Noticed you guys made an online leaderboard for demon knives and it appears you rolled your own solution. Did some snooping in procmon, where I can see you're using ovh (I assume bc of their "unmetered" bandwidth and ddos protection) for a vps and using a funny port number. So I got the hosting bit figured out, now I'm wondering if anyone has any resources/insights/lessons learned for actually coding the leaderboards. All I've ever looked at was steam's leaderboard api, which is pretty limited. I assume what you guys are doing is something very simple, like a simple sql db with a server program to respond to "get top scores" and "post score" requests. However, I ask anyway because anything with networking usually has some caveats and needs to be developed a bit more "defensively."

i was tinkering with adding the bloom shader example to my game. whenever the game tries to make a new world file it crashes. it says the error happens when setting up a new world file but i don't think the world file creation is at fault because it's code hasn't changed and if I go back to before i tried adding shader stuff it works fine. so my best guess is i setup the shader code poorly and it is causing some sort of memory corruption? honestly i have no idea what's going on and could use some help.

so a problem Iv been running into is how to make an optimized serializer for my floor thing. the main problem is the higher I put the limits for everything the more space each floor takes even if its not being used. like if the enemy per floor limit is 1000 but there's currently only 1 enemy on the floor it takes the same amount of space in memory as if 1000/1000 enemy slots were active as the size has to be reserved for them ahead of time or else there's out of memory error. I found a fix that makes it so that even if the max floors is 1000 that if you have only generated like 3 floors the save file will be tiny: u64 everything_but_floors = offsetof(World, floors); u64 active_floors = world -> active_floors * sizeof(FloorData); u64 all_save_data = everything_but_floors + active_floors; so it only saves the first X floor slots where X is the active floor amount and I think I could do something similar for the enemies and other stuff but it might be tough. the other problem is that if you do use all 1k floors the save file is still 1 GB or so which seems pretty large. if any serialize guru's have cooler ways to optimize stuff id be interested. Another fix I tried to do is to just load one floor at a time as was suggested to me before in a previous q&a, I feel like if I could figure this one out it would be a huge deal. but i was running to some problems last time I tried implementing the loading one floor at a time thing because serialization is tough for me i guess, I might give it another try soon.

Anyone got a plug on a quality pack for some drum one-shots? kick, clap, hats, etc. Happy if it's relatively low-cost as well, like <$10

SOLUTION: In your bloom shaders, you want to add this "if statement". To correctly draw the text. if (input.type == QUAD_TYPE_TEXT) return color; QUESTION: I'm currently halfway done with implementing Bloom in my game. I have a problem with text, when using the draw_text_in_frame it renders a rectangle instead of the text. I will attach an image example: It would be nice if the text could be rendered with the bloom shader. My current workaround is to draw_text after the shaders are done. Like how the buttons in the example are rendered.