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I noticed some people complaining about the lack of VSync under X11 in one of the mailing lists, but didn't mention it since I have no idea what X11 is  I'd still recommend going with floats for your positions though, otherwise you're gonna have a hard time with things that want to move at less than 30 units per second.
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Mar 26, 2011 17:32
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BizarroAzrael posted:I'm making progress with my Flash space physics engine, though I'm not sure it's behaving quite right. The problem is that the equation for the force of gravity has a singularity at r = 0, so the force gets huge when things get close together. There are many fancy ways to solve that, but collision detections should do the job by preventing anything from getting too close. Resistance wouldn't do much to fix it. You could try putting a hard cap on the force that's allowed but again the collision detection should do it. As for the collision detection, don't work it out based on forces. If you use forces you need to know things like the impact time and everything. Much easier to use the conservation of momentum. There's an alright introduction here: http://www.engin.brown.edu/courses/en4/notes_old/oblique/oblique.html The coefficient of restitution defines how hard the objects are. If e = 1 they'll act like pool balls, if you make it close to zero they'll lose a lot of speed each impact.
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Mar 27, 2011 17:01
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I just played through a short Castlevania-genre game, and it makes me want to make a game design suggestion to anyone making any game of that or any other RPG-exploration genre. This particular game constantly automapped your next destination, so there was no real exploration or decision-making left to the player. It was also largely linear - when you get a 'key' (such as the ability to double jump) it opens up a single passage to the next key, and maybe some tiny side-passages to power-ups. The old Castlevania way, it was kind of the opposite - when you get a key there was no guidance at all, and no way to make a note of things on the map, so you couldn't mark a square "come back to here when you get a double jump", meaning when you get a new 'key', if your memory of the map isn't great you'd have to go to all the unexplored exits in hope of finding the one your 'key' opens. It was also still largely the same "linear with a few side-passages" design. What I would like to suggest as a superior design to either of these is that you have a sequence of goals, the keys, in a linear form much the same, but you also jumble them a little so it's not entirely linear - maybe you can get key B before key A if you want, and use B to get D, but then you can bring it all back together with a dual C-and-D 'door' before the next section. It makes the path less fixed and allows the player to feel more in control of their progress. Similarly, don't just give map-guidance every time the goal changes, it's really boring when your every action is directed by a little arrow on the map with only the "kill monsters" part left up to the player. But also I do appreciate the value some guidance in its place - wandering around not knowing where to go is no fun either. So why not take a nice middleground, do like old Zelda did, have a character you can pay a little to give you your next step if you're stuck. Conveniently this works nicely with the not-quite-linear path, because the guide can always just tell you the first goal you haven't done - it doesn't make a difference that you've done A, B, D and F and *could* do C or G at this point, the guide can recommend C and it will definitely be available. You do have to make sure not to omit a goal in the guide's directives though - I remember back in the day being frustrated by original Zelda's fortune teller telling me what to do next and being unaware that I didn't yet have the hammer or something that was required to go where I was being told to go. This suggestion might, of course, be wrong - it appears that the popular thing to do these days is just always treat the player like a retard, and maybe there's a good reason for that.
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Mar 28, 2011 04:57
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roomforthetuna posted:This suggestion might, of course, be wrong - it appears that the popular thing to do these days is just always treat the player like a retard, and maybe there's a good reason for that. Honestly, if a game treats me like I'm retarded, at worst I get a little less enjoyment out of it than I would have otherwise. OTOH, if at some point I get completely stuck and have no idea what to do, if I'm not enormously invested in the game by that time, I'll probably just give up on the game. I'm not disagreeing that a balanced approach is best, but between the two it's probably better to error on the side of giving the player a little too much guidance. A lot depends on the genre though.
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Mar 28, 2011 05:07
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I played Shadow Complex with the guide line off, if that means anything. Don't hold my hand, but at the same time don't bury my next objective in an obscure corner on the completely opposite side of the game world. Metroid Prime is right on the edge of 'don't hold my hand'.
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Mar 28, 2011 08:42
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I want it to be off by default, but queryable if needed. If I put a game down for 6 months and come back to it, I want to be given just a little clue as to where to go next. Nothing is worse than losing all your velocity in a game just because you've had other things to take care of.
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Mar 28, 2011 20:04
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I quite liked the way that Fable 3 tried to handle it. The line can be switched off, and you can choose which quest target you want it to lead to. Of course, I'd have liked it more if the stupid thing had actually worked properly and not sat there for 2 or 3 minutes at a time telling me that my destination was always 3 meters behind me 
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Mar 28, 2011 20:11
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I think my biggest annoyance is nobody ever straddles the line between handholding and "do it yourself". For instance, it's okay if you don't automatically point me to my next objective, but let me put custom markers on the in-game map so I can keep track of where things are myself without having to make a map by hand or something. If you want me to do everything myself I'm okay with that, but give me the tools to do it! Honestly, a lot of games would be vastly improved just by the addition of an in-game notepad. Gerblyn posted:I quite liked the way that Fable 3 tried to handle it. The line can be switched off, and you can choose which quest target you want it to lead to. Of course, I'd have liked it more if the stupid thing had actually worked properly and not sat there for 2 or 3 minutes at a time telling me that my destination was always 3 meters behind me The problem with the Fable 2/3 golden trail wasn't that it was wrong, it's that it was SO SLOW. What would happen is it would point you towards the next node in the path on the way to your objective, only you could actually physically run to that node before the game was able to calculate the path between that node and the next one, so you would end up stuck with a line pointing to where you're already standing until the game can wheeze along and go "Oh right, you go HERE next." I have no idea how they could possibly have coded it for it to run that slowly. Pathfinding along a predetermined node network is really, really simple unless there are like, millions of nodes (and in Fable's case it was more like dozens per map, tops). The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Mar 28, 2011 |
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Mar 28, 2011 20:13
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The Cheshire Cat posted:I think my biggest annoyance is nobody ever straddles the line between handholding and "do it yourself". For instance, it's okay if you don't automatically point me to my next objective, but let me put custom markers on the in-game map so I can keep track of where things are myself without having to make a map by hand or something. If you want me to do everything myself I'm okay with that, but give me the tools to do it! But also I can understand that a lot of people want more handholding than that, so having a character you can go to when you have no idea what to do next, who you'd pay some money and they'd stick a relevant pin in your map for you, would be nice on top of a self-markable map. Perhaps there should be a "game design megathread" too, I feel like maybe I've derailed this from more technical things?
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Mar 28, 2011 21:04
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roomforthetuna posted:Perhaps there should be a "game design megathread" too, I feel like maybe I've derailed this from more technical things? Sign me up.
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Mar 28, 2011 21:49
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roomforthetuna posted:Perhaps there should be a "game design megathread" too, I feel like maybe I've derailed this from more technical things? If you're up for making a new megathread I'd argue for getting a mod to close this one down and starting a new one with a more informative OP. Something that covers common game dev stuff like GameMaker/XNA/pyGame, tools like Blender, sources for models and sound effects, etc. It could be a really nice reference and would help new people get acquainted with what's out there instead of asking the same questions every couple of pages. This thread's OP is totally useless. Personally I'm fine with discussing game design in a programming thread. The two subjects are pretty tightly linked if you're actually interested in writing your own game.
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Mar 28, 2011 22:26
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Making a new thread is not a good idea because there's no clear distinction about which posts should go in which thread. Design is part of development and I guess you could reserve this thread for non-design related (i.e. technical) aspects of development but nobody is going to care that much to make the distinction.
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Mar 28, 2011 22:31
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The two topics are linked because most people starting off on their first game are going to have to do both anyway, and what it is practical to program is massively important in deciding what is practical to include in the design. This isn't exactly a high-traffic thread to begin with.
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Mar 28, 2011 23:06
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PDP-1 posted:Personally I'm fine with discussing game design in a programming thread. The two subjects are pretty tightly linked if you're actually interested in writing your own game. In case you can't tell, that's the part of a thing I'm working on at the moment. Interfaces to player-owned shops in a MMORPG-ish game, specifically. You need a "pick what you're buying" window, with whatever scrollbars and crap and all pertinent information easily accessible, and then on top of that you need a "how many do you want?" popup and even something as simple as that is a lot more work than it should be. And then there's the question of whether to pass information through your popups like a FIFO system, or do it like a stack hierarchy (does your "how many" window report back to the "shop" window which completes the transaction, or does the shop report all necessary info to the "how many" window, which completes the transaction on its own?) I decided to set it up so every instruction except movement has a text equivalent, so in the shop each item button can have its own action assigned (eg. "/shopbuy [shopnumber] [itemnumber]") and that action makes a quantity-selection / confirmation popup window which has a similar string action assigned to "confirm" that takes a parameter from elsewhere in the popup. That way I can reuse the quantity-select window for other things later simply by assigning a different text command and displayed title to the popup. On the downside, since text commands can also be entered into the game's console, it does mean every command has to have all its parameters validated even *before* the server gets a hold of it. There is nothing in game-making I hate more than making a GUI, and it's these parts that make me regret my decision to wrap my minigames in a metagame. But I think it's really a necessary part to making the whole product a success.
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Mar 28, 2011 23:41
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I'm interested in making some "prototypes" for FPS games - specifically, mechanics, like sneaking/AI behavior and stuff. Just purely for fun. What engine/SDK should I look at?
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Mar 29, 2011 01:27
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It seems people are praising Unity for that kind of stuff lately.
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Mar 29, 2011 02:15
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So becuase I hate myself I am currently planning on starting to build my own C++ game engine from scratch, for a game which will basically be a minecraft clone (I don't want to deal with the issue of a lovely game design on top of my own lovely code  ).I already have a very solid background in programming, and have a lot of experience in with making games using Flash, XNA, and Unity. I'm really doing this for the learning experience. I also have zero aspirations for this game doing anything besides teaching me how do things better on whatever I work on after this game. I have two questions really: 1. Is there any particular base I should work off of or should I go whole hog and just use OpenGL? If I should go with OpenGL, is there a particular version I should use? From previous experience, I know that Java has multiple such as JOGL and LWJGL, so I would assume there are also a lot of different versions out there for C++. 2. I'd really appreciate some advice from people who have been here before. If you have useful tips or some pitfall to watch out for, I would really appreciate hearing about it. The Glumslinger fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Mar 29, 2011 |
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Mar 29, 2011 03:22
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This guy is basically remaking Minecraft and blogging about it in detail, so reading his stuff may be helpful for you.
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Mar 29, 2011 04:46
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Anode posted:This guy is basically remaking Minecraft and blogging about it in detail, so reading his stuff may be helpful for you. Thanks, this should help a lot with design issues.
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Mar 29, 2011 04:59
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OneEightHundred posted:The two topics are linked because most people starting off on their first game are going to have to do both anyway, and what it is practical to program is massively important in deciding what is practical to include in the design. I think it's fine to talk about design in this thread, after all it's the game "development" megathread, not the game "programming" megathread. The key is to keep the discourse meaningful rather than having it devolve into complaining about regenerating health or something (not saying anyone's done this; just that it's not a good direction to head in). roomforthetuna posted:There is nothing in game-making I hate more than making a GUI, and it's these parts that make me regret my decision to wrap my minigames in a metagame. But I think it's really a necessary part to making the whole product a success. I hate making GUIs too. At work I've been working on a (non-game related) program using java and NetBeans, which has its own built in swing GUI editor, and even then I find it's a pain. There's just something about the way a lot of languages/libraries handle GUIs that makes them so much more difficult to code than it seems like they should be. If I was involved in a major project, one of the first things I would probably do is put together my own GUI editor that can save a design as its own file that gets converted by the actual program into graphical data, so after the initial programming of the tool/interface, I'd never have to look at any GUI code again.
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Mar 29, 2011 05:10
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crazylakerfan posted:Thanks, this should help a lot with design issues. I was working on a Minecraft clone that I've since abandoned, if you're interested I could set you up with an SVN login and you can take a look at the code if it'll help.
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Mar 29, 2011 07:02
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As for the thread business, there is another thread that has pretty much been focused on design in Games for a while. How is UDK these days? I checked it out when they first released it, but haven't touched it since. Is it that much better or is it just a bunch of features not a lot of people use, or only use until the very end of game dev? What I'm trying to say is what is it's value for quick prototyping?
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Mar 29, 2011 12:04
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Anode posted:This guy is basically remaking Minecraft and blogging about it in detail, so reading his stuff may be helpful for you.
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Mar 29, 2011 13:58
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The Cheshire Cat posted:If I was involved in a major project, one of the first things I would probably do is put together my own GUI editor that can save a design as its own file that gets converted by the actual program into graphical data, so after the initial programming of the tool/interface, I'd never have to look at any GUI code again. And I don't know if it's a facet of Flash or just badly done Flash, but I've seen a lot of Flash interfaces where if you try to click and drag something you have to work slowly because the code operates on a "where the mouse and buttons are now" basis rather than "what actions have the mouse and buttons taken since the last frame". Please, anyone making a GUI, always operate on a queue of actions, only being able to type one character per frame sucks.
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Mar 29, 2011 14:19
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ambushsabre posted:How is UDK these days? I checked it out when they first released it, but haven't touched it since. Is it that much better or is it just a bunch of features not a lot of people use, or only use until the very end of game dev? What I'm trying to say is what is it's value for quick prototyping?
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Mar 29, 2011 15:07
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Anode posted:This guy is basically remaking Minecraft and blogging about it in detail, so reading his stuff may be helpful for you. drat everyone is doing this. I am doing this. I knew it was competitive but its so drat competitive, its just waiting for the next game to bust. Hopefully I'll be able to rise to the top with some good ideas.
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Mar 29, 2011 19:16
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Well, honestly, if your intention is to "beat" Minecraft at being Minecraft, I wouldn't hold out hope for that. The deck is really stacked against you. If you want to use it as a learning experience to build a different game with some of the same mechanics though, then it's still worthwhile.
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Mar 29, 2011 19:19
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Voxels, destroying and stacking voxels, and open worlds are what I am taking from minecraft. So it won't be a minecraft clone. Because heres the thing, minecraft should be an engine. Its not a game, its like a really good tech demo but it needs missions/quests which I guess is what adventure mode might be but that hasn't been talked about alot. One thing that I want to add to mine that I learned from HL and CS is *TOP SECRET* and I'm hoping it will give my game the appeal to make monies. Oh poo poo and that one guy is exposing his source which is great because I need to learn about optimization and some of the other stuff he is talking about. http://www.sea-of-memes.com/LetsCode1/LetsCode1.html Physical fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Mar 29, 2011 |
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Mar 29, 2011 19:27
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If that's the case then, you're probably better off not referring to it as a "Minecraft clone", because the first thing people are going to think of is sandbox building game, rather than action/RPG/whatever with modifiable environments. If you're working with Voxels there are some really good open source terrain generators out there. I don't think this is the one I'm thinking of, but it looked interesting: http://dmytry.com/voxelworld/ That sort of thing you might find very helpful; I know one of Minecraft's strongest points is the surprisingly interesting worlds it can generate, and building a good world generator is probably going to be the stumbling block on most of those sorts of projects.
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Mar 29, 2011 19:38
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Its GPL. gently caress that. I'll have to expose all my code if I use it. Also, I didn't say "clone" but it was kind of inheretied from the comment I was quoting. To me "minecraft clone" is kind of derogatory. I did a huge search on voxel terrain generators and didn't find much of anything. Do you have any more? Even if I don't use the code I can still learn from it.
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Mar 29, 2011 19:50
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roomforthetuna posted:The problem is, no matter how much you abstract away the GUI stuff (Windows has had a resource editor for ages that does what you describe!) you still end up having to go to code for the effects of every button, slider, etc. that does anything, and in a good GUI most of the widgets will do something.
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Mar 29, 2011 20:00
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Physical posted:drat everyone is doing this. I am doing this. I knew it was competitive but its so drat competitive, its just waiting for the next game to bust. Hopefully I'll be able to rise to the top with some good ideas.
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Mar 29, 2011 20:42
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:And to add on top of that, there's a good chance one will have to subclass/override/redo some of the more basic components to perform some kind of function more intuitively anyways. And every time you have to do something like that it's a pain in the rear end.
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Mar 29, 2011 21:44
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Is there seriously no way to draw a string using SpriteFont without a SpriteBatch? Why would they do this? I mean, it's not even that there's no other method to do it for you, it's that I can't even get at the information stored in the SpriteFont. I assume it's all internal? Also another misc thing that was on my mind: Half-pixel offsets only apply to textured primitives because of the way texels are mapped, right?
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Mar 31, 2011 07:46
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Does anybody recommend something other than Blender for a free modelling tool? I was trying to model my backyard to scheme and render some ideas of how we want to change it. I have then wasted a full week figuring out how to put leaves on a tree using a leaf texture. The transparency just doesn't come out right. I just can't imagine it being that hard. The texture has alpha channels and Blender even acknowledges that--kindof. The shadows are screwed up and it won't do the transparency in the 3d view. 
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Mar 31, 2011 14:48
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Mr.Hotkeys posted:Is there seriously no way to draw a string using SpriteFont without a SpriteBatch? Why would they do this? I mean, it's not even that there's no other method to do it for you, it's that I can't even get at the information stored in the SpriteFont. I assume it's all internal? The size of a SpriteFont is defined in terms of typographic points so that it looks the same when drawn regardless of screen resolution. To actually draw a string to the screen the SpriteFont needs to know the screen resolution so that it can scale itself appropriately, and it gets that info from the SpriteBatch which in turn contains a reference to the GraphicsDevice that holds the resolution information.
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Mar 31, 2011 14:50
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Does anybody recommend something other than Blender for a free modelling tool? I was trying to model my backyard to scheme and render some ideas of how we want to change it. I have then wasted a full week figuring out how to put leaves on a tree using a leaf texture. The transparency just doesn't come out right. I just can't imagine it being that hard. The texture has alpha channels and Blender even acknowledges that--kindof. The shadows are screwed up and it won't do the transparency in the 3d view. Why don't you just use 'home garden designer 2011' or something? Shovelware easily found online or at Best Buy/Walmart.
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Mar 31, 2011 15:18
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PDP-1 posted:The size of a SpriteFont is defined in terms of typographic points so that it looks the same when drawn regardless of screen resolution. To actually draw a string to the screen the SpriteFont needs to know the screen resolution so that it can scale itself appropriately, and it gets that info from the SpriteBatch which in turn contains a reference to the GraphicsDevice that holds the resolution information.
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Mar 31, 2011 15:43
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Does anybody recommend something other than Blender for a free modelling tool? I was trying to model my backyard to scheme and render some ideas of how we want to change it. I have then wasted a full week figuring out how to put leaves on a tree using a leaf texture. The transparency just doesn't come out right. I just can't imagine it being that hard. The texture has alpha channels and Blender even acknowledges that--kindof. The shadows are screwed up and it won't do the transparency in the 3d view. Google Sketchup is free (for the basic version) and has a thing called 3D Warehouse where people can upload models of all kinds of stuff. A quick search for 'tree' returned 8950 free tree models. It can handle transparency and shadows. You can export the result as a COLLADA file if you want to import the model into something else. A minute worth of work generated this: 
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Mar 31, 2011 16:11
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So I've been wondering for a while now how to create modal windows, code and design wise. Nothing too complex, just a window that will halt process (unless I don't want it to) and return a value. For example, you start a game, and click 'make new character'. A window pops up that asks you for the character's name, you type it in, and bam, new character with the name. And codewise it would be something akin to code:Or something. Basically I want to recreate Java Swing in C#. Preferably on my own, since I can create prompts and windows in my program but I have no idea how to get a value from it. Edit: The word I'm actually looking for is 'dialogs', derp. Morpheus fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Mar 31, 2011 |
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Mar 31, 2011 19:38
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