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I don't know if anyone else likes the 3dbuzz video's they created. I used them for OpenGL and was very happy with them. But I became fascinated with learning some of the other game development stuff. I just got a notice that they are going to have a "class" on developing an MMO. If you read the article, it seems very thorough: http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/content.php?170 Everything else I have done on their site were VTMs or looking at products of old classes, but this one seems to be brand new, and am curious to what going through the online class with all the meetings, etc was like. Does anyone have an opinion or experience with the 3dbuzz classes? <edit> They also made a entire training series on Unity 3d free for download http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/content.php?176 hallik fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Feb 3, 2011 |
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Feb 2, 2011 17:24
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hallik posted:They also made a entire training series on Unity 3d free for download Awesome! I just started working with Unity today so this should be helpful.
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Feb 2, 2011 19:59
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I'm looking for a good book on opengl mainly for 2d stuff. Do any of you have suggestions of what to pick up besides the lovely rear end red book?
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Feb 3, 2011 15:07
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Orzo posted:I think you might be slightly misunderstanding, XNA source and dest represent a source texture and a dest rectangle render target. Basically what I need is tiling from a sprite sheet, which I now know is impossible (from googling this issue) without the use of pixel shaders. Oh well, time to learn shaders! A little late but yeah you need to write a pixel shader and pass it two sets of texture coordinates, the logical set and physical set. In the pixel shader, take the logical set and chop off the integer component and use the fractional component to lerp between the physical set. The downside here is that you won't be able to use hardware texture filtering or mipmapping without getting artifacts. If filtering is needed you'll need to implement it yourself in the pixel shader.
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Feb 4, 2011 17:07
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Thanks for the response, I'm already in the middle of doing pretty much that (the first part, not the filtering). The upside is that this got my away from crappy flexible vertex formats and into vertex declarations! Always nice to learn the better way to do something.
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Feb 4, 2011 17:09
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Orzo posted:Thanks for the response, I'm already in the middle of doing pretty much that (the first part, not the filtering). The upside is that this got my away from crappy flexible vertex formats and into vertex declarations! Always nice to learn the better way to do something. I forgot to mention, if your tiles are all identical in size (or you aren't pressed for texture memory) you could use 3D textures instead, with each slice containing one tile. Then you could still take advantage of hardware filtering and the like.
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Feb 4, 2011 17:14
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They definitely aren't the same size. My system is going to use 1 file per texture as normal and use a rectangle packing algorithm to generate sprite sheets at runtime to minimize texture switches. Has anyone tried this before and are there any pitfalls I should be wary of?
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Feb 4, 2011 17:16
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Orzo posted:They definitely aren't the same size. My system is going to use 1 file per texture as normal and use a rectangle packing algorithm to generate sprite sheets at runtime to minimize texture switches. Has anyone tried this before and are there any pitfalls I should be wary of? You should definitely read this then  http://www.blackpawn.com/texts/lightmaps/default.html
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Feb 4, 2011 17:51
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Oh yeah this was actually something I was researching before I even started coding, I had a lot of fun playing with this: http://incise.org/2d-bin-packing-with-javascript-and-canvas.html
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Feb 4, 2011 17:59
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I think I've decided to start playing around with C# and XNA. Does anyone know of any decent reference books that will give me a foundation in the language?
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Feb 4, 2011 21:33
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If you are willing to shell out $35, they have a 3 volume video training series on C# / XNA on 3dbuzz. I believe you can watch a 1-2 min sample of each video/topic to see if you are even interested. The free ones play for the duration. http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_videonav.php?rec=xna They have a lot of free videos on their site, but I don't think the C# / XNA ones are in that group. I am kind of hooked on this 3dbuzz site lately. I get more out of training videos than reading a book (snore). They have a laid back style in them so it's easier for me to pay attention. I have been watching their free Unity videos and probably do the XNA ones soon. I broke down and signed up for the class where you build an MMO, I linked to it in another post. From that article, its going to be a pretty detailed. Pumped.
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Feb 5, 2011 00:49
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Wolfgang Pauli posted:I think I've decided to start playing around with C# and XNA. Does anyone know of any decent reference books that will give me a foundation in the language? For learning the C# language by itself, I like Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Step by Step by John Sharp. I have an older edition than is given in the link but it was clearly written and had decent examples. For XNA, I'd recommend XNA Game Studio 4.0 Programming by Miller and Johnson. Its one of the few books out there that assumes the reader is a reasonably competent programmer who wants to learn the XNA libraries in depth, while most other books are aimed at getting something flashy on the screen in a hurry and skimp on the details of how it got there. Make sure you're comfortable with C# before starting this book - it assumes you know that material already.
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Feb 5, 2011 01:25
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Where would you guys recommend releasing games as freeware? Any big sites?
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Feb 8, 2011 04:23
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r2x posted:Where would you guys recommend releasing games as freeware? Any big sites? Maybe TIGSource? Or gamedev.net? Hell, you can even make a thread here if you get permission from a mod.
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Feb 8, 2011 05:18
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Would anyone happen to have any experience with Autodesk's FBX SDK?
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Feb 8, 2011 22:13
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Paniolo posted:Would anyone happen to have any experience with Autodesk's FBX SDK? (COLLADA and FBX are nearly the same feature-wise) OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Feb 9, 2011 |
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Feb 9, 2011 15:35
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OneEightHundred posted:My limited experience is that it's terrible and you should probably use COLLADA in combination with FCollada or Assimp instead. FCollada is lower-level but supports basically the entire format, Assimp is more of a high-level general purpose model loader that supports a bunch of other formats as well and is quite handy. Yeah I managed to figure out everything I needed, but it was a huge pain (and takes loving forever to build.) Assimp looks much better to work with, thanks for the tip.
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Feb 9, 2011 17:17
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FBX is terrible for live engines, it's meant for writing exporters.
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Feb 9, 2011 17:34
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haveblue posted:FBX is terrible for live engines, it's meant for writing exporters. And yeah, never load them directly, they contain a bunch of information that's usually useless (i.e. scene setup), and a bunch of information that's buried under series of mappings and associations that you probably want to simplify by just requiring them. (i.e. if you have a simple skeletal animation system, you probably want to just enforce one skin controller on one mesh with one skeleton). Roll your own format designed around how you want your engine to use it (though if you want to be flexible, indexed weight blends work great as a storage format), convert to that. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Feb 9, 2011 |
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Feb 9, 2011 18:29
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haveblue posted:FBX is terrible for live engines, it's meant for writing exporters. Why would you assume I'm not writing an exporter?
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Feb 9, 2011 18:44
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Paniolo posted:Why would you assume I'm not writing an exporter? Are you trying to write an FBX exporter for an existing modeling package or something? Or trying to write something to convert FBX to another format? (in either case, use COLLADA instead, the FCollada API is much less brain-damaged and basically everything that exports FBX already exports COLLADA) OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Feb 9, 2011 |
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Feb 9, 2011 18:50
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I'm cross posting this from the CG thread since it can relate to Game Devs (especially Indies). Project Messiah is doing a Dare to Share program where they sell their basic version for $10 and pro version for $40 (regularly $1200) and everyone gets their license IF the goal is met (if not everyone is refunded). http://www.projectmessiah.com/x6/shop.html Seems a decent way to get a good animation program on the cheap (and legit) for small game devs interested in the asset creation side of things.
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Feb 9, 2011 18:52
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Wolfgang Pauli posted:Right now I'm interested in playing around with AI design, procedural generation, and simulation. I'm not concerned with people playing things I make and having fun, it's just to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity, really. I don't know if I'll move beyond that or not, but it's some place to start that will keep me motivated to learn more about programming. That's actually a good description of where I'm at right now, and for that I'm using C# to do roguelike development with libtcod. Spending more time with AI means (hopefully) spending less time with game physics and UI. The difficulty of making a good simulated platform for AI development is one reason why a lot of researchers go into robotics: even messing around with servos and mechanical engineering sometimes takes less time than trying to make an entire simulated universe. Obviously, you're not going to get anywhere with C, and even C++ development is a lot slower than C#. Libtcod is extremely simple to use (incidentally, the C++ version is broken with Visual C++ 2010). XNA is great, but apparently Microsoft got rid of their good tutorials that introduced XNA and C# simultaneously in an easy way. If you really want to devote yourself solely to AI development, something like the Unreal Engine might be suitable.
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Feb 9, 2011 18:52
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OneEightHundred posted:Because the FBX SDK is also used for importers/converters (much more often than writing exporters for that matter). Oh, I misunderstood what you meant by exporter. My project is a model viewer for my game engine that can import FBX/other formats, allow me to make some tweaks and add some game-specific metadata and export it in my engine-specific format. So I was using FBX SDK for importing, not exporting. Just in the last couple of hours I got importing via assimp working so I'll probably end up scrapping the FBX SDK importer.
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Feb 9, 2011 19:18
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I just made a big update for Tealy & Orangey live, if you want to check it out.
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Feb 10, 2011 00:47
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BonoMan posted:I'm cross posting this from the CG thread since it can relate to Game Devs (especially Indies). I just bought the $40 one. Hope this pans out. The CSS on that progress bar says 51% right now. We'll see if it moves.
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Feb 10, 2011 02:32
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I was looking around for Messiah stuff, and came across this. http://www.usefulslug.com/files/Xerxestest5.mov
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Feb 10, 2011 18:25
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hallik posted:I just bought the $40 one. Hope this pans out. The CSS on that progress bar says 51% right now. We'll see if it moves.
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Feb 11, 2011 01:31
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Wuntvor posted:Bought that, too, I've been dying to get my hands on some good modeling software. Seems to be at 65% now, so it's definitely moving. Seems like I chose a good time to check on this thread, got myself a copy and shared the link around.
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Feb 11, 2011 03:30
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Does Messiah let you create a model or is it just a rigging/rendering tool? The documentation on the website is pretty thin, and I kept getting directed to some pay-to-watch training videos.
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Feb 11, 2011 04:09
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PDP-1 posted:Does Messiah let you create a model or is it just a rigging/rendering tool?
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Feb 11, 2011 13:54
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Wuntvor posted:After looking at some videos, it does seem to focus on animation a lot more than I originally thought. I mean, for $10 there's not much else I could have bought and it does have basic modeling capabilities, I guess I should have researched it better though. How basic is basic? Does it do the job if you're just wanting to fart around with cheap technology and don't expect to be making the next Pixar feature film?
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Feb 11, 2011 15:30
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Drox posted:How basic is basic? Does it do the job if you're just wanting to fart around with cheap technology and don't expect to be making the next Pixar feature film? Doesn't sound like it.. Searched around a bit more on the net, and everyone is saying you do need some modeling software alongside it, even if it's just a $100 one. Example of such talk: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=2561198
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Feb 11, 2011 15:52
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Yeah it's mainly an animation tool, but still worth it at that price.
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Feb 11, 2011 15:58
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That's too bad, I'm too lazy to learn two things at once.  Oh well.
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Feb 11, 2011 16:08
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Drox posted:That's too bad, I'm too lazy to learn two things at once. Assuming you're talking indie game dev you're gonna need modeling AND animation...so why not have a strong animation package on the cheap? I mean hell it's $40. I bought it "just in case."
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Feb 11, 2011 16:14
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BonoMan posted:Assuming you're talking indie game dev you're gonna need modeling AND animation...so why not have a strong animation package on the cheap? I mean hell it's $40. I bought it "just in case." No, I just like reading this thread to see what people come up with regard to games. I was hoping it was an integrated package, even with horrible modeling capabilities, because I just want to play with a toy, not actually make things with it.
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Feb 13, 2011 01:48
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Drox posted:No, I just like reading this thread to see what people come up with regard to games. I was hoping it was an integrated package, even with horrible modeling capabilities, because I just want to play with a toy, not actually make things with it. Ah...well....never mind then!
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Feb 13, 2011 04:25
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This is so not far along it's probably borderline pointless to post, but I started playing around with the HTML5 Canvas... trying to learn the shapes and animations and stuff. http://www.stephanwozniak.com/production/shooter/ Just a 2d side scrolling shooter with basic collision detection. I do plan on fleshing this out to incorporate levels, real enemies not just boxes, bosses, etc... The code is pretty clean I think if anyone wants to see the approach I took. http://www.stephanwozniak.com/production/shooter/js/game.js Oh and I don't care about crappy browser compatibility for once, since this isn't for work! Only checked it out on FF and Chrome.
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Feb 14, 2011 22:12
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hedgecore posted:This is so not far along it's probably borderline pointless to post, but I started playing around with the HTML5 Canvas... trying to learn the shapes and animations and stuff. Flickers a bunch but it works fine for me in FF3 and Chrome in Fedora 14 (64-bit)
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Feb 14, 2011 23:02
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