@britzl - I think I found the slowdown problem.
It seems it was Win11’s new “Windows Defender Advanced Threat Detection”. I removed the whole Defold folder from being scanned (not the project just Defold executable folder) and for the last 30 mins.. its been working properly!! Argh!! Effin windows!!
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Good to hear that it is working again. But very annoying that window again and again makes life difficult for developers.
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Yeah. Im vhappy this is what it was. I did previously try making exceptions for individual runtimes (firewall and security) and that had no effect. I didnt realize you could make an exception for a whole folder, and this did it. still no probs.
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More progress. I made a little RLE Video playback system for the TVs in the UI. I’ll put this up as a separate dev blog and provide a project if people find it useful. I have a python script for generating the rle videos and they come out pretty small if you choose a good palette and your videos are suited to this sort of generation (very noisy, very colorful vids are probably not).
This is playing 320x180 (16:9) videos to a texture on a model at 15fps. The decode is extremely fast, so you should be able to do 60fps if you really wanted
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Ok. Another little snippet. Two different videos with different color palette sizes. These are just sample vids but they seem to convert and work fine. Very happy with it.
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Added project for the video system here:
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Ok. After fighting with Blender and gltf… I managed to get two pilots into the main screen. Starting to properly take shape. Happy with this atm. Will work on some lighting and maybe shadows (might just do some SSAO or something).
On the animation, the performance isnt that great. These are two go’s with models (gltfs) with about 10K polys and around 20 bones. The framerate noticably drops when these are added. Im wondering if I need to use the skinned material or something. Will investigate later, but its a little odd since I didnt think they were particularly heavy anims.
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So.. Its Xmas.. and Im rewriting some more stuff .. but heres a little Xmas video. Maybe.. maybe.. it will get to release early next year. But with so many other things I have on atm, Im not sure.
Otherwise, wishing everyone a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year! May you all have a wonderful 2026!
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Ive been remaking my road rendering system and thus I decided to put up the sprite line drawing project here:
https://github.com/dlannan/defold-sprite-lines/
Feel free to use as you want. Its all MIT license.
Im redeveloping it to be alot faster (hopefully) and if that fails I will move to a post render line drawing routine that I already have done previously. It complicated my f18 rendering pipeline so I dont want to do that yet .. so an intermediate method will be tried. We will see how it goes.
For information the method I previously provided, is not performance friendly because of the nature of the use (all the go’s and meshes). I suspect this can be improved greatly too, so I will be tinkering in branches on this repo if you are interested
As for F18.. the game is coming along. I keep having to rewrite many things. I was originally using imgui for the UI.. but this turned out to be not-so-great. Thus it is all removed now, and its all done in raw Defold ui elements, including the transitions and so on. The only major thing I want to improve in that is the text rendering, there are so heavy costs to it, so Im working on methods to cache and preset as much text as I can - not so easy with a simulation dash
It is also now running on web again, after many many many changes. Mostly to update from roughly 2020ish code that it was using which didnt work to well in current Defold. Additionally Ive been going through and rewriting all the shaders to be version140 compliant, but there seems to be some materials Im missing so I hope track them down to see if this helps with html perf.
I know with the road fixes, the shader fixes and some of the html optimizations I think it will end up pretty good in the web. I had wanted to be shipping by now, but as always, time is not easy to manage over Xmas and holidays
Im no longer going to try to specify a date, only specify completion requirements for a release. And these are:
- Worldbuilder (my internal tool for building missions etc) correctly builds scaled and map streaming world theater sections. This is mostly done, but needs some editing facilities for world data (land, urban, roads and objects)
- Simulator physics bugs ironed out - I have a couple of flight model stabilization issues to resolve.
- Enemy attack profiles (for both air, land and sea) so that they at least have some interesting AI to combat against
- Main Gui HQ menus - these are complete. Im really happy with this, and it was a large portion of the work (due to imgui) that was done over Xmas break.
- Main First Theater - This is around 70% complete. Once this is done and working, a free demo (web and hopefully Steam) is what will be released.
So many new extensions Ive made from this (and new systems - like the world streaming system) and it has been good fun to do. At some stage this year, I may package up my worldbuilder, the world streaming system and maybe the flight physics model (it works for almost any plane) .. will see..
Hope everyone had a great start to 2026 and I really hope sometime this year will be when the F18 game finally gets published. Its been a long time doing this, and Ive loved doing it.
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Little vid of the current Main menu/gui. Wanted an old school sort of “in the HQ” type feel, with a stipple overlay to give it a bit of an old feel too.
Theres a couple more additions. The user profile is editable and will be displayed in the surrounding gui while selecting theaters and missions. Replay and Quickstart are not fully complete, but they are mostly done.
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Added a dev diary for the line drawing here. Please use that topic for any related discussions or questions about it.
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Classy world builder! Did you use Druid and home made graphics for the UI? Or is it imgui stylized?
It is really neat!
How do you handle your world/mission data? A big JSON file or something else?
Your game really is improving, I love the waiting room concept. I’m looking forward for the release!
Continuing the discussion from F18 Interceptor: Building my favorite old Amiga game:
Thanks mate. Appreciate it.
The UI is now using Defolds UI and my own fsm setup with my own widgets etc. It originally used an old imgui that I think Britzl had done? So it might have been a very old version of Dear Imgui I think.
I think this is where if came from originally .. but I expanded and then removed it
The main issues I ran into were wanting to do some unique rendering passes with it, which kinda made it hard.
[ EDIT ] My bad. I talked about the f18 UI above, the WorldBuilder uses my own little ui setup using Nuklear. Here:
https://github.com/dlannan/defold-nuklear/
The world builder exports to a custom format in a tbl, but packaged with msgpack. This is quite fast, and allows me to stay reasonably consistent data wise. The world data, is quite small - I spent alot of time on this .. Im currently down to:
10m_land_l6 - 25MB
10m_roads_l6 - 15MB
10m_urban_l6 - 58MB
This is for the whole world It uses the awesome Natural Earth datasets here:
Of course, my data is a little “tailored” from those.
Thanks, the waiting room thing kinda comes from alot of those old games, from the Amiga days
Like: A10 Tank Killer, Gunship and Gunship 2000, F16 Falcon, F-15 Strike Eagle (prob my fave) and F-19 Stealth Fighter. These are all games I want to eventually rebuild myself, using this same framework and eventually multiplayer between them.
At the current rate.. I will prob grow old and pass on before I get there
Thanks for the support. Hope it does some justice to these old games I grew up with.
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Im tinkering with some simple effects in the theater now. Think it looks ok, will add some more bling here and there.
Apart from switching gui’s again (not going to) is there maybe a way to do this? I was thinking of using a color mask over the top, which might look ok.
If anyone has any suggestions. I may leave it for the time being. But it would be nice to color some specific words.
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If the problem is be far from reference point, why do not define diferent reference points around the world and take the nearest to us?
For example, the most important airports of the world can be reference points
Its not really about reference points its the offset from the world space 0,0,0 that is the problem (in terms of the shader executing the vertex stream). Once the distance is as little a 20km from 0,0,0 you start to see aberrations.
Thus, at a minimum I need to move the world 0,0,0 at least every 10km (so as to minimize the effect). Note, the view distance is also a problem here, since technically you can see a long way.
Atm the system is using a “streamed chunk” styled method (which is pretty common in games) and shifts the chunks as the player flys. This also requires all objects to be shifted regularly too. Its not great, but it works. And the chunks of the world are reasonably manageable using this method.
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Awesome!!! 
I love it!!!
Well, for this I said it, the possibility to use a “dinamic” 0,0,0 for the plane, if the use of the world’s start fails far of it.
But if at 20Km is failing this don’t change anything. I said it because I read about a mission going to Hawaii! Or something about 3.000Km… 
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Yeah. Its a bit of a pain. Technically with external fuel tanks an f18 could fly to Hawaii (well.. to the carrier north of Hawaii.. just)
Whether people want to fly for hours to do that.. hehe not sure. Unlikely. So there will be options for transitioning.
I want the game to have the full distance because many of the “game elements’ are about discovering lots of features around the US and Hawaii that you can do “things” to win rewards (medals and rank improvements).
For example in San Francisco flying under the Golden Gate Bridge.. will get you a medal
But there will be many others. And these are in addition to flying the missions, so there can be alot to do. The medals also help progress your rank and they also give you bonuses in flight (like ability to carry more missiles etc).
Still alot to do. Im remaking my worldbuilder atm (right now actually) in my own engine due to various issues I was having in Defold, that should be all sorted by tomorrow. Then I can add the features to the world builder I needed and finish off building all the missions and events.
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I’m dying to try it!!!
I discovered your project yesterday, and I love the look you’re giving to the game!
Coincidentally, I’ve been doing tests with the winUAEd F/A-18 Interceptor for two weeks!!!
It was my first Amiga game, and one of my favorites! 
I’ll have to try the menu before I give my opinion, it’s very different to the original, but I don’t like that stipple effect at all!
It very looks like the ancient crappy PCs. The original Amiga never looked like this!!! 
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