Announcing Elysian Shadows DC

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Re: Announcing Elysian Shadows DC

Post by sunchangping »

Keep in mind that none of these graphics are going to be used. These were taken during the development of the engine, so we popped some ripped sprites into it for the time being. We now have a few dedicated artists who have already made some very nice art for the game (that we aren't going to show off until we have an equally cool area to display them in).
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Re: Announcing Elysian Shadows DC

Post by RyoDC »

Since you're back online, do you plan on releasing dev tools and dev instruments you developed during Elysian Shadows production?
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Re: Announcing Elysian Shadows DC

Post by GyroVorbis »

RyoDC wrote: Wed Jan 10, 2024 8:54 am Since you're back online, do you plan on releasing dev tools and dev instruments you developed during Elysian Shadows production?
Holy shit, you're the first person to actually bother asking that.

Actually, yes. Yes, I do. The engine and toolkit were at a very powerful, capable place. I need to get over some code anxiety, because I've honestly leveled up in my coding abilities substantially since the KS period when a lot of the engine was written, and I have this burning desire to clean EVERYTHING ever up before I let people actually see the codebase, but I'll get over that.

I'm torn between just throwing it up on GitHub "as-is" and letting people already contribute to and work on it, even though in a lot of ways its not ready to be used by a game that isn't Elysian Shadows... or the alternative is to hold off and make it more polished before releasing it... Honestly still debating in my head.

There are a few logistical issues with it that will need to be addressed before it can be used generically by anyone to make DC games, though. For example, things like a "Create New Project" dialog and other things which would be necessarily for a general-purpose engine were foregone with our limited budget and development time, because ES was the only "project" and configuration needed by ESTk at the time... so it definitely makes some hardcoded assumptions that will have to be fixed up.

Another seriously annoying issue is that the rendering back-end will need to be redone on MacOS, as the OpenGL and OpenCL stuff I was using for graphics and compute have now been freaking deprecated by Apple, which is a real pain in the ass... But that will eventually need to be taken care of, as one of its biggest strengths was being fully cross-platform, and I can tell you right now, we're all over the place in the DC scene in terms of which OSes we use for development...

Since I've been back and have been contributing to KOS, though, there's so much I can't wait to be able to leverage in a game or engine that we have on DC nowadays that I'd like to expose... I still have some things in KOS that I'd like to take care of before going back to engine work as my main gig, but I'm definitely gaining motivation to do so as I go along.

...but if I'm working on KOS atm and not tools, would I be better off just throwing it up on GitHub already in the meantime? I really don't know... I know for a fact if I do that, I'll get ripped a new one for "zomg it's not even production-ready or usable!" by the mainstream, but I do believe, meanwhile actual developers may very well benefit from and get use out of it, even in the current state...

EDIT: You know what, here. Since I was basically just called a thief and a liar and told I cannot be trusted over on Dreamcast-Talk, here are some screenshots of the private repo on my GitLab server of the source code that would be open-sourced... No, the project wasn't a scam. :lol:
Screenshot from 2024-01-11 21-06-53.png
Screenshot from 2024-01-11 21-04-08.png
Screenshot from 2024-01-11 21-04-38.png
Screenshot from 2024-01-11 21-02-25.png
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Re: Announcing Elysian Shadows DC

Post by RyoDC »

Thanks for the update, waiting for the stuff to appear in public GitHub repo!

What dreamcast lacks, is any kind of finished game engine, which can allow you to create games on the same abstraction level as you might by using any modern engine like unity3d or unreal engine.

To build a dreamcast game, you need to mess with building toolchains, compiler building scripts, operating systems, mutexes, HAL, and it has nothing to do with making a game.
EDIT: You know what, here. Since I was basically just called a thief and a liar and told I cannot be trusted over on Dreamcast-Talk, here are some screenshots of the private repo on my GitLab server of the source code that would be open-sourced... No, the project wasn't a scam. :lol:
In my humble opinion, what happened is not due to the fact that you were a dishonest person or a "liar" - it's that your concentration and focus was offset more to creating a game tooling, neither creating a game itself.
Which in fact could be beneficial for the dreamcast community for example, but not really creating a game per se :)
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Re: Announcing Elysian Shadows DC

Post by GyroVorbis »

You know, I've heard a lot of theories about why our Kickstarter failed, and 90% of them have me just rolling my eyes at the computer screen, but...
RyoDC wrote:it's that your concentration and focus was offset more to creating a game tooling, neither creating a game itself.
Your intuition is spot-on. The truth is that I was overworked, tired, and was spread extremely thin on the Kickstarter being a kind of "tech lead" for the engine and tools PLUS being the "leader." The truth is that I was a horrible, terrible manager because of it. I always had my head down in my own code working on the SDK and tools and was just hoping to god the rest of the team knew what needed to be done and was working towards our common goal... Then notice my role was never, ever "gameplay programmer." That was something that I was always expecting to be handled by someone else, using my tools and engine, so that I could focus on what makes me happy: creating the frameworks, tools, and engines for other developers to bring their creations to life... and if I'm being completely honest, after doing some soul-searching, the truth is that I was never personally all that interested in being involved in the actual coding portion of the gameplay code which is what ES has always had an issue with. I loved the design of it, and I begrudgingly did it when it wasn't getting done, but I was always happier being a back-end tech kind of guy... which is largely why I've found so much happiness and fulfillment working on KOS for the community.

But yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm currently working with Twada to try to help improve the KOS PVR APIs so that we can do some of the more impressive graphical stuff that KOS has been lacking, but after that, I will be revisiting my tools and tech and releasing them to the scene.
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