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1

SFML projects / Re: Axioms Of Dominion, An Empire Forging Game

« on: May 28, 2022, 01:20:55 am »

No super interesting new images yet but I'm getting close to the point where I will want to fancify the UI a bit. currently using the default TGUI black theme and some border coloring. Most of my current work is on the AI and some upkeep on the multithreading as I advance the UI complexity. Also got a shitton of performance optimization outside multi-threading and heavily optimized the RAM usage. Of course a large map with lots of characters, 5-7 digits or so, could in theory use up 256GB of RAM. Sadly I can't test that till I splurge on some new RAM and a new CPU.

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SFML projects / Re: Axioms Of Dominion, An Empire Forging Game

« on: April 01, 2022, 04:44:44 am »

I wrote a couple new design posts that are very interesting recently. I also did a lot of work with TGUI, which uses an SFML backend, for the menus and UI.

This is a blog post about adding social simulation gameplay to Axioms, which is a fantasy strategy simulation game with heavy RPG elements. Unlike something like Crusader Kings there is actually a lot for characters to do.

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p/social-simulations-and-genre-blending?r=i2fsj&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

These are some recent game screenshots. The game map and interface are something I'm going to finalize well into development so they are basically in dev mode now but people love pictures:

https://imgur.com/a/g6EGR5P

https://imgur.com/HgKSM8d

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SFML projects / Re: Axioms Of Dominion, An Empire Forging Game

« on: January 20, 2022, 01:23:05 am »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/s/axioms-development-blog

There is a subsection of my substack for my development blog. Basically talking about what I'm doing. Try to post several times a week. Recently? Just grinding out some code changes from library updates from TGUI and SFML and doing a ton of refactoring of systems that support core systems. Almost got the basic loop functioning after all the changes. Conquering stuff, making deals with the AI, and some of the economic stuff.

My current hurdle that is giving me a compile time based break right now is that when you don't have traditional "nations/factions" as the core of gameplay but pure character relationships, and characters and their associated populations can move around, it is hard to have a good model for who "owns" a province. Been slowly cleaning up code related to that and getting a solid model and figuring out how to display that on a map mode or two.

Especially in the case of mobile, if not actually nomadic, tribes and stuff like that, how do you define control over territory? And since characters and their relationships are what define the political landscape, you can just have giant homogenuous swaths of color in the style of a traditional map painter.

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SFML projects / Re: Axioms Of Dominion, An Empire Forging Game

« on: January 14, 2022, 03:31:25 am »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p/tribal-politics-in-the-age-of-exploration-25a?r=i2fsj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Have a new design post and an upcoming companion post focusing on development related to classical tribal populations.

Also doing somework in TGUI, which uses SFML, to add recursive tooltips. Think I'll do action based tooltip locks instead of timed ones.

So far TGUI, and SFML proper have both been pretty useful doing almost anything I need to do.

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SFML projects / Re: Axioms Of Dominion, An Empire Forging Game

« on: January 09, 2022, 05:09:55 am »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p/attention-points-and-attention-economy?r=i2fsj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

This is a description of the likely controversial attention points system. Actions in Axioms will cost points, currently out of 1000, usually 2-8 but sometimes 1, 9, or 10 or in theory higher. Sadly a time based limit wasn't feasible so AP is the best solution. A ruler can't do everything.

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SFML projects / Re: Axioms Of Dominion, An Empire Forging Game

« on: January 06, 2022, 03:38:17 pm »

Sounds like fun! Do you have website with visuals or screenshots from the UI? I didn't find any on your game design website.

So these images except maybe the icons aren't representative of the final result but the good enough stuff for getting all the mechanics working.

Debugging some stuff:
https://imgur.com/a/23cnnra

A Randomly Generated Map:
https://i.imgur.com/pJGGiKy.png

Unique colors for province detection on maps:
https://imgur.com/q6ueCG4.png

Icons:

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SFML projects / Re: Axioms Of Dominion, An Empire Forging Game

« on: January 02, 2022, 06:22:07 pm »

This has been on pause for roughly 4 years because of life circumstances but I am working on it now and I'd like to release it in winter 2022 at least as early access though a full release is probable and preferred.

You can follow just design discussion at my substack which is free:
https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/

I'd put it at around 40% done. Most of the SFML and TGUI stuff is pretty settled aside from the UI panel design stuff.

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Graphics / Re: Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 28, 2016, 06:10:21 pm »

I am stupid, so sorry. Apparently the problem was that I was foolishly using a 32-bit application like a giant dufus. I recompiled SFML-2.4.0 and TGUI-0.7.1 and then my own project with the mingw-w64 compiler. I screwed it up repeatedly last night somehow but this morning I finally got everything right. 10000 provinces went all the way to 2.4GB of memory. I expect it'll go to more when the game is in full swing. Luckily 64 bit doesn't really care so I'm in the clear. Thanks for the help guys.

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Graphics / Re: Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 28, 2016, 04:45:29 am »

Okay so I upgraded to TGUI-0.7.1 and SFML-2.4.0.

Although every image, they are .bmp, is the same size of 36MB they range in unique province colors between 1000 and 10000. 6000 and up crashes, 4000 and down loads properly and I haven't tested any in between.

I assume when uncompressed the difference in number of unique colors causes them to be wildly different sizes?

Would switching to .png make any difference?

The total image size is 4096x3072 if that matters.

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Graphics / Re: Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 27, 2016, 03:58:07 pm »

As far as I know textures in vram are not compressed, so they may take quite more place. And YOU do load it to vram somewhere by using sf::Texture, sf::Image itself stores everything in RAM, and if it crashes, there may be some problem with SFML. If you want to draw it, you should divide it into smaller pieces, place in sf::Image/s and dynamically create sf::Textures to upload those to VRAM. However it can be pretty slow. Maybe lower image's resolution?

No image doesn't crash as far as I know. It's a map which is why it has that resolution. The only reason it appears to crash is that it has more unique colors. Otherwise the images are identical. Also apparently you can load 3 or more images with half as many colors but one image with 6000 fills memory. Seems weird.

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Graphics / Re: Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 27, 2016, 02:29:02 pm »

The problem is most likely your vRAM in GPU being too small to load image to its memory. Hover it can be contained within your normal RAM, so sf::Image methods work properly, as they use image stored as array of pixels.

I thought it might be that. I should have quite a bit of vram but ah well. Is there a way to force it to stay in RAM?

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Graphics / Re: Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 27, 2016, 03:06:36 am »

I attempted to run the program with different province counts on the map. It worked at 4000. At 7000 it closed with code 0x3. At 6000 I got some useful errors:

An internal OpenGL call failed in Texture.cpp <161> : GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY, there is not enough memory left to execute the command

An internal OpenGL call failed in Texture.cpp <375> : GL_INVALID_VALUE, a numeric argument is out of range

The game proceeded to post this error each time I load the image and then continued to run. The GUI works, the image appears to exist and I can even use the unique province colors plus getPixel to color pick and cause TGUI to put up proper province data. However the image outside of TGUI GUI panels is pure white.

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Graphics / Re: Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 26, 2016, 03:57:13 pm »

What the size (width and height) of your image?

5000 by 3000 more or less. I don't have exact values cause I'm at work.

I load a base image of the same size all blue for water then I add land then I color 10000 uniquely colored provinces and then I exit out and start again but go to the play game mode instead of map gen. That's why I don't understand why it won't load again as it was initially made/modified by sfml already. Is sfml checking against a smaller amount of memory than the program is?

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Graphics / Re: AW: Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 26, 2016, 02:44:15 pm »

What's the exact error message you get?
What's the overall memory usage of your application? What's your OS? What version of SFML are you running?

SFML 2.0, task manager says about 1.3gigs, Windows 7. Its also just a standard bitmap image. None of these things were different previously when it was working and I've had the memory use higher. The exact error message is just: "Failed to load image "". Reason: Out of memory. I guess it was crashing earlier with just Code::Blocks saying cxa_throw() so I moved a vector initialization ahead of the image load. But the vector doesn't affect the image so there does seem to be some sort of memory limit thing going on.

Actually checking again, the crash comes from this: Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
In sf::Image::getPixel (this=0x7cdc1ff8, x=3566, y=1950) at D:\sfml-release\_Sources\SFML\src\SFML\Graphics\Image.cpp:281 ()

Presumably because you can't use getPixel on an image that doesn't load. But I've got 8 gigs on ram and I'm not even close to that so I can't figure out why I'm getting an our of memory error.

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Graphics / Out of memory when loading image?

« on: October 26, 2016, 07:43:42 am »

I get an error which I previously hadn't gotten without much of a change to explain it. I'm loading an image and I get an error saying I'm out of memory. I have plenty of ram left and similar images had loaded fine before. Does SFML have some sort of memory limit I'm not aware of for this function:

sf::Image *ImageManager::addImage(std::string imgPath) {
    sf::Image *image = new sf::Image();
    if (!image->loadFromFile(imgPath))
    {
        // error...
    }
    images.push_back(image);
    return image;
}

Specifically load from file? For reference the image is only 36865KB.