I thought I should start a little series of monthly blog posts to show progress on the game. This will be a nice way for me to track my own progress on the project as well. This first one will include a bit of april, too, due to it being the series opener.

Updated (2023-07-09): Vidme links replaced

Introduction⌗

Since this is the first post I thought I’d talk about what I’m doing.

I’m building a game called (currently) UniverCity, a simulation game inspired by Theme Hospital. The player will manage a university: hiring staff, building rooms, managing student happiness, etc. The game has been built with multiplayer in mind so that you can compete with your friends and potentially sabotage their university. The game is still very much a work in progress.

I’m building it in Rust using SDL2 for window management/audio, OpenGL for rendering and LuaJIT for scripting. It’s been a bit challenging so far because whilst I’ve written Rust code in the past I’ve never done anything on this scale (the same could be said about most other languages I’ve programmed in, though). The only large, open-source Rust projects I currently know about are rustc and Servo, both of which have different structures when compared to a game engine (servo might be close but I struggle navigating its repo). I feel like my issues so far are due to a lack of experience rather than Rust, however, and that I’ll get better at handling this as I go on.

Bar me running into a wall with some design issues Rust has been pretty pleasant to work in. cargo makes using small libraries to handle common tasks easy. The error messages for compile errors are great and getting better all the time; I’ve almost never found myself confused by one. I’ve been stuck on nightly for a while now but I’m one unstable feature away from stable (retain_hash_collection) Update Just was marked stable before publishing this in the latest nightly (and beta), will be in stable in a few weeks. Even so, nightly breakages have been rare, and when it has happened rustup makes it easy to rollback. I’ve managed to keep unsafe code to a minimum, with the only exceptions currently being:

  • Access of components outside the ECS

    I’m using my own currently but using specs could solve this. (I started around the time specs came into being/slightly before, so I ended up creating my own). It can be done safely in some cases with my system but the unsafe method allows skipping a lookup per entity which helps with performance (the unsafe methods are generally only used during rendering).

  • Scripting

    Whilst I’ve made a safe wrapper around luajit now, a lot of my code still uses a State struct (below) to work around borrow issues. This occured because before using a safe wrapper, raw pointers were passed into lua hiding the borrowing issues; now it’s gotten to the point where changing it has become too hard. This is something I really want to fix because it’s one of the ugliest parts of my game’s code, but I’m at a loss at how to solve this nicely.

    Update: After writing this I attempted to solve this issue. I was able to fix ui and audio (below) by changing to Rc<RefCell<T>> for those types (handled internally for the most part) and storing a weak reference to them in lua’s registry. The only issue left is the level which is the only part of GameInstance that is actually used by lua. This is complicated because the level uses scripting to build some rooms and to place every type of object whilst also having to be accessible from lua. It might be possible to split up the level struct more to try and solve this but i’m somewhat lost on where to split.

$ rg "State" | wc -l
818

#[derive(Clone, Copy)]
pub struct State {
    ui: *mut ui::Elements,
    instance: *mut instance::GameInstance,
    audio: *mut audio::AudioController,
}

Gameplay⌗

Timetables for students⌗

Students now have timetables generated for them once they have registered at the registration office.

These timetables currently can have 4 entries on them (may change later). Each entry can either be a lesson (bound to a room) or a free period allowing the student to idle and relax. When generating a timetable the game will only pick lessons from the same ‘group’ as the first lesson and will not select the same lesson twice. Lessons with students already registered to them will be prefered over empty rooms. Free periods are currently randomly inserted.

Right now students are stuck with the first timetable they get which causes issues when rooms are removed. The plan is for students to re-register (or leave) at the end of an in-game term.

Money⌗

HUD display money and the current rating

Staff, rooms and objects now have a cost and will charge the player to place them. Students can now pay the player as well.

Staff have to be paid every 7 in-game days. Currently this is done based on the time they were initially placed and not on a schedule, behavior that should hopefully be fixed later.

Rooms charge once fully placed and not during placement, making playing around with the design of the room cheaper. When editing the room the cost of removed objects (or that gained by shrinking the room) can be used to place new objects. Any money unspent when finalizing the edit, however, will be lost.

Redrawn icons⌗

Before After

Improved the look of icons on the ui. Previously a pixel art style was used but I’ve changed over to a sketchy style instead. I feel this new style fits in better with the paper theme the ui currently has going on.

Notification system⌗

The look is complete, but the system itself is currently a bare-bones implementation. It will be used to notify the player of events occuring during the game.

A video of this system may be found here

Chairs/Benches⌗

Chairs A bench

Chairs and benches were added. Students will automatically sit in chairs during a lecture. The number of chairs affects the number of students a room can support (controller via a script).

Benches will be a place for a student to idle during free periods. At some point students may also use this whilst waiting for a staff member to enter a room.

Idling⌗

Students can be assigned to rooms marked as can_idle during free periods. This functions like a lesson where a script handles what the student does in the room, except that the room isn’t fixed. Rooms are randomly selected (slightly biased towards closer rooms) and students will attempt to switch rooms after a random amount of time. Students will stop their idle task as soon as a lesson starts.

Extensions⌗

Extension joining two buildings

An extension object was added that allows for two buildings to be joined together. Originally you could overlap buildings to join them but this introduced a lot of hard-to-handle edge cases; using an extension object solved a lot of these issues and allows for more control over the joins of two buildings.

Work on having random colors for units⌗

Random colours for professors

Video showing more. To try and make staff/students feel more unique I’ve started to work on a feature that allows for entities to randomly colours parts of their model. Currently these colours are selected from the entity’s json file but that does limit the number of colors I have to work with (mainly because listing them all is a pain). I also need to work on syncing these colours between the server and client.

Text wrapping on UI elements⌗

Simple enough but was something that had been missing for a while. Still have a few places that need updating to use it but the implementation exists now.

Walls are lowered during editing⌗

This replaces the transparent effect I was using before. Easier to render and solves a lot of the graphical glitches that the old effect had.

Moving/removing objects⌗

Objects can now be removed via a right click or moved via a left click. Saves having to dig up the whole room everytime you made a mistake.

Limited mode editing⌗

This allows for rooms to be edited whilst containing other rooms. This works like normally editing a room but prevents the removal or resizing of the room. Removing/resizing will work once all contained rooms are removed.

Overhead icons⌗

Entities can now have icons above their head to display a message to the player. Currently this is used for paying (money icon) and confusion (question marks). This will be used later to display happiness or other emotions.

Initial work on audio⌗

Nothing major but scripts can now play non-positional audio. I currently use this for button presses (although I’m not happy with the current sound).

Internal⌗

Wrapper types⌗

In order to keep the code clean a few types have been changed from raw integers to wrapper types. This changes nothing at runtime but prevents confusion when using them. e.g.:

i16 -> player::Id

i16 -> room:Id

i64 -> UniDollar

In the case of UniDollar operator overloading is used to make sure the value is used in a way that makes sense

// Valid - Returns UniDollar
dollar * 5
// Invalid
dollar * dollar
// Valid - Returns i64
dollar / dollar
// etc..

Removed usage of conservative_impl_trait⌗

Whilst I love this feature, I do want to start moving towards the stable compiler, and this doesn’t seem like it’s going to be stable for a while. Most usages of this that I changed just exposed the private type to the public (although one did require boxing the type instead).

Improved server side checks of commands⌗

The server ended up being too trusting in some cases. Some extra checks have been added to ensure the player is in the correct state for a command.

Pathfinding queue⌗

Previously all pathfinding requests were handled instantly. This started to cause issues at the end of lessons where almost every entity will try to request a path. This has been changed to a queue where paths are generated every tick up to a time limit; once the time limit is reached the queue will wait until the next tick to continue processing paths. This will cause a small delay for entities getting paths during busy periods but prevents freezing the game, which would be worse.