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FluffyDice posted:Does making a game from the stock JDK libraries count as trying to make a game engine? If so I feel kind of discouraged reading these last posts. Of course, to some extent that advantage depends on you being willing to throw together a hack-job anyway, and if you plan for that then you can, with minimal effort, do an equivalent hack-job in Unity. So the difference is more just one of where the environmental pressures push you if you're not paying attention. If you're going for something more complete and polished, a good framework is only going to help you out. But I think there's definitely something to be said for the thrown together hacky option with no framework. Simple platformers are right on the threshold of that being a good or bad idea - below that, in the realm of puzzles and flappy birds, gently caress engines, hack something together in a raw language with minimal libraries. Above that line, when you want 3D or physics or complex poo poo with branching storylines, you almost certainly want to use a framework.
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May 11, 2014 05:04
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FluffyDice: If it makes you feel any better I'm making a game in garden-variety Java2D right now and it works great for me. I find that most of the time elaborate game frameworks make tedious things slighty easier while making simple things complicated. Use whatever tools make you happy while you're working on your game and don't pay any mind to fads and gimmicks.
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May 11, 2014 05:36
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FluffyDice posted:Does making a game from the stock JDK libraries count as trying to make a game engine? If so I feel kind of discouraged reading these last posts. I'm following InternetJanitors lead with my own stuff.  It kinda feels like a real game.
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May 11, 2014 05:58
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GottaPayDaTrollToll posted:We barely managed to get out a one-screen prototype with wonky collision detection and a kickass soundtrack. The lesson I learned is that building your own engine is the best cure for wanting to build your own engine. I just learned this lesson this week after checking out Torque2D and seeing all the problems that I was struggling with, solved. So now I'm making game do-dads in torque 2d 
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May 11, 2014 06:42
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I'm not planning on having any physics but I do want to keep track of huge amounts of off screen characters and have a map that scrolls for miles. All just basic 2D stuff. So far it's coming together and I'm having a lot of fun coming up with ways to optimise everything as much as possible. I've made a few small projects with Game Maker so I've tried to build my designs structure around letting me make things similarly. I suppose at the end of the day I'm having fun and I'm learning stuff that's covered in the course I'm taking. I'm really loving the artwork my friend Elevorot has come up with too.
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May 11, 2014 06:49
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Internet Janitor posted:FluffyDice: If it makes you feel any better I'm making a game in garden-variety Java2D right now and it works great for me. I find that most of the time elaborate game frameworks make tedious things slighty easier while making simple things complicated. Use whatever tools make you happy while you're working on your game and don't pay any mind to fads and gimmicks. You're also working on your PhD in computer science. Polar opposite of where FluffyDice was at (and pretty much everyone else here).
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May 11, 2014 08:12
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Man first UE4 source for 20 bucks a month and now UT development happening out in the open. Looks like I picked a pretty good time to try to break into game dev! It'll be interesting to see how the UT experiment goes. I'm sure there is going to be a ton of noise in the forums.
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May 12, 2014 00:06
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nebby posted:Man first UE4 source for 20 bucks a month and now UT development happening out in the open. Looks like I picked a pretty good time to try to break into game dev! It'll be interesting to see how the UT experiment goes. I'm sure there is going to be a ton of noise in the forums. I kinda wish there was a third horse in the race, though. Did ANY of the other contenders get traction, or had Unity already kind of flattened them? Maybe Havok / Trinigy / whatever they're calling that at this point?
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May 12, 2014 03:25
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What ever happened to Torque?
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May 12, 2014 03:26
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Shalinor posted:Kinda doesn't matter, honestly. UE4's already far enough ahead (and Unity 5 is enough of a confused mess) that Epic is going to sweep at least the top end of indie/etc space again. They're probably going to command the most attention over the next few years, though hopefully Unity gets their heads out of their asses and pushes back with "features that are finished instead of half-baked" and "a willingness to also debug old stuff instead of just half-baking new stuff." Though I gather that's in part because of their studio culture, so I wonder if we'll be seeing some big layoffs/restructuring over there as fallout.
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May 12, 2014 03:38
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Suspicious Dish posted:What ever happened to Torque? Torque is open source now (MIT license iirc), and... I don't know, fading into obscurity?
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May 12, 2014 04:05
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rarbatrol posted:Torque is open source now (MIT license iirc), and... I don't know, fading into obscurity? I was just reading that some popular moddable game is in Torque. To the point where there is a Redis client in Torquescript or whatever it's called.
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May 12, 2014 04:24
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Suspicious Dish posted:What ever happened to Torque? Unity planted a bullet square into its head. I was closely following it and even making a game in Torque2D when they switched to the open source MIT license. They completely fractured the community and killed all viable support for the older versions of their engines, both of which had a LOT of loving problems. I quickly realized that I had no interest in developing their new engine for them and moved over to Unity which has been about a hundred times better in every way. A shame really as Torque2D actually had some neat things going for it, as old and kinda busted as it was.
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May 12, 2014 04:28
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GarageGames was bought out and ran into the ground by a company that wasn't interested in the Engine tech. What's left is nothing but a shell. Some devs from GG went to Unity. Frozen Synapse, Frozen Endzone, SPAZ, Steam Marines were all made with Torque post GG buyout / after everyone that started the company left. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 04:32 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 04:29
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Torque3D's only real advantage over Unity was access to the engine internals, and it sacrificed a LOT for that. I think they were expecting a lot of community effort to go into modernizing it when it went open source, but that hasn't really happened, even though it has seen a few significant commits. Now that UE4 is out, that advantage is gone, so it's basically perma-hosed. Crystal Space and Irrlicht have conclusively proven that the open source community can't keep a full-fledged engine up-to-date by itself, and Unity is way ahead of Torque3D, so there are roughly zero scenarios where Unity wouldn't be a better choice. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 04:53 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 04:47
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I don't know why companies think that putting your source on GitHub is a surefire way to get free labor.
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May 12, 2014 04:52
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The last I was aware of with Torque2D, they went from Torque Game Builder 1.7, which was a somewhat flawed but decent game engine where you could just start a new project and drag and drop things and make a game, into Torque2D 2.0, which was a pretentious indie-programmed unusable mess where you had to go into the Sandbox to create Toys to play with.
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May 12, 2014 05:16
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Top Bunk Wanker posted:The last I was aware of with Torque2D, they went from Torque Game Builder 1.7, which was a somewhat flawed but decent game engine where you could just start a new project and drag and drop things and make a game, into Torque2D 2.0, which was a pretentious indie-programmed unusable mess where you had to go into the Sandbox to create Toys to play with. I was just using Torque2D 3.0 earlier this week and its seems exactly how you described Torque Game Builder, just drag and drop AppCore to your new project and you have a working game. It's the first time I've used Torque2D though
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May 12, 2014 05:21
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Suspicious Dish posted:I don't know why companies think that putting your source on GitHub is a surefire way to get free labor. It has actually worked for them, like they have received some important commits like fixing a lot of perf issues in TS and implementing Bullet and Recast. It's not enough to sustain the entire engine though. I think the only maintainable model of this sort is components, since commercial developers can pick up those projects and ultimately kick contributions back without worrying about the rest of the engine's baggage, and Torque has a LOT of baggage (i.e. TorqueScript...). Lua, Recast, and Bullet have had a lot of success by doing that. Torque isn't well-suited to that at all though, it's very heavily integrated and pretty much all of it needs heavy updating. The only really nice thing about it is that it has multiplayer out of the box, but even that's missing important stuff like NAT punchthrough and not pissing off Windows Firewall. The only real way I can see T3D having a future is by getting a MAJOR cash shot in the arm and doing a big feature blitz to get somewhere on par with Unity, or at least close enough that the subscription-and-royalty-free source code becomes attractive. As it stands though, their current direction is basically the opposite: They dissolved the company-headed steering committee and handed everything off to the community, and as far as I can tell, they're hardly doing anything but selling support for it. That revenue stream is going to dry up very quickly, and GG's future doesn't look very bright. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 06:50 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 06:30
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Tenacious J posted:Tenacious J posted: Shalinor posted:This is probably an excellent call. Also, once you know C#, learning C++ (especially the style of C++ that UE4 will enforce) shouldn't be all that much worse by comparison. But there's less you can gently caress up with C#, so it's a better starting point. Your reply was reassuring and gave me a ton of hope and motivation. Now two days later, hope has been dashed due to several barriers to C# (money and having a Mac). I wanted to check in if you think Python and something like Panda3D would still serve my purposes. I anticipate that going from python to C++ would be more of a leap.
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May 12, 2014 07:07
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Tenacious J posted:Your reply was reassuring and gave me a ton of hope and motivation. Now two days later, hope has been dashed due to several barriers to C# (money and having a Mac). I wanted to check in if you think Python and something like Panda3D would still serve my purposes. I anticipate that going from python to C++ would be more of a leap. For C#, doesn't monodevelop work on mac? I know monogame claims to support mac.
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May 12, 2014 07:19
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Afinostux posted:For C#, doesn't monodevelop work on mac? I know monogame claims to support mac. From my exploration, there is a lot of trouble with it. They bake MonoDevelop into something called Xamarin studio and charge money for that. Current source is available on their guthub page but must be complied and people have said it is messy. Old complied versions of monodevelop are available, but too outdated. All in all, it seems sketchy to me.
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May 12, 2014 07:25
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You haven't looked very hard. You can use the free version of Xamarin Studio, aka MonoDevelop still. http://monodevelop.com It's the same exact thing Xamarin Studio offers minus MonoTouch and MonoDroid. It's not some old version. It's the same thing. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 07:34 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 07:31
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^^ Sorry, I guess I just didn't really understand what Xamarin is. Seems like just a lot of extra stuff getting in the way and I kept seeing complaints when I would search about it.xgalaxy posted:You can use the free version of Xamarin Studio, aka MonoDevelop still... Oh, I'll take another look then thank you. Python wouldn't be a great idea? Tenacious J fucked around with this message at 08:32 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 07:34
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Tenacious J posted:^^ Sorry, I guess I just didn't really understand what Xamarin is. Seems like just a lot of extra stuff getting in the way and I kept seeing complaints when I would search about it. Unity on Mac comes with an up to date version of Xamarin rebranded as MonoDevelop out of the box. You don't need to go looking for anything extra.
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May 12, 2014 12:14
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Tenacious J posted:Your reply was reassuring and gave me a ton of hope and motivation. Now two days later, hope has been dashed due to several barriers to C# (money and having a Mac). Go get Unity for Mac. As stated it's got Monodevelop built-in when you install it. Also Unity was first built for Mac and still runs slightly better on Macs then Windows machine. If you want C# on mac -> go get Unity 3d.
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May 12, 2014 16:59
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Help! How do I promote my game? I keep making blogs and deleting them. Do I get a domain and post game dev blogs and screenshots there and then mail a bunch of websites about the game and that they should write a feature about me + link to my poo poo? I'm really bad at talking to people about myself. But I wanna say the game is in a state where I could start being like "hey there's this game I'm working on, it looks like this:  "
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May 12, 2014 22:15
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Pizzatime posted:Help! How do I promote my game? I keep making blogs and deleting them. Do I get a domain and post game dev blogs and screenshots there and then mail a bunch of websites about the game and that they should write a feature about me + link to my poo poo? I'm really bad at talking to people about myself.
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May 12, 2014 22:48
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Shalinor posted:Get on Twitter. Make a Tumblr. Both. Either. Tumblr's good for screenshot-sharing, Twitter's good for chatty stuff. This might seem dumb, but how do I get people to notice those?
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May 12, 2014 22:55
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Pizzatime posted:This might seem dumb, but how do I get people to notice those? Follow people you like, engage with people whenever possible, be active in the community, and, most importantly, post often. You'll probably have virtually no traction at first, but that's fine; just make sure you keep at it.
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May 12, 2014 23:09
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#screenshotsaturday is also a good way to get people to discover you.
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May 12, 2014 23:31
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I just finished up a match-3 (bejeweled-style) base for a procedural RPG thingy I'm going to be working on. It's basically the first thing I've ever really put together (it's done in Construct 2, that's how inexperienced I am.) I know GameMaker-likes aren't particularly great for bigger projects, but for what I'm doing it seems more than adequate, if a little fiddly. As a side-question, is it teaching me any bad habits that I'm going to have to wean myself off? It's pretty basic so far. It has support for combos and chains, all the stuff you'd expect, and takes a maximum of 40% CPU on my lovely laptop, so it's doing well so far. I don't want to go into too much detail on how the game is going to play, but it's going to be reasonably unique in that you'll be able to customize the actions available to you on the board between fights without having any direct control over the board layout. One tile "color" could be set as a power attack for one fight, and a fire spell the next. That'll let me make the game harder than what's out there and require the player to have to think a bit about strategy when tackling the tougher parts. There are a couple more features I don't want to spoil until I've gotten the project in a full alpha state with a functioning battle system, but I have a feeling that having dealt with arrays, variables of all scopes and sizes, functions (even recursive ones) and managed to stop the physics engine from sending a simple tile grid into a demonic orgy, that I can actually pull this off. I mean, I know it's a bad idea to put my full attention behind what is my first game project (and a relatively complex one at that) but a man can dream.  (I'd like to learn Unity/UE4 and get a better grasp on C#/++, but I don't want to spend another few months learning before I can really get started.)
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May 13, 2014 14:12
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Pizzatime posted:Help! How do I promote my game? I keep making blogs and deleting them. Do I get a domain and post game dev blogs and screenshots there and then mail a bunch of websites about the game and that they should write a feature about me + link to my poo poo? I'm really bad at talking to people about myself. I'll let Rami Ismail from Vlambeer answer this one: "http://ramiismail.com/2014/05/four-common-questions/ posted:
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May 13, 2014 16:02
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So I know probably none of you devs use the kinect, but what are your guys' thoughts on the removal of the kinect from the xbone as a separate sku (this news just came out)? I think its a dumb idea (never gently caress with your baseline).
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May 13, 2014 16:31
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Wozbo posted:So I know probably none of you devs use the kinect, but what are your guys' thoughts on the removal of the kinect from the xbone as a separate sku (this news just came out)? I think its a dumb idea (never gently caress with your baseline). EDIT: Oh crap it's already done. http://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/2014/05/13/xbox-one-without-kinect/9034753/ FYI: Available June 9th. Now if they could just get the use your xbone as a dev kit thing! Also: "In the same announcement, Microsoft also confirmed that beginning in June it will no longer require owners of the Xbox One or Xbox 360 to be Xbox Live Gold users in order to access entertainment apps such as Netflix and Hulu." Probably a dumb idea as they are loving with the baseline, but MS might have some analytics on the % of Kinects that are not plugged in. If there is a decent % (like 30%+) that are not plugged into the systems, it's probably time to ditch it. Of course once they do that the % of Kinectless XBones will massively increase, but some people just want a game machine. Personally I think they should do everything they can to make the current Kinect smaller, cheaper, more usable. Maybe downgrade the camera slightly as I think most people just use the voice part of the Kinect anyway. Getting rid of the voice stuff would hurt MS/Xbone usage much more than a worse/no camera. Maybe a XBone mini, with mic built in and no camera? Stick100 fucked around with this message at 16:58 on May 13, 2014 |
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May 13, 2014 16:48
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Yeah, loving with the baseline is a no-no. Especially NEGATIVELY loving with the baseline  .
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May 13, 2014 17:10
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Wozbo posted:So I know probably none of you devs use the kinect, but what are your guys' thoughts on the removal of the kinect from the xbone as a separate sku (this news just came out)? I think its a dumb idea (never gently caress with your baseline). http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3622381 On a game development note, looks like Harmonix is gonna get screwed by this pretty hard. Poor guys 
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May 13, 2014 17:14
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Zaphod42 posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3622381 Yeah, I get that there's the hatebox (I even posted in it today wtf-ing over this). Its just a place where people go to laugh about it. Wanted some legitimate developer perspective.
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May 13, 2014 17:33
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Wozbo posted:Yeah, loving with the baseline is a no-no. Especially NEGATIVELY loving with the baseline On the other hand, it's a kinect. The only people who actually use that thing are budget mocap folks.
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May 13, 2014 17:34
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HottiePippen posted:Follow people you like, engage with people whenever possible, be active in the community, and, most importantly, post often. You'll probably have virtually no traction at first, but that's fine; just make sure you keep at it. xgalaxy posted:#screenshotsaturday is also a good way to get people to discover you. poemdexter posted:I'll let Rami Ismail from Vlambeer answer this one: Thank ya'll very much, especially dexter, that is some seriously sound advice. Thanks!
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May 13, 2014 17:46
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