Archive:
I've had a bit of fun with the Steam Runtime, this week. I've recently bought a Framework Desktop machine, and although Eggnob's been running fine, locally, it's been hard-crashing on the Steam Deck and, I later discovered, on the Desktop. In both cases, it looks like a hard crash in the GPU, and in both cases, it's down to the setup of the post processing shaders. And yet, my laptop (also an AMD machine) runs the game fine, locally and through Steam. Er...
This is pretty amusing to me because the shaders are the simplest thing in the world. I wasn't expecting to touch them again, but here we are, on round three. Annnyway, after a lot of digging, it appears that the current Steam runtime, Sniper, is on SDL 3.4.4. My Linux machines are on 3.4.8. SDL_GPU's under a bit of churn atm, for obvious reasons (it's still "new"), but I can see the RADV offsets into libvulken from the coredumps, so I'm reasonable confident that something's changed in the Vulken pipeline creation path.
Part of me wants to know what the actual problem is. It should be fixable by tweaking the shaders. But that's a load debug session, and you know what? I've got better things to do with my life. Eggnob's a good few months away from release. The Steam runtime is going to get updated. It's quite possible that I won't have to fix this, so I've decided to kick the can down the road.
Instead, I added a quick commandline option --disable-post-processing that does what it says on the tin, and changed Steam's launch commands, on Linux, to use it. Yes, this is a hack. Yes, I am very lazy. Ship It! etc...
Eggnob is rapidly approach the point where I can stick a demo up. All the UI is in and working, I have 16 levels, and Andrew from Immortal Joysticks is acting as the first Ben Richards, speed running the game and giving me the odd bit of feedback. What I'd like to get to in the next couple of weeks is a permanent, web playable demo, so I can point people back to the Steam page.
But that needs art. So yesterday I knocked up a quick logo, and Ste Pickford's agreed to do me a loading screen. As soon as that lands, I'll make the million capsules for Steam and get a page up.
Hurrah!
Musings, random thoughts, work in progress screenshots, and occasional swears at Unreal Engine's lack of documentation -- this is a rare insight into what happens when a supposedly professional game developer plans very little up-front, and instead follows where the jokes lead them.
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