Game Development Megathread

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Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Has anyone in this thread had any experience with Torque or specifically Torque 2D? Just kinda curious as everything seems to be going really well for me thus far but I wasn't sure if there was anyone else here that's used it in the past.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2013 21:54

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 19:38

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Yeah I've been following the Torque MIT progress and it does sound interesting and there have already been some neat demos but I'm not sure if it'll be right for us just yet. From what I understand the first release isn't going to include any sort of visual editor which is sort of vital to our production pipeline as I'm sure as hell not going to be able to guy my awesome artist to also be an awesome coder any time soon. :v:

I do kind of want to check it out for maybe mobile dev once our PC version is farther along or close to completion. I figure also by that time more of a community and hopefully documentation will be developed around MIT.

It's a shame that their recent Kickstarter for a GameMaker-ish development studio didn't go anywhere and I believe some people were let go because of it but they've said that they're going to be retooling the project in some way.

Just to shed some light on my current process, I started working with Torque 2D this summer after evaluating a number of engines. It honestly seemed like the easiest for me to jump into as I knew I'd be working solely with 2D for the time being. After a bit of a break to get married I've been developing with it regularly for the past month and am building out a system of behaviors and controls that my artist can then use to create levels in TGB. It hasn't always been easy as some of the documentation out there is really goddamn old but as of now I feel I have a pretty good grasp of how the engine works. My project is also built off of the Platformer Starter Kit which I've been retooling for my own needs. I really like that I've got full access to the source but to tell the truth I was real goddamn lost at first as I haven't touched C++ since college.

And if it's okay with you I might fire a very Torque specific coding question at you soon.

e: ah here's the post about the lack of editors for Torque MIT along with a list of other new and deprecated features

Yodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jan 26, 2013

# ¿ Jan 26, 2013 22:43

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Torque MIT isn't officially released but there's info all over their blog section. Here's part one of three articles with lots of info along with the one I linked above: http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22130

e: here's part 2 and part 3 along with a live TAML demo

As for the editor, yeah it's not the best but the way I see Torque you can't really use it unless you want to get your hands dirty with Torquescript and C++. TGB is nice for a visual representation of your levels and piecing things together but it's not even close to being an all in one drag and drop like GameMaker.

I haven't seen the specific bugs you're talking about though.

Yodzilla fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Jan 27, 2013

# ¿ Jan 27, 2013 03:39

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

SuicideSnowman posted:

I've made a video showing it in action. The character controls are extremely exaggerated just to attempt to simulate conditions that most likely wouldn't happen under normal circumstances. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9YSHxnikFw

You know what, I think I need to implement this in my game. I don't know why I didn't think of it before but having triggers that sort of surround your player for various needs is a really efficient and clever way of achieving a lot of things that could consume cycles otherwise.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2013 00:55

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

I'm planning on learning Unity at some point in the near future so that's helpful to me! Thanks.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2013 17:34

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Sorry to double post but apparently Torque 2D MIT was released yesterday. Here's the project on GitHub for anyone that wants to pull it down and play around with it.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2013 18:15

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

I know the original FEAR used it slow time effect in multiplayer. It worked by picking up a powerup and everyone else's or everyone on the other team's movement and shooting would slow way the hell down. It worked actually worked really well but sadly (like everything else fun about FEAR's multi) was stripped from FEAR 2.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 19:15

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

That looks pretty cool! Maybe I'll give it a shot when I have a chance.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2013 22:50

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

So what version of Futile for Unity should I be downloading? I know it's in active dev and he doesn't update the Master all that often but even in the Development branch it seems as if he hasn't updated Futile.unitypackage in seven months. Is there some other place where he posts updates? I couldn't find anything like that on his Reddit account.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2013 19:35

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Yeah that's strange. Maybe I'll just contact him myself.

And while going through those Futile tutorials I saw him using Glyph Designer and TexturePacker which seem like really nice, useful tools. Can anyone speak to those and anything like them?

# ¿ Mar 22, 2013 22:55

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

So I'm trying to get into Unity with Futile and I've gone through MattRix's tutorials and started making something of my own but I've already hit a roadblock. For some reason I just can not get my own texture atlas working. Can someone download this thing and tell me what's wrong? It's about as simple as it gets and the error being thrown doesn't help at all.

I have all of my atlas files in "\Assets\Resources\Atlases"
Here are my files TestAtlas.png and TestAtlas.txt
The text file appears to reference everything correctly
In my Unity project I have the TestAtlas.png settings as:

Which is the same as in his sample project. In my code I'm calling:

code:

Futile.atlasManager.LoadAtlas("Atlases/TestAtlas");

...and when it runs it throws the following error:

code:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
FAtlas.LoadTexture () (at C:/Users/Public/Documents/Unity Projects/FatOut/Assets/Plugins/Futile/Core/FAtlas.cs:102)
FAtlas..ctor (System.String name, System.String imagePath, System.String dataPath, Int32 index, Boolean shouldLoadAsSingleImage) (at C:/Users/Public/Documents/Unity Projects/FatOut/Assets/Plugins/Futile/Core/FAtlas.cs:79)
FAtlasManager.ActuallyLoadAtlasOrImage (System.String name, System.String imagePath, System.String dataPath) (at C:/Users/Public/Documents/Unity Projects/FatOut/Assets/Plugins/Futile/Core/FAtlasManager.cs:33)
FAtlasManager.LoadAtlas (System.String atlasPath) (at C:/Users/Public/Documents/Unity Projects/FatOut/Assets/Plugins/Futile/Core/FAtlasManager.cs:53)
Main.Start () (at Assets/Scripts/Main.cs:44)

I've tried creating multiple atlases some containing only one image and the same error is being thrown over and over again but I can load his sample atlases just fine. What the hell is going on here?

# ¿ Mar 26, 2013 15:51

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

poemdexter posted:

Set your maxsize to 2048. Your png is 1024x2048. I learned this yesterday after my atlas moved up to the next size in TexturePacker and then all of a sudden, garbled mess where my sprites should be.

It doesn't matter. I've tried setting Max Size to its actual size or the biggest like in that screenshot (which is what he does for his atlases) and I get the error either way.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2013 15:57

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

poemdexter posted:

Recheck my post. I added additional info.

poemdexter posted:

Also set your Texture Type as "Texture". See if that helps. Here's my atlas properties:

Nope, nothin' doing. Still throws the error.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2013 15:59

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

poemdexter posted:

I added your atlas to my code it loaded just fine. Got mario on my screen and everything. Spelling errors somewhere?

I just don't know. This is beyond frustrating and I have no idea what the hell is going on. The only code I'm calling is this:

code:

Futile.atlasManager.LoadAtlas("Atlases/BananaGameAtlas");
Futile.atlasManager.LoadAtlas("Atlases/TestAtlas");

I'm not creating any objects, not loading any sprites afterwards, nothing. BananaGameAtlas loads fine but as soon as I try to load my TestAtlas or any other atlas I create it throws that error. I'm using the same files I uploaded and the "image" in TestAtlas.txt is TestAtlas.png which is what's in the folder so I'm completely and utterly stumped.

E: GOD loving DAMMIT now i understand why he has all those atlases with _ScaleNum and how that corresponds to the screen resolution you're running at. gently caress i'm a goddamn idiot

programmin' :smugwizard:

Yodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Mar 26, 2013

# ¿ Mar 26, 2013 16:55

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

The problem was that I copied this over from his sample code:

code:

FutileParams fparams = new FutileParams(true,true,false,false);
fparams.AddResolutionLevel(480.0f,	1.0f,	1.0f,	"_Scale1"); //iPhone
fparams.AddResolutionLevel(960.0f,	2.0f,	2.0f,	"_Scale2"); //iPhone retina
fparams.AddResolutionLevel(1024.0f,	2.0f,	2.0f,	"_Scale2"); //iPad
fparams.AddResolutionLevel(1280.0f,	2.0f,	2.0f,	"_Scale2"); //Nexus 7
fparams.AddResolutionLevel(2048.0f,	4.0f,	4.0f,	"_Scale4"); //iPad Retina
fparams.origin = new Vector2(0.5f,0.5f);
Futile.instance.Init (fparams);

Which enables you to have multiple atlases with differently sized versions of the same elements for different device resolutions. While cool, what this was doing was when I ran

code:

Futile.atlasManager.LoadAtlas("Atlases/TestAtlas");

...was that it was looking for TestAtlas_Scale1, TestAtlas_Scale2, etc which didn't exist and was throwing that error.

Now that I know how supporting multiple resolution atlases works I was able to strip out what I don't need for now and load my regular one using just this:

code:

FutileParams fparams = new FutileParams(true,true,false,false);
fparams.AddResolutionLevel(1024.0f,	1.0f,	1.0f,	""); //iPad
fparams.origin = new Vector2(0.5f,0.5f);
Futile.instance.Init (fparams);
Futile.atlasManager.LoadAtlas("Atlases/TestAtlas");

And now it works great.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2013 17:30

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

xgalaxy posted:

Sony getting rid of approval process.
This along with the Unity licenses is making the PS4 very attractive to indies.

Only question is how expensive a dev kit will be.

I've heard that Sony is easy to work with regarding dev kit pricing for indie developers. I'm sure it's a case by case thing but that's coming from two devs I've spoken to about cross platform authoring.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2013 14:07

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Question about Unity and Futile and shaders. We're planning on making multiple time of day versions of our levels. Now I know that Futile has shader support so I think I can add subtle tinting to objects to simulate this. I've also heard that this can cause some performance issues if there's too much going on but is that preferable to having repeated assets in multiple atlases? Here are some simple sample assets we're working with:

How would I go about writing a shader to, say, add a slight blue tint for a night scene or orange for a sunset?

# ¿ Mar 30, 2013 03:13

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

roomforthetuna posted:

Kind of surprised there's no Tilemap-specific class. Seems like a thing that belongs in any 2D game library.

I haven't tried it but isn't that what FTilemap is? I've used his camera class and it works well, it might be worth investigating his tilemap implementation too.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2013 00:23

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

I'm a bit confused about the version of MonoDevelop that comes with Unity. It says it's version 2.8.2 but if you go to the MonoDevelop website it says there that there's 3.0 available but then if you click on the download link it says the latest stable version is 4.0.1? So is the version that comes with Unity just super out of date?

e: oh Monodevelop is now something called Xamarin Studio? weird

e: you know what, gently caress it I should just use Visual Studio. i like the quickness of MonoDevelop and Xamarin seems like a nice, newer version of that but both of them don't seem to support the whole "page up and down to see what variables this function takes in" that Visual Studios does. like, it pops up the window with overload options and shows you the up and down arrows to browse through them but only Visual Studio allows you to actually click on them and see what they are. for some reason MonoDevelop and Xamarin show you the arrows but nothing happens when you try to interact with them. i don't get it

Yodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Apr 3, 2013

# ¿ Apr 3, 2013 16:50

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Why do they intentionally use an old version of the application? Especially one that seems to be rather buggy.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2013 02:02

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

SupSuper posted:

I got rid of MonoDevelop ASAP (specially since Unity refuses to use anything else while it exists)

There's an option in Unity that lets you select whatever editor you want it to use. When I had Monodevelop and Visual Studio 2010 both of them were in the dropdown and then when I installed Xamarin all I had to do was navigate to the .exe and it added itself to the list.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2013 14:54

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

That's kinda weird. Although due to weirdness like that I've just started opening the code's .sln file instead of launching anything from the Unity project hierarchy. That way I can actually make changes to the project as a whole and it'll save properly instead of on a file by file basis.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2013 15:57

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

It works just fine with 2012 Express but haven't tried using the debugger in any way.

e: woop beaten

# ¿ Apr 4, 2013 16:46

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

God loving dammit I was all getting used to Visual Studio 2012 and for some reason intellisense just randomly loving decides to stop working and aaaarrrrrgghhhh!!

Computers are the loving worst.

e: maybe it was Visual Studio 2010 conflicting? ugh

Yodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Apr 5, 2013

# ¿ Apr 5, 2013 04:43

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Someone please tell me there's no hidden or terrible reason not to use the PlayerPrefs object in Unity because it's so goddamn easy it's glorious.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2013 20:35

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Unormal posted:

I've noticed individual reads can be a little slow on mobile devices; so don't read like 50,000 individual settings out of it during time-sensitive operations on mobile devices.

Orzo posted:

Of all the crazy things Unity does for you, it's kind of humorous to get excited about a service which essentially saves and loads primitives

No problems there. Noice.

Shalinor posted:

It's also very easy to hack into, so don't store secure data there or anything.

Coming from Torque2D it's a godsend.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2013 21:32

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

So is there some weird difference between running Unity in Windows and OSX? I've been working on my Futile project in Windows just fine but as soon as I tried to compile it in OSX it chokes on this in FScreen.cs

code:

#if UNITY_IPHONE || UNITY_ANDROID
TouchScreenKeyboard.autorotateToLandscapeLeft = false;
TouchScreenKeyboard.autorotateToLandscapeRight = false;
TouchScreenKeyboard.autorotateToPortrait = false;
TouchScreenKeyboard.autorotateToPortraitUpsideDown = false;

I found this post saying it was undocumented deprecated code but his replacement

code:

Screen.autorotateToPortrait = autoRotateKeyboardPortrait;
Screen.autorotateToPortraitUpsideDown = autoRotateKeyboardPortraitUpsideDown;
Screen.autorotateToLandscapeLeft = autoRotateKeyboardLandscapeLeft;
Screen.autorotateToLandscapeRight = autoRotateKeyboardLandscapeRight;

doesn't compile either? I'm guessing that the OSX version of Unity is hitting the UNITY_IPHONE bit which is kind of weird but what is the correct way to do...whatever is supposed to be here?

# ¿ Apr 10, 2013 00:04

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Thanks. Yeah my goals for tonight were 1) learn how to test and debug Unity on iOS devices and 2) learn how to manipulate and read device orientation. The latter got me a little mixed up but I think I've got a handle on it now...for the most part.

Yodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Apr 10, 2013

# ¿ Apr 10, 2013 03:53

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Just out of curiosity, and I was only thinking this because I was playing Anodyne yesterday, what is the math behind jumping in a Zelda-esque game?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2013 01:38

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Ha! Yeah that's about what I was thinking, I didn't know if it was any more complex than that. Thanks for the clarification.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2013 02:40

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

For any of you interested the recently Kickstarted 2D skeletal animation tool Spine released their Unity and generic C# runtimes today. I'm not entirely sure how to use it and if it's possibly to integrate into Futile but I'm drat sure going to try.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2013 14:41

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Suran37 posted:

The Kickstarter specifically says it will work with Futile and 2D Toolkit.

It'll worth with it but there will have to be work done on Futile's part which is more what I meant. From Futile's creator on the release:

quote:

Yes! This is definitely something I want to integrate. I'm not exactly sure how much work it'll take to turn that generic runtime into something Futile can use, but I don't think it'll be that bad.

If he's stoked then so am I. :v:

# ¿ Apr 15, 2013 23:15

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

For anyone interested in Unity with Futile I found a new tutorial someone made that takes you through creating a Pong clone start to finish: http://subpxl.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/an-introduction-to-futile-a-2d-framework-for-unity/

# ¿ Apr 16, 2013 23:41

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Is there any way to get Unity to stop rebuilding my goddamn solution file? I want to build off of .Net 4.0 and bring in my own references but it keeps clearing them out and resetting the target framework to 3.5.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2013 01:12

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

One Eye Open posted:

I believe the version of Mono(version 2.6 iirc) that Unity uses only has full compatibility with .Net 3.5.

No the version of Mono that Unity ships with works just fine with .Net 4.0 but that doesn't matter anyway since I'm using Visual Studio. The problem is that the Unity editor seems to be constantly generating new solution files for some reason which overwrites any changes you may have made to the environment.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2013 14:51

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

That's what I'm wondering. I thought the solution file was just for whatever IDE you're using. I'll try duplicating and renaming one to keep modified and see if anything blows up I guess.

e: nope that didn't work at all! even a duplicated, renamed solution gets reset by Unity and Unity relies on the solution it generates to run in-editor so any changes you don't make to its solution will cause compilation to fail when you try to test. welp

e₂: maybe it would also help to explain what i'm trying to accomplish. currently Futile is limited when it comes to checking collision between two objects. he's working on that and physics for a future build but for now the simple way of checking collision is this:

code:

Rect obect1Rect = object1.textureRect.CloneAndOffset(object1.x, object1.y);
if (obect1Rect.CheckIntersect(object2.textureRect.CloneAndOffset(object2.x, object2.y)))
{
    ...a collision has occurred do something

However the above code doesn't take into account rotation on a sprite. For that I was going to implement something like this 2D Polygon Collision Detection which should work but since Unity keeps resetting my references to System.Data, System.Drawing and System.Windows.Forms it won't compile. .Net 4.0 I like to use for other reasons but that's why I need to bring in additional references. if anyone has any ideas as to what to do I'm all ears

Yodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Apr 18, 2013

# ¿ Apr 18, 2013 01:20

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Are there tutorials for that I can follow and is it usable with Futile?

# ¿ Apr 18, 2013 02:04

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

I think procedural works well as long as:

1) the actual gameplay is fun as hell and
2) the player doesn't "see the Matrix" easily and figure out how it's all being put together

The idea of a completely random 3D world for Hellgate: London was a really cool one and the environments technically looked nice but the resulting layouts were just so goddamn boring. It literally didn't matter what shape the enrionemtn was because it didn't change the gameplay one goddamn bit. A game like Spelunky on the other hand revels in randomly generated maps and I couldn't see it working any other way.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 23:37

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

Notepad++ is the bee's knees. Even with Sublime Text 2 at my disposal I still find myself going back to N++ for certain things since it's just so clean and snappy. Also it has the best Find In Files functionality I've ever seen in a text editor.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2013 13:57

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 19:38

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

You most certainly can drag files into N++ to open them. I just gave it a shot and it worked fine.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2013 14:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Game Development Megathread

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