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It reminds me of that GIF of a Great Dane trying to hump a chihuahua.
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Dec 11, 2018 05:06
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Tetracube posted:Not a game but it fits: AIs breaking their own programming That sheet summarizes a lot of stories from this paper, which has more details and is a quite entertaining read.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:24
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frodnonnag posted:Like how in diablo 2 they had both homing and piercing arrows, stacking both effects would end up with an arrow that would travel to an enemy and then zip back and forth over them, hitting them over and over. I was pretty salty when I found out about this, because I was enjoying my bowazon who wasn't heavily geared towards guided/piercing shot and suddenly I discovered that the Only Bowazon Build online was basically built around a specific crossbow with high fire rate, 100% pierce, and "freezes target", that incidentally was named after Blizzard.
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Dec 14, 2018 03:20
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This is Surgeon Simulator, if you'd told me those were promotional screenshots I'd've believed you.
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Jan 25, 2019 17:01
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I don't get it, is it that the monsters are loving off to go poke at a corner instead of attack the player?
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Mar 12, 2019 00:57
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It's easy to forget that we still don't have a really reliable process for people of varying skill levels to build software with a predictable build quality and timeline (fast, good, cheap, pick one). Games exacerbate this problem because they usually get released at a specific time rather than when the developers are happy with the product. Net result: some nontrivial percentage of games are going to get released in a woefully un-ready state.
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Mar 13, 2019 15:37
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RatHat posted:Also also the people riding the rocket are not actively trying to break it. Reminds me of a (likely apocryphal) story I heard about a navy jet that got totaled because the pilot was sitting in the cockpit, on the grounded jet, and decided to see what would happen if he punched the "raise landing gear" button while on the ground. Turns out it raises the landing gear! He'd expected it to raise an error message instead. Whoops.
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Mar 14, 2019 23:45
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"Look, probably nobody's going to find it in the first couple of weeks after launch. We have waaaaaay more important things to fix first." This is what fixed launch dates do to you. Well, that and dysfunctional company cultures / development processes.
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Mar 28, 2019 15:11
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Is it a remarkable and privileged career? Sure, in most cases. Does that mean the people in that career are not allowed to complain when their employers act like poo poo? gently caress no. You don't get carte blanche to be an rear end in a top hat just because you're paying your employees a lot of money.
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Apr 5, 2019 20:55
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This fantastic GDC talk from an old shareware dev includes a bit on fielding irate calls from people who purchased CDs containing dozens to hundreds of free games, including the dev's unregistered shareware game. They were not thrilled to discover they'd have to fork over even more money to get access to the rest of the game, despite the fact that the dev hadn't received a cent from the CD bundle. I remember exploring such bundles as a kid, though I think ours all came "free" with my dad's subscriptions to various software magazines.
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Apr 11, 2019 18:34
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FactsAreUseless posted:Shareware discs are how I played Castle of the Winds, the only one of those games good enough to be memorable. Cool shareware games I remember playing that I'm pretty sure I first found on those bundle CDs (and keeping in mind we were a Mac household when I was a kid):
I think they're also how I was introduced to Moria, and thereby Angband. Those are both completely free though.
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Apr 12, 2019 15:11
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That reminds me of a glitch I had in AC2. I was up in the rafters in the church in the endgame, watching the pope give his mass and the audience in the pews. I creep up to above the pope, make my dive to kill him...and he vanishes. Just gone. All of the churchgoers in the pews get terrified and try to run away, but they can't find the exit to the church, so they just get in line and do laps in a circle in the open space the pope had been standing in. It was goddamn creepy, and I was half-convinced the pope vanishing was intentional. Then I reloaded, and the second time around it triggered properly. 
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Apr 12, 2019 18:59
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HisMajestyBOB posted:Same, especially Realmz. Yyyyyep. I remember downloading hacked characters that had stats through the roof. They'd attack with rare magic gear that did fire/frost/lightning damage on every hit, so it'd be like +4 burn damage! +3 ice damage! +4 lightning damage! +2714 physical damage! I also discovered a dupe trick wholly on my own. This was one of those games where you'd make a bunch of characters, then you'd assemble them into a party and load the party into a scenario. Thus there was a character/party management screen, where you could arrange your party and trade items between characters. I think the way it worked was that characters in scenarios were saved in a different savefile from characters not in a scenario, so you could trade a scenario item to a non-scenario character, then reload the scenario save to restore the item and be able to trade it again. I reported this to the dev, in particular how you could use it to make exponentially huge stacks of gain-stat potions. Their response was not to fix the bug, but to make the gain-stat potions not stack. 
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Apr 13, 2019 03:35
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Cardiovorax posted:Honestly, if I wrote a book and after ten years, some guy came and told me "yeah, you don't own this anymore now, I'm gonna keep publishing it but you won't see a cent," would that honestly be any less hosed up? More convenient for you personally, maybe, but that's not even just how many years were between publishing the first and the last book of the Harry Potter series. Regardless of what the timeline is, the creator of the work is going to feel put out if others start profiting off of it without giving the creator anything. The point isn't to find some magic point at which the creator says "you know what? You're right, feel free to do whatever you like with my baby." The point is to pick a point that's as short as possible without discouraging many creators from creating. Copyright law is supposed to benefit society, by a) making sure that creators get to benefit from their creations (since with no copyright at all, it'd be very hard to justify the time and effort of creating easily-copied works), and then b) getting those works out to society, so that people can enjoy them and incorporate them into their own creations. I'm not saying you specifically are doing this, but anyone arguing that you need a life-of-creator-plus-70-years copyright to encourage people to create probably also believes that billionaires need tax cuts to encourage them to spend their money. The option I've heard of that seems pretty reasonable to me is have exponentially more expensive copyright extensions. By default you get, say, five years, which is enough to get most of the profitability out of most works. If you decide it's worth $10k to get another five years, go for it. The next five years after that is $100k. And so on. In rare cases this will make legit business sense, because the work is the foundation of some large, profitable media empire. When that happens, everyone benefits through the increased copyright fees you pay. But in the majority of the cases, it's not worth it, so all the uncapitalized works fall into the public domain where everyone else can then try making their own spins on the piece.
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Apr 13, 2019 14:54
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Jeza posted:So rich people can basically protect their copyright practically ad infinitum and poor people lose anything in about 5-10 years. Sounds about right. The intent was that you only maintain copyright on things that are still making you money. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you're going to want to continue to renew the rights to a flash-in-the-pan piece. You can, but it'd be throwing money away unless you think you'll be able to capitalize on it. You can scale copyright fees based on the owner's ability to pay if you like. But claiming that e.g. Tolkien justifies the existence of long copyrights doesn't seem reasonable to me. Tolkien wasn't incentivized to write Lord of the Rings by the possibility that decades in the future it'd be converted into a blockbuster movie series.
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Apr 13, 2019 17:44
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DarkDobe posted:I want more guns that arent just 'hitscan projectile reskin' Borderlands 2 has a ton of guns that aren't just bullet hoses. The problem is they're rare as poo poo, or for the more common ones (the ones given by quests), just aren't very good. For example, one quest gives a shotgun whose pellets fly in a predictable wave fashion instead of spreading out. It sounds good because with skill you can get all of the pellets to hit a single target at range, but in practice the gun doesn't do that much extra damage if all pellets hit, and if you want to shoot things from mid to long range, headshots with an AR or sniper rifle are just way more practical. Also I'm not sure that any gun in Borderlands 2 is actually hitscan; I'm pretty sure they all have bullet travel times, just with some being fast enough they might as well be hitscan for the ranges the game plays at.
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May 13, 2019 14:33
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Regular Nintendo posted:I somehow got myself into a situation in one of the BL2 dlcs where the enemies were insanely spongey (talking like 40 bullets from my strongest gun) yet only yielded 1xp That can definitely happen if you're in the >30 level range, because the enemies just get massively stronger and if your guns don't keep up you can be in a world of hurt. How well does EDF hold up for solo play? Is 4.1 (the one on Steam) worthwhile? I've heard the series can be a bit uneven.
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May 14, 2019 01:54
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Zereth posted:look I am going to take everything in the entire dungeon which is worth anything and you can't loving stop me I've always felt that this was one of the biggest problems with this category of game. Like, clearly you have to have a limited amount of stuff you can carry because there's so much stuff in the game and it would be completely immersion-breaking for you to literally just grab every movable object and shove it into your inventory. And clearly there should be people interested in buying the cool stuff you find while out adventuring. And money is useful! We built our society around accumulating the stuff! But as a consequence, players turn into crazy pack-rat adventurers. Two seconds after you finish unloading gear onto a vendor, your pack is full, and you spend the remaining time until the next vendor constantly dropping slightly-less-value-dense objects in favor of more-dense objects. Half the game is spent staring at your inventory and doing (estimated value) / (weight of object) calculations. Some games have taken some steps towards addressing this. Torchlight lets you offload loot to town without actually going to town by sending your pet on a shopping trip (and you have a gratuitously huge inventory in that game anyway). ToME similarly lets you convert unwanted loot into gold at regular intervals. Angband just straight-up doesn't let you sell anything to vendors, and you get your money by finding actual money in the dungeon.
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May 24, 2019 15:49
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Wild T posted:When the developers created the rickshaws, they made them just as another vehicle in the game's engine, so the game treats them like a very low-speed car. Meaning a wooden rickshaw pulled by a ballgagged man in a leather outfit violently explodes into a fireball when destroyed. The developers thought it was hilarious so they left it in. Really, more games should take the Goldeneye approach to property destruction. Everything explodes. Even filing cabinets and desk chairs.
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Jun 10, 2019 17:07
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moist turtleneck posted:rigging is the shittiest part of animation and after you do it for long enough you can never not over analyze how people walk ever again I used to model, rig, and animate stuff. Made a humanoid with walk, run, jump, climb, crouch, turn, and turn-while-crouching animations. This involved an awful lot of very slowly acting out animations in my apartment so I could track where my body parts were and translate them into poses. Animation is not something you do if you want to maintain a charade that you're a dignified person.
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Jun 10, 2019 20:56
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Cardiovorax posted:And that, my friends, is why you do sanity checks. I'm willing to bet that's at least in part a quaternion issue. There is no sanity when it comes to quaternions.
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Jul 25, 2019 16:34
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That's one hell of a pass to make with pure arm strength, no body motion behind it.
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Jul 31, 2019 16:51
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Zanzibar Ham posted:It's both Dwarf Fortress and a sneak peek at the upcoming spinoff Goat Fortress Part of a twofer crossover with Goat Simulator. Dwarf Simulator is...not that much different from Dwarf Fortress, to be honest. It's just in realtime 3D.
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Aug 30, 2019 02:26
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mmj posted:I think the original japanese zelda game had a similar glitch that lets you beat the game in less than 1:30 by turning the cave you enter to get your sword into the door you enter after beating ganondorf to get the triforce and end the game I don't know about that glitch, but there's definitely a glitch in Link to the Past that lets you break the stair-climbing animation to get out of bounds and just walk to where the Triforce is.
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Sep 4, 2019 22:45
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The real question, in my mind, is how you manage to have an affair with your own wife. Were you both sneaking out incognito to meet up in a hotel?
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Sep 15, 2019 02:40
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The Cheshire Cat posted:All of his lines are delivered pretty poorly but I think it's basically that he was essentially given no direction. He read the lines as flat and boring because nobody told him how he should be reading them. If you get no direction, you should go balls-out giving the most ridiculous acting you can think of IMO. Let loose and have fun with it. Dare them to tell you to dial it back.
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Oct 18, 2019 02:22
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Cleretic posted:It turns out Sonic 06's prototype actually works better than the released game. It wouldn't surprise me if that vertical slice would have collapsed entirely as soon as anyone tried to extend it past the little bit that it was made to show off. Vertical slices are meant to nail down how the game is supposed to play -- get the feel right, show the kinds of challenges that they want to base the design on, that kind of thing. It serves as a guide to further development, but it's merely a pleasant bonus if any of the stuff used to make the vertical slice can be re-used. They're knocked together as quickly as possible with any and all development shortcuts permitted, because you want to know ASAP if your genius game idea is actually any fun to play.
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Nov 27, 2019 01:19
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I'd guess that part of that is not having a good workflow for turning the raw recorded voice acting into individual lines. Some tired person is sorting through hundreds of hours of people talking and trying to identify where each line starts and stops without having to listen to the entire thing. This is 100% cheating since it's for a game I'm actively working on, but I was trying to set up basic AI airplane movement and, uh, made the airplane singularity. https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1202727023702970368
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Dec 6, 2019 19:20
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zedprime posted:A breakpoint is a debug tool that stops active threads and yells at you/starts a source/memory debugger at a predetermined point. He was asking why they couldn't set a watch breakpoint on the height variable and see what caused it when they figured out it was fall damage code. He wasn't saying cap the NPC height variable or whatever you might have thought that meant. Yeah, figuring out that NPCs were falling happened early...but it's not like you can just set the breakpoint and play for awhile, trigger it, then see what's going on. It took very specific circumstances for the bug to happen, which were rare under normal game testing, but not so rare that they never happened when you increased the number of "testers" by several orders of magnitude. Theoretically they could have shipped out a patched version of the game that logged a bunch of information when NPCs exceeded some set height and sent those logs back to HQ, then waited for the logs to come in. That's not exactly a player-friendly way to fix bugs though.
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Dec 13, 2019 16:26
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I'm reminded of the Bandit King monster type in Dungeonmans (a roguelike made by goon madjackmcmad). Every monster can have champion versions that get special abilities; the Bandit King's champion ability is to disarm you and toss the weapon onto the ground nearby. But if you aren't using any weapons, he'll happily remove your fists instead (and toss them on the ground). Fortunately you can't actually lose your fists, which lead to one fight I had where there were three copies of my fists sitting on the ground by the end.
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Dec 23, 2019 22:35
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This is 100% cheating, as it's for a game I'm developing and therefore almost certainly not going to make it into production, but I loved it dearly and wanted to share. My game is a naval combat game, and the other day I was working on adding torpedo attack planes -- they fly towards their target ship, drop a torpedo, it lands in the water and goes forward. Everything was working fine except the torpedoes were vanishing as soon as they got dropped. Where were they going? Waaaay the hell off the map, that's where. Because they had a velocity somewhere in the vicinity of mach 9. Ah yes, of course  (the cause was that my projectile handling code was multiplying the provided aim vector by the projectile's specified velocity...and the "aim" vector was the airplane's flying velocity. So the torpedoes were going about a hundred times faster than the airplanes were, and the planes were already traveling at a decent clip) A related bug that I have yet to fix: I recently improved my boat motion logic so that they actually float on the waves of the ocean, instead of just kind of sitting there at a fixed height while the waves pass through them. As a consequence of this, if a boat is at the top of a wave, torpedoes will pass underneath it. Which is great for the player when they're getting shot at...less great when you finally line up your own torpedo shot and it misses through no fault of your own.
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Feb 16, 2020 01:44
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Cardiovorax posted:Just how big are your boats compared to your waves? Because that sounds a bit out of proportion. You're right, they're out of proportion. That's because the ocean's job primarily is to sell that you're out at sea, not to present a realistic depiction of being out at sea. Here's the "rough" waves with an Iowa-class battleship, pretty much as big as you're going to get:  And here's the same, with calm waves:  Iowas have a draft of 11.5 meters, meaning that in calm water 11.5m worth of the ship is underwater (and the deck is about 8.5m above the water). They probably don't have the issue with torpedoes passing underneath them. Smaller ships like the Clemson-class destroyers and Northampton-class cruisers that the player is fighting in these screenshots have drafts of 2.8m and 5m respectively. Given that my rough waves are tall enough to wash over the Iowa's deck, those smaller ships are definitely going to be sailing over torpedoes.
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Feb 16, 2020 16:27
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Cardiovorax posted:I'm just saying this as a layperson, but wouldn't it be easier to just have more and smaller waves at a more realistic scale? You could avoid the issue of having ships bob up and down that way and probably make it all look better, too. I used to have more and smaller waves. It didn't feel very interesting. The ocean feels far more impactful if it has large waves, and that in turn helps build the overall feeling of the game. It's a bit like how comic book characters have "heroic" proportions or why movies often choose a small palette of colors that dominate most scenes. It's unrealistic, and it creates some extra challenges that you have to solve, but it's worth it for the increased emotional buy-in from the audience. Now, I won't claim that I have the aesthetics of my game on lock. The ocean does need some more iteration, particularly with colors and how other objects interact with it. But I'm pretty happy with the shape of it at the moment. And yeah, there's any number of ways I can solve the torpedo issue. Most likely I'll just give them a bigger hitbox; it's not like you can see them (or the underside of your ship) clearly enough to notice if a torpedo hits you that shouldn't have, which is usually the main problem with weird hitboxes. In particular I can make the hitbox taller without changing its width.
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Feb 16, 2020 18:19
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Cardiovorax posted:No, seriously, who develops an ARPG and doesn't make loot filtering literally one of the first features to implement? They're wholly unnecessary if you just don't drop so many crap items in the first place. If drops are 10x less common but 10x more likely to be useful, then there's no need for filtering and balance is preserved. This is the approach that Angband (a roguelike that's pretty clearly the inspiration for Diablo I) took. It used to be that high-level enemies would drop up to 16 items apiece, all of them "valuable" (like Holy Avenger swords, dragon scale mail, rare spellbooks, etc.) but statistically useless because by the time you're killing those enemies you almost certainly already have better. Nowadays the game automatically destroys loot that isn't good enough, so you never even see it. I'm glossing over a fair amount of detail work and polish and making it sound simpler than it is; it really does work well and removes a ton of tedium from the game. It does rather interfere with the whole "loot pinata" aspect of the genre of course. Whether you find that aspect valuable is up to you.
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Feb 16, 2020 19:17
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Replace "get to" with "have to" and you have it, basically. Do you want to set up your own loot filters? Personally I'm in the genre for the "crush monsters, get loots" aspect moreso than the "configure a rules engine" aspect. Again, I'm just saying it's possible to do the genre without requiring the player to do loot filters. It's not objectively better or worse IMO.
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Feb 16, 2020 19:31
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"Moving the world around the player" is 100% a stylistic choice, as is "the game pauses when you aren't doing anything". I think a big part of coming up with cool new game mechanics is seeing the broken poo poo that inevitably turns up when you're doing development, and figuring out how to make that fun. Semi-famously, Devil May Cry 1 was originally going to be a Resident Evil game, but during development they had a glitch where enemies would get tossed up into the air when the protagonist attacked them. They liked it well enough to make an entire new series instead.
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Feb 17, 2020 01:18
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Pretty good posted:I'm so loving mad this game got shelved What is this?
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Feb 19, 2020 15:53
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More cheating by posting my own game. I'm working on improving performance, and as part of that am trying to make a faster but less detailed model for the AI ships to use for steering and wave motion. It uh, is not quite there yet. https://i.imgur.com/2jlOUlD.mp4
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Mar 30, 2020 20:55
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Cardiovorax posted:I still have no loving idea how something like that could possibly happen, but it's definitely up there. Here's my guess: the game decided it needed to spawn in the ship (out of nowhere, and who knows why that happened). This involves bringing in a) the ship itself, and b) the ship's crew. The crew spawned normally (i.e. where they would be if the ship spawned correctly), but the ship for some reason spawned with an invalid, massively negative, altitude. Now, the game has logic for determining the boat's altitude based on the movement of the ocean. It needs this for realistic wave motion especially during storms. The game corrects the ship's altitude slowly over time -- it's not subject to gravity or bouyancy, the game just moves it up and down based on what direction it thinks the water's in. But it doesn't allow for very large motion in a short time, because that would look implausible. So the ship gradually climbs out of its massively negative position towards the correct altitude. As for why all the people fly up into the sky, my guess would be that when the ship's altitude gets corrected, that adjustment is also applied to the people on the ship, to avoid them clipping into the deck or getting tossed around. So they spawned thousands of meters above the ship's deck (or rather, the ship's deck spawned thousands of meters below them)...and as the ship rises, so too do they, to maintain that same offset. The hole in the ocean is probably a side-effect of logic to make sure that the ocean doesn't clip into the interior of the ship. That's not a big deal for a large ship like this, but it's more important for e.g. rowboats where you don't want to see the ocean through the bottom of the boat. And they probably just re-used the same logic for all ships regardless of size.
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Apr 14, 2020 16:58
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I very much doubt the menu itself is putting strain on the console. The most common cause of inexplicable resource-sucking in simple scenes, I expect, is simply that they didn't bother to cap the framerate of the menu, so it's updating at something ridiculous like 500+ FPS.
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Apr 19, 2020 04:12
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