this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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In this release, we're updating the engine from SDL to SDL2, and there are many optimizations to go along with it. Aside from the optimizations, SDL2 is also the stepping stone to ports. We have Linux compiling and playable; it just needs some testing.

Moreover, there is now a(n experimental) multithreading option in the game settings that makes the game even faster!

We also have some new individual tree graphics, and an update to grass ramps as well.

This has been mostly the hard work of Putnam! Meanwhile I've started up on adventure mode - the long work of updating menus and adding audio has begun! Hopefully we'll have some progress to show their soon, as we continue updating fortress mode as well.

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[–] Hellebert@beehaw.org 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Putnam has been such a huge blessing to this game since they took ~~him~~ them on.

With a Linux port I might have to install it again too. Ugh my sleep.

Edit: I was an idiot.

[–] Tarte@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Fully agreed! It's 'took her on', though.

It's just insane how competent some people are. Here's an interesting video interview from 5 month ago. And here's a written interview about her joining the team, which I also found interesting and very impressive.

[–] apotheotic@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It absolutely does matter - male default needs to stop!

[–] Hellebert@beehaw.org 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I didn't use male as the default, I had just seen various forum posts over the years referring to Putnam as him and assumed that was correct. Of cause I assumed wrong.

[–] apotheotic@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh sure - I'm not calling you out or anything. But somewhere along the line the people whose forum posts you were reading had made the male default assumption, and it stuck with you! Not your fault that someone else made that assumption.

[–] Hellebert@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago

All good - I should have been more mindful and probably used gender neutral language instead.

[–] Tarte@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In case someone is wondering about your response: My comment originally included the phrase "Not that it matters, [...]", but I immediately edited my comment after I posted it, because I agree with your sentiment. You were faster than me.

[–] apotheotic@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks for leaving context here, so I don't look like a raving lunatic :P

[–] Hellebert@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I learnt something new today.

[–] Dragonseel 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wow. That is a cool. My limited experience working with single-threaded game-stuff tells me it is exceptionally hard to port stuff that is written without threading in mind, to multi-threading. Getting the behavior to stay the same while still actually getting better performance requires some really deep insight into how stuff works in the program. On a (program-)global scale. Mad respect if it works out. This should make huge maps or huge fortresses possible.

I haven't yet played the steam version (it is on my todo-list though), but sank quite some hours into the "legacy" version. It can become laggy if you play on big maps with a lot of dwarfs/critters etc on it. I am excited to have even more stuff possible in this already very complex and huge game.

[–] soundasleep@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm really curious how they're doing it, too! I'm making a multithreaded simulation game and the parts that can't multithread well are related to AI / character logic / tasks and errands / pathfinding, and anything to do with rendering.

[–] Dragonseel 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes, would be cool to get some technical overview on how they do it. Maybe a lengthy blog post or something.

Rendering can be multi-threaded if you do it grounds up and use a rendering API made for it such as Vulkan or DX12. I used Vulkan a bit and you can create command-buffers from threads, and assemble them into your queue then. So you could have one thread creating the command buffer to draw all static meshes, and another one doing it for the particle system. And there is the "Async Compute" that allows the GPU to do compute shader tasks while CPU is busy building draw commands etc. I don't know enough to tell you details as my own work with Vulkan is very basic. But the in-house engine at my workplace uses those techniques to multithread.

There are systems that can run in parallel to each other. The sound system often needs to be their own threads. Low priority tasks such as wayfinding for NPCs. They don't need to recalculate their paths in a tight loop every frame, they "interpolate" to the next waypoint in between.

Parallel stuff is so dang hard to get correct and actually gather speed. Kudos to you that you are doing that. May your data access never be a race condition. :)

[–] soundasleep@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah in the future I've already decided I want to try creating IntBuffers and stuff on threads but I'll need to do a lot of testing to make sure it's actually faster across a wide range of hardware 😀

I wrote a little blog post about my latest work if you're curious!

[–] Tarte@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Would you mind explaining to me why you would include "anything to do with rendering" in that list? I haven't tried myself at multithreading yet, but rendering was easy enough (in my limited experience) to completely decouple from the actual game state or game logic.

I'm simply curious, because I'm toying with the idea to utilize multithreading in my next project.

[–] soundasleep@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

By "rendering" I mean when you interact with OpenGL, the GPU, etc - at least in my engine (lwjgl/libgdx), it's expected to be on the main thread. From what I understand too when you get into GPU land everything is already kinda-asynchronous on the driver side - it's only when you call flush() that it actually blocks your thread - which makes it difficult to profile some things.

But I am still a newb at all of this! I'd love to hear your experiences!!

[–] tochee@aussie.zone 3 points 2 years ago

Super excited about this as the game runs like shit on my laptop and there's a long running issue of fortresses becoming unplayable at high populations. Anyone tried it out?

[–] gabo2007@vlemmy.net 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I hope this means the Mac version is coming soon!

[–] eight_byte@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago

That would be awesome!

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 2 points 2 years ago

Also nice to see the Linux edition getting more love as well, hopefully they release it soon.

Tried the Steam version when it came out I think a year ago, but got frustrated because stairs were broken. Don't suppose anyone knows if they fixed the bug/misfeature where you couldn't build up stairs without access to the floor above?

[–] Iqunlimited@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Been a dream of every long time dwarf fortress player for this all to happen. It's wonderful having an extra person on who can work on all this stuff while tarn and zach full steam ahead with updates.

[–] SuiXi3D@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] LoafyLemon@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Rimworld already utilises multithreading.

[–] greenskye@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

Yep. Multithreading isn't a magic fix for these really complex games. At the end of the day some stuff just has to happen in order.

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