mrspatula

So had I :(

A lot of these bugs seem to also go unfixed, I think with the intention that you pay for Unity Pro which gives you source code access to the engine and you can work around them / fix them yourself.

I've been looking more and more at Godot, and I really like it. Open source, you can script in C++, and it seems to have most of the features necessary for a simple 2d game like this (perhaps not for some AAA 3D game of course).

Thank you.

Lots of interesting troubles - quite a few surrounding Unity itself. E.g. they have a physics API that gives different results when run automatically by the engine at 1x speed and when you run it manually as fast as it can go. This came up because I wanted to test every level automatically offline, using the exact same physics simulation as the player would experience.

The procedural generation of the levels was also an interesting problem. I used rejection sampling to basically place non-overlapping circles in a box, but when you want to create quite a dense level this becomes very inefficient (it can be very hard to slot the final few circles in). I tried a number of heuristics and other methods to speed this up, but none of them actually improved over brute force. One of the most interesting was using Gibbs sampling - i.e. generate an initial valid level configuration, then move one planet at a time and sample from the ensuing Markov chain (basically sampling from the marginal distribution of each planet given all the others). This ~kind of worked, but was annoying for a few reasons so in the end I just brute forced rejection sampling on a beefy AWS server :)

Yes, exactly. Have to pay $$ to remove that splash screen logo!

Thanks! I personally wouldn't use Unity again. I've run into so much trouble and so many little bugs. An example: just yesterday I updated Unity itself (a minor patch upgrade), and it broke half the links in my project, I had to manually downgrade some official unity packages to get it to compile, etc. I also find the fact that C# is garbage collected to be very annoying - in a real-time application, I just want total control over when stuff is allocated and deallocated. Even in a simple game such as Astro Golf, I spent ages tracking down silly allocations that lead to stutter-inducing GC. Unity physics is also a right PITA - I could go on and on..

Thank you. Yeah, a fluke trickshot after 10 loopy orbits feels pretty epic!

Do you mean to compare scores after a specific number of levels?

Hi HN,

I just launched this little game of mine - Astro Golf. You can think of it as Desert Golfing but in space, where the gravitation pull of the planets create some interesting levels. I think it was on an HN comment that I first heard about Desert Golfing many moons ago, so it felt fitting to post this back here.

All the levels are procedurally generated, and are guaranteed to be hole-in-one-able. I did this by computationally testing a huge amount of levels offline.

This is my first game, and I learnt a lot doing it. Happy to answer your questions! I hope you enjoy it.

Peace