Linux Gets Vulkan, DOR Card Creator is Born

First off, I’d like to publicly thank the person who was kind enough to make a $30 toward the development of the remake. You’re awesome. 

In my free time this week, I decided to install Ubuntu 20.04 to a separate hard drive in my computer. I was able to successfully install Unity Hub and the latest versions of the Unity Editor on Linux with relative ease. The “hardest” part of the install was marking the executable bit on the AppImage, then remembering I needed to install Blender. Oops. Kudos to Unity for their Linux experience!

To my dismay, OpenGL 4.2 has a bug with render textures. I only use render textures in two spots: the terrain preview, and the new Card Creator Card Preview (more on that later). As you can see, the card preview is missing in this image:

The camera preview shows up confirming it’s not a problem in the camera, rather a problem in the OpenGL renderer or in my graphics drivers. I’m currently running Intel HD 4000 graphics (my graphics card is being passed through to a VM, more on that another day). The fix was actually to switch to Vulkan renderer.

Vulkan performance on Intel is a little unstable, but that might also be the Unity editor and the fact that I’m running it on Potato graphics. The frame rate spikes between 80fps - 110fps at times, but the render texture works, and our live card preview works!

That naturally brings me in to the next small piece I’m developing: the DOR Card Creator.

This will eventually become the tool to let you create and share modified cards in the game, but for now I’m creating it because I need help!

With this tool, you’ll be able to create a custom card, preview it as it will appear in game, and set up fusion lists and card effects. It’s still in its early days, but if you’ve ever written C# before I’m sure you have an idea of how this small tool works. Reflection is a beautiful thing!

Card definitions will export as JSON, you can create custom cards all you want and setup fusions for cards already defined in the game (NOTE: In the initial release of the card editor, you will only be able to setup fusions for cards already in the game. First version will include the approximately 700 monster cards gathered from the game’s data. Once the game has mod support, the tool will also get mod support).

I plan to include this with the final game, as a bonus for beating the game. Until then, this week I will be releasing it as a standalone tool so stay tuned for that. 

It’s time to make a credits screen so I can thank everyone who’s helped with development, either by donation or by submitting card definitions.