u/PhonicUK

Why? They function as a complete snapshot of the servers state. You can roll back in time, try something different, then go back where you were originally. It's more like a time machine than a standard backup facility.

The actual file and directory structure is preserved, so in Minecraft for example, chunk files that weren't previously present in the first snapshot get removed. Restoring to a newer snapshot brings them back.

You can have both full and partial snapshots, you can choose whether to include everything including the base data and configuration, or just the application state.

Restoring a snapshot automatically takes a new one of the present state so you can't accidentally lose something you didn't intend to.

I thought it was fast when I hit 25K tris/second, but further optimisations and tweaks have pushed this to an absolutely absurd 40K tris/second, so over 600 on-screen triangles at 60fps on an ESP32 S3.

This is all running on my open-sourced Jet renderer - https://github.com/CubeCoders/Jet

These improvements were made largely by reducing how much memory was having to be copied around and sorted per-frame, along with some minor SIMD operations to optimise memory copying. Basically it's been less about the speed of the actual rasterizer and more about alleviating the memory bottleneck.

I left it in CPU controlled but this is an entirely playable game. I plan soon to introduce cross-platform multiplayer so you can play an ESP32 and a PC head-to-head, just because I can.

I've shown off my (now open source!) Jet renderer a few times, but the S3 is full of surprises.

So, for my next trick - real time screen space reflections with distortion for water ripples, lens flare, bumped from 4 to 8 ships. This is now down to about 45-50FPS instead of 60 but it's worth it for how it looks, and I'm pretty sure I can recover some of that speed back still :)

The water ripple works due to the way that rendering uses the painters algorithm. Further away objects are rendered before near ones, so by the time we render the water nearer to us, the further away object it's reflecting is already in the frame buffer. This allows the reflection to be done in a single pass rather than requiring an additional pass after rendering the rest of the scene. This makes it relatively friendly to the cache on the ESP32 S3 since we've only recently drawn the pixels that we're now reflecting.

Engine source is available at https://github.com/CubeCoders/Jet

I've shown off my (now open source!) Jet renderer a few times, but the S3 is full of surprises.

So, for my next trick - real time screen space reflections with distortion for water riples, lens flare, bumped from 4 to 8 ships. This is now down to about 45-50FPS instead of 60 but it's worth it for how it looks, and I'm pretty sure I can recover some of that speed back still :)

So - this was an absolute ball ache, but it works.

No Hyper-V, no Windows Pro requirement, no Kubernetes, no Alpine - just the server running on a plain Debian / Ubuntu / whatever Linux distro without too much extra mess. We still recommend that you use AMPs own containerisation for this because it'll save a few minor headaches.

You can read a little more about what the requirements are here: https://discourse.cubecoders.com/t/dune-awakening-server-guide/40200

Getting this into something simple and turnkey on normal Linux systems was absolutely absurd. But very worth it.

A couple of weeks ago I showed off Jet, my ultra-fast 3D renderer that could run on the ESP32: https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/1sunrkh/ive_been_building_a_wipeout_style_3d_game_this_is/

I've just released the source under the AGPL 3.0 licence!

I can't wait to see what you all do with it!

The track is procedurally generated at startup time, I've got 3x Ai players with collision avoidance. Physics and collisions work great and let ships nudge each other around.

This is using an ST7796 SPI display. As I said in the title this is doing interlaced updates using two half height buffers leveraging both CPU cores so one draws the next frame while the other takes care of IO.

This is a fully custom 3D engine, right now its got a set of directives turned on to only do the fastest style which is solid filled triangles with no lighting.

The shadow dynamically adjusts to match the track surface and ship orientation but is other a flat outline of the ship as a separate model. There's about 2000 on screen triangles peak.