Happy new year 2026

I know I am late but I wish you all dear readers and lurkers a Happy New Year 2026, and I hope you have all booked a ship to be in the middle of the Atlantic to gaze upon that total solar eclipse in August! I know I won't be there, I will be in Spain! :grin:

An extremely quick update on several things:

• You may or may not have noticed but many of the updates mentioned here  are now live have been live since around Decembre 27th: entity bookmarks, high precision coordinates system, etc. I did not post about it because I was busy with real life.
• Shaders will have to wait; I have decided to focus on eye candy at a later stage. Or this is an excuse as I am not very good with them and it is taking me fucking forever to move forward on that front 8-}. Take your pick :) The "shader as content" part is deployed though, even if not used.
• I have continued playing with LLMs and NLP, but have decided to go back to this later as well; as NPCs without PCs are not very useful. La charrue avant les boeufs, toussa…

That's it.

BUT. Very very soon some posts about how I have started to work on making this interactive. Why yes, this is about trying to build a game; so expect stuff about:

• Entities: what are the actors and the objects in the game world? How are they defined and how: 1) do you interact with them 2) do they interact with each other? How do they interact with the procedural part of the world?
• Attributes: the building blocks of entities, across types. Interesting normalisation work is in progress here.
• Skills, Traits, etc.: those "extras" on entities that give flavour!
• Actions, logging and replay capabilities, or: the joys of normalisation versus specialisation.
• The Tech tree (on local) has been enriched and perhaps more importantly is starting to be linked to research & blueprints, so to actions, so to skills, so to gameplay.
• And many others linked to damage types, governance systems, detection mediums, movement mediums, faction creation process, production and industrial endeavours, etc.

And last but not least, a crazy and (I think) extremely novel idea that I absolutely love but that worries me because of its technical implications. If I manage this one and do it well, the tactical and strategic opportunities in the game will increase a thousand times.

Stay tuned <3

Edit a bit later: someone extremely close to me, whom I respect deeply and - perhaps more importantly - is an expert power gamer of the 4x genre, has said to me that Adlumens's depth in terms of procedural data is impressive. Now even though this was pleasing to hear, he also told me:

…but you're going to have a hard time creating a game engine that matches it.

In other words, it seems there are a series of hard challenges ahead in terms of depth, complexity, richness of combinations and what not. Scary :-)