May Progress Update (Patreon)

Heh, well I said I wasn't getting into a routine of this sort of post, but it so happens there are a number of different things going on, so here we go again :P

Beta 10

Beta 10 will bring a bunch of new features so it's still early in development yet, but after completing all the drone and AI work I talked about earlier, I've finally started on the last major required feature remaining on the development roadmap: ambient audio.

The first stage of this process is to see what the experience is like with just every single machine out there making its own noise. As you're probably familiar with, many machines in Cogmind already have associated looping sound effects, but this is currently limited to mechanically important or otherwise special plot-related machines, as well as some long-time placeholders for testing (notably the Nuclear Reactor and Quantum Generator). To complete the collection we need an additional 122 loops!

I've divided the remaining work into four categories (including # loops required):

• Terminals (7): Each faction will have its own terminal sounds, rather than having everyone use the same 0b10 sfx.
• Prefab machines (13): Unique named machines that exist only in prefabs, for example the RIF Installer or Zion quarantine scanner.
• Explosive/special non-interactive machines (19): Machines found mostly around 0b10 are selected from themed groups like "energy" or "storage," where each map is assigned certain map-appropriate themes (I talked about this in an old blog post). Some of these are explosive or have other purposes (ex: Energy Cycler), so taking these as unique identifying qualities among "non-interactive" machines in general I split them out into their own category to shrink the main category and otherwise give them priority when it comes to better sfx.
• Fluff non-interactive machines (83): The largest category are all the remaining machines that don't really have any mechanical purpose (besides blocking view and being destructible obstacles to movement), but still serve to reflect and define the theme of a map.

This week I actually already finished the first three of those categories! By the numbers that means progress is currently at 32%.

So that's a good chunk of work behind us, but the last category will also be the most challenging since it's so large and varied. I will probably try to further break that one down into smaller chunks by theme where it will help.

They're pretty obvious on sight, but now you'll also be able to hear active 0b10 outposts in the caves due to their generator :)

You can see the generator's audio getting louder outside when the door is open.

Since in the early stages it'd be annoying to have to find machines in game to test, naturally I'd be using Cogmind's test map which contains a copy of every non-prefab machine in the game. But to keep it from being a massive map, and because it was built long before any of these machines had audio, there are a ton of machines in close proximity, so I decided to add some extra debugging features to make testing here and elsewhere easier...

So now I can actually toggle all machine audio at once, as well as mute audio sources individually on the fly.

Next up with regard to debugging I may want to be able to tweak audio propagation settings from within the game, since that'll make it easier to set the required values, and an easier time setting values pretty much always improves the final result since you can instantly see how changes affect the map experience and are free to make a lot more adjustments before getting tired of repeatedly closing the game and starting it again :P. This is what led to higher quality in the particle effects, since those, too, can be edited without restarting the game.

Once we've hit a milestone in the ambient audio development, I'll be releasing an interim playable version for patrons if you want to try it out. That'll likely happen some time later this month, or whenever I can finish at least the machine output.

REXPaint Patch

REXPaint now supports multi-layer copy/cut/paste! This will naturally be really helpful for those of you working with multi-layered images. I do a lot of multi-layered work myself but didn't often enough need to actually edit multiple layers at once that the lack of this feature bothered me, so I'd never really thought about it. But a recent mention by frequent REXPaint user gumix brought it to the forefront and I spent an afternoon building that this week.

The patch to enable this feature is available here.

No plans for a proper release yet, but I should probably spend a full day somewhere in here just plugging away at random little features and fixes to do an official 1.05 release, since we have a fair number of 1.04 patches at this point.

Roguelike Tilesets

If you're building a roguelike you might be interested in tilesets for use as placeholders or even permanent graphics for a hobby project. I put together a newer version of our old tileset list on r/RoguelikeDev, this time as a wiki page which I'll maintain when more pop up. Check it out.

Some samples:

Streams

I've been streaming more Cogmind runs recently, including the latest fun one where we ended up getting Programmer couplers and building off that together with a melee loadout (part 1, part 2), but starting next week we're going to take a little break from Cogmind to try out the latest Armoured Commander II, which just hit Steam EA.

After that hopefully the 7DRL reviews will be out and we'll be playing more of those, too.

Although in between all this it's also likely I'll stream some Beta 10 once we get the new ambient audio in, just for fun :D