Posts

Some about a year ago I made an AI-skeptic post where I strongly opposed the then-common AI hype. A lot of “AI evangelists” were roaming around and constantly blown the hype with misleading suggestions: “You just cook it wrong” (okay), “Just prompt properly” (nope, LLMs are simply dumb af, and I wasn’t hired to mentor AI what’s the difference between unit and integration tests), “They speed up performance” (for sake of postponed collapse of the codebase and cleaning up the AI-generated mess no one actually knows what does exactly). Listening all that bs was irritating my engineering soul as hell. ...

I’m happy to present yet the other milestone achieved in Penal Engineer. Past 2 months were dedicated to an extensible framework of input handling: mouse and keyboard. Apart from that (and to demonstrate the power of it), I made a whole new framework for sprites outlines (contours) dynamic generation and making them drawn on mouse hover and selection of entity. Architecture revamp Composition I was building Penal Engineer as a modular project from the very beginning. However, I discovered that quite a lot of user interaction was handled by an uber-module (.exe), while a role of .dll-s libraries got to stay serving ECS and some gameplay. This used to block modders from potential expansion of the ecosystem, not letting them replace parts of the game which could be granularized even more. ...

Don’t worry, I’ve not dropped the project yet 😊 Actually, for past months I was working hard on something closing the gap between cool-looking static scenes with a rich but boring architectural modding foundations, and a real game having dynamics. Accomplishments ✅ Added sprites & prefabs: Guard, Stairs, Bunk, Toilet, Boiler. ✅ Reworked rendering system: now entities from floors below the camera floor (or above if camera is underground) are dimmed properly and providing correct hitmap for mouse interaction. ✅ Built foundation for HUD. Rewrote the Debug Overlay with the new API with Stack Panels and other rich UI capabilities. ✅ Added mouse interaction: now the game knows what HUD element or entity on the map the mouse pointer is over! This is the hugest achievement to unblock further development! ✅ Added game wallclock and aging systems: now the world and entities age with time. And it’s visible in Debug Overlay. Flexing Ground floor First floor: the guard and concrete flooring/walls from beneath are properly dimmed Dungeon: entities from above the ground are properly dimmed, while dungeon-located prisoner & water boiler previously hid under ground appears Hovering entities: check their age in real time! ...

I decided to temporarily abandon my endeavor with Mod API. The reason is quite human and simple: I spent a lot of time on this project by now. However, since the New Year, I still have nothing playable to show off. A couple of days ago I encountered a need to conduct yet another refactoring. Namely, I had to revamp the whole Config XML engine to decouple it, in order to allow an XML mod parser to reuse the same XML engine. I also made the extensible file accessor API so that to grant a safe, controllable but extensible access to different part of the file system. And for that, I also employed the XML engine to allow configs and mods to universally read files via trusted file system plugins. ...

My past post was way too vague. Today I decided to shed the light on what actually I have come through. ✋ CAUTION: This post may only be of interest for C# developers. Skip them if you don’t feel like a geek. What’s up? I didn’t limit myself to only game exit hooks. Instead, I decided to design a full-fledged, complex hook system which could benefit not only myself but any future mod developer. ...

UPD 2026-04-05: Hooks That Let Mods Breathe. Short update: Finally, I’ve accomplished a major roadmap item: ✅ Game exit hooks. A mod might need to know a player is about to exit the game. I’m going to implement two-phases game exit process: First, all concerned mods are queried (asynchronously) whether they allow exiting. This is a moment when you mod could ask a user some confirmation. Second, (if all concerned mods asynchronously confirmed) all concerned mods receive pre-exit hook. This is a moment for your mod to make clean up, save subconfig and so on. The API had to be reworked several times, but eventually I’m quite happy with it: ...

Hey guys, The entire past month (wow, it’s mid-March already??) I spent on the fascinating journey with re-implementing Windows®™ Registry in expandable way for mods. How it was? A bit painful, I must admit. But I loved every minute of that pain (as any genuine engineer would, I believe). First steps First of all, I entrusted the amazing ChatGPT to build quite a naive implementation. Of course, this required a lot of prompting and directing, because the task I tried to solve was not trivial at all: loading an XML file with XSD schema validation, whereas could be custom XSD schemas registered in-flight by plugins, all bound with XsdGen’ed classes which are also subject for dynamic registration and binding to XML namespaces… Basically, I had to craft the entire SOAP framework without remote calls and on modern .NET. ...

After a month of storm at my main work hell with all shitty one-day layoffs and rebuilding roadmaps and commitments (I’m a lead engineer there), I’m finally back to put hands on my beloved Penal Engineer. First things first, the result of the poll: Survey results Thanks for voting, and most important – thanks for all your warm and supportive comments under that post! I love you guys. Your presence inspires me to continue delivering the game, and shines the light in our quite dark times we have with IT overall in the world (and especially in U.S.). ...

Hey hey hey, my dear followers, I promised you to deliver _something_ by the end of 2025, and I hold my word! Most of the time I spent since my last post was to deal with the walls textures. Having stepped in shoes of a potential modder, I realized how inconvenient the last design could be. And I’ve made some changes… again. For the last time. Honestly. I won’t retouch this anymore in the closest future. Time to move forward to more interesting parts of the game. ...

Finally, I’ve reworked the wall segments stuff heavily! This took multiple rewrites, and with a bit of sadness I had to reject some capabilities built into the engine in the past (such as free-angle sprite rotation, and it got fundamentally incompatible with scaling and trimming, while trimming was essential to not draw the wall caps at junctions). How it looks for modders since now: 128×32 for wall straight horizontal segment (leftmost and/or rightmost 16×16 to be overlapped by crosspoint sprites) 32×128 for vertical (likewise. 16×16 areas to be overlapped by wall caps) 32×32 crosspoint sprites: L-junctions, T-junctions, cross-4-walls All the walls are now seamlessly rendered. No gaps, no ugly overlaps at junctions. This means dense prisons stay readable even at high zoom levels - no visual noise, no guessing where walls actually are. ...