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AdhesiveMadMan3 years ago(+1)

Oh man, so many ideas... This game has got me hooked.

Though for starters, I'm more than sure there's a great amount of optimization that can be implemented to make the game run better. Late in a game, many graphical glitches will begin occurring such as the black hole's model becoming trapped in a certain spot or huge lights appearing. This also seems to be connected to performance drops. I also feel spaghettification could be reworked to be less GPU-intensive, such as replacing some of the particles with glowing wires (representing the light being pulled in strands). This would also look much, MUCH prettier. I attached a picture to give you a visual.

It would also be cool if there was a light bending effect around the black hole Itself, such as objects behind the black hole being reflected around it (if you've seen the GIF of the Earth orbiting a black hole, you know what I'm talking about). I'm not sure how hard this would be to program, though.

I'm sure I'll end up getting more ideas soon after I post this, there's just so much potential for this game to be a smashing success.

 

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CleverAI3 years ago

Holy moly! I didn't expect that. Okay, let me go through it:

The feeling of trapped in a certain spot a the end of the game appears, because you have no more static focus points left. So it looks like you're not moving anymore, but you actually do.

The huge lights will become smaller and smaller the bigger you are. It should have the effect like: At the beginning some material was still able to escape from you, but later you're so heavy that this is not possible anymore. This effect is GPU bound and should have a minor effect. Keep track of your FPS if it really drops significantly as soon as a lot of stars were absorbed.

Spaghettification is handled by the same universe system which handles the whole stellar interactions. Each "particle" is an entity with 1 stellar mass and affected by other objects gravity. So it is not GPU, but CPU bound. But I can reduce the GPU resources more if I change these from a spherical to a point based mesh, because they are so tiny, you probably won't notice the difference. To get a more glowing wire look I have three ideas:

  1. Instead of collapsing a star into multiple little spheres, I can create long capsules. Each vertices of a capsule is a point where the gravity can pull on. -> I think this would lead to strange artifacts and clipping errors.
  2. Create a water-like shader, which graphically combines small spheres into one fluid object. This creates the illusion as if there is one long spaghetti. So I don't need to change the system, but only need to give these "particles" another shader. I think that's the best solution.
  3. Each "particle" gets a trail renderer and draws a trail behind it. It's probably the easiest, but I think not the best for performance.

The light bending effect of a black hole is also shader based. I know there are already assets, which achieved this effect, so I need to look around how to create it with my current hybrid-renderer v2. As I am not familiar with shader coding, I hope there are some Shader-Graph (visual scripting for shader) examples for it.

Thanks. I really appreciate your ideas!

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