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So in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxH_gmh6euE) Notch is editing the code in debug mode and seeing the changes in real time. Is that just a lwjgl thing, or is this some feature that I never knew about in all languages? I know Unity supported it, but I had figured that it was a feature unique to it, but if I can use it with other languages that might be awesome.
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Nov 16, 2011 21:09
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ambushsabre posted:So in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxH_gmh6euE) Notch is editing the code in debug mode and seeing the changes in real time. Is that just a lwjgl thing, or is this some feature that I never knew about in all languages? I know Unity supported it, but I had figured that it was a feature unique to it, but if I can use it with other languages that might be awesome.
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Nov 16, 2011 21:15
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You can do edit-and-continue in C++ for that matter if you compile with it enabled (which, in turn, tends to disable a huge host of optimizations). It's naturally a feature you have to be careful with, doing things like adding new variables can trash the state enough that it forces you to restart the application.Rocko Bonaparte posted:I was wondering now how common it was for games written in static languages on Windows to actually target 64-bit now? It's becoming more common, but developers have been increasingly utilizing stream loading since it lets the assets drastically exceed the resident set, and once you have that, the memory constraints mean a lot less. There currently isn't a lot of incentive to release a 64-bit build as we aren't yet to the point where there's a huge need or benefit to a 2GB+ resident set. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Nov 16, 2011 |
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Nov 16, 2011 21:50
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Actionscript 3 question: I have a risk-like map comprised of randomly generated countries. I'm rendering the borders between countries with graphics.moveTo(border.points[0]) followed by graphics.lineTo(border.points[1...n]). Now I want to render an interior border in the color of the country's owner. I thought this would be as easy as lerping between the center point and each border point and simply drawing the border again. code:Is there a better way to draw this?
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Nov 16, 2011 22:44
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I wouldn't worry too much about 64 bit yet - there's not enough adoption to switch to it completely and it's too big a hassle to distribute 2 builds as an indie. vvv I agree. What I meant was, maintaining and distributing 2 binaries is extra work that might not be worth it. Vino fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Nov 17, 2011 |
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Nov 16, 2011 23:09
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Vino posted:I wouldn't worry too much about 64 bit yet - there's not enough adoption to switch to it completely and it's too big a hassle to distribute 2 builds as an indie.
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Nov 16, 2011 23:24
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OneEightHundred posted:Most major middleware engines support 64-bit already or at least have 64-bit builds: Source since 2005, CryEngine since I don't know, Unreal since UT2k4, Rage soon, etc. It's not too hard to hit 2GB if you're doing AAA stuff and you're not simultaneously targeting consoles. But yeah, almost everybody doing dev on PC is targeting console as well, in which case they're not going to go anywhere near 2 GB. 64 bit OS market penetration is around 60% according to Steam's hardware survey, and DX10 is at 56%. So you pretty much have to make your stuff work within 2 GB, on 32 bit OS, in DX9, unless you are willing to really limit your audience. :\
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Nov 17, 2011 05:18
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I was wondering now how common it was for games written in static languages on Windows to actually target 64-bit now? I'm asking this after wrestling with a lot of middleware stuff that were still 32-bit by default. It's not at all common. Of maybe a dozen recent PC games installed on my computer right now, not one has a 64-bit binary. If there's no tangible benefit to doing it, then all you're doing is increasing your QA load for a marketing bullet point that's unlikely to result in a single increased sale.
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Nov 17, 2011 06:15
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Heh maybe I should stop trying to get all these 64-bit dependencies set up then. It's a shame--I was just about done. 
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Nov 17, 2011 08:16
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So, I've just decided that the project I was working on was too ambitious for me - proper real-time networked multiplayer combined with trying to use anyone else's free physics engine is a disaster, I don't want to make my own physics engine, and my metagame-lobby part was just going to be (hell, already has been!) too much interface work for me to face. Rather than continuing to throw hours into it in the hope of eventually finishing a game that I'm not even convinced would be marketable, I'm thinking I should just start again, saving the reusable parts, on a game I'm more convinced would do well, and for which I don't foresee nearly as many difficulties (ditching multiplayer and all the trading/conversing/etc. interfaces that come with it, along with the networking and lag compensation that are an incredible pain in the rear.) Now I have a question before I even really get started with my new game, based on the one difficulty I foresee - if I came here (probably not this thread, but it seemed like a good place to ask the question) with a finished (or at least alpha), working, decent game, but for which all the graphics were hideous placeholders, and asked for someone to fill in the graphics for a percentage cut of whatever the game makes, would I have a better chance of finding a decent taker if the animated graphics were 3D models or if they were sprites? Edit: additional question - is there some sort of weird psychological reason why those loving dialogue boxes in RPGs always appear the text one letter at a time, and sometimes allow the player to speed it up a bit by pushing a button, rather than just giving you all the text? Should I do that too even though I hate it? roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Nov 21, 2011 |
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Nov 21, 2011 05:12
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roomforthetuna posted:Edit: additional question - is there some sort of weird psychological reason why those loving dialogue boxes in RPGs always appear the text one letter at a time, and sometimes allow the player to speed it up a bit by pushing a button, rather than just giving you all the text? Should I do that too even though I hate it? Don't have advice for the rest of your post, but I have to say there's something I really like about scrolling text. I can't really explain it, but I think it would feel pretty weird for it to be missing. The right way to go here would be to have scrolling text by default, and allow the player to turn it off (and probably change the scrolling speed) as an option.
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Nov 21, 2011 10:06
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roomforthetuna posted:Edit: additional question - is there some sort of weird psychological reason why those loving dialogue boxes in RPGs always appear the text one letter at a time, and sometimes allow the player to speed it up a bit by pushing a button, rather than just giving you all the text? Should I do that too even though I hate it? Older RPGs especially gently caress this up because they're translations from Japanese which has an information density per character at least twice as high as the English alphabet, yet the text speed isn't adjusted. That mistake gets imitated and we get painfully slow speech boxes everywhere. My preference is an options setting for text speed that goes medium/hyper/instant. Regarding art, sprites for sure if you want quality for spec.
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Nov 21, 2011 11:18
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I don't mind scrolling text if I don't have to wait for it, but it isn't something that I look for when deciding if I like a game or not. If the choice is between scrolling text slower than I can read and instant text, I'd pick instant text every time. Honestly, I'd just do instant text and spend that hour or whatever you'd spend implementing scrolling text on something more important and possibly come back to it after everything else is done.
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Nov 21, 2011 13:48
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Usually the text speed is controllable and most JRPGs let you skip the scroll effect (i.e. just make the entire text appear) by pressing the confirm button, assuming they don't have an option to disable it entirely.
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Nov 21, 2011 15:58
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The Radix posted:It can be used quite effectively to represent a character's 'voice' (sometimes literally using different pitched chirps) and in general is supposed to slow down your thinking to force you to absorb dialogue. Comic books traditionally use all-caps in voice bubbles for the same reason I believe. I thought that comic books use caps for the same reasons most road signs do: in English, it is easier to tell capital letters apart from each other than lower-case ones. It's a readability thing.
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Nov 21, 2011 16:49
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That might make sense too, or just as likely it's pure tradition, but I've noticed a lot of comics use an allcaps-in-dialogue/regular-in-captions+narration arrangement, although examples of the latter in most books are pretty rare. Stuff about allcaps being less legible here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability Retarding reading speed is mentioned too.
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Nov 21, 2011 17:01
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OneEightHundred posted:Usually the text speed is controllable and most JRPGs let you skip the scroll effect (i.e. just make the entire text appear) by pressing the confirm button, assuming they don't have an option to disable it entirely. That's why I asked though, thanks guys for confirming my suspicion that it's mostly just me who really hates the slow text paradigm. I'll probably go with a half-way solution of fast-but-not-instant text. Also, good point the guy who said to make it do different bleepy-bloop sounds to represent different voices while the text appears. Also, I'm not going to do the thing that really irks me about slow-appearing text, where you appear it one character at a time and only word-wrap when the partial word becomes long enough, so the word starts to appear on one line then jumps down to the next. That looks remarkably unprofessional to me, even though I've seen it happen in professionally published games. How hard is it to look ahead to the end of the word and insert a newline if it's going to wrap? (Rhetorical.)
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Nov 21, 2011 18:19
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roomforthetuna posted:That's the funniest-worst combination - it's less frustrating than being stuck waiting for slow text, but having the same button for "next frame" and "stop wasting my time with this frame" makes it very easy to miss dialogue (by pressing "stop wasting my time" when the piece of dialogue was short and had already finished appearing so it gets interpreted as "next", or by an accidental double-press) - contrary to the presumably intended effect of making it appear slowly in the first place. Skip and confirm are the same button so that you don't have to keep moving your thumb to different buttons. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Nov 21, 2011 |
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Nov 21, 2011 20:42
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Have an option in your settings screen: "Text speed: [Instant] Fast Normal Slow".
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Nov 22, 2011 00:54
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ZombieApostate posted:I don't mind scrolling text if I don't have to wait for it, but it isn't something that I look for when deciding if I like a game or not. If the choice is between scrolling text slower than I can read and instant text, I'd pick instant text every time. Honestly, I'd just do instant text and spend that hour or whatever you'd spend implementing scrolling text on something more important and possibly come back to it after everything else is done. I hate scrolling text a whole lot, and so does everyone I know, except for one guy who "doesn't notice" (I've watched him play games and he mashes the continue button like everyone else). Whatever approach you use, if there isn't an option to disable it then it had better be loving perfect, and it had better dramatically enrich dialog. Really it's one of those things that's worse to do wrong than not do at all. I feel like voice acting is the same way.
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Nov 22, 2011 05:44
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Blue Footed Booby posted:I hate scrolling text a whole lot, and so does everyone I know, except for one guy who "doesn't notice" (I've watched him play games and he mashes the continue button like everyone else). Whatever approach you use, if there isn't an option to disable it then it had better be loving perfect, and it had better dramatically enrich dialog. (this doesn't mean you can't have long speeches, they can be fun. It's just that, if you do, they should be broken up by a reasonable number of breaths, and mashing the button should skip to the next breath. Each breath should also move the cutscene along, if you have such a thing.) My current approach has me treating each page of dialog as though it were its own dialog branch. Technically I could make each page have a scroll bar, but I'm starting to think I'd be better off just peppering monologue sections with solitary (more...) "branches" that lead to the next breath. If we used full VA (we're not - flavour VA only), I'd just make the VA for a breath finishing be an auto-trigger event for the (more...) button. This also means I've got plenty of hooks to move a cutscene along, with the flow of the scene turning per dialog page. Most importantly, it's set up to encourage making pages instantly skippable for fast readers. Going this route will get you dialog-centric sequences. If you don't want that, you really need to go to the opposite extreme, and have fully scripted cutscenes that emit subtitle text line events as appropriate (which also won't need scrolling). The middle ground between the two is just ugly and a pain to use. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Nov 22, 2011 |
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Nov 22, 2011 19:05
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I think we might be talking about two different things, but I'm not sure if the first guy to say "scrolling text" meant actual scrolling, as Shalinor does, or the thing previously being discussed which is text appearing gradually, that doesn't really have a name because there's no word for it. I had an interesting thought on the subject - those people who think the letter-at-a-time text is a good thing, if a game had it as an option but defaulted to just appearing the whole block at once, would you ever bother to actively turn on "slower" mode? I know a lot of people, myself included, would turn on "instant" mode given the choice.
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Nov 22, 2011 19:27
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roomforthetuna posted:I had an interesting thought on the subject - those people who think the letter-at-a-time text is a good thing, if a game had it as an option but defaulted to just appearing the whole block at once, would you ever bother to actively turn on "slower" mode? I know a lot of people, myself included, would turn on "instant" mode given the choice. I think it really depends on the type of the game and how important timing/pace is to the dialogue, I think for example the Phoenix Wright games uses it nicely and a bunch of the great moments would lose a lot of impact if all the text was instant (but that game is in almost-visual novel territory) If the text is mostly "I am Error" type stuff I would either put it way fast or instant depending on how enjoyable the text scrolling sound is 
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Nov 22, 2011 21:26
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I prefer skippable scrolling text with chirps, personally.  I think the takeaway here is that no one is going to fault you for displaying the text too fast. But you'll catch hell if you scroll it too slowly.
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Nov 22, 2011 21:39
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Don't pull a L I T T L E M O N E Y and you'll be fine.
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Nov 22, 2011 23:34
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MasterSlowPoke posted:Don't pull a
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Nov 22, 2011 23:36
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One of the opening scenes of Final Fantasy Tactics is talking about some outlaws, and it takes about 30 seconds for those two words to autoscroll. This is a cutscene, and is thus unskippable. The phrase must have been much more verbose in Japanese? edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJRiyr05B0&t=10m40s ignore the nerdlord providing commentary MasterSlowPoke fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Nov 22, 2011 |
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Nov 22, 2011 23:40
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One thing I've seen in a few games that you might want to consider if you do omit scrolling though is the ability to page back. The main advantage of scrolling is the very real usability advantage of not having to reload a save because you fat-fingered the confirm button and missed a panel.Shalinor posted:We're making games, not novels.
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Nov 23, 2011 00:05
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MasterSlowPoke posted:One of the opening scenes of Final Fantasy Tactics is talking about some outlaws, and it takes about 30 seconds for those two words to autoscroll. This is a cutscene, and is thus unskippable. The phrase must have been much more verbose in Japanese? Holy crap, that's just obscene. Scrolling should be much faster than you can read, that one was actually so slow that by the time it'd finished I'd forgotten how it started. I'm a fan of scrolling text, it helps pace dialog a lot better. I've always felt like games that don't have autoscroll don't give a poo poo how they present the text to you, which just makes me feel like it probably isn't worth reading. Putting a little bit of work into the presentation helps make it not feel like a thoughtless text dump.
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Nov 23, 2011 00:37
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Oh hey look what just got released: https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl
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Nov 23, 2011 01:15
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OneEightHundred posted:Oh hey look what just got released: The code is not using the "Carmack's Reverse" stencil shadow method. Is it using depth-pass instead?
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Nov 23, 2011 01:45
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MasterSlowPoke posted:One of the opening scenes of Final Fantasy Tactics is talking about some outlaws, and it takes about 30 seconds for those two words to autoscroll. This is a cutscene, and is thus unskippable. The phrase must have been much more verbose in Japanese? Assuming you're using kanji, Japanese typically takes fewer characters to express the same ideas than English. I'm assuming that it displayed characters at the same rate per character, but took less overall time, making it more bearable.
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Nov 23, 2011 02:09
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HiriseSoftware posted:The code is not using the "Carmack's Reverse" stencil shadow method. Is it using depth-pass instead? quote:@ID_AA_Carmack John Carmack According to an earlier tweet, that amounted to 6 lines of code change. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Nov 23, 2011 |
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Nov 23, 2011 02:13
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OneEightHundred posted:According to an earlier tweet, that amounted to 6 lines of code change. code:
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Nov 23, 2011 03:59
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Hammered out a quick guide to compiling it with Visual C++ Express: http://icculus.org/~riot/doom3_vcpp_express.txt You lose the GUI tools and you lose the app icon because the RC files depend on the MFC includes. Aside from that, it starts and plays the game and generally appears to work.
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Nov 23, 2011 05:00
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So, I have a slight dilemma concerning saving rotational values of 2D objects to disk (level data). For now, each sprite has a simple rotation value, representing the local rotation around the center of the object. The editor supports 'snapping' rotation, that is, it snaps to the major values that I have decided are basically increments of 15 degrees. However, holding CTRL down allows free rotation of any amount. Currently the rotation is stored in radians. The problem is that for any value except for 0, the rotation is a very long number (pi/2, pi/4) and that's a lot of wasted space for items that are simply rotated 90, 45, 180, or any other common degree rotation. So I have two options that I can think of: 1) Use two fields, a boolean and a number, to implement simple compression. The boolean switches between 'compressed' and 'free' mode, and the number is basically an enum representing the common values (0 = 0, 1 = pi/12, 2 = pi/6, etc) for 'compressed mode', or just the raw value for 'free mode.' Downside: more complicated to maintain. 2) Store everything in degrees. Downside: need to convert into radians after loading from disk. However, this is probably a trivial cost. What do you think? After typing it all out, I'm leaning towards #2 for simplicity, but I could be convinced otherwise.
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Nov 23, 2011 17:11
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3) Save numbers as binary rather than ASCII so that you're not wasting 246/256 of the space in the first place?
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Nov 23, 2011 17:23
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Is just saving it as a float too bulky? Are you really running into file size issues or are you trying to super optimize from the get go?
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Nov 23, 2011 19:16
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seiken posted:3) Save numbers as binary rather than ASCII so that you're not wasting 246/256 of the space in the first place? Or really, to keep it readable and practical, just truncate your floats when saving them - you probably don't really need that long of a number for your pi/2, 6 digits would most likely work just fine. But if you're going for readable, switching to degrees makes more sense too, especially if you're not too worried about precision on the non-square angles - then you can write it out in degrees as an integer. The cost of converting from an integer in degrees to a float in radians is much less than the cost of reading a float as a string anyway. So just do that. roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Nov 23, 2011 |
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Nov 23, 2011 19:29
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I wouldn't call it 'super' optimizing. Yes, I know the saying about 'don't optimize prematurely', but I feel like people use that as a mantra instead of a guideline. Some thoughtful design, if not too complex, can be good. And yes, it's because floats are too bulky.
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Nov 23, 2011 19:30
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