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Pfhreak posted:Hey, in some parts of the world it's June 1st, right? That means maybe we could move out of the Pre-Pre-Gamedev phase and into the Pre-Gamedev phase, right? Synthorange is in Australia, I'm sure he can verify his clocks say something like, "rear end early, June 1" You, I like how you think.
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May 31, 2012 20:20
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Orzo posted:Are there any games that follow a philosophy where your items and abilities actually matter and require mastery? It seems just about every game these days tries to give so many options to the player that they end up with an arsenal of stuff that just doesn't matter. A few examples of games I've played recently: I'd say in part it's a design challenge because what you would have to do here is force the player to use a variety of weapons/tools/strategies/whatever, but you have to induce them to do this in a way that's fun, obvious/learnable, and is not annoying. Forcing players to do anything can get annoying real quick, though, if you're not careful. The most common way to do this in your typical violent fighty game example with weapons is some sort of rock/paper/scissors specialization system that forces players to switch to the optimum weapon based on the situations, or else just tiering the weapons and then scaling the enemies you fight really heavily to force players to switch weapons as they progress. Both can be kind of clunky. Throw in stuff like upgradable weapons, and you have a tricky situation since you now have to balance the relative strengths/weaknesses in such a way that there isn't one optimal weapon that's good enough since being forced to switch weapons and make decisions takes effort and therefore presents an additional cost to switching weapons that will lead to your weapon switch incentives being ignored by some players if they can avoid it with tolerable losses. Also, in a non-linear game, if you make one particular item the "best" or even a necessary item for a given situation in order to coerce players into switching to them, you have to be sure the player has that item by the time the situation comes around. Otherwise, they either have to stop whatever they're doing and do something else since they don't have the necessary tools at that point in time, or else they'll just sit there and keep slamming their heads against the wall doing it with their current tools and failing until they get sick of it and stop. Communicating this effectively can be quite difficult short of extremely tight and linear designs as seen in the Zelda games.
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May 31, 2012 22:15
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Pfhreak posted:Hey, in some parts of the world it's June 1st, right? That means maybe we could move out of the Pre-Pre-Gamedev phase and into the Pre-Gamedev phase, right? Synthorange is in Australia, I'm sure he can verify his clocks say something like, "rear end early, June 1" The theme is neither pudding nor fishsticks. Nor Doctor Who.
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May 31, 2012 22:16
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Well The Doctor is an rear end in a top hat and I want a second opinion. I can wait until tomorrow.. barely
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May 31, 2012 22:18
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Ok, I managed to add replay/simulation functionality to my game like I was discussing on the last couple of pages (turned out to be pretty easy, cool). And it has an awesome speed up / slow down feature, so I took the opportunity to make a demo video of it. Graphics aren't particularly suited to video compression but whatever. Also maybe very slightly NSFW because of explicit lyrics in the music I slapped on it...?
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May 31, 2012 22:19
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seiken posted:Ok, I managed to add replay/simulation functionality to my game like I was discussing on the last couple of pages (turned out to be pretty easy, cool). And it has an awesome speed up / slow down feature, so I took the opportunity to make a demo video of it. Graphics aren't particularly suited to video compression but whatever. Also maybe very slightly NSFW because of explicit lyrics in the music I slapped on it...? That rules, nice one! (A good thing, 'cos I'd be upset if such a great tune was wasted on a lame-o game-o.  )Don't s'pose you can be convinced to make a Mac port?
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May 31, 2012 22:25
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Thanks! I totally would but I don't have a Mac so I can't do it myself unless I find a friend to lend me one or something (I think? I don't know anything about cross-compiling). That said I used SFML/opengl for the windows version so aside from a few wee things it should be pretty easy to port in theory... you wanna volunteer?
seiken fucked around with this message at 22:57 on May 31, 2012 |
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May 31, 2012 22:35
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seiken posted:Ok, I managed to add replay/simulation functionality to my game like I was discussing on the last couple of pages (turned out to be pretty easy, cool). And it has an awesome speed up / slow down feature, so I took the opportunity to make a demo video of it. Graphics aren't particularly suited to video compression but whatever. Also maybe very slightly NSFW because of explicit lyrics in the music I slapped on it...? This looks fantastic. Find yourself an awesome chiptunes musician, you've really got something there. Kinda Geometry Wars-eque, but more interesting.
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May 31, 2012 23:09
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Hey cheers! Actually I'm an alright electronic music guy myself (there's some stuff in the related videos) so I have that covered. I was toying with the idea of doing something cool like having dynamically synthesized music that plays in time to stuff blowing up, I'm not totally sure though. I'll probably leave music till a later version when I've figured out what I want to do with that.
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May 31, 2012 23:36
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seiken posted:Thanks! I totally would but I don't have a Mac so I can't do it myself unless I find a friend to lend me one or something (I think? I don't know anything about cross-compiling). That said I used SFML/opengl for the windows version so aside from a few wee things it should be pretty easy to port in theory... you wanna volunteer? I probably would volunteer but I don't have enough time for my own projects as it is. Maybe when your game is successful enough that you can pay for my time! And I definitely agree that integrating music well would be a great addition to the experience but that's probably just the techno musician in me appreciating the synchronized and choreographed enemy movement patterns.
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Jun 1, 2012 09:33
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I'm thinking of making something using an HTML canvas. Good idea/bad idea? What are my options for audio control?
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Jun 1, 2012 17:13
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Manslaughter posted:I'm thinking of making something using an HTML canvas. Good idea/bad idea? What are my options for audio control? Audio is going to be really browser dependent right now, but it's settling down nicely. I've used impact.js and enjoyed it, but there are other options for canvas game development out there.
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Jun 1, 2012 17:22
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Let's get it on. SA GameDev VII is a go. Balls.
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Jun 1, 2012 17:29
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This isn't a game development question but I thought this would be the best place to ask. I have a 2D matrix of vectors and I'm trying to apply a texture to it that is warped based on the direction and magnitude of the vectors. I have zero experience in this stuff so I'm not really sure what to look up. The closest thing I've found to what I'm talking about are flow maps. This does what I'd like but with the added step of adding more warping over time. It does not explain how, mathematically, to apply warping as it's handled by the program he's using. If anyone is interested in flow maps Valve put out an really cool presentation on their use in Portal 2.
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Jun 1, 2012 18:07
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That's pretty trivial to do with pixel shaders. Basically when you do a texture lookup in a pixel shader it's something like: color = tex2D(texture, coordinates) ... This returns a 4-component float vector, usually with all components ranging 0..1 from the minimum to maximum values of the color channel, or possibly anything if you're using a floating point texture. Texture offsetting is normally done as something like offsetColor = tex2D(offsetTexture, coordinates); color = tex2D(texture, coordinates + (offsetColor.rg - 0.5) * offsetScale); The second lookup has the location it gets the coordinate of the pixel offset by the value of the first.
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Jun 1, 2012 19:33
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OneEightHundred posted:That's pretty trivial to do with pixel shaders. Basically when you do a texture lookup in a pixel shader it's something like: I have the feeling I'm in for some heavy reading. So warping a texture using a vector map is called a texture offset? If I'm understanding right a pixel shader should have a function that offsets each texture pixel (or color channel or whatever) by the vector direction and magnitude of my vector map? I assume it would automatically handle filling in the blanks with interpolation or something? Anyone happen to know how to do this or at least where to start looking in OpenGL?
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Jun 1, 2012 22:36
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A typical way to encode this data visually is to use a displacement map. Pick two channels from of red, green, blue, and encode the displacement as a range from -N to N into a 0 to 255 pixel value. Because HTML5/Canvas/WebGL is all the rage, you can examples of these new filters by Googling and appending "js", like so. It's fairly easy to write a shader for.
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Jun 1, 2012 23:02
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Suspicious Dish posted:A typical way to encode this data visually is to use a displacement map. Pick two channels from of red, green, blue, and encode the displacement as a range from -N to N into a 0 to 255 pixel value. If I'm understanding what this is correctly, its not really what I'm looking for. I just want to warp a texture on a 2D plane. Edit: Actually that link is what I'm looking for thanks. I need to read more carefully. Ether Drunk fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 23:34
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Does anyone know of something XNA like (provides good easy to use 2d graphics functions, native code, hardware accelerated, good programming language), but that works cross platform (specifically on mobile(iOS, Android))? I've been looking at 2d libraries for unity, but they kind of seem like overkill for what I do. Unity almost does do much for my tastes. I'd also like to stay away from flash based stuff(not an actionscript fan).
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Jun 2, 2012 15:29
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mmm11105 posted:Does anyone know of something XNA like (provides good easy to use 2d graphics functions, native code, hardware accelerated, good programming language), but that works cross platform (specifically on mobile(iOS, Android))? Covers a few of your points, but I've heard good things about http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/ - If you don't mind Lua it could be worth checking out. That being said, I make 2d games in Unity with Sprite Manager 2. I'm a huge fan, and none of the advanced features really get in the way in my opinion. Use what you need, ignore the rest.
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Jun 2, 2012 16:48
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mmm11105 posted:Does anyone know of something XNA like (provides good easy to use 2d graphics functions, native code, hardware accelerated, good programming language), but that works cross platform (specifically on mobile(iOS, Android))? Check out impact.js, it's not flawless on mobile platforms yet, but I'm enjoying it.
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Jun 2, 2012 17:08
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Azazel posted:Covers a few of your points, but I've heard good things about http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/ - If you don't mind Lua it could be worth checking out. First one look OK. I would just use unity, but for the games I make I'm not a big fan of the object with script attached methods. Would rather have a traditional system of classes and code and a game loop (XNA style). mmm11105 fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jun 2, 2012 |
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Jun 2, 2012 19:23
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mmm11105 posted:Does anyone know of something XNA like (provides good easy to use 2d graphics functions, native code, hardware accelerated, good programming language), but that works cross platform (specifically on mobile(iOS, Android))? I've never tried using it, but monogame aims to be an XNA clone that produces portable code. monogame posted:MonoGame is an Open Source, OpenGL implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. Our goal is to allow XNA developers on Windows & Windows Phone to port their games to the iOS / Android / Mac OS X, Linux and later this year PlayStation Suite and Windows Metro. It must be fairly far along as it was used to port Basion to Linux for the Humble Indy Bundle.
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Jun 2, 2012 20:07
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What would you guys recommend for learning unity? It seems daunting to start in.
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Jun 5, 2012 22:54
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Along that topic, what are some good game development blogs and/or websites? Not really for beginner game development. Just some good reads you can learn from.
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Jun 6, 2012 00:00
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TJChap2840 posted:Along that topic, what are some good game development blogs and/or websites? http://gafferongames.com/ http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/ http://msinilo.pl/blog/ http://flohofwoe.blogspot.com/ http://procworld.blogspot.com/ <- favorite to watch Those are some of the ones I know of. Most are not really kept up to date or anything. Seems most people have taken to twitter. So I follow a bunch of people on there.
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Jun 6, 2012 00:27
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mmm11105 posted:What would you guys recommend for learning unity? It seems daunting to start in. From what I remember, their platformer tutorial - at least I think that was the one - was a really good overview of the Unity way of doing things. No idea for 2d-specific stuff though.
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Jun 6, 2012 00:46
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Can anyone help me with loading animated GIFs with their palettes intact into Pygame using PIL? I'm trying to do this for a retro project so I can manually change palettes later but it's strange. The project is here, it's fairly well commented and very very short, bare minimum to demonstrate the problem: http://www.mediafire.com/?0l19mfv3addnb82 pil.py is some functions to help with loading GIFs I've edited together from various resources and someone's blog, but there's some really strange bug I can't work out what's happening. I can load the palette from the first frame and set each frame to use it, or I can load the palette from each frame and set each frame to use its own. I can load one image and it will only work the first way, I can load another and it will only work the second way, and some won't work either way. I don't get it. I saved two of them with photoshop and one was downloaded from the internet, they're commented which ones are which. You'll see what the problem is when you run main.py You'll need Pygame and PIL, I used python 2.6 but it should work with more. Thanks in advance if anyone helps!
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Jun 6, 2012 12:30
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Does anyone have any good sources for placeholder art assets, especially 3d skeletal animations for humanish characters? Public domain preferred, but not necessary.
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Jun 6, 2012 21:53
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mmm11105 posted:Does anyone know of something XNA like (provides good easy to use 2d graphics functions, native code, hardware accelerated, good programming language), but that works cross platform (specifically on mobile(iOS, Android))? Someone in this thread turned me onto LibGDX and I've since become a convert. It ticks all the boxes for 2D game dev and after battling with Unity for ages, it just feels so good to use a 2D specific physics engine. The documentation is pretty lovely but if you don't mind digging around, it's a very rewarding engine to work with. It definitely supports to Android and I -think- there is a wrapper out there for converting the applets to iOS but I may be wrong.
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Jun 6, 2012 22:59
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mmm11105 posted:What would you guys recommend for learning unity? It seems daunting to start in. I'd read the intro docs to learn the basics of it, then I'd just start trying poo poo out in the editor while look at the examples. Atleast that's what I've been doing to learn while porting a game using Unity at work. ninja edit: btw, I'm using Sprite Manager 2 for 2d stuff. It's a neat tool, but if I could go back in time I'd probably try using 2d Toolkit.
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Jun 7, 2012 02:10
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Hanpan posted:Someone in this thread turned me onto LibGDX and I've since become a convert. It ticks all the boxes for 2D game dev and after battling with Unity for ages, it just feels so good to use a 2D specific physics engine. That looks real cool - shame it has no iOS support but I could live with that. I'll try it out sometime. Anyone have experience with cocos2d-x? I already know a little c++, and it seems to support iOS, Android, PC, Linux, Metro and even QNX.
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Jun 7, 2012 02:33
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Cream_Filling posted:Does anyone have any good sources for placeholder art assets, especially 3d skeletal animations for humanish characters? Public domain preferred, but not necessary. There's the CMU mocap database: http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/ however they use uncommon file formats so you might have to do some conversions.
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Jun 7, 2012 10:21
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SAHChandler posted:There's the CMU mocap database: http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/ however they use uncommon file formats so you might have to do some conversions. Thanks. Not quite what I'm looking for, though, in that it looks like sort of raw data that has to be converted and editied into usable assets. I appreciate it, but I'll probably go with plan B, which is ripping content from a commercial game. I just want to prototype stuff using a pre-made model/animation set. Hopefully the conversion or decompiling or whatever for the model files won't totally scramble everything.
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Jun 7, 2012 16:19
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Can anyone point me in the direction of materials/articles regarding latency/lag/timers/cheating in browser games? An example being if two users were both presented with a button they had to click and raced to click it. I would like to accommodate for any latency differences and prevent cheating if possible. Thanks a lot.
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Jun 7, 2012 18:01
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If I have a large tilemap and the player's view is only a portion of that tilemap, what is the easiest way to move the tilemap based on the player's movements? Redraw the tiles as they appear? If that is correct, what is the best, most efficient way for that?
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Jun 7, 2012 20:25
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TJChap2840 posted:If I have a large tilemap and the player's view is only a portion of that tilemap, what is the easiest way to move the tilemap based on the player's movements? Redraw the tiles as they appear? If that is correct, what is the best, most efficient way for that? I'm in a similar situation. What I've done is split the world into grids. I display 5x5 grids (can be whatever you want, 3x3 whatever) around the character and whenever the the character gets close to viewing the void outside of the rendered 5x5, I recenter the character in a new 5x5. Creating an illusion that the player is continually walking across the world. I don't know if that's the correct way to do it... but I can walk across a map the size of the Europe without fps dropping.
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Jun 7, 2012 22:51
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Holy poo poo holy poo poo holy poo poo. There's been a Unreal Engine 4 trailer and Devkit walkthrough released. I'm having way too intense feelings for what it is. I'm so happy. I can't wait to use it. Here's a trailer to see it pushed to its limits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZmRt8gCsC0&hd=1 Here's a walkthrough of the new UDK (really REALLY good): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8&hd=1 To sum up a few cool features in the videos: Support for GPU particles (ie millions of particles at once with little to no lag), bounced real-time lighting (!), instant playing in the editor (!!!), real-time debugging through the editor, and tons more. Edit: Also remember that there's no UnrealScript anymore, only C++, thank god. Jewel fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jun 8, 2012 |
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Jun 8, 2012 16:54
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God drat.
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Jun 8, 2012 17:02
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Jewel posted:To sum up a few cool features in the videos: Support for GPU particles (ie millions of particles at once with little to no lag), bounced real-time lighting (!), instant playing in the editor (!!!), real-time debugging through the editor, and tons more. I really wish they would have talked more about that, though. I want to know how they're handling transparencies. That both demos more or less completely avoided them has me wondering if that's a sore spot for them, now.
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Jun 8, 2012 17:10
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