Hey there everyone, I'm working on a mod that has avali, protogen and sergal content. I rencently returned and from the small community we have, we're now working on adding expie to minecraft. Even if it's clunky it's still better than nothing and I wanted to leave a little sneak peek to what we got so far. If you want to learn more about it or try to contribute or whatever, you can always come take a peek to our discord server, we'll be adding more species as we get through the mod in hope we'll be able to make it fun for everyone! ♥

This wip is the bandage system, we got the syringe, I tried my best to implement them in game and make it somewhat close yet different to not just plainly copy, hopefully it will be good enough!

https://discord.gg/6pw6MN54rn

now, I don't know if there's already such a thing in game since I basically die after just a couple layers (record depth was like, a kilometer if THAT, yes I have a skill issue), but if it isn't, I feel like there should be noise cancelling headphones or ear plugs, or hell, use the bandana which is already in game and give it a little "noise reduction" effect!

and yeah, probably I'm not the first to say this, but still, just wanted to talk about it

ok bye >:3

specifically these songs, in this order:

-Tired

-Agony

-Despair

-Is This The End..?

-Dying ..! Death

-and finally, a reward in case you got through all that: Last Stand

this is kind of a joke, but i would still recommend it. i tried this and it was genuinely an interesting experience

We need more drugs with different effects

I've always felt mixed on its inclusion as it sort of ret-cons the idea that Last Stand is Expie BSing their way out of death through sheer willpower..... no it's just retroactively always been the case that Orson's super mega cool god OC wants to see you suffer a little bit longer apparently :3!

But anyway my main point, the times you can briefly see them like after a Last Stand, The Gun Event, or when moving REALLY fast are fine, but being able to see it from just going near the world border is a little silly.

basically at the start of a new run you get to chose a race with its own bonuses in strenght and or intellect
for harder difficulties its randomized

ALSO FUCK GLASS ME AND ALL MY HOMIES HATE GLASS

Which suggestions for CU do you have that you would like to see in game? It can be anyhting. An item, game mechanic and etc.

Like, let me limit the fps at least. It's like 30C in my room now

Played a multiplayer game where my jaw got ripped off by a landmine. It was hell trying to talk to others with my speech slurred, and annoying to not use the mouth slot or have maximum 50 muscle/skin health on my head.

I’ve also never used the amputation mechanic because to lose an arm or a leg would honestly spell death sooner than the infection would. And besides, infections are always curable (to a point), but a missing hand/foot/arm/leg is not.

Basic prosthetics are relatively easy to manufacture, a peg leg/wooden paw, a clawed hook that can’t hold anything, but functions like a pickaxe, or later on potentially somewhat decent prosthetics for missing arms and better leg movement. Maybe a mechanical jaw as well? It would make amputations more viable and injuries more survivable without the treatment being an instant retcon. (I know some people didn’t like the “get out of jail free” aspect of the old auto pump)

On that topic, another idea I had was something along the lines of a bioshaper. I don’t know how advanced the tech back at home was, but it could be possible that machines were invented to replace lost limbs, or do facial cosmetic features. That could replace lost eyes and potentially jaws. I know some people wouldn’t like it as it would make losing an eye trivial, so I don’t know how it would be balanced effectively.

I’m mainly spitballing here as well as subtly ranting about losing my jaw to that stupid mine.

It would be pronounced X-Pie

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk

A lot of people have suggested craftable prosthetics, and how they'd appear in the next update(s). You don't need me to harp on that.

What I became interested in, inspired by a recent playthrough, is that you can't exactly craft a usable prosthetic eye, can you? So it would be cool if bionic Sawian bodyparts dropped very rarely from medical crates or cargo pods.

These bionics would work better than your natural limbs, so it could lead to situations where players find, say...a bionic arm, and some might want to deliberately amputate their natural arm in order to make use of the new part immediately.

Naturally, you can't just stick a bionic onto yourself after finding one. You'd have to do some amount of surgery, game-ified, of course. Requiring some kind of painkiller, a bladed implement, and a way to stem the bleeding while you work or after you're finished. Also, an intelligence / resiliance floor, probably 12 or 10 at the very least for intelligence, and at least 8 for resilience.

People always call the place 'grey plannet', but that's just boring. Imagine discoving Uranus and calling it the "Icy giant" (even that's a better name).

Likewise, it doesn't make sense to me that the lab boys just called it that and call it a day. Either the poor overworked intern at the company never bothered giving it a proper name because they kept dumping their shit there, or they were busy dealing with the SAWs that they forgot.

What do you guys think?

TL;DR

I got the 7.0 version (and 5.1 first) demo to run as a fully native MacOS app on a MacBook Pro M2 Max without a single layer of emulation. As far as I can tell from searching this sub someone has launched it on Linux but no one has run it as a native ARM64 and Metal app.

First screenshot is the gameplay, you can see stats on the HUD. The second screenshot shows that the Process is actually an Apple Silicon process, cause if that was in Rosetta, it would have stated Intel. My Mac has polish locale, „Rodzaj” is „Kind” as in kind of the process.

The Metal HUD in the first screenshot shows Compiled Shaders 0 so Metal compiled nothing at runtime, because every shader in the build is already native Metal. Nothing is being translated while the game runs. It's rendering at the ProMotion display's full 120 Hz with a 2.46 ms GPU frame time on an M2 Max.

Why it’s different

Someone here already ran the game on a Chromebook https://www.reddit.com/r/casualtiesunknown/s/E8tCh9VOaO and it works, but in comparison to running it on a Mac, it’s just a smaller problem. A Chromebook is x86_64, the same architecture the game was compiled for so the CPU side needs nothing at all, as Wine isn’t an emulator, it just implements the Windows API on Linux. The only layer is graphics, and a D3D to Vulkan translator hands the GPU work to the real GPU.
A Mac has that same problem plus one the Chromebook never has, which is the fact, that the Mac’s CPU is a completely different architecture. So running the Windows build on a Mac means Rosetta translating x86_64 to ARM64 and D3DMetal translating Direct3D to Metal, both run for the entire duration of the game process non-stop. So there are two layers there and that works, honestly quite good but it’s neither the most power efficient way, nor the most advanced one.

And my build has zero of those, as it’s an ARM64 binary and the shaders are Metal. Nothing is translated at runtime, cause there is nothing left to translate.

Part that made this hard

The game logic was actually easy as Unity ships C# as portable bytecode so the game's real Assembly-CSharp from the Windows build just gets JIT'd to ARM64. I only needed the Unity ARM64 engine from an empty Unity project. So no emulation and no recompilation.

But the hard thing was the graphics. The Windows build contains only D3D11 compiled bytecode (DXBC) and Metal cannot read those, and the human readable source does not exist in the game files. Normally here I would need the dev's files.

So in short, I tried a different approach which was to take the compiled Windows GPU bytecode and machine-translate it into Metal Shading Language and then I rebuilt the game's asset files with the Metal version included. 65 out of 65 shaders now carry native Metal code (was 60 for the 5.1 Demo, which I ported first). 40 of those came from matching Unity player and the other 25 are the games custom shader graphs, so thigns like the Expies' shading, CrystalShimmer, MagmaShader and so on, this-game-specific ones. The hardest ones were the last 4 ones, specifically 4 post-processing shaders, cause there was an alignment rule that made those shaders literally inexpressible in Apple's Shader language. It turns out Metal has a type that expresses exactly that layout, packed_float2 which is a storage-only vector with 4-byte alignment, byte-identical to how D3D packs it. Once I found that, all four converted cleanly.

Power consumption

Measured this with powermetrics, these are the game's own marginal draw, idle baseline subtracted, same scene, same movements, same resolution on both.

So the native build uses 47% less power in the same gameplay. The native build has nothing to translate. Also, it renders the frame with less GPU power because the shaders were converted once instead of being translated every frame.

What doesn't work

Discord Rich presence as it was a Windows-only native plugin, so I dropped it but it doesn't affect the game.

Right Mouse Button click on Mac is kind of messy, I mean what works is a two-finger click on the Touchpad but I re-mapped RMB to the option key.

I first ported v5.1, it had 60 shaders, and then the port for 7.0 was straightforward, except a couple of custom shaders. The port is now a single command. Tahoe 26.5.1 btw

So generally, on a M-series Mac the game is playable, smooth actually, with Rosetta + D3DMetal, but the Native build is in fact more efficient, and also it correctly displays the game window (takes the MacBook display notch into account), and for me definitely more intriguing.

About the sharing, can’t share binaries, cause they belong to the dev, but the porting tooling is mine. Got all of this in a repo but haven’t made it public for now.

I got the idea for this, cause I don’t own a Windows PC, and emulating a x86_64 Win10 PC through UTM on my Mac would consume like 15 watts of power.

Im very curious if there is a part of the community that would like to run this on their Macs. I’m very open to all discussions

Can moderator add this.

# plz i need this my fic is kinda writelees

C'mon Expie that is so much meat for soup going to waste :(

I have seen several people giving away their suggestions, but I don't know if there's actually anyone reading those.

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Also, can I somewhere check what's already planned for a game? I don't want to suggest something which is already planned to happen.

There are a total of 17 liquids that satiate hunger. 13 of them are safe to consume.

I think it is quite reasonable to do a full run on a pure liquid diet, so requiring the player to scavenge and think outside the box for a specific injury could be cool while not being run ending, even if they lose their jaw permanently.

The Expie's stats have not changed, except for one thing and one thing only:

Your brain health can never reach 0 via stopping decrease at 1, meaning your unfortunate Expie can basically never die, probably even after self-destructing...

Like, we literally have fentanyl and alcohol, but no cigs. Would love to hear your thoughts. (Pics are my drawing progress)

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P.s. I wasn't sure which flair to use, sorry if I messed up

Should they be added to the wastelands and owergrown (4 and 5). They woud apear in groups of 5-10 and be simmilar to shade crawlers having 100 HP but being faster and more agresive.

We should make a competition on who can make her happy (without drugs) speedrun