Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

While we're on the subject of physics i've been trying to do a simple 2D implementation of Jakobsen's Verlet intergration system of using projection instead of penalty or impulse based collision and i've run into a snag. Basically for some reason the integration when combined with constraints is generating its' own torque and it actually looks pretty realistic if it wasn't for the fact it's not meant to be happening.

code:
void CParticleSystem::verlet()
{
	for(int i = 0; i < m_vParticles.size(); i++)
	{
		SParticle* p = m_vParticles[i];
		Vector2 temp = m_vParticles[i]->position;
		p->position += p->position - p->oldPosition + p->forces * (m_timeStep * m_timeStep);
		p->oldPosition = temp;
	}
}

void CParticleSystem::satisfyConstraints()
{
	for(int iterations = 0; iterations < NUM_ITERATIONS; iterations++)
	{
		for(int i = 0; i < m_vParticles.size(); i++)
		{
			m_vParticles[i]->position = 
                Vector2::vmin(Vector2::vmax(m_vParticles[i]->position, Vector2(0.0f, 0.0f)), Vector2(1000.0f, 1000.0f));
		}

		for(int i = 0; i < m_vConstraints.size(); i++)
		{
			Vector2 &x1 = m_vConstraints[i]->pParticleA->position;
			Vector2 &x2 = m_vConstraints[i]->pParticleB->position;
			Vector2 delta = x2 - x1;
			float rLength = m_vConstraints[i]->restLength;
			delta *= (rLength * rLength) / ((Vector2::dot(delta,delta)) + (rLength * rLength)) - 0.5;
			x1 -= delta;
			x2 += delta;
		}
	}
}
Basically the vector of particles is just a struct holding the current position, the old position and the current acceleration (accumulated forces) and a constraint just consists of pointers to the two relevant particles and a length (like a stick).

Anyway for some reason when the length isn't exactly correct the constraints don't act like they should and cause some odd behaviour that cause semi-realistic torque/angular rotation which is confusing the hell out of me.

Here's the project, for some reason unknown to me it requires both VC8 and VC9 CRTs installed which I can provide seperately or you can get them off the MS site, it's called Terrain because it was just a test project I had set up so ignore that.

If anyone can take the time to help me out on this it would be fantastic because i'm trying to understand the best I can and it's confusing the crap out of me, I have a feeling it's to do with either floating point problems or generating the correct lengths but I can't find out what the crap i'm doing wrong.

The Jakobsen GDC paper on advanced character physics is the one i'm trying to implement, found here.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Thanks for the help, however I linked said paper at the end of my post, the reason for the changed constraint code is because it's using the later faster revision in the paper used to remove using costly sqrt() calls.

quote:

We now discuss how to get rid of the square root operation. If the constraints are all satisfied (which they should be at least almost), we already know what the result of the square root operation in a particular constraint expression ought to be, namely the rest length r of the corresponding stick. We can use this fact to approximate the square root function. Mathematically, what we do is approximate the square root function by its 1st order Taylor-expansion at a neighborhood of the squared rest length r*r (this is equivalent to one Newton-Raphson iteration with initial guess r). After some rewriting, we obtain the following pseudo-code:



// Pseudo-code for satisfying (C2) using sqrt approximation

delta = x2-x1;

delta*=restlength*restlength/(delta*delta+restlength*restlength)-0.5;

x1 += delta;

x2 -= delta;


More to the point however, even with the slower and maybe marginally more accurate way from earlier in the paper the same behaviour appears with the constraint causing some odd torque. I really want to get onto intersection tests and proper rigid bodies so this is really annoying me :(

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I'm really confused by what you guys are defining as data-driven and hardcoded, I mean all behaviour is more or less hardcoded but that doesn't stop it being data driven if it relies heavily on easily definable data. Do you mean having like one generic weapon class that you choose which behaviour it has through the data you supply it? Like a machine gun is the same as a rocket launcher but with different projectile behaviour? It just doesn't seem like anyone has defined what they mean when they say data-driven.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

The other (and in my experience easier to work with) system to use "has-a" over "is-a" as in, an entity has a pointer/reference to a renderable object that can render itself, which means it'll cut down dramatically on both code and memory redundancy when the vast majority of your entities use the same mesh/plane/textures etc. It also allows you to be a bit more black-boxy when it comes to platform implementationy stuff like graphics libraries, since all your rendering code is contained in the rendering/scenegraph files of your code.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I develop alot in Unity3D and can probably help with any questions anyone has regarding the physics/gameplay/non-rendering related stuff. It's one of the joyous development experiences i've ever had in terms of everything not only working correctly but also in scope of possibilities. It may not be super cutting edge graphics wise but for prototyping and iphone games it's really awesome.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Vinlaen posted:

How do you create rooms and indoor environments for Unity3D? (ie. Neverwinter Nights, etc)

It seems like I need to learn Blender (or Google Sketchup?) but I'm not sure.

What's the _easiest_ way for a programmer who knows very little about modeling to create some simple rooms and hallways with a few textures?

You can use the built in primitives for setting out simple walls and so on, anything past that and your best bet is a proper 3D modelling program, Blender is free, has good integration with Unity and is pretty popular in the community. I personally find it one of the most horrifyingly awful UIs i've ever experienced but whatever floats your boat.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

If you can find a map editor that exports maps as FBX or some other polygon based format that unity reads then great, the issue is that map editors in general are designed around BSP trees or CSG operations, which are used in older generation engines for faster occlusion culling (i.e. not drawing what you can't see). Unity doesn't do BSP trees so it can't read BSP files.

So in answer to your question, i'd recommend any typical 3D modelling program like 3DSMax/Maya/Softimage XSI/Blender since they all have pretty good integration with Unity (apart from Max which requires a bizarre trick to export correctly). They also tend to be easier to use if you're not used to Hammer/UnrealEd/etc. If you find any modelling application you're happy using that exports to FBX it'll almost always be fine in Unity.

The other option is to just use Unity boxes for everything, scale them to the right size and so on then texture them as needed, it'll probably be alot easier and you can always try and find a willing artist once you get the gameplay side of things working.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

If it's Unity (which it looks like it is), you can just use transform.Rotate() with euler angles and it'll automatically convert (easily fast enough) to quaternions and you won't suffer from gimbal lock or aggregating errors. I get horribly confused by quaternions though so it might not fit your purpose.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Game Maker is as perfectly valid a tool in testing game design ideas as any other way of getting it done, if all you're interested in is design and you accomplish what you want to accomplish in Game Maker or MMF2 or whatever, then what does it matter that you didn't learn how to do it manually? I mean obviously if you want a job in the industry as a programmer it's not going to help but he (and like 90% of the people who ask about Game Maker) express no interest in that.

There seems to be an idea perpetuated heavily here that you have to learn every caveat of every area of game programming before you can create anything more interesting that pong. When some of the most interesting game design is coming from people like Cactus and the experimental gameplay project where the entire point is end result over method, inferring that you should do it in a particular way despite it taking considerably longer and more than likely not working as well is retarded in my opinion.

I'm not sure if it's programmers trying to validate their career choice or what but the attitude is usually 'Game Maker is cheating' and not based on the limitations of those products (because they're usually alot less limited than you think).

That said if you want a job in the industry as a programmer you obviously need to do it the proper way, but transitioning from GML to C# to C++ is probably pretty smooth (I don't know i've never used Game Maker).

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

It depends on what tool you use, Unity is more of a typical middleware solution for professional developers than a Klik'N'Play style thing and can do anything that you want to implement in it while providing a series of handy helper classes, while Game Maker tends to do more stuff for you and therefore limit what you can do within the existing framework. XNA is essentially the same thing but does less (and therefore has more freedom) and doesn't come with its own scene manager and level editor.

People can argue all day about what constitutes 'real' games programming, but unless we're all meant to write in ASM and manually support different processor extensions I don't really know where that concept came from.

Again though for those interested in a career in the industry a good understanding of computer science and current C++ APIs is essential, atleast for the next few years.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

You either have to make the bullet use a trigger collider (with the rigidbody) and rely on OnTrigger messages, or, use Physics.IgnoreCollision() between each object you don't want to collide with manually. The latter is more what you described but is one of the most annoying issues with Unity (lack of collision groups) and usually using trigger colliders is going to be better unless you really really need collision data (intersection/normal).

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Unity has built in networking, I believe it's built on Raknet but not i'm entirely sure, I believe it uses UDP as it's very capable of multiplayer action games from the tests i've done. I guess it's also worth noting that it was used for Cartoon Network's Fusion Fall MMO although i'm not sure how much of that was using the built-in networking. I believe it's possible to use System.IO.Sockets too if you want to do it manually.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Staggy posted:

I've just found this deal: a year-long free subscription to Develop magazine - either digital or doormat copies - for anyone in the UK only.

The form isn't asking for any credit or debit card details either, so it isn't a case of forgetting, a year from now, that you signed up and getting hit for a full-paid subscription.

I can't say I've heard of the magazine before, but for £0 it seems pretty sweet.

Thanks a lot for the heads up, i'm surprised you haven't heard of it, it's the equivalent of game developer for the UK, it's not necessarily as good but has post mortems and whatnot sometimes (less so than GD). Either way it's great to get for free.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I personally use OGMO but it's not really the best, I tend to write a lot of small very specific editors for certain things in as3 with AIR to make up for the shortcomings. I think the key thing with 2D level editors is having the ability to define as much information and behaviour as you want, OGMO does that well for most stuff but could really do with a plugin system (or be open source which Matt is apparently planning on once the code is cleaned up a bit, i'd rather just have him clean it up publicly).

Also I never understood why people dislike XML based file formats for things that aren't huge in file size, it's readable, there's a good implementation for every language and DOM really suits a lot of game entity data. I'm guessing a lot of people have bad experiences from Xerces or having to validate for software engineering/web purposes.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I'd really recommend getting started with Unity, the choice of languages and structure in general support getting started better than Unreal which has a scripting language that can be hard to get to grips with (and it was badly documented back in UT2004/UW2.5 era but has probably significantly improved on that front). Unity is much more open and easy to use, the editor is more straightforward in a lot of respects as it doesn't have to conform to some of the performance centric parts of unreal levels. That said you won't be able to achieve the same level of visual fidelity without doing a lot of it yourself, although with Beast lightmapping and a load of other new features as of Unity 3.0 it's a lot easier to get there.

I know a lot of people who used to be purely artists get to grips with Unity and produce pretty amazing stuff and the ability to publish to iPhone (when you pay for the necessarily licenses) and other platforms can be handy if you produce something you feel is worth it.

Valve have changed rather recently but getting them to even acknowledge you used to be a real issue and I really wouldn't expect to use it straight away. There are alternatives like the delivery system by IndieDB/ModDB and i've heard good things about Impulse by Stardock. Really if you're looking for realistic publishing and monetisation advice of personal and independent projects, TIGSource.com and the business forum there is going to be your best bet for getting advice from people who've been through it all. That said I wouldn't do anything when starting out with the intention of it being a profitable venture, it takes a lot of time to get good enough at everything to produce work people will want to pay for, but you seem to be aware of all of this.

In general if you want a job in the industry as a whole being able to show a fully complete project with all the little extras that make it look professional is going to be more valuable than any series of half completed projects. Obviously if you're going for super specific roles a series of tech demos could be better (and the equivalent portfolio work for artist positions) but the ability to show you can commit and complete a full project is incredibly important.

I've become a big fan of Flash via Flashpunk (or flixel, whatever floats your boat) lately, with FlashDevelop and Flex I don't deal with the Flash IDE at all and it's very much like writing in java/C#, with a slightly less well formed language. The routes to market for flash projects are somewhat easier too, with sites like Flashgamelicense.com providing the ability to auction off your games to flash portals like Armor Games/Kongregate/Miniclip/etc. Again consulting the TIGSource forums will be your best bet for information on that. It's probably worth noting that it may not be viewed as favourably on your resume because of ingrained ideas of flash development though, although the lines are becoming so blurry that the ability to implement everything in flash is pretty much the same as anything now.

One thing i'd really not recommend is trying to do 2D stuff in Unity without integrating a 2D physics library such as Box2D for it, the joints used for 2D physics in Unity are temperamental at best and the collision system essentially requires you use it.

With regards to machinima it really depends on the level you go into, if you provide a lot of custom animation and you want to get into animation and you're using it as a showcase great, if you're just doing it to show off your ability to create set pieces within a specific engine you're limiting yourself somewhat and people are more likely to hire animators who can do both over someone specialising in that.

With regards to OGRE, I'm not a huge fan, the rendering engine is very well made and incredibly extensible, but the community (or lack thereof) is atrocious and at best it's obtuse and at worst it's a bloated mess. Now I'm sure some people will disagree and I haven't used it in about a year, but when you have options like Unity which probably has the single best development community in existence (especially the IRC channel), the only benefit of using OGRE is to prove you're capable of developing in C++. It abstracts all the graphical API and input usage so you don't really learn anything about that either. Torchlight is great and all, but as I understand it they wrote a huge toolset for their engine that isn't publically available for use in other OGRE projects (nor would it necessarily make sense).

Hope this gigantic wall of text helped.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I was only comparing the surrounding communities in terms of support, I've used both heavily in various projects. It was in response to him talking about his OGRE based FPS engine and I was merely pointing out it's probably not going to be the best option for making a full game on your own due to the lack of tools (intended or otherwise) for stuff like scene management. Also when referring to OGRE it's kind of implied that you'd be using one or more of the many OGRE ready implementations of various physics, sound and GUI libraries. Also it's kind of strange to assume that someone who know enough about OGRE to know the community and code structure would not know what the R stood for.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

It's sad but Unity Tech's position on it is that the cost of doing it way outweighs the benefit, with all the testing that would need to be done to satisfy such a tiny amount of users, it doesn't really make financial sense. It may have changed since they got all this success but it didn't a year ago. Either way the lack of a linux plugin won't effect any financial venture really so it'll probably be on the back burner for a while even if it does get worked on.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Lutha Mahtin posted:

Another newbie question: are there any decent (Free/free) programs/libraries/engines for Android? Cross-platform stuff is highly preferred :wink:

I found Andengine to be a bit too heavy for my purposes so I ended up using libgdx, it's simple, has everything i've needed as well as a really really fast sprite batcher. Plus it's easy to have it run multi-platform (includes guides and whatnot).

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

This probably doesn't need to be said but i've found the more time I spend trying to work out the perfect architecture for a project, the less likely it is that I actually finish said project. If you just generally stick to very basic concepts like keeping components separated and then add in something simple like an event system/message pump, you can deal with issues with that approach as they occur as opposed to planning for every eventuality, of which the vast majority will never occur (and the ones you didn't think of, will). It's way too easy to get into the trap of trying to make your game engine the most generic and extensible thing in existence and waste so much time you could've wrote a purpose built engine for 3 different games.

I mean it's great to be aware of all the various design approaches and there's no harm in discussion or anything, it's just that I know far too many programmers who spend their entire lives writing perfectly templated, serialisable, extensible, support everything under the sun engines that never produce anything that doesn't require a "Hey so this doesn't look much but underneath it all it's the sistine chapel!" disclaimer.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Just use Unity3D, it's pretty easy to get into and is designed to be easy to get into, I know at least 3 different ex or current industry artists who have made their own games through it, including one who had a lot of success as an indie with an iOS title. It costs money to get iPhone or Android licenses though and a significantly larger sum to get the Pro version and the pro versions of the smartphone export stuff.

I think the idea that you need dedicated programmers for hobby projects that don't have some tech basis is rapidly becoming outdated, it just requires the people taking over that role to put in more work than someone who's heavily experienced in it. You can totally avoid a large majority of the complicated 3D math, specific API and optimisation knowledge thanks to prebuilt solutions like Unity or Shiva or even flixel/flashpunk.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I wonder how many times this same discussion about striking a balance between doing stuff well and actually getting games done has happened in this thread, it must be once every 3 or 4 pages by now.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Using Unity extensively will probably teach you more about how a good engine architecture can allow not only a wide variety of projects but also make doing them all a lot easier. I don't think you'll find many people who find Unity's component approach anything but great, especially when it allows the performance centric parts to be done in an optmised fashion without impacting the general usage of the engine.

There's nothing inherent in Unity that restricts any particular usage apart from very cutting edge API specific stuff that isn't yet supported or something that's only available in Unity Pro like direct access to the graphics library or C++ plugins for special APIs (like webcam augmented reality stuff or custom peripherals and so on).

The shortfalls of Unity are generally for edge case stuff where you'd need the source, like porting to unsupported devices or replacing the physics engine or sound library, although for the latter there may be C# ports that can be used easily due to the use of Mono.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Where'd this 50mb number come from? My windows build of a project with around 1mb of assets was 4.88mb, the web build was only 400kb which confuses me given the assets size and the mac build was double the windows build because it contained both an x86 and a PPC build.

If you're not aware Unity has a web plugin system too that reduces the need to include the base engine stuff as it's already on the user's PC. There's even Unity web games on Kongregate and some other flash portals now.

I'm not intentionally trying to evangelise for it, it's just there seems to be a lot of misconceptions based on experiences with other engines that simply don't apply. I mean WildTangent really buggered up the general view of non-flash browser plugins for game development so I can understand people being weary about that side of things but the idea that game development tools can't be efficient and easy to use is horribly outdated.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Unity's flaws are generally related to doing group projects without (and sometimes with) the Asset Server, it's incredibly hard to collaborate on the same project since you can't just diff the Unity project file. With the asset server (for which client licenses are usually prohibitively expensive) it's a lot easier since prefabs and assets are versioned and whatnot correctly.

The other main issue is that PhysX is kind of a giant pile of poo poo for 2D stuff because there's no reliable way to limit stuff to a 2D plane without running into some bizarre issue at some point. It's definitely not my first choice for 2D projects, but there's nothing to stop you from implementing Box2D or using whatever C# port of it is available.

In general the problem areas of Unity are the stuff that's in there to help that have bugs or don't have the thing you want in them, but there's usually a way of implementing whatever you wanted yourself and side stepping that stuff. That said the lack of a switch to remove some stuff completely from the end binary (like PhysX) is annoying.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Like everything it really helps to have an external motivator like an actual deadline, or a self set deadline that coincides with something else important. After you've got the base idea down you really want to apply pressure on yourself to complete the project, either because you're tired of never finishing projects and want to finally have one completed, or because you want to sell it and make it cost efficient for the amount of time you've spent on it or whatever reason you can come up with that motivates you to continue with it when it's decidedly not fun to do so. The reason being that every project routinely hits points where it's not fun to continue but then become fun again later on.

The key part of competitions isn't the lower standards of what you're expected to do, it's that there's this hard time limit and everything you do manage to get in is an achievement and not expected. If you keep this attitude when just developing for fun in your spare time then you'll enjoy even the stuff you think might be boring because you can make it a challenge. For example I used to hate making menus and GUI widgets and whatnot, but after wanting to emulate good menu systems and learning how easy to do most transition effects are, it's probably my favourite part of writing a game past developing the main idea.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Internet Janitor posted:

While we're kinda on the topic of menus and UIs, what sort of architectural approach do you guys usually take?

What I've been doing lately is something like the following:

- ViewModule is an interface that every menu screen and major (exclusive) game view implements. You can draw them, they are serviced with various mouse/keyboard events and they know about a ViewStack.

- The ViewStack contains a stack of ViewModules and dispatches events/redraw calls to the topmost ViewModule.

When the game starts, I push the main menu's ViewModule onto the stack, and whenever a menu is exited it can pop itself off and immediately transfer control to the module below. If I want to produce complex transitions I can wrap shim ViewModules around the "next" view that capture redraw calls and produce some kind of animation before popping themselves and pushing the "next" view.

In the game engine itself I often mirror this approach and build up the game and its UI in mostly decoupled layers, the main difference being that I make input events bubble down the stack until handled and service redraw calls to all layers, back-to-front. This makes it very easy to have dialog boxes, cutscenes and so forth where keymappings change completely and/or gameplay pauses without turning a "main game" class into spaghetti.

Thoughts?

I mean that's more of a general architecture as it links into MVC (Model View Controller) style systems, but yeah that's generally how I approach it on a high level for dealing with different layers of GUI/input systems, it's pretty much the perfect situation for showing off consuming events too.

The key to making GUIs feel alive is just making as much of it as possible move when it comes to transitions, I tend to (and this varies depending on if it's a component based architecture like Unity or an inheritance based approach) have a series of menu panes that are essentially buckets of menu items, telling them when to start entering or exiting or when they're active and whatnot. That way you can switch panes by telling one to exit then bringing a new one in, add dialogs by having them sit on top and exit themselves when they're finished and overall simplify GUI transition writing to just enter and exit functions (e.g. scale/alpha/position interpolating).

Also if they all follow the same general approach of interpolating from invisible to visible then you can mess about with different interpolation/easing functions to achieve different effects. Add in a couple of delays where needed and you end up with a remarkably easy to use, extend and debug system. It has its limitations and isn't necessarily going to be super efficient, but in general menu systems don't need to worry about efficiency and with a component architecture you can separate stuff down to just enter or exit transitions and combine and layer them as appropriate.

Here's some old example thing from a year ago I did to show off the approach:

http://billyfletcher.com/unity/GUITest.html

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Yeah you can use Boo with Unity3D which is just a .NET enabled python, I mean it's nowhere near as good as just using C# which is a much nicer language to use, especially with the MonoDevelop debugging and autocomplete stuff in the Unity version of MonoDevelop.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Vino posted:

Err - wrong. You need some of 1-4-5 (in fact I think you need mostly 1-4-5) or you'll never get anywhere. The game industry doesn't hire designers without skills in other places. You need to get cracking on learning some art or programming (or both!) if this is what you want to do.

Also yeah check out the game jobs thread, there's lots of great people in there.

It's to get on the course not to get a job, there's no junior designer job that would ever present a list and say 'please show 3 of the 6 things here'. Presumably they teach you an actual skill on the course although it seems somewhat unlikely given that it's for game design and is so short.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

pastorrich posted:

http://www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/continuing-education/aec-programs/video-game-level-design/video-game-level-design-courses

Those are the courses. There's a 45 hour scripting class and another on 3D animation and I would put my own hours on learning code and whatnot. It's a 1320 hours program. Is that good? I just want to get started, so I need to have a decent portfolio ready in one month so I can have some basic knowledge and grow on it.

Well the value of any of these courses is in the skills learned and the portfolio produced as a result of it or by doing it and that course seems to be heavily themed around level design. Level design isn't really game design in the typical sense, it's more like 3D modelling but using the software for whatever engine you're using and either reusing existing assets or making a minimal amount of them yourself in a more typical 3D package, there's obviously more design that goes into it with regards to making it fun for whatever the game's mechanics are, but it's more a case of level architecture and engine specific scripting. This course definitely seems oriented around the commercial 3D engine level editors over indie/handheld 2D sort of stuff.

I'd try making a level in UDK or Hammer (HL2 map editor), see if it's the thing you want to do or not and if it is then I imagine this course will be great. Just remember that you get out what you put in, you'll get a job based on your portfolio and skills demonstrated within it, not based on any degree or qualification in general.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Well it'll cost $800 to get both the Unity Android and iOS output licenses so i'm not entirely sure it's going to be cost effective.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I'm having a weird issue i'm not entirely sure how to approach correctly, in my game you shoot space ships with a turret, anyhoo the problem i'm having is that it's really hard to place the crosshair correctly for shooting stuff at far and short distances.

You can play it here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6564397/3dr/3DRenderer.html

At the moment I get a point an arbitrary (far) distance from the direction of the cannons, then have the camera look at that point, then have the bullets converge on that point. As is the bullets converge on the point seemingly fine, but the centre of the camera is off by a bit (like 20 pixels out of 240) at max range, so I adjusted the crosshair graphic accordingly. This however makes it hard to aim at stuff reasonably close without it seeming completely off. Is there like an actual way of doing this in some genius clever way I can't think of (other than raycasting from the cannon to see if it hits anything and placing the cross hair there which i'll probably try but it seems a bit wonky)?

I mean if I look at flight sims convergence is a pretty big deal and the cross hair is set to a specific range anyway so it's not a huge deal if it is off, but it feels like it could be tighter.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

It's flash, so click anywhere in the box in the middle and then use the arrow keys to aim and space to shoot.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Vino posted:

You have a parallax problem. Alternate way to do it is to raycast from the camera instead of from the turret, then aim the turret at whatever the crosshair is looking at, or if it's looking at nothing then converge at a default distance. This way the crosshair should never move.

Also the big problem with aiming is that the arrows are overly sensitive. It's hard to hit such a small target so far away.

Where are you planning on going with this game design wise? It needs more to spruce it up.

Yeah I was already doing the whole bullets go to where the camera is looking thing, it's just the manual offset made it look wrong when it was working fine. I turned that off and it's all good.

As for controls and game design, I literally started the renderer last week and got OBB collisions done yesterday so like not really looking for input about either at the moment. I mean the game itself is going to be a rather simple arcadey game where you defend a big ship from lots of little ships via turrets all over it that you upgrade and change weapons of and whatnot.

Anyway thanks for the help.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Unity has the ability to additive load and unload scenes and you can use asset bundles to control what's loaded when to a certain extent. I don't really know but in general people dismiss things in Unity because they don't learn how to use it properly, it's a remarkably efficient engine.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

shrughes posted:

It can be if you use reflection.

WHY?!

Why would you needlessly complicate someone explaining a fairly basic idea with a utility library that they won't use for months if at all? Seriously this is the poo poo that confuses people into doing retarded things like spend 3 months planning the perfect engine for their extensible version of tetris so they could feasibly make it an MMO if they wanted to 20 years from now.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

Um the reason why a lot of studios implement Scaleform for minor implementations is just because they're anticipating using it in another product or they sell their engine as middleware and having support for it is very important. I mean UT3 meant implementation for UE and BC2 meant implementation for Frostbite, if any company is licensing any of the engines with it implemented then it's incredibly easy for them to use at considerably less cost than rolling their own.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

OneEightHundred posted:

Usually the licenses for middleware are per-title.

And? The point is the cost and man power of implementing it, when a company is licensing an engine and wants to use Scaleform they don't want to have to spend the extra money implementing it, especially if they're on limited source access licensing deals. Also usually is a really weird term to use in this case since whether middleware is included in the licensing or is licensed separately varies heavily from engine to engine and from specific middleware within those engines. Obvious examples being Havok in UE is integral and included, while scaleform or some special lightmapper like Beast may not be as it's not necessarily needed.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

I wouldn't say audio is an afterthought, it's all done through the same system of Components but that's how everything works in Unity. Mess around with all the Audio components, there's basic audio sources that you can make 3D or not, reverb zones that will apply effects to certain sounds like a spherical collider and so on. Just use it and when you find something you don't understand ask on the Unity forums or (probably the best option) in the IRC room.

I mean I don't know what it is you think it's missing so I can't comment on whether it has it or not, it's not always been the best on being remotely to up to date with the APIs it uses so it's entirely possible, but asking specific questions in #unity3d on freenode is easily going to be your best option to find out.

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

If you're not away Ludum Dare 22 starts in like 5 and a half hours!

It's really fun if you fully commit and great for people who are just getting into game development for learning or people who just want a challenge!

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

brian
Sep 11, 2001
I obtained this title through beard tax.

uncleKitchener posted:

Welp, GGJ loving sucked this year. Our artists were a bunch of poo poo heads. We also switched to XNA to get a junior on board, but from now on I will never work with that guy ever again. gently caress him, gently caress his dumb rear end girlfriend and her retarded furry friends.

Important lessons learnt.

I've heard a lot of horror stories about GGJ so i've never taken part, in general if you're looking for a really cool jam to go to and don't mind travelling, look up the TIGJam or jam forum on TIGSource.com. I went to TIGJam UK2 or 3 and it was a great experience and everyone was really nice, you tend to do stuff on your own as opposed to in teams but there's no hard and fast rules.

You basically want to avoid as many students and recently graduated dudes looking to pad their portfolio as possible as they tend to have awful ideas and no idea how to approach doing very quick work. You basically want to go to one that is all ethusiasts who have probably attempted to do a ludum dare or an experimental gameplay challenge before.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply