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TheOrange posted:Is it that much of a detriment of having a degree that isn't that related to gaming if you can prove experience with related tools and projects in a portfolio? A degree only really matters for working internationally. The portfolio is by far more important. Also qa is nice as an entry point to More qa, and production. If you want to do anything else you'd be better served spending your time on making a good portfolio. QA is not the dream job people usually assume it is and in 9 out of 10 studios you're treated like trash, don't aim for it unless you hate yourself or are crazy...or both. I was lucky to work at a good studio, most people aren't that fortunate.
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Sep 17, 2012 03:43
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Peaceful Anarchy posted:Except it helps a lot in actually getting a visa to work in the country. That's what I was talking about for how it's only really useful for working internationally. Degrees make visas easier to get, but portfolios are what're needed to land a job.
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Sep 17, 2012 07:23
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omeg posted:Does anyone know a good skinnable, easily extendable (custom controls) GUI library for C#/OpenGL? Most libraries seem to use C++ and I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon than try to interface with C++ from C# (plain C is easy). In the end I just said "gently caress it" and rewrote Garry's GWEN in C#. It's a bad port though, still has some annoying rendering (and functional) bugs, event system sucks balls (needs overhaul) and I didn't really update it while Garry still worked on GWEN. Scaleform? ...the unity one is c# I think. Not sure about the main version.
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Sep 17, 2012 09:22
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Mug posted:I mentioned it earlier in the old thread by I wanted to get some opinions here in the new thread. The 8600 is pretty awful and most folks have better cards than that. trying to support Intel integrated chips will drive you crazy. I'd recommend against it unless they changed a lot in the past year or so. Hardly anyone used Intel chips a while back except for laptop users and now there's much better chips for that stuff now. Both cheaper and faster.
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Sep 18, 2012 04:07
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Mug posted:My concern is that the game is almost "unplayable (35 fps)" on the following specs, which I consider to still be a fairly okay PC. That machine is somewhere along 6 years past it's prime, it's no longer a powerful machine. Just to illulstrate how old it is, I've gone through 3 computers since that was in its prime, all of which were built on a massivly small budget. Although they sound similar the difference betwen a Core Duo and a Core 2 Duo is pretty big, I think the core 2 duo you're listing there can do something like 80% more calculations per second than the core duo listed. It looks like you really want to support these really old PCs though, so you need to do some performance analysis. I'm guessing you have a CPU bottleneck, by the behaviour you described, but you should see if that's the case for certain, and fix any inneficiencies you have. The most important thing to do would be to make sure you're calculating the bare minimum you need to at any given time. The biggest culprit for killing performance I've found is someone adding some expensive code and having it run every frame. Collision detection can be a big one for that, especailly if you opted for per-pixel collision. Juc66 fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Sep 18, 2012 |
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Sep 18, 2012 05:47
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I'm awful at posting some days.
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Sep 18, 2012 05:48
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Mug posted:I'm not too bad at performance analysis. Sometimes I'll dedicated an evening (5 hours) to running through my OptiSlots (which is my performance analysis nodes) and picking one to just work at like crazy to make it lower. I'm honestly awful at optimization compared to the engine programmers I know so my advice might not be fantastic, but there's a number of tricks you can use to get performance better. Use a "tick" system for various expensive things that seriously don't need to happen every frame. Basically it's setting up one or more secondary loops to go through things that are happy to happen less often than every frame. Pathfinding is a good example, Do things need to check their path every frame? Do they move slow enough that there's no way they could blow past the next node in their path in 1 frame, maybe having it every other frame or every 10 frames would work better. If you can even just get it to every other frame, you can split the path calculation for 1/2 on even frames, the other half on odd frames, and that cuts down the burden for pathing by a bit. Checking for objects to garbage collect is another, maybe you only need to check that once every other frame. Knowing how to calculate the complexity of various algorithms is pretty useful too, at least for optimization. There's usually several ways to do something, and knowing what'll be fastest for your particular needs is very handy. also, think of ways you can "cheat" at making something happen that's not 100% accurate, but it's close enough for people to not really notice. Being inaccurate isn't a big problem if it's still fun in the end of the day. Not many people mind too much if things use collision boxes as opposed to per-pixel collision for example. Well that's pretty much all I can think to say about that ... hopefully it's of some use. If it's not all that great I can try to get my hands on one of the actually good programmers I know to provide some advice.
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Sep 18, 2012 06:45
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Mug posted:Because my game runs on isometric tiles with a global turn clock, its already got path finding only happening when people bump into a wall/person or when they're told to move to a new location that they can't actually see. All AI only happens when a creatures decision cool-down (related to their footstep speed) hits 0. The only things I can think of are to rescale everything once, keep it from memory and use those rescaled items when you need to draw. OR use openGL or directX to do the rescaling. sorry I'm not much help *shrug* that's about all I can come up with.
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Sep 18, 2012 07:52
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Vermain posted:If I could solicit some advice: I'm not the greatest pixel artist, and I find this a significant roadblock in working on my own personal game development. The advice I'd give to you is to find professionally made pixel art, and then start deconstructing how various stuff is made. What's proportions do they use, how do they blend colours, what sort of palette do they use etc. and then practice, a lot. And try to learn as much about general art as you can. Pixel art is a style but general art knowledge goes a long long way and is applicable through many different styles. edit: ^^^^^^ That's a nice art style. I take that blockiness over less-than-perfect polygonal models any day. Juc66 fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Sep 19, 2012 |
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Sep 19, 2012 22:35
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Steam protection is pretty easy. Upload your exe to a certain place then it wraps it and spits out a copy protected exe, no muss no fuss.
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Sep 21, 2012 05:26
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The White Dragon posted:Now I've never claimed programming to be my strong point--just good enough to get things working without the universe imploding-- but I've been checking my task manager with my game open and have gathered the following data: I've never used XNA so I'm going to make some assumptions here. XNA should have a garbage collector of some sort (I'm assuming it does) which should clear the memory for your unused data. What you probably need to be doing is making sure that all references to garbage data are broken so that the garbage collector knows the data is trash and that it should remove it. edit: haha, looks like I'm slightly too slow at typing
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Sep 24, 2012 21:27
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Pfft, I play piano like that in real life.
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Sep 27, 2012 18:10
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Shalinor posted:... in all seriousness, there is growing burnout on pixel art. I don't know if it's reached beyond the hipster crowd yet, and it doesn't apply so much to stylized pixel art (ie. Paul Robertson, Sword and Sworcery, etc), but genero-JRPG pixel art people and hard-tiled worlds are increasingly a done thing again. Personally I wouldn't call Paul Robertson's art stylized so much as just out and out good. I wish I was half as good as he was at making that stuff because his images look way better than anything polygonal (to me at least ... and ignoring the really gross stuff he makes as well) That actually makes me wonder, are there any art houses folks know that can do that sort of quality of low-res art on the cheap?
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Oct 1, 2012 01:10
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Mug posted:I draw the way I do in my game because I don't know how to do anything else. I think my game looks nice enough so far, personally. I'm pretty big on dumping on other people's art (and my own) but honestly I like your stuff. How it's all put together reminds me of syndicate, and that's a good thing.
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Oct 1, 2012 02:52
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Mug posted:Do many of you guys actually follow a linear kind of "prototype/pre-alpha" -> alpha -> beta -> release path with the games you make? I do, especially when working for clients since it makes milestone payments and so forth a lot easier to set up. edit: looking at your pre-alpha gameplay, I think you'd grab an audience in kickstarter and / or greenlight without too much trouble if you ever decide to go those routes. Juc66 fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Oct 3, 2012 |
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Oct 3, 2012 23:05
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Epsilon Plus posted:How do I figure out what engine/SDK/whatever I want to learn to make my game in? GameMaker suddenly appearing on Steam miraculously reminded me that I have a lot of great ideas for games and should probably make them instead of waiting for one of my friends to magically become a competent programmer. The games I want to make are more reliant on menus and buttons than movement and physics. I'm willing to (try to) learn proper programming; I just don't know where to start. Programs like GameMaker and platforms like Flixel and Stencyl seem more focused on action games, sidescrollers and the like - lots of focus on moving objects around the screen and the like. Unity looks more flexible (and one of my favorite games and an inspiration to me was made for it - AI War), but it seems really focused on 3D environments. I know that Source and UDK and the like are obviously not good choices for me: I can pick out the wrong answers, I just can't find the good ones. Well figure out what features are important to you, and what your budget is and then take it from there. There's so many engines that suggesting something to fit your needs would be kinda tough. For me what's important is it being a 2d engine with various bells and whistles(like particle effects), low cost, and iOS, and that lead me to trying (and really liking) cocos2d. I know a number of folks who use Unity, and advocate for it like crazy, I haven't seen a simple and cheap way to make the games I like on it, but it has a lot of great features that will fit most people's needs. Some folks use things like game salad or other such engines where you basically don't do any programming and put the logic together visually. so, in my opinion, there's no one solution to fit all needs. I'd recommend trying a number of engines, just make a simple hello world program, take a look at their feature lists, licensing fees and how large the community is that supports them (bigger is better) and then decide after messing around a while.
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Oct 4, 2012 05:12
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Ularg posted:Well guys, Make something.
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Oct 5, 2012 05:40
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Ularg posted:What IDE would be recommended? My friend who does coding for a living recommended me Eclipse. Try a few out. Visual Studio's nice(ish), and usually what you deal with at a big studio. If you want to be able to make a full engine from scratch, you're probably wasting your time since it's a lot easier to use a premade engine and then add the game you want to that.
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Oct 5, 2012 05:56
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Ularg posted:Yea I think I'll have to put more time into learning and doing stuff on my own before investing money on a community college CS class. I'm still not very confident. Soooooo ... make something. At worst it'll suck and be a good learning experience.
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Oct 5, 2012 06:18
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Harold Krell posted:Do any of you know of a good 3D modeler, preferably one that can export to DirectX? I've tried using Blender, but I've heard that the exporting script it comes with isn't very good. It has been a while since I've been up to date with 3d tech though.
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Oct 5, 2012 14:03
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Pretty much everyone is a Bad Coder, don't worry about it too much. The thing about that stuff is that it is the right way to do it - but if you can get stuff done without it, then you're still producing something and so that's still better than someone who does it the "right" way and never gets past the documentation phase. Making an engine from scratch is such a waste of time in my opinion. You can spend all the time you'd use making something from scratch and turn those into features, or more games, or time with the family. Even just editing in the special stuff you want for your game to an existing engine is way faster than doing it from scratch.
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Oct 5, 2012 14:55
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Orzo posted:Define 'engine'. Because the more high level an engine is, the more freedom and control you sacrifice when making your game. It is almost guaranteed that using an engine will eventually lead to the inability to implement certain features, even if the engine is open-source. If this is cool with you (and it often is) then go for it. But there are advantages to rolling your own, so it certainly isn't a 'waste of time' as you put it. It's also a great learning experience and can help teach you how to handle complex organizational problems and abstractions, both very important skills in programming. The engine is the main game loop, event scheduling, garbage collection, and other such super generic needs. Writing that over and over from scratch with the intent of not reusing code is weird. Writing an engine from the bottom up, once, is useful if you want to be a software engineer in a game studio, or just in general. But if you're aiming to be a designer of some sort or an artist(even a tech artist) you don't really need to know how a bitmap is structured or even how to display one. Actually even as a software engineer, working on game logic, you'll spend most of your time adding features or modifying an existing engine. As an example I think mass effect 1 was something like 2/3 original code with the other 1/3 being unmodified ue3. So using something that already exists and bending it to your will is pretty handy experience too. So as practice / a learning experience I think making an engine is ok, but as a regular workflow I think it's a waste. Juc66 fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Oct 5, 2012 |
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Oct 5, 2012 18:52
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Orzo posted:By your logic here, using C# or Java to program a game is using an engine. Garbage collection is typically handled by the language, as is 'event scheduling'. Main game loops are trivial and if you can't make that yourself, well, you probably shouldn't be programming at all. As for how to display a bitmap to a screen, that is sort of what I was getting at when I said 'define engine.' A framework is not an engine, and I'd argue that a library that helps you display images to a surface of some sort is not an engine at all. Nor is a library that plays sound and music, or one that runs physics simulations, etc. Who really cares what the exact definition of an engine is. My point is that you can get the tedious crap done for you in some form 90% of the time, and doing that stuff repeatedly is a waste of time, time you can spend on literally anything else. There's no need to constantly reinvent the wheel, and when you do make the odd super-wheel improvement, never reusing the code is nuts. As in I seriously think you'd be crazy, to intentionally make things unusable in more than one program. Hell if you're using unity you can even sell your new and improved wheel and make more from your efforts.
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Oct 5, 2012 19:25
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Regalia posted:I don't think it's a good idea for someone who has clearly never written a game engine, or even knows what one is, to bestow upon us the virtues of not writing one. Such vitriol, being angry about it doesn't make working from scratch any less of a waste of time or money though. I don't really know your history and you obviously don't know what I do or have done, insulting me isn't really going to convince me you're right, even if you're actually gaben.
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Oct 5, 2012 21:42
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Orzo posted:This is a thread for discussion about making games. When the discussion is about whether or not to make your own game engine and Person A interprets that as, for example, Unity, and person B interprets it as SlimDX and FMOD, I think it helps to get an idea of what we're talking about. And when person C is talking about 'garbage collection' in the context of a game engine then yeah there's a serious communication problem. Unreal Engine 3 has garbage collection as a major source of headaches, bullshit, and other wonderful behaviours. You even can use the engine to force garbage collection sweeps while you're in-game if you need to force the behaviour. I'm not saying it's a part of every engine by any means, but it's not off in la la land of imaginary items I pulled out of my rear end, and hell it was just an example anyway. the part I'm taking issue with is partway down regalia's pretty good post (sorry for the lack of proper quote, I broke it somehow and I'm too lazy to fix it) "So now you know what you're writing an engine for, do just that. Write an engine exactly for your design. Do not try to write some reusable, general game engine that you can use for future games; write an engine for your exact requirements. Use magic numbers, take shortcuts, don't try to guard against things that can't happen in your game (but may happen in the general case). Optimize for productivity. When you write your next game, you start again. " That's financially unsound advice most of the time. The more time you save, the more money you save, and the more money you save the more you have available for marketing, art, audio, and anything else your game will need. I liked the rest of his post though.
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Oct 5, 2012 22:23
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wretched_gavek posted:Was playing around this morning trying to gets some elements of a 70's comic book style. I'd totally play "Take On Me" the game if that's what you have in mind. especially the bikers with pipes part. Edit: I'm also seconding what The White Dragon said. In the picture he's responding to, I actually didn't realize there were buildings at all until he mentioned that they were hard to see.
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Nov 1, 2012 13:13
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thegasman2000 posted:Thanks for that have got this far... Sigh so you're looking to see if two cards match and then you're going to kill them both if they do right? I think you're putting the logic in the wrong place. (keep in mind I've only opened up stencyl maybe 10 mintues ago, so my depth of knowledge isn't too deep) As best I can tell you should put the code to check for matches in the scene. You can reference multiple actors in there, kill and modify groups, and get / set variables on actors as well. I can probably come up with an example later if you're willing to wait and no one else beats me to it.
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Apr 6, 2013 19:48
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Polo-Rican posted:Dude, does Stencyl offer the option of just writing / seeing "real" code? Because this puzzle poo poo is harder to understand than code. It doesn't seem easier at all. I'm pretty sure it does, let me tell you, playing with the lego bits is confusing me a bit. I know what I want / need to do but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to get the building blocks to match up to make it happen. I'll have more time to look into it tomorrow, but right now my advice to thegasman2000 would be just to say screw it and write the thing in actual code. edit: you don't need to make them different actors, you could just set a variable on them that you're using to check what value they have. and set their face accordingly when they get flipped over. I would normally say to not make them different actors, but stencyl is oddball enough that it might actually be far less trouble and less messy to do so. Juc66 fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Apr 6, 2013 |
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Apr 6, 2013 21:21
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thegasman2000 posted:Uh unity is plain not logical for my little brain. Following tutorials and not understanding the reason for changing obscure settings ain't helping any! also you can't go wrong with the tutorials from 3dbuzz. although I say that only having seen their thingies for Unreal and Unity, maybe their programming ones are awful, but I doubt it.
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Apr 7, 2013 13:04
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Mug posted:It's scary, I honestly feel like the game is a confusing broken mess of systems and is hopeless, but when other people play it, it's like they see an entirely different thing. I see everything as a bunch of systems, all independent just happening on the same screen. I notice every decision the AI makes and I know EXACTLY what bugs are occurring and what is going wrong Get used to those feelings, that's pretty much how I feel about every single game that I've ever worked on. Hell it's been years and i STILL feel that way about Mass Effect.
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Apr 9, 2013 07:25
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Mug posted:Annex is a verb in the case of Black Annex. Oh I totally thought it was a noun, and it works quite well that way in my mind as well. either way, cool name.
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Apr 9, 2013 22:33
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I can't speak for everybody, but what I do is I list the features that I want the game to have, core features / nice to haves, etc. I work on the core features first, then the nice to haves when possible, and eventually piece by piece I end up with a for real game. Other folks I know, especially on large projects they're attempting solo or with a small group, make the major things all their own little game and then put what they made / learned into a more comprehensive large project down the road. Like they'd make a walking game, then a talking game, and then a walking-talking game, then a game where you just fight things, then you can walk and talk and fight things, and eventually you end up with an RPG where you can walk, talk, fight, pick things up, get quests, etc. but basically for me, and the folks I know at any rate, it's a matter of seeing the large thing you want to do, and then breaking it down into pieces you can manage in time frames where you can see results. Like a week per major feature for example. Each week you feel like you did something significant, and you're getting closer and closer to the overall game being playable.
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Apr 11, 2013 12:37
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thegasman2000 posted:I have a big proper school whiteboard but can't hang it in my home office. Stupid 18th century cottages! Why's that stop you from putting up a whiteboard?
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Apr 13, 2013 11:53
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thegasman2000 posted:Does anyone know if I can use Futile in Unity with javascript instead of C#... There doesn't seem to be any mention and I am looking for a 2d framework for unity that is free. I think it's just c#, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. What's wrong with c#?
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Apr 16, 2013 22:05
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thegasman2000 posted:Any recommendations on learning c# online? Based it around Unity naturally. I'm pretty sure 3dbuzz has c# tutorials / learning videos, and more than a few with using c# in unity as well.
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Apr 17, 2013 04:04
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thegasman2000 posted:I am not worried about apple. Either is a yes or no.. Its the what if it gets accepted and then I get into legal issues. Not sure killing obama is a great idea. just make it uncle sam then.
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Apr 19, 2013 15:04
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Lord Windy posted:Does this happen to anyone else? Code that was working before suddenly stops. The only times I've seen code just suddenly stop working is when I make a change that causes it to stop working, or I forgot to clean out previously compiled stuff between testing and the old leftover crap starts interferring with the new coding atrocities I'd created.
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Apr 29, 2013 10:10
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thegasman2000 posted:gently caress stencyl ... That's certainly the sentiment I had after I tried to use it for a game jam one day.
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Apr 30, 2013 00:55
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someone may have said this already, but why not unity? it's free for the basic engine, at least until you start making a certain amount of money from your games.
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May 23, 2013 16:27
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Terashell posted:Which I don't have, great... I might be able to fling 50-60 around, but I still don't know which engine... having 3d characters in a 2d game would be weird but pixel art is as hard if not harder than rendering 3d models which I can't do to begin with. you don't have to use 3d stuff in unity, use the futile framework if you want a free 2d thingy in unity. It has worked out quite well for the nimblebit guys.
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May 23, 2013 16:37
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