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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krefGJh2MR8 Turns out the best way to "fake" 2D is to just do more 2D lol. Gotta look into post processing and compositing to make it look more hand painty.
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Feb 18, 2021 09:03
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I dig that art style!
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Feb 18, 2021 11:04
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Phigs posted:Man, even making a bare-bones prototype UI is a bunch of fiddly busywork. making a fun gameplay prototype: a few days turning the prototype into something that's technically distributable and playable: a few weeks turning that into a "real" game with proper menus, saving, loading, etc: a few years
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Feb 18, 2021 15:53
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Polo-Rican posted:making a fun gameplay prototype: a few days h-heh y-yeah. a f-few days..  i find i'm much better at the fiddly menu making and building tooling than making enjoyable gameplay loops. feels bad, man.
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Feb 18, 2021 16:51
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Feels good to make art again! Just finished this new NPC today, a 20-something woodpecker named Wick. They'll mainly be your go-to NPC for all your woodworking needs (and possibly your ghost story needs!) https://twitter.com/SlickNickLives/status/1362571901369942020?s=20
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Feb 19, 2021 02:44
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Omi no Kami posted:I've used a Huion H610 Pro for a year+ with zero complaints. It's very bare-bones, and I get the feeling if I were a better artist I'd want more pressure sensitivity and some additional bells & whistles, but it does everything I need for around fifty bucks.  are super basic. It got here today, but so far I haven't had time to do much other than make it sure it works out of the box with SmoothDraw, EverNote, and SketchBook, which it does (or seems to; buttons don't, but I think that's to be expected with just the default inbox Windows driver).I'm mostly interested in a larger surface, low cost (for the surface space) compared to Wacom options, and some particular basics, like having the drawing/writing surface being physically distinct from the non-recognized area/rest of the body of the tablet, so I can feel when I move past it or bump up against the boundary, unlike on the low-end entry point Wacoms I have (small Bamboo models of various generations). minidracula fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 04:47
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I have a playtester who's experiencing bad performance issues with my game. What's weird is that they have the same CPU/GPU/RAM specs as another playtester, who had no issues. Their performance problems also don't have an obvious cause in terms of what's going on in-game. Like, they can play my "stress test" mission, with 64 aircraft carriers (and hundreds of aircraft) and 16 cruisers, without any problem as long as there isn't a ton of overdraw from screen-filling explosions...but in the first real mission, which has 12 destroyers, 4 cruisers, and 1 carrier (with 4 destroyers and the carrier being added after the others are dead) he gets slideshow-like performance. I spent a couple of days working on performance, and got CPU time down by about 30% and GC allocations down to under 1kB/frame in most circumstances, but it hasn't made a perceptible difference. Short of somehow getting profiler data from him, I'm not sure how to diagnose this. The one difference I can think of between this playtester and the one with the similar hardware specs is that the first was streaming on Twitch, while the second was recording locally with OBS. I can see how that could impose a performance penalty, but I don't see how it could result in one mission being fine while another is awful.
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Feb 21, 2021 19:03
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I have a playtester who's experiencing bad performance issues with my game. What's weird is that they have the same CPU/GPU/RAM specs as another playtester, who had no issues. Their performance problems also don't have an obvious cause in terms of what's going on in-game. Like, they can play my "stress test" mission, with 64 aircraft carriers (and hundreds of aircraft) and 16 cruisers, without any problem as long as there isn't a ton of overdraw from screen-filling explosions...but in the first real mission, which has 12 destroyers, 4 cruisers, and 1 carrier (with 4 destroyers and the carrier being added after the others are dead) he gets slideshow-like performance. Has that same tester tried playing the game without any streaming going on at all? Computers are crazy complicated, the problem could be any number of tiny subtle details about that user's computer configuration that aren't obvious, and you working on squeezing out more frame rate won't necessarily fix it. Tough to know how widespread it'll be when you only have a small sample size of testers though.
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Feb 21, 2021 19:25
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I have a playtester who's experiencing bad performance issues with my game. What's weird is that they have the same CPU/GPU/RAM specs as another playtester, who had no issues. Their performance problems also don't have an obvious cause in terms of what's going on in-game. Like, they can play my "stress test" mission, with 64 aircraft carriers (and hundreds of aircraft) and 16 cruisers, without any problem as long as there isn't a ton of overdraw from screen-filling explosions...but in the first real mission, which has 12 destroyers, 4 cruisers, and 1 carrier (with 4 destroyers and the carrier being added after the others are dead) he gets slideshow-like performance. The biggest performance issue I had with my game was when my game had to keep hitting the hard drive while other poo poo was going on. No idea if that's what's going on with you, but recording locally would obviously have a bigger HD hit
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Feb 21, 2021 20:06
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Zaphod42 posted:Has that same tester tried playing the game without any streaming going on at all? Good call, I'd forgotten to verify that. They do not see performance issues when not streaming, or at least nowhere near as bad. One thing that seemed to help some was reducing the resolution. Though it turns out I have a bunch of bugs around that, and the game would keep changing the resolution back to the default when the scene changed. Tunicate posted:The biggest performance issue I had with my game was when my game had to keep hitting the hard drive while other poo poo was going on. No idea if that's what's going on with you, but recording locally would obviously have a bigger HD hit I don't think I'm hitting the hard drive at all during combat, except for Debug.Log calls. And those shouldn't be particularly common; I think the most frequent log messages are for destroying ships or running out of explosions in the explosion pool.
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Feb 21, 2021 20:56
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So your models and sfx are all precached?
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Feb 22, 2021 00:11
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I instantiate everything before the mission starts, and in any case, if this were a loading issue, I would expect it to clear up once everything was in RAM.
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Feb 22, 2021 00:23
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Has anyone ever found any gamedev articles on lighting dark scenes properly? I'd love to build some "true" night time scenes where players need a torch or whatever to see, but it seems that may be a fool's errand given how many results I get for "Foo is too dark! how do I fix my monitor to see?" What think ye?
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Feb 22, 2021 00:31
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For games where the player isn't the only light source, the best trick I got is light the floor and make the ceiling extremely dark. This keeps the playable space playable but the looming darkness makes everything feel dark.
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Feb 22, 2021 01:06
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Any recommendations for cross platform multiplayer in Unity? I need to do voice chat, pass some simple data, and pass hands/head data for VR players and I'm willing to buy assets but I'd rather not pay an ongoing subscription. I would use Steamworks but I would eventually like this to work across mobile, PC, PCVR, and standalone VR. I posted this request in the other game dev thread and got a suggestion to use Vivox for the voice chat and MLAPI for the multiplayer. Do any of you have experience using MLAPI? I'm finding a lot of people complaining about the documentation. Networking makes me wary, I don't want to pour tons of time in to a solution that ends up having issues with connecting players due to firewalls and poo poo.
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Feb 22, 2021 03:39
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cmdrk posted:Has anyone ever found any gamedev articles on lighting dark scenes properly? I'd love to build some "true" night time scenes where players need a torch or whatever to see, but it seems that may be a fool's errand given how many results I get for "Foo is too dark! how do I fix my monitor to see?" This is definitely an interesting problem I've spent some time thinking about. I haven't seen any good "best practice" articles out there though. Most people just make everything a dim blue ambient but it doesn't look remotely realistic. The problem is realistically dark nights are frustratingly difficult in a video game. IRL when its that dark, you end up relying on your other senses more to fill in gaps. You hear and feel your way around in ways that are hard to convey to a player in a videogame as easily as sight. I mean poo poo, think about how many games that have bright scenes even end up giving important objects or NPCs a glowing outline to help the player find them; and that's WITH daylight. So I think generally people just go for playability, and as long as the scene implies night time nobody really minds too much that it doesn't actually look realistically dark. I think it can be great, but enough time and thought would need to be put into it that it'd need to be a core gameplay mechanic for some reason, like in the Thief games or a horror game.
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Feb 22, 2021 04:06
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cmdrk posted:Has anyone ever found any gamedev articles on lighting dark scenes properly? I'd love to build some "true" night time scenes where players need a torch or whatever to see, but it seems that may be a fool's errand given how many results I get for "Foo is too dark! how do I fix my monitor to see?" If you want to make a true night scene, you make a true night scene and everything that comes with it. If you design around that and it being that dark adds something then all good. Proper darkness (inside, no moonlight, no skyglow) is a powerful tool used carefully. Also I'm not the only person that will ramp up the brightness in completely dark areas to check if the darkness is truly zeroed or just close to it. Flannelette fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Feb 22, 2021 |
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Feb 22, 2021 05:07
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I think it's aggravating for a game to just be dark regardless of genre or setting. I think this is a common sentiment which is why studio games rarely do proper dark. Better to sell the vibe of being dark than just have no lighting. There's a lot you can do with shader effects and changing colors that communicates darkness without removing the visuals of a game. Dark as a gameplay mechanic is tough because it's hard to make it interesting. Making sure you have batteries/torches/etc is not an interesting problem to solve especially in single player. Don't Starve makes it work since other systems tie into it and dark is a game over state so there's no bumbling around. FuzzySlippers fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Feb 22, 2021 |
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Feb 22, 2021 10:25
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also making a game dark really suffers from hardware limitations. Not only do things like dust/reflections/glare make dark images much less visible, the total dynamic range of a monitor isn't suited for doing it in the first place. In pitch blackness the human eyeball can detect single photons, you aren't gonna get that sort of granularity out of a 8-bit-per-channel computer monitor.
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Feb 22, 2021 10:54
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Tunicate posted:also making a game dark really suffers from hardware limitations. Not only do things like dust/reflections/glare make dark images much less visible, the total dynamic range of a monitor isn't suited for doing it in the first place. In pitch blackness the human eyeball can detect single photons, you aren't gonna get that sort of granularity out of a 8-bit-per-channel computer monitor. I feel like this is the biggest issue that I rarely see anyone talk about regarding darkness in video games and you put it very well!
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Feb 22, 2021 11:43
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Realistic darkness is one of those fabled things that gamers chase but every developer realizes isn't feasible early in development. I remember some of the first mods to come out of Fallout and STALKER was to remove the horizon ambient which makes both games completely unplayable at night but you know "muh realism."
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Feb 22, 2021 13:55
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Even movies don’t try to make darkness realistic, and they don’t even have to be playable! And then one of the last game of thrones episodes decided to go hard into darkness for most of it and they got poo poo on very hard for it
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Feb 22, 2021 14:04
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In my toy project I turn the saturation down a bunch at night (along with blues and dark) and I think it works, but it's also pretty specific to my use case so ymmv
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Feb 22, 2021 14:55
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al-azad posted:Realistic darkness is one of those fabled things that gamers chase but every developer realizes isn't feasible early in development. I remember some of the first mods to come out of Fallout and STALKER was to remove the horizon ambient which makes both games completely unplayable at night but you know "muh realism." Wouldn't realistic darkness involve simulating the output of human low-light vision in a way that when displayed on a monitor and perceived by light vision look reasonable?
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Feb 22, 2021 15:20
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Using post processing to flatten or crush as much detail in the lower ends while still retaining useful, readable geometry (the general shape of things) is an effective way to approximate darkness, without it being 100% blackness. If you think of the value system, 1 being almost totally dark (some detail) and 7 being the highlights (almost fully washed out), you’re massaging the shadows to be in the 2-3 zone while also desaturating. This lets the player see, but it’s limited. If seeing in darkness is important you also better have one of those shadow calibration steps when the game starts!! (“Adjust your brightness until the $blah is just visible”)
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Feb 22, 2021 16:40
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OddObserver posted:Wouldn't realistic darkness involve simulating the output of human low-light vision in a way that when displayed on a monitor and perceived by light vision look reasonable? I think the original Operation Flashpoint (the game the evolved into ARMA) game did this - night was almost black and white. Dark night is rarely pitch black. There's starlight/moonlight etc, even when cloudy some of it gets through. Inside/underground is a different story though. cmdrk posted:Has anyone ever found any gamedev articles on lighting dark scenes properly? I'd love to build some "true" night time scenes where players need a torch or whatever to see, but it seems that may be a fool's errand given how many results I get for "Foo is too dark! how do I fix my monitor to see?" Articles, no. But there are plenty of games that encourage playing with very dark screens and gamers usually abide by them rather than cheating and turning gamma up. You can use almost any game where you're asked to adjust gamma so that the symbol on the left isn't visible, but the symbol on the right is, as a guide for low light gameplay. Absolute pitch blackness is a problem with no commonly known fixes (TMK), but I think it's possible. You'll need to put in extra gameplay mechanics in order to relay information to the player - some ideas off the top of my head is outlining nearby stuff to simulate sensing nearby things and very low light vision, making the player walk slowly and carefully so that they don't accidentally wander off a cliff they could have sensed with their feet IRL, things like that.
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Feb 22, 2021 16:52
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I loved the night time in Dragon's Dogma where you couldn't see loving anything outside of your lantern radius except things that create light like enemies casting spells, and then every clip I've seen of the game at night has had the brightness cranked up so you can see super far. This doesn't have much relevance but idk I guess my view here is that if you're gonna have poo poo be impossible to see on the properly calibrated brightness settings you should probably crush those values with a shader on higher brightness settings so that you aren't penalized for setting up the brightness the way you tell the player is correct. FWIW my own night time shader multiplies each channel based on how well lit the area is, from 0.25 to 1 for red, 0.3 to 1 for green, and 0.45 to 1 for blue. This seems to work well for everything except bright yellows.
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Feb 22, 2021 17:53
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Current internet darling Valheim has no brightness slider and it gets unplayably dark at night and during storms. The game is gorgeous so I'm a little charitable about it, but on the other hand, spending 50% of the game squinting to see stuff is super frustrating. So I guess the lesson is don't do it unless it looks amazing?
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Feb 22, 2021 18:10
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OK, this is a good time to bring up my own weather system. So, here's a sample scene in the daytime: Here's that same scene at sunset:  And here it is at night:  This feels a little unsatisfying, but I'm not sure what I would change without making it way too hard to see anything. Pretty much the only things that actually take light in my game are the ocean and land. Everything else fakes it by using a global color multiplier, which is a dark blue for nighttime. Basically for each time of day, I have settings for the sun intensity/color, skybox to use, ambient (skybox-derived) light intensity, ocean color, and the global color multiplier. Note that I only change weather / time of day as a scripted event, i.e. not just due to the passage of in-game time. If a mission says it takes place at nighttime, then the entire thing is at night, until and unless a script says to cue the sun.
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Feb 22, 2021 18:23
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:This feels a little unsatisfying, but I'm not sure what I would change without making it way too hard to see anything. Day look great to me, but Sunset feels like it's missing a lot of yellow and possibly a tiny bit of purple. It seems super apocalyptic due to being entirely red. Night is probably good to go (it feels like night) butif you did want some more light I bet you could get away with a tiny bit more pale white/light blue ambience in there, especially if it lights up/highlights the islands and enemies more than the water.
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Feb 22, 2021 19:34
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I'm not gonna comment on realism but for feels that sunset rocks and my general thoughts about nighttime are make it purple, make it pretty. I've got better-than-average eyeballs (though I don't experience the world visually) so when games make things invisible outside of the lit range, I can usually see it with a bit of squinting. Which results in me turning the gamma up past squinty range when they ask me to calibrate the visuals because 1) I don't know what "barely visible" is supposed to mean and 2) I don't wanna squint.
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Feb 22, 2021 22:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:OK, this is a good time to bring up my own weather system. So, here's a sample scene in the daytime: Add a big yellow moon if you want more color at night
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Feb 22, 2021 22:33
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Thanks for the feedback! I've added some more blues to the sunset scene: And I figured, what the heck, there's not much light pollution out on the ocean in the 1930's, so let's throw the Milky Way on there:   They're at least more colorful now.
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Feb 22, 2021 22:48
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I'm using darkness because I want players to have to use like a flashlight. I have not yet added in brightness controls so I'm not sure what kind of flatlining I'd need to do in the post process to make it actually dark. Also I custom rolled a sort of toon shader for UE4 post process and I'm only slightly happy with it. I feel like toon shading should be stupidly easy but as it turns out it's ridiculously hard and difficult to do.
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Feb 22, 2021 22:52
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The Titanic posted:I'm using darkness because I want players to have to use like a flashlight. I have not yet added in brightness controls so I'm not sure what kind of flatlining I'd need to do in the post process to make it actually dark. I remember the Doom 3 flashlight being pretty cool. It was a long time ago, but I think I remember the darkness was actually black and not something you could just get around by turning your monitor's brightness up. But you could see the lights on all of the machines around you.
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Feb 22, 2021 23:39
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Thanks for the feedback! I've added some more blues to the sunset scene: I think this is a huge improvement, it looks awesome. I can't tell if the glare would be hard to deal with when the camera rotates to look more left, but it's still so pretty and looks like a sunset now. The night scene I personally liked better before. I think the image in the sky feels a bit weird in terms of scale, and super busy in that second shot especially. It's a lot better in the first shot but the colors are causing some weird issues with your islands it looks like.
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Feb 23, 2021 00:19
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baby puzzle posted:I remember the Doom 3 flashlight being pretty cool. It was a long time ago, but I think I remember the darkness was actually black and not something you could just get around by turning your monitor's brightness up. But you could see the lights on all of the machines around you. I liked it too. I want to make night dangerous as well, and a sort of stopping point for the player to get somewhere safe and do the whole sleep to morning thing, or do some risky night stuff. Part of that reduction of capability is needing to hold some kind of light. I'm using the new UE atmosphere system too, it's nice but night has no stars and I've got to re-add that to my day cycle system.
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Feb 23, 2021 01:12
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Superrodan posted:I think this is a huge improvement, it looks awesome. I can't tell if the glare would be hard to deal with when the camera rotates to look more left, but it's still so pretty and looks like a sunset now. I've toned it down a bit, mostly by darkening things. I do want things to be colorful even if it verges on looking a little odd. Better that than to be flat or dull!  The reason the terrain looks a little odd is that it takes fog based on the skybox behind it (which gives me a fantastic horizon), and the sky is kind of purple with this skybox. On a tangentially-related note, one thing I'd like to include in my game is spotlights that can be used to highlight enemy aircraft at night. However, since nothing in my game actually takes lighting, I can't do this with real lights...and actually doing it with real lights could get expensive in a hurry, unless I limit the player to having only, like, 4 spotlights per ship. Which would feel disappointing when I let them install a ton of other stuff. I figure that the spotlight can probably be done by making it a particle emitter that fakes "god rays". I could probably fake lighting a plane by giving every single plane its own copy of all of its materials, and telling it "hey, you're being lit up, multiply your colors by X" to make them brighter. Or I could make the planes render in batches, and use instanced material properties to vary the lighting on a per-plane basis...kind of a pain, since the shader I use is a giant mess I bought off the asset store, and modifying it is annoying. Are there other options I'm missing?
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Feb 23, 2021 01:33
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Back in the old days we made a cylinder with an opacity that went from white to black and used that as the "light" ray. You could use that there and turn up the colors on your plane and it'd probably look like it's being lit up. 
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Feb 23, 2021 01:55
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The Titanic posted:Back in the old days we made a cylinder with an opacity that went from white to black and used that as the "light" ray. You could use that there and turn up the colors on your plane and it'd probably look like it's being lit up. Thanks for the tip on how to do the light ray! I was hoping to avoid creating a ton of material instances or completely overhauling my plane rendering though.  Then again...maybe I don't need to bother?  Just the fact that the spotlight aims at the plane might be enough.
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Feb 23, 2021 02:47
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