Game Development Megathread

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Rocko Bonaparte: Mar 12, 2002; Every day is Friday!

OneEightHundred posted:

I wouldn't have dreamed that Epic would have released a free version of UE, but I'm not actually that shocked by the lack of good low-end C++ options. That much has pretty much been the territory of open source engines, which have been awful starting with Crystal Space (1997) and continuing through today because the developers are all more interested in making stuff that's fun to develop (i.e. renderer features) than useful (i.e. tools, cohesive integration, scripting, networking).

I give credit there for Irrlicht for at least admitting that and making a rendering engine, versus an entire game engine. But in the bigger picture, I've been mashing away on my own game engine to tie into that for awhile now, and only now can I say I have something with a good entity-component-subsystem model that I could be comfortable using. Plus, currently it only ever crashes when I tell it to exit! I really only went this route because I wanted to get more cozy with C++ generally, but boy do I pay for it.

# ? Mar 7, 2012 23:51

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# ? May 11, 2024 20:20

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

I give credit there for Irrlicht for at least admitting that and making a rendering engine, versus an entire game engine.

Well, I don't give them credit for it, that's exactly what I'm critical of. Irrlicht can get off the hook a bit for having a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more thorough game engine, but the problem in the first place is that there is way too much focus on making renderers and not a thoroughly-integrated game engine. Making mods for existing games, including engine mods, is staggeringly easier because a lot of the difficult integration and content creation problems have been solved, but making renderers is attractive because it lets you get flashy screenshots without doing the hard, unglamorous work needed to make a full game tick.

I have more admiration for Cube and it sequel because they went all the way, even though the result is really esoteric.

# ? Mar 8, 2012 05:44

Svampson: Jul 29, 2006; Same.

So I've taken a break from my metroidvania and started working on a Isometric turn-based strategy game, just finished implementing some A* pathfinding! (Which I'm so proud of I had to stick a gif of it into this thread and INTO YOUR FACE)

So I want the character to jump up ledges instead of floating up them which happens because I'm lerping the objects position (a Vector3), would it be possible to give the lerp a curve to make it look like a jump? I'm horrible at Math so I have a hard time figuring it out

Svampson fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Mar 8, 2012

# ? Mar 8, 2012 07:35

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Svampson posted:

I'm horrible at Math so I have a hard time figuring it out

If you want something like a simple gravity hop, it's not that hard.

Figure that if you have point A and B and it takes time T to get from one to the other, the amount of height lost to gravity is G*T^2

You need to apply an initial vertical velocity that will cancel out that height loss, plus cancel out the high difference of going from A to B.

So...
Vx = (Bx-Ax)/T
Vy = (By-Ay)/T
Vz = (Bz-Az + G*T^2)/T

And the position at time t is:
Px(t) = Ax + Vx*t
Py(t) = Ay + Vy*t
Pz(t) = Az + Vz*t - G*t^2

# ? Mar 8, 2012 08:11

Paniolo: Oct 9, 2007; Heads will roll.

OneEightHundred posted:

Well, I don't give them credit for it, that's exactly what I'm critical of. Irrlicht can get off the hook a bit for having a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more thorough game engine, but the problem in the first place is that there is way too much focus on making renderers and not a thoroughly-integrated game engine. Making mods for existing games, including engine mods, is staggeringly easier because a lot of the difficult integration and content creation problems have been solved, but making renderers is attractive because it lets you get flashy screenshots without doing the hard, unglamorous work needed to make a full game tick.

I have more admiration for Cube and it sequel because they went all the way, even though the result is really esoteric.

The worst part is that the so-called "rendering engines" inevitably start creeping in features like resource management, collision detection, UIs, sometimes even entity/component systems. At that point, it's not a rendering engine; it's a lovely half-finished game engine.

# ? Mar 8, 2012 08:20

shodanjr_gr: Nov 20, 2007

OneEightHundred posted:

I wouldn't have dreamed that Epic would have released a free version of UE, but I'm not actually that shocked by the lack of good low-end C++ options. That much has pretty much been the territory of open source engines, which have been awful starting with Crystal Space (1997) and continuing through today because the developers are all more interested in making stuff that's fun to develop (i.e. renderer features) than useful (i.e. tools, cohesive integration, scripting, networking).

The other sad thing in my opinion about open source C++ rendering engines is that they've sorta reached feature parity with each other and they don't even ship with some of the more exciting stuff that you find in recent games (or if they do, its in the form of small examples, aka token deferred shading example).

I'm working on some software for a power wall and a CAVE system at my school and I've ended up using visualizationlibrary (visualizationlibrary.org) along with equalizer for distributing the rendering. At the end of the day, I find that an object oriented wrapper on top of OGL works pretty well if all you care about is rendering. Plus VL supports all the latest OpenGL wiz-bang (4.2 tess shaders and what not).

Although if Unity decided to expose fine grained control over buffer swaps, I'd switch to that in an instant...

# ? Mar 8, 2012 09:27

a slime: Apr 11, 2005

Svampson posted:

So I've taken a break from my metroidvania and started working on a Isometric turn-based strategy game, just finished implementing some A* pathfinding! (Which I'm so proud of I had to stick a gif of it into this thread and INTO YOUR FACE)

So I want the character to jump up ledges instead of floating up them which happens because I'm lerping the objects position (a Vector3), would it be possible to give the lerp a curve to make it look like a jump? I'm horrible at Math so I have a hard time figuring it out

These are cool gifs

Do you plan on doing anything that allows people to perceive depth without rotating around constantly? I have been thinking about some kind of isometric action game where complex 3d environments are made possible through lighting, but I'm not sure if it's enough

# ? Mar 8, 2012 10:21

Svampson: Jul 29, 2006; Same.

not a dinosaur posted:

These are cool gifs

Do you plan on doing anything that allows people to perceive depth without rotating around constantly? I have been thinking about some kind of isometric action game where complex 3d environments are made possible through lighting, but I'm not sure if it's enough

I'm using a orthographic camera for those gifs but have switched to a perspective camera since it do become a bit too MC Escher at points, perspective camera combined with with some proper textures should hopefully be enough to convey depth

OneEightHundred posted:

Math Magic

Thanks! This was a good starting point, which lead me to figuring out how to use curves made with the Unity Curve editor and simply adding it to the Y as the vector is being lerped (Didn't think it would work at first since they are called AnimationCurves but can apparently be used for all sorts of cool things!)

# ? Mar 8, 2012 11:20

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

Svampson posted:

Thanks! This was a good starting point, which lead me to figuring out how to use curves made with the Unity Curve editor and simply adding it to the Y as the vector is being lerped (Didn't think it would work at first since they are called AnimationCurves but can apparently be used for all sorts of cool things!)

That is... a seriously clever solution. There is a mathematical solution, of course, but the result will always be sterile. What you've got has a ton more hoppy personality already.

The only other suggestion I can make is, when you detect a height incongruity, to change the lerp time to half length with the extra time buffering at either end. It'll make the jumps feel more poppy, and thus more like jumps. What you're doing there amounts to animation, so all the usual principles of animation (anticipation, etc) apply.

Shalinor fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Mar 8, 2012

# ? Mar 8, 2012 16:01

Rocko Bonaparte: Mar 12, 2002; Every day is Friday!

OneEightHundred posted:

Well, I don't give them credit for it, that's exactly what I'm critical of. Irrlicht can get off the hook a bit for having a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more thorough game engine, but the problem in the first place is that there is way too much focus on making renderers and not a thoroughly-integrated game engine. Making mods for existing games, including engine mods, is staggeringly easier because a lot of the difficult integration and content creation problems have been solved, but making renderers is attractive because it lets you get flashy screenshots without doing the hard, unglamorous work needed to make a full game tick.

Compromise for partial credit then? They openly at least said they were making a rendering engine versus claiming to make a full-on game engine, but flubbing everything else by the shiny.

quote:

The worst part is that the so-called "rendering engines" inevitably start creeping in features like resource management, collision detection, UIs, sometimes even entity/component systems. At that point, it's not a rendering engine; it's a lovely half-finished game engine.

Okay, I stand corrected.

# ? Mar 8, 2012 18:01

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

shodanjr_gr posted:

The other sad thing in my opinion about open source C++ rendering engines is that they've sorta reached feature parity with each other and they don't even ship with some of the more exciting stuff that you find in recent games (or if they do, its in the form of small examples, aka token deferred shading example).

I don't think that having a really full-featured renderer is that important. Unreal only recently added deferred shading support and was used to crank out plenty of AAA titles in the meantime.

The shoddy state of non-rendering features is much more frustrating. I'm sure you can think of many projects that, given good art, would look better than UT2k4. Can you think of any open-source engine that, given the appropriate assets and only gamecode-level programming, could duplicate its gameplay though? Okay, so we're more than 8 years behind.

I think the only ones that could do it right now are Blender (which has no network support and has a learning curve from hell) and, of course, Doom 3.

# ? Mar 8, 2012 18:12

resting bort face: Jun 2, 2000; by Fluffdaddy

This thread makes me feel like such an rear end in a top hat. I'm still stuck on really basic hurdles in comparison to what I see posted here, and it's easy to forget about the progress I've made in the last couple of months.

Right now I've gone back and implemented some screen states into my XNA game because the base code was getting out of hand. It took some doing, but I got it to compile again -- except now all my sprites are getting drawn as if their position is Vector2.Zero.

I see the player's sprite initialized for a fraction of a second to where I've assigned it, but then it rubber-bands back to 0,0 with all the other sprites. The movement code will make it move left and right like I want it, but as soon as you let go of the keys, zoop, back to 0,0, instantly. So now I have to figure out if it's something to do with the screen states I've added or if I introduced an unrelated bug when I rewrote the game's logic to play nicely with the new states.

# ? Mar 9, 2012 06:38

poemdexter: Feb 18, 2005; Hooray Indie Games!; College Slice

Mastiff posted:

This thread makes me feel like such an rear end in a top hat. I'm still stuck on really basic hurdles in comparison to what I see posted here, and it's easy to forget about the progress I've made in the last couple of months.

Right now I've gone back and implemented some screen states into my XNA game because the base code was getting out of hand. It took some doing, but I got it to compile again -- except now all my sprites are getting drawn as if their position is Vector2.Zero.

I see the player's sprite initialized for a fraction of a second to where I've assigned it, but then it rubber-bands back to 0,0 with all the other sprites. The movement code will make it move left and right like I want it, but as soon as you let go of the keys, zoop, back to 0,0, instantly. So now I have to figure out if it's something to do with the screen states I've added or if I introduced an unrelated bug when I rewrote the game's logic to play nicely with the new states.

Each screen state should ideally have it's own draw method. The screen manager should control which screens are "active" meaning which should actually draw. This allows you to have a HUD screen on top of your game screen. Your issue could be many things but I suggest you hit F9 a whole bunch in your code and just step through watching the player's position variable.

# ? Mar 9, 2012 15:16

Svampson: Jul 29, 2006; Same.

I have a question,
Say that I have 4 transparent boxes stacked, the faces show trough the transparent ones in front of it making it darker where the cubes meet!

Left is how it looks now, Right is how I want it to look

# ? Mar 9, 2012 16:35

Orzo: Sep 3, 2004; IT! IT is confusing! Say your goddamn pronouns!

Not sure if this is a reasonable solution (depends on your design / requirements), but you could detect such situations and merge the models together if it happens.

# ? Mar 9, 2012 16:41

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

Svampson posted:

I have a question,
Say that I have 4 transparent boxes stacked, the faces show trough the transparent ones in front of it making it darker where the cubes meet!

Left is how it looks now, Right is how I want it to look

Let's see... you could:

- Make your boxes render to the z-buffer, and draw them in strict front-to-back order. This would mean that they could NEVER overlap, though, so be careful. I don't know if there are other valid case where you would in fact want two boxes to overlap visually.

EDIT: - You could further improve that by rendering islands (groups of touching boxes) back to front, but individuals boxes WITHIN islands front to back. I believe that would give you islands that alpha-blended against eachother, but would still hide internal faces within islands.

- Give the boxes stacking intelligence and knowledge of their faces. If they detect a top-stack, disable their top plane. If they detect a side-stack, disable the side plane. Etc.

... of the three, given your world design, I'd argue that the stack intelligence approach would be a better idea. It would be easy to implement, and be very flexible in an otherwise large, complicated isometric world. Island tracking is a bit trickier than just determining neighbor boxes. (EDIT: I also don't know if you could do #1 or #2 in Unity without some hard-core render path mangling, which you may not be up to / you may only have Basic anyways)

Shalinor fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Mar 9, 2012

# ? Mar 9, 2012 16:58

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Svampson posted:

I have a question,
Say that I have 4 transparent boxes stacked, the faces show trough the transparent ones in front of it making it darker where the cubes meet!

You could render translucent objects to a separate buffer and then overlay it, or render them front-to-back and enable depth write.

Both of these will prevent translucent objects behind it showing though, the best solution is to remove the polys in the middle.

# ? Mar 9, 2012 16:58

resting bort face: Jun 2, 2000; by Fluffdaddy

poemdexter posted:

Each screen state should ideally have it's own draw method.

Good to hear. This is what I ended up with when I adapted some code from a tutorial, so it tells me I'm working in the right direction.

I also got my hero's sprite to draw in the correct spot, but an array of collectable items still stubbornly sticks up at Vector.Zero. I think I'm zeroing in (heh) on the problem, though. Thanks for the F9 tip. Didn't know about that before.

# ? Mar 10, 2012 03:50

RoboCicero: Oct 22, 2009; "I'm sick and tired of reading these posts!"

I'm writing a few custom shaders in XNA and it seems that the way XNA precompiles them means I can't have dynamic arrays. I've been looking around on the internet for solutions and they're mostly that special brand of helpful advice that makes no sense to someone who hasn't solved the issue.

What I'm gleaning is that I should either change how XNA loads HLSL, or go into the compiled assembly code and hand-tweak the result. Does anyone have any experience with the former?

I'm doing post-processing effects, and while I'm currently just sampling 8 times around the current pixel with the displacement changing according to my needs I'd like something better looking.

# ? Mar 11, 2012 02:27

Paniolo: Oct 9, 2007; Heads will roll.

You should clarify what you mean by dynamic arrays, because if it's what I am thinking then you simply can't do that in HLSL (and it has nothing to do with XNA.)

# ? Mar 11, 2012 03:33

RoboCicero: Oct 22, 2009; "I'm sick and tired of reading these posts!"

Oh, yeah, okay. That lines up pretty much with everything I've been reading. I might've been misinterpreting the people who were saying "just change the assembly dude".

I was trying to do a call in the vein of

code:

float radius = length(direction)
for(int i = -radius; i < radius; i++)
    //blend pixels, etc. etc.

but it's, like you said, be a HLSL thing. I'll probably fudge it slightly and have functions with defined blur sizes that I can clamp movement to (if speed is below this value, don't blur, if it's between these two values use this blur amount, etc.) and, if that looks acceptable, mess around with interpolating values instead of thresholding them.

# ? Mar 11, 2012 04:34

Slurps Mad Rips: Jan 25, 2009; Bwaltow!

I have a brief question. I'm currently working on a cross platform game (OS X and Windows) in C++. I'm also writing a few small tools that convert stuff from common formats like collada or obj to a custom binary format.

I've been using CMake as my build system, but it's becoming more and more of a kludge for me to add files as I develop, and to have custom tools as part of the build system. I'm sure for distributing stuff CMake is great (it's used a lot in open source projects), but I need something a little easier to use. I've written my own build system before in python, and it works fairly well (faster than scons, slower than waf at the moment). The only downside being that you need to be doing development on the command line essentially, and I'm not sure others are going to be too pleased about it if I bring them on board.

My question then is what build systems do you guys recommend for small teams, where it is in development, and not being actively distributed (but might be, at some point)? I'd like to avoid doing something where we have to edit and keep up to date two separate project files for the different platforms. It usually becomes a hassle, and it still results in me writing additional custom tasks for something like msbuild, or using shell scripts on OS X from within xcode.

It's dumb to care this much about a build system, but it bothers me if I have to do more than type a few letters, or press more than one button.

# ? Mar 11, 2012 18:14

Nalin: Sep 29, 2007; Hair Elf

Are you looking for something that can generate project files? If so, I personally use the Lua-based premake4:
http://industriousone.com/premake

You create the premake4.lua build script like so:
http://pastebin.com/QZF2ybUG

You then run premake4 specifying the type of project you want to build and it generates it:
premake4 vs2010
premake4 codeblocks

I made a simple "build" directory that included batch/shell scripts that you can double click on to build the desired project files. It works well for me as I only have to maintain the single premake4.lua file. If I make changes to it, I just run the batch file again and it spits out an updated project for me.

# ? Mar 11, 2012 20:25

Paniolo: Oct 9, 2007; Heads will roll.

SAHChandler posted:

I have a brief question. I'm currently working on a cross platform game (OS X and Windows) in C++. I'm also writing a few small tools that convert stuff from common formats like collada or obj to a custom binary format.

I've been using CMake as my build system, but it's becoming more and more of a kludge for me to add files as I develop, and to have custom tools as part of the build system. I'm sure for distributing stuff CMake is great (it's used a lot in open source projects), but I need something a little easier to use. I've written my own build system before in python, and it works fairly well (faster than scons, slower than waf at the moment). The only downside being that you need to be doing development on the command line essentially, and I'm not sure others are going to be too pleased about it if I bring them on board.

My question then is what build systems do you guys recommend for small teams, where it is in development, and not being actively distributed (but might be, at some point)? I'd like to avoid doing something where we have to edit and keep up to date two separate project files for the different platforms. It usually becomes a hassle, and it still results in me writing additional custom tasks for something like msbuild, or using shell scripts on OS X from within xcode.

It's dumb to care this much about a build system, but it bothers me if I have to do more than type a few letters, or press more than one button.

What problems are you having with CMake? I mean, I despise CMake as much as someone can (we use it at work to maintain a few absolutely massive projects across 12+ platforms) but at the end of the day it's pretty much the best of a whole lot of really bad solutions.

If you're looking for something that would let you, say, use the Visual Studio interface to add files to a project and then have those changes automatically reflected in the *nix makefiles, I'm highly skeptical such a thing exists or ever will.

edit: Premake looks just like cmake with possibly a more readable syntax and probably fewer features, so I'm not sure how that's an improvement.

# ? Mar 11, 2012 20:32

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Paniolo posted:

If you're looking for something that would let you, say, use the Visual Studio interface to add files to a project and then have those changes automatically reflected in the *nix makefiles, I'm highly skeptical such a thing exists or ever will.

Which is strange because it wouldn't be that hard to make this (at least for simple cases) as a Perl script. You'd still have to set project-wide settings separately, but skimming files from a vcproj and putting them into a "make.generated" or something, and having a main makefile (with the project settings) that make-includes make.generated is pretty simple. You could even throw in an 'all' dependency on make.generated itself being dependent on the vjproj file so you couldn't forget to keep it updated.

You'd also probably need to generate header file dependencies, but I've done that with an incredibly simple perl script myself, that updates an included "make.depend" on issuing a "make depend" command. Automating that together would be easy too.

I can understand why people might not want to spend the time doing this for their own projects, but it's weird that it hasn't already been done for people to use.

# ? Mar 11, 2012 20:59

Internet Janitor: May 17, 2008; "That isn't the appropriate trash receptacle."

Yesterday I ran yet another Game Jam. This time, the theme was "...And Now a Word from our Sponsors..."- we each chose a product or company that doesn't have anything to do with fun and made a game inspired by it.

My entry centered around "Five Hour Energy" turbo B-vitamin shot things. You must lead an everyday wage slave through his weekly routine, carefully managing his time and budget while completing as many tasks as possible. The only way to get everything done is to harness the power of Five Hour Energy to stop time. Some mild hallucinations and time-space anomalies may occur- rest assured that they are harmless. Do exciting things like showering, purchasing sandwiches, playing darts and collating documents!

The whole idea was stupidly ambitious for a 12-hour game jam, but I managed to get most of the really important features in place. How do you folks think I did? You can download a standalone Java app here. Arrow keys move, and space is used for dismissing dialogs and as an action button.

As always, here is the source! (Forth)

# ? Mar 11, 2012 21:38

etcetera08: Sep 11, 2008

Internet Janitor posted:

FIVE HOUR GAME

Ahaha, this owns.

# ? Mar 11, 2012 21:50

ambushsabre: Sep 1, 2009; It's...it's not shutting down!

Internet Janitor posted:

Cool Game Jam

It's really cool how your game is all one class and so neatly organized and everything, you seem like you really have a great handle on Fourth.

edit: in this vein, I'm really bad when it comes to creativity (I know I know), so maybe this weekend (or week?) someone posts a loose theme and people can jam on it if they want? Seriously I'm horrible with ideas. It kills me.

ambushsabre fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Mar 12, 2012

# ? Mar 11, 2012 22:00

mustermark: Apr 26, 2009; "Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors).

ambushsabre posted:

It's really cool how your game is all one class and so neatly organized and everything, you seem like you really have a great handle on Fourth.

edit: in this vein, I'm really bad when it comes to creativity (I know I know), so maybe this weekend (or week?) someone posts a loose theme and people can jam on it if they want? Seriously I'm horrible with ideas. It kills me.

I like this (http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/game-idea-generator/) when I'm feeling uncreative (always). The poo poo it generates almost always sounds pretty neat. Just ran it and got, "magical, dark, abstract, music game combined with shooter, set in the 4th dimension."

Internet Janitor: your stuff's always amazing. Do you have a write up anywhere on your playing with fourth, like a blog or something?

# ? Mar 12, 2012 02:47

ambushsabre: Sep 1, 2009; It's...it's not shutting down!

mustermark posted:

I like this (http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/game-idea-generator/) when I'm feeling uncreative (always). The poo poo it generates almost always sounds pretty neat. Just ran it and got, "magical, dark, abstract, music game combined with shooter, set in the 4th dimension."

This is great, but I ran into an issue immediately: upsetting, sim game combined with sim game, set in a cemetery.

# ? Mar 12, 2012 02:50

Jewel: May 2, 2009

ambushsabre posted:

edit: in this vein, I'm really bad when it comes to creativity (I know I know), so maybe this weekend (or week?) someone posts a loose theme and people can jam on it if they want? Seriously I'm horrible with ideas. It kills me.

Actually I'd really like a weekly thread or a thread with weekly events like that where anyone can participate, and a loose theme gets set and you have 24/48 hours to make a game. It'd be nice practice and it'd be more often than mini ludum dare's and stuff, plus it'd be goon only. Maybe we could do a small judging system where whoever wins sets the next theme?

# ? Mar 12, 2012 03:23

Paniolo: Oct 9, 2007; Heads will roll.

roomforthetuna posted:

Which is strange because it wouldn't be that hard to make this (at least for simple cases) as a Perl script. You'd still have to set project-wide settings separately, but skimming files from a vcproj and putting them into a "make.generated" or something, and having a main makefile (with the project settings) that make-includes make.generated is pretty simple. You could even throw in an 'all' dependency on make.generated itself being dependent on the vjproj file so you couldn't forget to keep it updated.

Unless you're only going to capture the most trivial of cases,, this would be orders of magnitude more complicated than you think it would be. However, if you still disagree please go ahead and do it because I would love nothing more than to never write a CMakeLists.txt file again.

# ? Mar 12, 2012 03:53

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Paniolo posted:

Unless you're only going to capture the most trivial of cases,, this would be orders of magnitude more complicated than you think it would be. However, if you still disagree please go ahead and do it because I would love nothing more than to never write a CMakeLists.txt file again.

I was thinking moderately trivial, maybe the second-most trivial. I'd not bother to support individual file exclusions, for example, because it's not something I use myself (and it's something that could be worked around with preprocessor definitions and includes instead). Basically, all I'd be pulling out is preprocessor definitions for the different build types, and a file list.

So yeah, if you'd need it to support things like custom build types that would be a different matter. Though still, honestly, fairly simple. But it's not something I'd do for you because my existing cross-platforming stuff with a little bit of manual fiddling works well enough for me.

# ? Mar 12, 2012 04:03

poemdexter: Feb 18, 2005; Hooray Indie Games!; College Slice

ambushsabre posted:

This is great, but I ran into an issue immediately: upsetting, sim game combined with sim game, set in a cemetery.

I got boring board game set in space.

# ? Mar 12, 2012 04:06

Internet Janitor: May 17, 2008; "That isn't the appropriate trash receptacle."

Thanks, guys! If you have any thoughts about the gameplay I might still do some tweaking. I feel like it's a little threadbare.

ambushsabre: Organization is how you stay sane in Forth. It's in the nature of the language to break tasks down into many small pieces. Personally I think one of my favorite aspects of working with Forth is how nice my source code ends up aesthetically. I try to make games that are polished on the inside as well as the outside.

mustermark: I don't blog, but I do intend to put together a postmortem for Five Hours of Power- I'm just really bushed right now. I'll be sure to drop a link in this thread when it's ready. In the meantime, I do have a postmortem for "Deep", a game I posted here a while back https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/blob/master/docs/postmortem-Deep.md

It's interesting to reread that and reflect on how my standard libraries have progressed since that game.

Internet Janitor fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Mar 12, 2012

# ? Mar 12, 2012 04:11

Slurps Mad Rips: Jan 25, 2009; Bwaltow!

Paniolo posted:

I would love nothing more than to never write a CMakeLists.txt file again.

This is actually why I had written my own, and it works fairly well, the only difference is that it doesn't generate a visual studio or xcode project and I feel kind of bad for forcing someone to do the same workflow that I follow. Then again I could just tell them (and anyone else I ever bring on) to deal with it :v:

The part that conflicts with me is that while I do plan to make the engine code (not the game code) open at some point, I'm not entirely sure folks would be too pleased about having to use 'yet another build system', though I guess I could also tell them to deal with it. But at least mine is installable via pip and has unit and integration tests so that's one thing I've got over something like waf. v :v:

# ? Mar 12, 2012 06:43

poemdexter: Feb 18, 2005; Hooray Indie Games!; College Slice

I might actually finish a game project for once. I'm using L�VE (love2d.org) which is Lua + Box2D physics + some graphic stuff. It feels a lot like python and pygame without all of pygame's nice libraries. It's also missing a lot of Box2D functionality (BoundaryListener god drat it) but I'm working around it.

The game plays like an old 5 and half inch floppy game called cannons. Take turns firing at the other player trying to score hits. I wanted to keep it as basic as possible so I'd actually finish it.

# ? Mar 12, 2012 06:49

Scaevolus: Apr 16, 2007

Internet Janitor posted:

Thanks, guys! If you have any thoughts about the gameplay I might still do some tweaking. I feel like it's a little threadbare.

the only winning move is not to play (you should get fired and lose the game if you miss two days of work in a row)

The clock should be advanced before telling the player he is running late.

Making the title image -> optimal tile grid calculation into a compile-time directive (:image-compress title-tiles title-grid "title.png" 8 8 ?) might be a good idea.

:enum bed alarm-clock ... could replace :const bed 0 :const alarm-clock 1 ...

# ? Mar 12, 2012 07:58

h_double: Jul 27, 2001

mustermark posted:

I like this (http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/game-idea-generator/) when I'm feeling uncreative (always). The poo poo it generates almost always sounds pretty neat. Just ran it and got, "magical, dark, abstract, music game combined with shooter, set in the 4th dimension."

"Historical sports game set in a zoo"

Jewel posted:

Actually I'd really like a weekly thread or a thread with weekly events like that where anyone can participate, and a loose theme gets set and you have 24/48 hours to make a game. It'd be nice practice and it'd be more often than mini ludum dare's and stuff, plus it'd be goon only. Maybe we could do a small judging system where whoever wins sets the next theme?

I like this idea. The thread might be a better fit in Games (more potential participation, e.g. people using something like Game Maker who might not venture into CoC) but it's good thinking to have it be frequent and casual enough, to get more people on board and not stressed out about the "stakes" of a particular game.

h_double fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Mar 12, 2012

# ? Mar 12, 2012 13:39

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# ? May 11, 2024 20:20

Jewel: May 2, 2009

h_double posted:

"Historical sports game set in a zoo"

I like this idea. The thread might be a better fit in Games (more potential participation, e.g. people using something like Game Maker who might not venture into CoC) but it's good thinking to have it be frequent and casual enough, to get more people on board and not stressed out about the "stakes" of a particular game.

I could potentially make the thread on the weekend. I'll try and gather info and write it up during the week, and I'll decide on the weekend if I should post it. Feel free to mention ideas in this thread before the weekend, and I'll see about adding them to the OP (or tell me you have an amazing idea and would rather write one!)

Edit:

poemdexter posted:

I'm also down for something like this however you might want to make it weekends only as some of us have 9-5 jobs and families so 24-48 hours might translate to 3-6 hours in reality.

Yeah, I wouldn't post them or advocate an alternate OP posting them during the weekdays anyway. 48 hours is usually a lot nicer than 24 hours too due to timezone problems relating to 24 hours. I'm over in Australia land though so I have no idea when good times are.

Jewel fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Mar 12, 2012

# ? Mar 12, 2012 14:19

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Game Development Megathread

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