of high pitch sound, and I can lengthen or shorten the falling part depending on how long the nuke will take to land

[hard moth]

I think maybe a longer falling sound and slightly longer explosion (if possible) would be great!

[tired haven]

over 1000 FPS pretty consistently, at least in the early game

I don't see any effect for full HP, even though it's enabled

When the framerate fluctuates a lot, the audio becomes glitchy. It is possible the audio isn't being ran independent of the rest of the game, so lag in the game causes lag in the audio

Actually there is a slight change in the HP bar at full HP, but it's very hard to notice. It should be more noticeable

I think I can maintain over 500 FPS, at least most of the time

But my PC is really powerful, being basically top of the line or more of a low-end server

I think it's a bit better now, with some of the more visible issues being fixed, but there are still some issues, like the audio lag and the full HP visual effect being too subtle. At least those are the ones immediately noticeable to me

[cold egret]

ok, I'll make another couple versions later today!

[cold egret]

something like this?

[hard moth]

The explosion sound is great but im still unsure about the falling sound. Is there a sfx that sounds more like a wistle?

If there isnt I think its good

[cold egret]

I can probably make a whistling sound, yeah

I'll make it later today

[cold egret]

is this good?

I can make the whistling longer or shorter as well

and higher or lower pitch

[hard moth]

Good slightly longer may be better

[cold egret]

ok! I'll do that later today

[cold egret]

made the whistling longer

[hard moth]

I think its great!

Im back home so I can start working on the game now

[tired haven]

Oh, cool. Does that mean we might get updates again?

[hard moth]

yah, hopefully

[tired haven]

Ok. The effect for a full HP bar is too subtle and hard to see in the current version, could that be made more visible?

[hard moth]

I can work on that yah

[tired haven]

Cool, it's one of the things that was still wrong. There's also audio stutter when the framerate is inconsistent, so you should look into that too

I tested the game without Vsync enabled. It runs at above 500 FPS pretty much for as much of the game as I got trough, but that's still a bit worse than I'd expect from a game like this but I'm not sure.

I do think the game could still do with more optimizations.

[hard moth]

prob, I think ill first look into optimizing enemies since they are the primary source of lags still

[tired haven]

I think if you get it running on my hardware over 1000 FPS consistently or so, that would probably be good for most hardware configurations.

I might test the game again once I get back on my PC today, as it's been a bit since I last played it and I don't remember if there was anything else too major. I also noticed you fixed the gymbag drones showing lv1.

And the fullscreen mode works pretty well

I should probably try what happens if I put it in fullscreen on my second display, which is not 16:9

Running in not 16:9 still causes black bars

[hard moth]

Fairly certain if the proprotions are not exact there will be black bars

Don't want to stretch a pixel art game

[tired haven]

You could make the color different

[hard moth]

will look into it if its possible to change the color

[tired haven]

Maybe make them a color that matches the usual color of the playfield, like green, so they aren't distracting during gameplay

[tired haven]

Do you still think a leaderoard could be a good feature?

[hard moth]

Possibly in the future, but I want to focus on core features for now

[tired haven]

Yeah, that's what I think too. Do you mind if there's other stuff hosted on my system too, since it doesn't interfere with the leaderboard host, as long as it uses a unique port? I think I might get to host a database for Neuro rants soon

[hard moth]

Sure why not dont see why it would affect the leaderboard in any way

I also can run a droplet if you cant run the setver anymore

[tired haven]

I can run the server as long as my system is functional and connects to a network, so I don't think I'll be unable to any time soon

And I don't see any reason why the host would be affected by other hosts if they don't interact with each other, especially since I'm gonna have 64GB of RAM soon

By the way, once you make the host program, can you add a feature to automatically copy the data from the G: (host) drive to the F: and E: drives periodically?

That would give the data some redundancy

[hard moth]

Ill see, still pretty clueless about network stuff aside from basic websockets

Inuke6000

[tired haven]

That's a pretty good explosion effect. The backups would just be writing to a location on disk, so it wouldn't involve network stuff for that

[tired haven]

By the way, did you make it so the DM allegations upgrade can only take you from full HP to 1 at most like I recommended?

[tired haven]

The underpowered laptop I use for remoting into my PC is handling the game decently. On the first attempt the FPS started around 120 and stayed above 90. The system has a i5-8265U and it's respective integrated graphics. (UHD 620) It's 100% GPU, like most games on this thing

Kinda impressive it can still run it that well though, since it's very bad compared to my main system

Welp, the lategame is literally less than 10 FPS on this laptop

It's literally unplayable

This thing is just standing there, doing nothing. Maybe it spawned during a lagspike and broke

Actually it follows, but doesn't shoot

[hard moth]

Hmmm, ill check

[tired haven]

I'm currently testing on one of my very bad computers, the one I use for remoteting to my main PC/server

I guess the end screen works. Just not the boss itself

That time it didn't go to a consistent <10 FPS, but it was definitely not a good framerate, especially with it stuttering a lot

How will you replicate the lag for testing by the way? I don't think you'd have a system that's equally as horrible as this laptop

[hard moth]

Unsure, but fps goes down sometimes for me too if there are too much enemies

[tired haven]

Technically you could run it with a very limited amount of resources somehow, although I don't know how that would work. I also don't know if it being an obvious GPU bottleneck matters

Maybe Windows' power management settings

Or underclock your GPU a lot

[hard moth]

Kinda tired from the last three days (it was Uni prep stuff) so made almost no progress today hopefully tomarrow will be better.

[tired haven]

Ok, if you're tired, don't work too hard. It's that simple

[cold egret]

awesome! what other sfx do you need?

[hard moth]

For now, I don't think there is any, since the next upgrade (halo) is always on

[cold egret]

ok, cool!

I think I'll make a couple misc sfx that could be useful for anything next, then

[tired haven]

Having a really high chance for cookies makes chicken bakes not appear at all, if the chance for those is low. Unknown if it works the other way