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ShinAli posted:I skipped out on 4.4 and went through applying each patch manually to 4.5. I think they released a new zip in the same download page that might fix things, though. We did release a new version, which should fix the compile issues (we forgot a few files, oops.). Some of the patches that were meant for 4.4 are not needed for 4.5, as they were patches for Unreal itself that were accepted by Epic. Not sure about the thread crash though, but then again I'm a web developer  .Another person on the mailing list asked about VS support, but there is currently nothing planned for it. I don't know if there are any hooks to actually do this without us doing something first, but I can ask to see if it's possible.
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Nov 3, 2014 18:45
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ShinAli posted:I skipped out on 4.4 and went through applying each patch manually to 4.5. I think they released a new zip in the same download page that might fix things, though. If you got Xamarin for Unreal working with 4.5 that would be great if you could share it. All of my current projects are 4.5 and once I got Xamarin for Unreal working I couldn't open any of my existing projects (due to being editor 4.4 attempting to open 4.5 files).
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Nov 3, 2014 19:09
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I have a question about repositories and layout with a Unity project. I've been dropping all my C# files right in the project view right now, including the stuff that isn't a MonoBehavior. I think this going to become unsustainable. What is the best practices for organizing the source? In particular, what should I do about the stuff that isn't directly a component? The second part of that is source control. How should I set up source control for all this? How do I balance that between binary repositories and code repositories?
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Nov 3, 2014 20:56
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Drastic Actions posted:Some of the patches that were meant for 4.4 are not needed for 4.5, as they were patches for Unreal itself that were accepted by Epic. Oh yeah, I called those relaxin' patches. Drastic Actions posted:Another person on the mailing list asked about VS support, but there is currently nothing planned for it. I don't know if there are any hooks to actually do this without us doing something first, but I can ask to see if it's possible. From a cursory look, it seemed like the Xamarin Studio plugin was running a server, or the UE4 plugin was or something. It wouldn't really be super difficult to figure out what's going on. Stick100 posted:If you got Xamarin for Unreal working with 4.5 that would be great if you could share it. All of my current projects are 4.5 and once I got Xamarin for Unreal working I couldn't open any of my existing projects (due to being editor 4.4 attempting to open 4.5 files). I've tweeted at Miguel about it and he seems to want to take the conversation over to email; hopefully we'll figure something out.
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Nov 4, 2014 01:17
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My buddy and I have launched our humble little Kickstarter for our little weekend warrior game project - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1581854625/dungeon-slammers The biggest challenge has been keeping an artist paid while she pumps out all the crazy designs we've asked for. Some finished character (dragon scale armor) designs she dropped on us this morning: 
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Nov 4, 2014 09:58
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Azazel posted:My buddy and I have launched our humble little Kickstarter for our little weekend warrior game project - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1581854625/dungeon-slammers
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Nov 4, 2014 17:08
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Yeah, there's this level of "If it's going to be F2P, I'll just wait until it's released to see if I want to spend money on it" going on. It doesn't help that in your case you're not giving any idea of how much of a stipend backing will get you (and what you can get with that stipend).
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Nov 4, 2014 17:25
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Unless you're asking for 1 million dollars and plan on spending 100% of it on advertising, your F2P game is not going to get much traction on mobile. You're competing in a saturated, commoditized market where companies hiring behavioral psychologists, A/B testing app icons, and straight up buying users via ads for 2 bucks a pop is the norm. Good luck!
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Nov 4, 2014 17:41
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I'm just loving around in XNA but was wondering if there was a place for free crappy art assets? I am looking for horses in particular. I have no idea how to make 3D art so that's not (yet) an option. Also I'm bad at art.
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Nov 4, 2014 18:29
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TheReverend posted:I'm just loving around in XNA but was wondering if there was a place for free crappy art assets? I am looking for horses in particular. OpenGameArt is an okay place for free art assets (although you have to keep track of the licences, of course) + they have horses!
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Nov 4, 2014 19:12
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Shalinor posted:I wish you all the best, but that'll be a struggle. Mobile F2P games are nearly impossible to Kickstart. :/ I appreciate the comments from everyone. We understand the challenges behind the mobile F2P market, and trying to build a KS around it specifically. It'll still get released if this KS fails, we're just seeing if it's possible to offset our out of pocket costs. That said, our actual market is Japanese mobile, an industry I've worked in for a few years. They lap up these kind of games like candy, so we'll see how it goes vs. the English speaking market.
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Nov 5, 2014 00:06
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Azazel posted:I appreciate the comments from everyone. We understand the challenges behind the mobile F2P market, and trying to build a KS around it specifically. It'll still get released if this KS fails, we're just seeing if it's possible to offset our out of pocket costs. I really enjoy what your artist has done and I actually wanted to make a similar game after seeing Smash Bros 3DS's streetpass minigame (basically the same game)! You're right about the Japanese market though, good luck!
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Nov 5, 2014 00:27
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I am wondering how to properly do some collision detection for hitboxes in Unity. I had latched on to the OnTriggerEnter, which works fine for moving objects. I was trying to test on a stationary object, and it won't trigger. I couldn't get it to trigger until I nudged the object. I discovered OnTriggerStay is no use either. How do I get these stationary objects in the hitbox's bounds to trigger when the box is created?
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Nov 5, 2014 07:24
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Try calling Rigidbody.WakeUp? Or just a guess, but maybe moving the object is causing Unity to change it from static? I'm guessing Unity doesn't bother checking triggers against static objects.
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Nov 5, 2014 11:47
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Flownerous posted:Or just a guess, but maybe moving the object is causing Unity to change it from static? I'm guessing Unity doesn't bother checking triggers against static objects. The problem I have with calling things on the stationary objects is that I have not detected them. So I have to come up with another way to find them. If I had that, then I could probably just use that for my hit box.
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Nov 5, 2014 17:07
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Yeah that's pretty much it. The problem seems to have come up for a few people, but the solutions have been very contextual. ... but those are what you use. You can also get a fairly long ways with networks of raycast - raycasts are pretty good at describing the sweep of a sword, for instance - but you need to remember to backstop your checks in case the ray you spawned is INSIDE the thing you're hitting. It won't find the collision if the origin point of the ray is inside the hit object. So you end up either hitting everything for a good distance behind your hit volume too, or you do a secondary check to catch those cases and then run a calc to see if that hit you detected was for a thing in front or behind you, and... etc. It gets complicated. But start with the raycast and spherecast. Yes, this means your hitboxes are actually hitspheres, and yes, that's kind of stupid in a logical sense, but it works. (and spherechecks are way faster anyways) EDIT: And this isn't a Unity-specific problem, I had to do the same thing for our melee system in UDK. I think they even had the same "why is there no Physics.BoxCast?!" limitation. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 17:36
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Shalinor posted:You do it by not using actual colliders. You know that suite of functions off of Physics, that includes Raycast, Linecast, and so on? There's a couple of sphere variants in there you can use, which means you run a bunch of those per-frame at the various transformed positions of the skeleton/whatever to which have been assigned hit volumes. The "thick ray" / the pill shape is super handy too, and can approximate boxes in some cases. The HUGE BUMMER is that at least some of them only check against the AABB, so THEN you have to do a secondary check on all "hits" to make sure their COLLIDER actually hits the box you're checking against. So read the doc carefully on every single one. Ewwww. So what do you do for projectiles against stationary targets?
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Nov 5, 2014 18:59
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Ewwww. So what do you do for projectiles against stationary targets? Triggers DO work, it's just that they don't work when you create them at a point. OnTriggerEnter et al ONLY work for triggers that you actually move through the world. So a bullet, they might work for, it's just hitboxes on a melee animation (that are naturally created only on the frame(s) requiring them) where they especially don't work. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 19:14
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Mecanim isn't as improved in Unity 5 as I hoped. They added to the API but almost all of it is in reference to their new vision of using mecanim animation state machines as logic machines too. Fans of playmaker may like that but its way too fiddly for me. Unfortunately most of the rest of the mecanim code access is in the editor namespace so you can't use it in builds. So you have some options for assembling animators through editor scripts but it means you still can't just ignore the machines entirely and play clips directly or assemble the controllers at runtime as needed.
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Nov 5, 2014 23:07
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FuzzySlippers posted:Mecanim isn't as improved in Unity 5 as I hoped. They added to the API but almost all of it is in reference to their new vision of using mecanim animation state machines as logic machines too. Fans of playmaker may like that but its way too fiddly for me. Unfortunately most of the rest of the mecanim code access is in the editor namespace so you can't use it in builds. So you have some options for assembling animators through editor scripts but it means you still can't just ignore the machines entirely and play clips directly or assemble the controllers at runtime as needed. I hate to be down on Unity, just because it's such a great platform at its core, but it's clear to me that the Unity team is never going to fix any of the issues with Unity. They'll just continue to release flashy new things, that'll be partially broken on release and then continue to rot on the vine because no one ever bothers to fix the issues. Then in response to everyone being displeased with the state of the feature, the Unity team will announce a big flashy new replacement feature for the broken feature, and release it partially broken as well, and the process will continue. In short, Unity development is becoming a minefield of broken features that you need to learn (often by trial and error) to avoid, lest you work your way into a wall and need to throw out big chunks of your own work to get around it. Frankly, UE4 competes against Unity for some developers (I've already made the switch; C# or no), but a lot of developers will never make the switch until C# is a first-class language in whatever engine they switch to. I just wish another C# game engine like Paradox 3D or WAVE would make it big on the scene and start putting a little direct competition against Unity. If UE4 doesn't scare them, I'd like to see a direct competitor step up and make them shake in their boots. Maybe then some stuff will get fixed.
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Nov 6, 2014 00:34
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The King of Swag posted:In short, Unity development is becoming a minefield of broken features that you need to learn (often by trial and error) to avoid, lest you work your way into a wall and need to throw out big chunks of your own work to get around it. We're getting really into unity dev these days, and I couldn't agree more. As former flash devs, though, in a weird way we feel right at home...!
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Nov 6, 2014 00:49
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Unity 5 doesn't feel particularly close to release either. I'm guessing a couple months into 2015 at least unless these betas start improving quickly. There are a lot of snazzy things that aren't even in 5.0 so that means 5.x improvements aren't coming till mid to late 2015 at the earliest. Since I wanna do a similar game after I finish my current one I want to keep my basic code framework but move it into something that's more engine neutral. I have little experience with lua but since most of my code isn't performance sensitive it seems like a good choice to convert to and then I can move on to UE4 or whatever makes sense at the time.
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Nov 6, 2014 01:40
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The King of Swag posted:I hate to be down on Unity, just because it's such a great platform at its core, but it's clear to me that the Unity team is never going to fix any of the issues with Unity. They'll just continue to release flashy new things, that'll be partially broken on release and then continue to rot on the vine because no one ever bothers to fix the issues. Then in response to everyone being displeased with the state of the feature, the Unity team will announce a big flashy new replacement feature for the broken feature, and release it partially broken as well, and the process will continue.
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Nov 6, 2014 03:58
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So you're saying leave the broken unity up to the hands of people with mostly no experience making things on the scale that they make them in; who also make addons/assets that are usually just as broken and can be (and have!) broken or disappear on a moment's notice? 
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Nov 6, 2014 04:43
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This whole thing between Unity and UE4 is messing with my head. Two years back, I was making GBS threads out C++ and doodling my own little C++ engine to get up-to-snuff on C++ and game stuff. Everybody was doing Unity then. I was doing a lot of C# at work and really don't have problems with it. I'd rather be writing in that than C++ most of the time. Now everybody is running off to UE4 and doodling in C++. What should I be looking at if my unrealistic expectations are an action RPG or simple RTS, but would probably wind up just making really small, simple things? This because I'm just one dude with some spare time. I think I'm pretty fluent in both C++ and C#, but I'm not really interested in picking up yet another one.
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Nov 6, 2014 06:49
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:This whole thing between Unity and UE4 is messing with my head. Two years back, I was making GBS threads out C++ and doodling my own little C++ engine to get up-to-snuff on C++ and game stuff. Everybody was doing Unity then. I was doing a lot of C# at work and really don't have problems with it. I'd rather be writing in that than C++ most of the time. Now everybody is running off to UE4 and doodling in C++. What should I be looking at if my unrealistic expectations are an action RPG or simple RTS, but would probably wind up just making really small, simple things? This because I'm just one dude with some spare time. I think I'm pretty fluent in both C++ and C#, but I'm not really interested in picking up yet another one. As someone in similar circumstance who works in unity at work, I'm running all my side projects in UE4. What really sells it for me is the feeling of competence I get from the team behind unreal. It's almost exactly the opposite to how I feel about unity.
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Nov 6, 2014 07:51
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leper khan posted:As someone in similar circumstance who works in unity at work, I'm running all my side projects in UE4. What really sells it for me is the feeling of competence I get from the team behind unreal. It's almost exactly the opposite to how I feel about unity. ok so to dabble in it, it sounds like I can just plop down $19 bucks, unsubscribe, and see how it goes. If I ever get serious, I guess I can sign up again. Is that right and legit? What is my recourse for doing some kind of scripting and rapid prototyping? I could only see their visual scripting language, but I was hoping for something that I could monkey in real-time in a text editor.
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Nov 6, 2014 08:17
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In an update to hit box collisions: I switched to a sphere casting collision and it looks like I'm getting what I was expecting. That includes shenanigans like multiples of the same object colliding that I have to filter out. I had that stuff show up when I was doing a hitbox in my custom project. I guess I was on the right track back then. But now I guess I should go kick the tires on UE4 and see what's up.
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Nov 6, 2014 08:19
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i'd be more comfortable with UE4's C++ if it wasn't for having to also use their own object model that's layered on top of c++ via macros. they have to have that abstraction to expose stuff to blueprint, but it's just.. layering a simpler model on top of a complex model makes the overall package *even more complex*.
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Nov 6, 2014 09:18
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So I haven't really been in the mood to do any real work tonight; or in my case, learn more about the intricacies of C++ in UE4, because it uses a ton of macros*. So I decided to actually start playing around with WAVE and Paradox 3D. First impressions from their websites is that WAVE is mobile focused with PC support, while Paradox 3D is PC focused with mobile support. First impressions from the communities is that while older, WAVE doesn't have much of a community going, although there are multiple games released using it. Paradox 3D already has a more active following despite being really new (still early alpha). The company backing WAVE appears to be a company that was setup and funded just to make the WAVE engine. The company behind Paradox 3D--Silicon Studios, is a large development studio that develops games, as well as graphical and game middleware. For instance, one of their other products is a real-time optical effects simulator, that's capable of accurately simulating real-life lenses and optics. I picked Paradox 3D to install first and look at their sample projects, because it already has Visual Studio 2013 support directly integrated (the engine supports both .NET and Mono). As soon as I launched the engine, it was clear that Paradox 3D is coding centric. In fact, there's no equivalent to the Unity or UE4 scene editor. Scenes are entirely built in code, and the Paradox 3D editor is centered around asset and solution management.  Because projects are code centric, it appears that everything is accomplishable at runtime, which I imagine would make moddable games much easier to create. I won't really go into the code itself, as all I've seen is the code for the included game projects, but it all looks fairly straightforward. The only thing I've noticed that's really out of the ordinary (and I quite like), is that creating asynchronous methods and tasks are super easy. Their examples make heavy use of it, showing how easy it is to jump some code out into its own thread, only to have it rejoin the main thread when it's done. In fact, this is specifically listed as a feature on the website: Paradox3D posted:Script with async To keep this post from getting too much longer, I'll just round out the other major points of interest I've run across. The engine uses a component based system for entities, so in that fashion it's not really very different from Unity. The currently available renderer's include modern OpenGL and DirectX up to DX11, which brings me to the shader system. There is no visual shader system, but you are given a very robust system to work with. There's a lot to say about it, which is why I'll just link to it instead (scroll down to "Shaders and Effects"): Paradox 3D - Graphics Finally, the engine is open source and free to use, and any games you create with it are wholly yours. The binaries are released under the Paradox 3D license, while the source code is released under GPL v3. From what I understand, the use of GPL v3 for the source code will not have any effect on your code or game; it's simply done that way so any changes made to the engine must be shared back into the master repository, if you don't want to relicense your game under the GPL. In my own personal opinion, the engine looks like it has a lot of potential. No, it doesn't offer all the features you'll find in UE4 or Unity, but it looks like a lot of thought has gone into designing what is there. Keep in mind that this post is in no way an endorsement, as I haven't even dug very deep into it yet. I'm simply looking at the new alternatives out there, and giving an assessment. I'm not sure if I'll download and try the WAVE engine, as it does look very mobile centric. * Using any other library or framework, we would have called this preprocessor hell. I understand Epic did it this way to minimize (a lot of) boilerplate code, but that really doesn't change the core of the issue, which is drowning in macros and lots of non-standard code.
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Nov 6, 2014 11:47
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Woah, thanks for that. I've been recently looking for some lightweight 3D engines that run in C# that aren't as bulky as unity/unreal, and that seems pretty good. If there's any even lighter weight I'd love to know (just apis to load in/draw models with materials, and a renderer that's extensible/tweakable with shadow support is all I need really), but this might work if it's light enough. I'll have to test! Thanks! Edit: It seems to be in Alpha! How new is it, and is there anything major missing? What plans are there for the future before release, or is it mostly bugtesting right now? Edit2: One last thing: How do you best find lightweight game frameworks? Searching for engines usually gives something that's too bulky. Edit3: It's a few hours later and I've played around with it a bit. It seems confusing! I'm not quite sure how to use it properly yet, but I think I could like it with a bit more progress on it. I'm still interested in a lighter weight framework though. Jewel fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 11:56
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poemdexter posted:Unless you're asking for 1 million dollars and plan on spending 100% of it on advertising, your F2P game is not going to get much traction on mobile. You're competing in a saturated, commoditized market where companies hiring behavioral psychologists, A/B testing app icons, and straight up buying users via ads for 2 bucks a pop is the norm. Good luck! Mann where can I get me some of that sweet sweet $2 CPI?
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Nov 6, 2014 15:39
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Gul Banana posted:i'd be more comfortable with UE4's C++ if it wasn't for having to also use their own object model that's layered on top of c++ via macros. they have to have that abstraction to expose stuff to blueprint, but it's just.. layering a simpler model on top of a complex model makes the overall package *even more complex*.
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Nov 6, 2014 17:44
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Shalinor posted:This is most of why we're still Unity (and why we're watching the UE4 C# stuff so closely). UE4's C++ hybrid weirdness is a mess, and would actively slow down the rate at which we can produce game code. C# is faster to implement. Not to mention code portability. I can see moving a good amount of C# code to another engine that supports it but when most of your game is in blueprints it seems very unportable.
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Nov 6, 2014 18:13
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:ok so to dabble in it, it sounds like I can just plop down $19 bucks, unsubscribe, and see how it goes. If I ever get serious, I guess I can sign up again. Is that right and legit? Yes, you can drop $20 and develop with that version of the engine and release games on it forever per their licensing terms. They added dynamic reloading of c++ a little bit ago. That might be sufficient for what you want. $20 was pretty easy for me to budget; if you're financially stable, my best suggestion would be to try it.. They have pretty good intro tutorials.
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Nov 6, 2014 19:17
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leper khan posted:Yes, you can drop $20 and develop with that version of the engine and release games on it forever per their licensing terms. I'm finding the C++ resources kind of lovely. I remember unity being more friendly with regards to coding resources and the usability of examples.
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Nov 6, 2014 20:04
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If you're wanting to learn UE4 you could use blueprints before the c# stuff gets smoothed out, it'll all be the same principles On a different note, if given a normal, how do I get a rotation to make a thing come out at the normal direction? Like, let's say I do a trace and hit a wall, I want a particle effect to spawn at that point (so far it's easy), but I want the particle effect to point outwards from the wall at the wall normal (so if the wall was facing 5 degrees up the particles would come out at that angle) Why is it so hard to get a rotation from a normal? I find all sorts of conversions but they require multiple vectors. If there is a resource someone could point me towards that helps me understand this that'd be even better
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Nov 6, 2014 20:20
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echinopsis posted:If you're wanting to learn UE4 you could use blueprints before the c# stuff gets smoothed out, it'll all be the same principles You need two vectors to make a rotation. To rotate an object to face along a vector, you first need to have a vector that represents the object's zero rotation state. From those two vectors (zero and normal in this case), you can calculate the rotation between them, which is the rotation you need to set on the object. Usually the zero vector is something like (1,0,0).
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Nov 6, 2014 20:30
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I apologize if this has been answered upthread, but as much as I like Unreal Engine I can't get my head around their weird brand of C++. Mind you I haven't touched C++ since school, so it's entirely possible I've just lost my touch, but it seems like the tutorials already assume you know all about C++ and they're just teaching you the API. Where's a good place to brush up on C++ that's relevant for Unreal Engine? Should I just look at the content examples, because a lot of them seem to be pushing Blueprint pretty heavy.
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Nov 6, 2014 21:08
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echinopsis posted:If you're wanting to learn UE4 you could use blueprints before the c# stuff gets smoothed out, it'll all be the same principles Yup, the C# (Xamarin for Unreal) is currently planning on ONLY implementing blueprint APIs. From what I can tell it's working alright on 4.4 and should soon have 4.5 access. There seem to only be a couple very minor issues so far.
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Nov 6, 2014 21:10
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