iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

loren schmidt @lorenschmidt.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

village generation update: things are in a neat place now, where the villages are newly connected to the world sim. population is synced, and i'm part way making it so resources a town or city has, like ceramics, salt, etc. are actually reflected diegetically!

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A photo of the level editor for System Shock 1 was posted a few years ago, they look very similar, just re-arranged

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The rumor had always been that the editor and game were a single executable, this seems to show that it could flip back and forth between the game view and the editor.

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Holy shit, an old DOS issue of the 90s magazine GameByte included a screenshot of the level editor used for Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 - I don't think I've seen this anywhere before!

Screenshot of the level editor for Ultima Underworld 2 - showing a 3d view of the game on the left, and a 2d tile view on the right.

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Been focusing on NPCs - fixed up their rendering and revived their AI state machine, but biggest of all: the Babl conversation VM was recoverable and is working again!

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is looking so rad lately!

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Living in the Bay is 90% complaining about which of the two companies d’jour is ruining housing prices, and then traveling anywhere else and going “but I would never live here though”

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

ⓘ chloe @unluckychloe.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

terrain litter

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Stats screen is starting to work too! That flip is wild, they capture the screen and then draw a series of squished and cropped rectangles to fake perspective.

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Inventory and HUD are a lot more solid now. Working on this has made me wish more games let you nest bags in bags

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Also starting to get some more object types like Critters, and 3d objects like the Doors and Door Frames rendering

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Ultima Underworld uses the same 'pick index buffer' drawing that System Shock used to get pixel accurate picking

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Movement is a bit more solid, object sprites are starting to show. Revived the scroll output too!

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

These are real software rendered triangles! TTLG always did things the complicated way.

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Haven’t found the entry into the 3d world rendering yet, but the level looks to be loading properly. If I hack my way into the automap and reveal everything

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

That’s a very sober take on things, this does seem to be a path for open source projects

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Character generation is looking much better now, that weird rectangle in chargen was a special color that was telling the next draw to pull from a saved buffer instead of being stomped on. Now trying to get in game!

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Wiring up some sleeps and palette fades has things looking a bit better, also fixed up the main menu buttons

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Interestingly this simple rect fill is not that simple, it also seems to have a mode selector, and if set there are two special palette colors - 20 and 21 - which do a temp buffer save and restore respectively

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The blank rectangle on the left is the current mystery - this code seems to be a rect fill with a set pen color, but what it seems like it should be doing is marking that area of the screen as 'do not draw here'

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Made some more progress, revived some of the mouse code which was mangled due to this port using a stylus and not a mouse. That black area at the bottom of the screen is actually an on screen keyboard that can be clicked on!

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

So far this can get into character creation but most of the text does not render, except for the very end at the 'Enter a name' step. Continuing past this also just loops to the start of character creation again

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Interesting note: the Pocket PC ran the game rotated 90 degrees in portrait mode, so the framebuffer is actually 240x320 and not 320x240, to display properly it needs to be rotated back before drawing in SDL

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

So far this stubs out the Pocket PC hardware functions so that we can use SDL instead. So far we can draw the framebuffer to the screen and can do some basic keyboard input

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Doing this on OSX makes this even more difficult as we can't just compile for 32 bit, have to port to 64 bit along the way

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Adventures in decompiling Ultima Underworld! Decompiling the DOS build gives an inscrutable mess, but the Power PC port looks more promising as the assembly code seems to have been ported to C for this port

The main menu background for Ultima Underworld's Pocket PC port

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Secret of Evermore: * Assemble a party of people with special interests based on different time periods * Oh no! You Have Been Isakai'd * Each session you're in a new weird village based on one of those time periods * Also there is a dog * who changes breed based on location

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 13/08/2026

I feel like an issue that would connect well with voters would be doing anything at all to slow the current progression toward "absolutely everything now is a scam"

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

Brendon Chung @blendogames.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I wrote a post comparing Quakeguy 1996 to remastered Quakeguy 2021 blendogames.com/news/post/20...

2 similar-looking quakeguys standing next to each other

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Speaking of Sokol and Imgui, is there an example showing how to draw a Sokol texture in Imgui? When upgrading Delve to Zig 0.16 I noticed that `imgui.igImage` now seems to require both a TexId and TexData, wanted to see how to wire that up.

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

brendan mordheim @brendanmcleod.dev · 06/08/2026

I used the power of the One Ring. I recognize that it's evil, and I expect a lot of people to be mad at me for using it. Sorry! However, I plan to continue using it. Here's why: (1/62)

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

Helm @helmll.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

one of the hardest images ever made

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen.com · 16/07/2026

done this before but now can't find it, so... posting this so i can find it again from an old remedy talk. max payne level design scale. his house before and after they realised you can't just build shit at real-life scale and expect it to work as a level. i am always pulling this out for folks

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

Robin-Yann Storm @rystorm.com · 15/07/2026

I keep seeing arguments for games being expensive due to hyper realistic expectations for art, or simply lots of art. What I don’t see is the actual most costly reason: Indecision Iteration is good, but the yearly rebuilding of entire characters, storylines, and levels, is the most expensive thing

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

"The input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors wrote those, not the search query!" Yes, chefkiss

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

When the source code of old games is found or open sourced, it is more than just some instructions that can produce a build artifact. You can read through and get a window into the creation of that work, and potentially how the idea shifted in phenomenological time.

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

loren schmidt @lorenschmidt.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

bridges (complete with a new bug where a high bridge stomped a low bridge)

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Like Tolkien knew, sometimes the best thing is to write a scathing reply letter and then file it away in your desk forever.

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

Ranged Touch @rangedtouch.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

SHELVED BY GENRE has begun THE RETURN OF THE KING, so come get Bilbofied with us: rangedtouch.com/2026/07/03/t...

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

This is such a vibe. Would your renderer allow you to add spikes or columns of pixels for grass?

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Chad Cuddigan @cuddigan.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

agents feeding bad data to agents down the chain ad-Infinitum

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Reposted by Chad Cuddigan

Trudi Castle @trudicastle.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Been playing the remake of Starfox 64 - I think these graphic are how I always saw it in my head! Slippy tries his best ;D

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