Just another update.

I initially planned to write something new for the blog, but the FB post came out so well that I think we will go with it:

This was a long time of silence :( As you know I'm always struggling with finding topics that I think are interesting. The last six months were interesting ones. They were full of surprises, tough decisions, and some easy ones but in the last 19 years, the project is still pretty much a constant in my life. I'm also one of the lucky ones whose family supports me in what I do even if sometimes I do not understand my motivation behind this project. I'm also happy that I do not need to work on this project alone and some people still follow it even if sometimes I'm lazy with posting new stuff.

The project like always moving forward but at the same time not moving as fast as I would want it to move. Still, there is some stuff that we managed to do. Created SDF text built into the engine that will give us nicer UI, decal support, text in the scene support, improvement for lighting in the level, and improvements in the animation system (this one came with some funny screenshots, guess which ones :D), tools improvements, and a lot more things that I not necessarily remember.

 

There is sadly one common theme in all of this work. There is some "deposit" that we need to put before we would be able to work on some new stuff. Currently, we are trying to use some resources from other people NatureManufacture, and Rokoko to make them usable in our technology. To achieve this we need to make importers, add shaders, and make some changes and fixes in our pipeline. This will save us time later but for now, pay the price in time and changes in technology (which is not necessarily bad).

So we put the visual part of the work on the game for now on hold and focused on the way Twinsen will behave in the game and the tooling that will allow us to make it the best we can. We also still following our quest to bring the new Twinsen model to the game in all its glory.

As you can see there is a lot of stuff happening and even more will be coming soon. We just need some more time.

Doubts

We always forget how time flies by. Here we are in the second month of 2025 and there is no update regards Tribute. For this worrying that we gave up, we can guarantee that we did not. There is still a lot of progress in the project even if doubts are sneaking into our minds.

We mostly dig through code and try to make something usable from what we have but it is not easy. Balancing life and work on this personal project is challenging at times. This is not only because of lack of time but also because of motivation.

These days more and more we catch ourselves being lost in what we do, and that is why we started writing down the final version of the story with dialog and all the events. This is to gain more focus on what we do. The whole thing starts with:

Every story has a beginning and the good ones hardly ever start in the prison. That is why ours starts at home with the warm sound of cracking wood in the fireplace. In the background, a TV set plays on some news channel reporting on a lively speech given by the Fun Frock. He speaks about people who call themselves "the rebels" and are a threat to the peace on the planet. (...)

 L.B.A. : Tribute - story

While writing down the stuff we try to catch thoughts that sneak around our heads. This is not always easy as they sometimes hard well. There are days when things look like TV series about making games and there are these other days when nothing goes right. 

Still, we preserve and try to do what we can. We switch to different tasks, trying to approach things from different angles but this is not always helpful. We are just humans and humans are flawed. This is also what is so impressive about us. We are flawed but at the same time, we can reforge these flaws into our strengths and create impressive creations.

We want to believe that this will be the case with Tribute. What we learn by resolving our current problems will become the foundation that will make the final product better. In this place, we want to congratulate the team of the official remake of L.B.A. for succeeding in shipping the game. This is not an easy task.

And this is all for now, We are getting back to working on the project as the game will not make itself. 

  

Free-talk

I feel like I should write about something to show that we still work on the project but there is not really a lot to write about this time. In such a moment I always feel lost with the direction of the post, so let's not have a direction and drift across different topics. Project related and not. Give me info on how you like this kind of content.

Getting older for some is scary. I discovered that over time I'm more and more satisfied with what I have and what I achieved. I feel like I'm getting wiser, partially because I realize how stupid some of my decisions are. This is somehow normal, we are all humans (I do not include bots parsing this text) and because of that, there is more than just logic behind our decisions.

This applies to everyday decisions and work-related ones. Some mistakes are easy to solve. Have a chat, apologize, repair something. Others are just impossible to resolve or have long-term consequences that we do not want to fix.

My decision to start Tribute on custom technology is one of them. I somehow cannot give up on this idea as it influenced my personal and professional life. This is a big thing for me to make a reality but times fly by and there are these frustrated friends who I meet only because I working on Tribute :

This whole journey is awesome and at the same time a terrifying one because you alway think what would happen if you decide to quit? What this all years of work would mean? In the end you just push it aside and do stuff.

Of course I talk a lot about how we do this stuff, and you need to believe that we do them. For example, the last few weeks have brought so many good things that only people working with technology would really appreciate. But I'm one of them and I want to do this cool stuff but at the same time I want to make the game but I'm not always in the mood for it.

Thinking about the reasons, there is a lot of them. There is my day job which occupies 8 hours of my life and pay for it. There is time spent with family that is needed to preserve sanity, but there are also other everyday tasks. This way before we notice I am tired or do not have enough energy or time to really dig into the world of the Twinsen. When this happens I prefer to work on more technical aspects of the game as they just require less involvement. There is a problem, and you trying to solve it.

There are also these moments when I am finally able to enter THE ZONE, and it is an awesome experience. It's just you and the world of Twinsen. The only limitations are my skills and imagination. This does not happen a lot but when it is it is a time when the locations you seen are born, where untold lore is created and everything takes shape. But as I started this is just a moment and before anyone notices things bring me back to reality and it is time to once again pick some more technical aspects that require less involvement but move the project forward.

And I believe that there are things to look forward to.

Tribute, quo vadis?

Things never stay the same, this is a constant in life.

I experienced this a lot in the last half a year. I finished working for Unity Technologies and moved back to Poland to live with my girlfriend. I started a new consulting job for which I created my own company. I of course named it "Coffemonsters". Things are good.

This could potentially be the end of the post, but then it would be a short and boring one 😁 I'm curious how many of you noticed a foreshadowing of problems.

1... 2... 3...

When I created the company I was happy that finally, "Coffemonsters" is something more than just a name. I'm still happy about it but some problems came with it. On one sunny day, I went for a walk and realized that there was a potential problem regarding Tribute.

Till now we were making things under this name as individuals. This was ok as we were creating a Tribute for the game we liked. Now with Coffemonsters being a company, this means that we could step on the toes of 2.21 :( So what to do now?

I did the most oblivious thing that was to do. Give up on the project. No... just joking. I wrote to Ben from 2.21 and just asked him directly if this would be a problem. I had nothing to lose. What I learned is:

• He knows who I am and that I work on Tribute.
• He is ok with us continuing to work on the project.
• They really care about LBA and its community.

So nothing changed, we are still continuing work on the project. We also really encourage you to support the upcoming remake from 2.21. I believe they are doing the best they can to bring to us once again the magic of the Twinsen universe.

Changes in graphics

People following the project with interest in its technical aspects know that the L.B.A. Tribute runs on OpenGL. This graphics API was introduced in 1992 and by some, it is loved while by others, hated. These days you may hear an opinion that it is inferior compared to DirectX.

In reality, the answer is more complex. OpenGL evolved from its original form and these days the current stable release carries version 4.6 which was released in 2017. I mention that because on the internet, you can still find tutorials and people using OpenGL 1.4 from 2002  and claiming that it is inefficient and not modern. 

In reality, if you look at the API that OpenGL 4.6 offers, you will see that it is closer to the Vulkan API than OpenGL 1.4. We ourselves used multiple versions of OpenGL and in these 18 years, we learned how to use it efficiently, grew fond of it, and these days have a large sentiment for it. But even we understand that in the game industry, nothing stays the same. Things moving forward, GPU architecture evolving, API changing, and modern tooling focus more on supporting Vulkan and DX12.

This was visible when we recently tried to improve our shaders compilation pipeline. Our goal was to combine SPIR-V which is us for Vulkan with OpenGL. Based on documentation it should work without any problems but in practice, our attempt was only partially successful. We managed to use it for shader compilation which gave us uniform errors across different vendors. But it also failed to load the SPIR-V shader in OpenGL which was our goal. All our attempts to use it resulted in not passing some data to the shaders. We even tried examples from other people. But even they failed for our machines which was a sad discovery.

Another example of issues with OpenGL was when we were tracking graphical issues. Each of them was a small issue with the API usage that potentially could be caught by the debug layer in Vulkan. In the end, all the tools for OpenGL did not give us clear information that something went wrong and we needed to spend a significant amount of time to track them down. For people interested in graphics we are currently using RenderDoc and Nvidia Nsight Graphics. Looking only at them we have a feeling that OpenGL lacks debug tools compared to more modern APIs. In some way, this makes sense as the current focus of the vendors is on the modern API and not on something used by a few. 

That is why we decided to start the process of switching all our tooling to support:

Now, don't worry. We do not plan to drop everything. We plan to do things in stages and the first one of them is to prepare code for the second graphics API and display a triangle on screen. This effort will be driven by Alex while I’m continuing our Little Big Adventure project. Things are slowly coming together and last week was the first time when we felt that we finished with only fixing stuff and doing something that moves us closer to the finish line. 

Dr. FunFrock

This time we feel like we should talk about something nontechnical. Sadly we do not have something specific in mind so I will try to reply to question 2.21 posted recently on X :

"Check out the new look of Dr. Funfrock! What are your thoughts?"

For me personally, I have mixed feelings about the new version of Dr. FunFrock. I think that the changes done to his face will fit nicely with the new style. The addition of a mustache and eyepatch is also ok as it gives him an interesting look. I really do not mind changes like that. 

What I do not like is his body. I watched this fragment from the trailer at 25% of the speed and his posture looks pretty muscular compared to the chooby version we know from the original game. I kind of liked how he was before as it gave him this unique look compared to all the classic evil characters. Another aspect that feels weird, is his clothing. Looking at his shoulder pads I suspect that they wanted to show him as a dictator, with a look closer to general than as a researcher. But I once again am not really sure if I like these changes.

Still, this is the first look at his new design. Looking forward to the finished version of the game.

We know that this is a short post but this was a tough week where stuff with the project did not really go how we would like it. The plan was to actively work on a new animation system and we ended up repairing stuff and going in the circle with some other changes. This is part of the "fun" of making the game with its custom technology. Want to believe that this week will be better. 

T&T - Tribute and Technology

While writing posts we always want to share everything that we do. We talk about art, technology, and design. We never thought about it as a problem. Things changed recently when were writing yet another post and it hit us that there may be different ways of doing it. That is why we want to experiment with a more focused approach, where posts are focused on only a single aspect of our work. We don't know if this will work out but we are looking forward to your feedback what do you think about it :)

I would like to think about White Rabbit Engine as a project of love. When I started it 18 years ago I was young, passionate, and full of dreams. I wanted to create something awesome and this was a way for me to make these things come true. If I saw where we got with it I would be blown away by the things we achieved. I would be also terrified by how long it took to get here. 

But here we are 18 years later and I would describe my feeling more like one you can find in an old married couple. While working on the projects there were ups and downs. Successes and failures. The initial passion disappeared, and some dreams failed. This may sound grumpy but this is how things are in real life. 

But don't worry, what was lost was replaced by different things. I found pleasure in the creation process. I found joy in resolving hard problems that we encounter all the time. I had hundreds of discussions about the work that was done and what I wanted to do. I realize that even if those initial feelings are not there the project is still a project of love. Maybe even more than in the past as this love is mature.

So far we talked so much about the engine and we know that some of you may not really care about it and just waiting for the Little Big Adventure: Tribute to be done. We are painfully aware that the process of creating this game is slow. We are also aware that if we switched to Unity or Unreal we could probably achieve the same results faster. But then let's think together. 

Why do people follow us? 

Initially, we worked on the game that people love. Wish that there was a modern version of the game was probably the reason why a lot of you started following our struggle. These days we all have something we wished for, an official remake from 2.21 that looks really promising: 

What holds people to projects?

With this official remake, some lose interest but there are still some that stay with us. They may do it because they wished for a different approach to the game? We are aware that some of you do not like the direction that the official remake took. We think this is perfectly fine to have such an opinion and Tribute maybe something closer to your vision as we plan to continue the direction that we chose some time ago. 

What really defines this project?

We would say that what defines this project is our approach to its development and the custom engine is one of the aspects that make it what it is. For us Tribute is part White Rabbit Engine project and White Rabbit Engine project is part of Tribute. That is why we are glad that 2.21 does not complain about us doing what we do, if they did it we would be in big trouble.  

Of course, as we have mentioned many times this is not a competition to what they do and want to support their work. We want to give you a taste of what could be if we approach the source material differently. This is only taste as this will cover everything to leaving Citadel Island. May not sound like a lot but it still should give you a feel of what we wanted the whole thing to be: An epic adventure. 

Now the only question is did we get stuff right in what we wrote?