Kashnox - New Programmer

[Kashnox]

Hey, everyone, I’m Ethan, but I usually go by Kashnox online. I learned about Thrive years ago and now that I finally have the skills I need to contribute, I’m excited to be part of the team.

I don’t have much direct game development experience, but I’ve been working in the simulation industry using C# and Unity for about three years now, so I haven’t had too much trouble understanding the codebase so far.

Every stage of Thrive is really exciting to me, so I’ll probably need some help figuring out where to jump in. For now, I’ve just been taking on random microbe stage bugs because that seems to be what most of the GitHub issues are for, but I’d be happy to help wherever I’m needed.

[hhyyrylainen]

Welcome to the team. Glad to have you onboard. It’s been nice seeing your PRs fixing random stuff that’s been known for a long time. I’m sure everyone will be glad to see many long-standing microbe bugs being taken care of.

Btw if you didn’t see the context yet about the refactor I told you about on Github, it’s this:

Moving to an Entity Component System (ECS)

While working on redoing the game logic using a custom physics engine and just delegating rendering to Godot, I’ve started to re-evaluate using a full Entity Component System (ECS) approach. I just spent a couple of days basically just commenting out code and putting an absolute ton of not implemented exceptions into the code. The most egregious place being the Microbe class, which even when split into multiple files is quite a behemoth. I had originally said that redoing the game with a full EC…

And this for the wider context:

Increasing game performance

Let’s get some information down on the dev forums as well about low performance. So the game seems to drop to low FPS after playing for quite a while. Even dropping to single digit FPS. I’ve already reduced the game entity limit from 1000 to 300, but even that doesn’t fully help, but seem to at least postpone the problem a bit. I’ve done C# profiling: [Kuvakaappaus - 2021-12-05 10-42-11] [Kuvakaappaus - 2021-12-05 10-46-30] And native code profiling: [ima…

[Kashnox]

That sounds good to me. Finding and fixing bugs is one of my favorite things to do as a programmer.

[Thim]

@Kashnox

Finding and fixing bugs is one of my favorite things to do as a programmer.

That is quite a gift. A debugged microbe stage would do a lot for Thrive.

[Deus]

If you have any questions regarding where to find gameplay concepts, please feel free to contact me or any other game design team members. Glad to have you here!

[Kasterisk]

Welcome @Kashnox, good to hear that you’re excited with fixing bugs, certainly nice to have more manpower in our team to do that. My general advice is not to be let down by the eventual barrage of reviews when you’re further on your pull request contributions.