|
as someone who is a fan of things, never listen to fans but also never make decisions driven purely by shareholders media under capitalism is a land of contrasts
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2018 23:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 06:15 |
|
|
What are your project management pet peeves?
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2018 03:06
|
|
|
"Scrum" with a 25 person engineering team, resulting in hour long stand-up meetings. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2018 15:59
|
|
|
New additional daily standup meetings because one of the producers got annoyed someone made a (technical, not relevant to this producer) decision without him being informed first. Edit: Alternatively, Hansoft. Falcorum fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Dec 24, 2018 |
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2018 18:01
|
|
|
'We don't need a producer! Everyone on the the team is their own producer!'
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2018 20:39
|
|
|
Falcorum posted:Edit: Alternatively, Hansoft. What about Hansoft do you hate?
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2018 21:28
|
|
|
floofyscorp posted:'We don't need a producer! Everyone on the the team is their own producer!' We don’t need a Producer because then I’d have to share the authority!
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2018 22:35
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:What about Hansoft do you hate? The entire thing.  I can see how it might be useful for producers but as an end-user I have the following beefs with it:
It may be PEBKAC but overall Jira managed to be cleaner and more straightforward than Hansoft. If I had a decent way to filter the TODO list and it remembered collapsed panels I wouldn't really complain about it.  It's not the first questionable management software choice we've made (we previously switched to an HR system that listed Holiday times with precision down to the microsecond, so if you took a full day off, it would say you took 8.000000 hours and it was also loving slow).The one advantage Hansoft has so far is the dark theme.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2018 23:16
|
|
|
Red Bones posted:With modern remasters of classic games (e.g. the recent Spyro and Crash Bandicoot series remasters, the 2011 Halo 1 remaster, the upcoming Warcraft III remaster) how does the cost, the development time, and the development process compare to developing a game from scratch? For clarity, I'm asking about the remasters where the graphics and the engine are overhauled or remade but the game design, level structure etc etc remain the same, rather than a total remake/reimagining that changes a lot of features. That wasn't even an unusual approach at the time, like the FF7 PC port uses very different data formats from the PSX version, which AFAIK is partly because some of the PSX data (like the music) was designed to be interpreted by PSX-only libraries supplied by Sony. Halo:CE's remaster was a fork, there have been a decent number of interviews/articles with details on it. Some PS remasters, the remasters of the PS2 God of War games for certain, were done by forking the code and using only retail disk data (i.e. nothing was rebuilt from the source assets). Xun posted:If this isn't too politically charged, how do you guys feel about reddit mobs getting game employees fired like in the Arenanet thing? Is this something you're worried about or were the company(ies) who gave into the mobs just unusual pushovers? Does this affect your opinions on unionizing?
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2018 09:06
|
|
|
OneEightHundred posted:I don't think a Reddit mob was really the main factor there. There was a Reddit mob over having a trans character in the same game and they ignored it. The problem is more that responding to a player giving a suggestion (even a stupid/obvious one) by retweeting them with a comment that amounts to "get a load of this guy" is an extremely bad idea. Well - it was a Reddit mob in that the company wouldn't have felt obligated to respond or do anything at all if there weren't a ton of people from Reddit insisting that they do (specifically, through firing). My feeling is that, regardless of whether u feel she was making a valid point (that she gets targeted by these sorts of replies more often as a woman), I think someone coming off as "rude" to customers is a pretty poor reason to fire them. There's always been plenty of antagonistic artists in like, every field. I don't think carefully crafted even-handed responses should be an obligation of anyone but Public Relations/Community Reps.
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2018 09:36
|
|
|
It's probably more likely that person got fired due to internal politics than a reddit mob over a tweet and that was just a convenient excuse.
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2018 10:49
|
|
|
Falcorum posted:It's probably more likely that person got fired due to internal politics than a reddit mob over a tweet and that was just a convenient excuse. Uh, i dunno, when her version of the story is quote:“I was given no opportunity to argue my case,” she said. “My manager was on vacation. [O’Brien] spent some time insisting that developers must be friends with the company’s customers, and that it was unacceptable to say that we aren’t, even when we’re not on the clock. He told me I’d look back and regret this, because we were doing great work and I’d ruined it. quote:Recently two of our employees failed to uphold our standards of communicating with players. Their attacks on the community were unacceptable. As a result, they’re no longer with the company. I don't think u rly need to scheme a conspiracy
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2018 13:03
|
|
|
How does draw order work with respect to particles and effects? In Dark Souls 3 i noticed the bloodstains draw on top of the fog doors. I assume that the fog doors are drawn after geometry and before other particles and doesn't update the z buffer so when it comes time to draw the bloodstain the engine still thinks it should be visible. But that got me wondering how games draw particles from multiple sources in the right order. Does it work out the depth of every particle on the screen then sort them and draw them in a painter's algorithm way?
|
|
#
?
Dec 27, 2018 14:41
|
|
|
CJ posted:How does draw order work with respect to particles and effects? In Dark Souls 3 i noticed the bloodstains draw on top of the fog doors. I assume that the fog doors are drawn after geometry and before other particles and doesn't update the z buffer so when it comes time to draw the bloodstain the engine still thinks it should be visible. But that got me wondering how games draw particles from multiple sources in the right order. Does it work out the depth of every particle on the screen then sort them and draw them in a painter's algorithm way? They're both translucent effects which run afoul of the z buffer (last time I checked, raytracing gpu might start solving this issue in future) so you have to use a more expensive way to sort or a-blend them (if at all) so you'll often see order errors with multiple transparent polys (glass behind smoke, glass behind glass, etc).
|
|
#
?
Dec 27, 2018 16:16
|
|
|
CJ posted:How does draw order work with respect to particles and effects? So as you already seem to know, real-time rendering often employs what's called a depth buffer (or z-buffer). Simply put, it's an extra screen-sized buffer that keeps track of normalized depth, which you can think of as how far "into" the screen fragments (pixels) are, so that if later in the frame you try to render another fragment that would be behind the existing one, instead it's simply discarded. As long as all you've got is opaque geometry, it's a great way to make sure things appear in the right order on screen, no matter what order you actually draw stuff. You draw an opaque fragment, everything that would be behind it is occluded. Nice. Not so nice for transparent planes, though, as they end up occluding as if they were opaque. The depth buffer just stores a depth value, and writing a semitransparent pixel or an opaque one makes no difference to the depth buffer as long as they're at the same depth. Furthermore, transparent planes typically depend on correct ordering in order to composite correctly. So, if you want something transparent to look right, you have to do two things: sort your geometry back-to-front, and disable depth writes when drawing them. They should still respect the depth buffer though; a puff of smoke should still be hidden if it's behind a wall. So depth test needs to stay on, but depth write gets turned off. It may have occurred to you that if we're sorting stuff anyway, it might be useful to make use of the depth buffer to reduce fill rate by rendering opaque geometry front-to-back; that way, the depth buffer fills up more quickly by rendering geometry that's likely to occlude the most before rendering geometry that's further back. Lots of engines do this. Naturally, sorting costs CPU time, so it's a tradeoff you have to decide if it's worth it or not and how finely to sort. So the basic algorithm is: Sort opaque geometry front-to-back, sort transparent geometry back-to-front, render opaque geometry with depth test and depth write on, render transparent geometry with depth test on and depth write off. But we have a problem. Sorting transparent geometry is not as easy as it sounds. For starters, a modern game can have millions of planes on screen at any one time, so transforming to screen space and sorting every single plane 60 times per second is often not feasible. Worse yet, there are pathological cases where intersecting geometry cannot be consistently sorted at all. And on top of that you have another problem: draw calls. Even if you could somehow sort every individual particle in the same pass as everything else in the scene, you'd run into a problem when you go to render them because all these little particles are likely to be using separate materials. Long story short, switching materials is expensive and every time you do it means a new draw call. With potentially hundreds or thousands of particles in a scene intersecting, this can tank performance just on draw calls alone as your game switches back and forth between the orange and blue materials just because the orange dust cloud is in the same spot as the stupid blue dust cloud. So we do what we always do - we cheat and hope nobody notices. Most engines have some rough concept of an "object" in the game world; it could be a player character, a wall, a switch on a wall, or a particle system, or whatever. There can be hundreds of these in view at any time; but hundreds is several orders of magnitude better than millions, and we can sort that in real time. Unfortunately, this means intersecting/overlapping objects sometimes glitch out, if they're transparent. It's much easier with opaque geometry, where the depth buffer saves our asses by cleanly allowing geometry to just intersect without any obvious problems - remember, the order in which you draw opaque geometry doesn't matter for the outcome. Particle systems typically sort their own particles internally, but care naught about other nearby particle systems. Most of the time this looks fine and nobody notices for long enough to care. If an effect is too egregiously off, you might put in a special case flag on that particular particle effect to make it take the costlier path and sort alongside other systems. But typically we just work around it, or just don't put that effect near other effects that it's not playing nice with. You might be surprised how much of game design only works because you strategically avoid putting problematic things next to each other. So, in short, the answer is: We only approximately draw planes in order, by sorting them as objects rather than individual planes. It looks good 90% of the time and has the benefit of actually being doable in real time, which is good enough to ship. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Dec 28, 2018 |
|
#
?
Dec 28, 2018 20:35
|
|
|
Yeah. Don't read your own games feedback, it will lead to madness and/or joblessness.
RossCo fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Dec 30, 2018 |
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2018 03:52
|
|
|
haha you must not work on mobile games, cause people will legit threaten to kill your family and then spend $100 on gems the very next day my favorite are 5 star reviews that talk about how much they hate the game
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2018 07:38
|
|
|
tyrelhill posted:haha you must not work on mobile games, cause people will legit threaten to kill your family and then spend $100 on gems the very next day That sounds like a classic sign of addiction instead of actually having fun.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2018 16:21
|
|
|
tyrelhill posted:haha you must not work on mobile games, cause people will legit threaten to kill your family and then spend $100 on gems the very next day Now THIS is a games award show I would watch. "And this year the award for most batshit commenting community goes to....." Thats an interesting point actually. How do other developers feel about review bombing etc? I know that reviews are super important for the mobile sector, but on console/PC it feels like sooner or later something will happen to trigger one which makes it an inevitability to be handled rather than a situation to be avoided. RossCo fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Dec 30, 2018 |
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2018 18:01
|
|
|
Buckwheat Sings posted:That sounds like a classic sign of addiction instead of actually having fun.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2018 23:12
|
|
|
How come food in games always looks n64 quality? You can have a game that has incredible graphics and attention to detail like RDR2, but when you see characters eating a plate of food it looks blocky as hell.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2019 02:51
|
|
|
ChocNitty posted:How come food in games always looks n64 quality? You can have a game that has incredible graphics and attention to detail like RDR2, but when you see characters eating a plate of food it looks blocky as hell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX5cgYpDLQw
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2019 03:24
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqAfXQCItMA
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2019 19:26
|
|
|
i mean look at the food in japan and america/england, are you surprised that japanese games render food more lovingly and appealingly
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2019 23:26
|
|
|
4k 10-bit color hdr subsurface scattered volumetric raytraced chip butty
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2019 23:51
|
|
|
djkillingspree posted:i mean look at the food in japan and america/england, are you surprised that japanese games render food more lovingly and appealingly This means there's a greater incentive to make food actually look like something you would put in an ad.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2019 00:21
|
|
|
Japan understands the importance of presentation and aesthetics with food. They double wrap relatively inexpensive bags of cookies. They use beautiful handmade organic paper and nice ribbons to wrap boxes of sweets. Entrees are always come on their own separate plate. More garnishing is used. Portions are smaller, so the quality is higher, so you appreciate it more. Nicer restaurants have individual dining rooms so you have privacy and dont need to listen to other peoples stupid and boring small talk. And despite their custom of not tipping, service is always better than in the US. But I do want to get that final fantasy game so I can play the cup noodles quest.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2019 03:47
|
|
|
The actual reason is that food as a game object most often is on screen for less than a couple seconds and it is relatively small on screen (very few pixels in screen space devoted to rendering the food model), and it has to be loaded in and out quickly, so it gets the same treatment ambient creatures do. Low poly, low res, get it done and move on. Where food takes more importance in the design (like in FFXV and MHW where food affects gameplay and abilities) or if they want eating to be a Cool Thing with a neat payoff (like in MHW) they will put more importance into the assets. Note, though, that when they DO put more time and effort into the food assets they will show them off. Or rather, they put effort into the assets because they're going to be showed off.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2019 03:59
|
|
|
mutata posted:The actual reason is that food as a game object most often is on screen for less than a couple seconds and it is relatively small on screen (very few pixels in screen space devoted to rendering the food model), and it has to be loaded in and out quickly, so it gets the same treatment ambient creatures do. Low poly, low res, get it done and move on. Where food takes more importance in the design (like in FFXV and MHW where food affects gameplay and abilities) or if they want eating to be a Cool Thing with a neat payoff (like in MHW) they will put more importance into the assets. I don't necessarily think it's just that. Flowers are low res in games but artists take care to make low-poly flowers not look ugly. I think, in many cases, making food actually look appealing just isn't a priority for a lot of game devs. And, the subtle details that make food look appealing are more complex to render than most props.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 02:59
|
|
|
I mean, that's essentially what I'm saying, yes. The work to make food look immaculate is low priority. Flowers exist in the world and generally don't disappear. Food is usually a consumable that is eaten after a few seconds on screen.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 03:02
|
|
|
mutata posted:I mean, that's essentially what I'm saying, yes. Flowers exist in the world and generally don't disappear. Food is usually a consumable that is eaten after a few seconds on screen. The worst food though is always the like static plates that are spawned in the world. I remember doing QA on a game where I was pretty sure the food was just a photo of worms
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 03:04
|
|
|
Haha, fair enough. It really just goes to resources, both rendering as well as production. Non important assets get lesser treatments!
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 03:10
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 15:07
|
|
|
lovingly rendered condom normal maps
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 18:02
|
|
|
rip visceral
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 18:17
|
|
|
So as an artist, looking at something like a hamburger like that, and most food for that matter, they're all incredibly complex organic forms with multiple material types and shading models, it's really no wonder they get the shortcut treatment. The good news is that photogrammetry makes capturing all of that detail easier and more straightforward, so rejoice digital food lovers!
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 19:06
|
|
|
Here, here's a dragonfruit I made via photo scanning for you gaming food lovers! Warning: music for some stupid reason. https://www.dropbox.com/s/jqw0vegzoo9sawf/dragonfruit.mp4?raw=1
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2019 21:34
|
|
|
How much of 3d modelling is photogrammetry of physical objects these days vs pure computer designs? Will we be at a point where more artists are sculpting physical miniatures and scanning them?
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2019 01:16
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:lovingly rendered condom normal maps The same cannot be said for the cigarette butts.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2019 02:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 06:15 |
|
|
ShadowHawk posted:How much of 3d modelling is photogrammetry of physical objects these days vs pure computer designs? I'd say most realistic-styled games use at least some photogrammetry these days, be it full object scanning or material scanning. Some games like the Battlefront and Battlefield series games as well as RDR2 use primarily photoscanning, but not many. I haven't heard of any games sculpting miniatures and them scanning those, though, and that's probably for the simple reason that if you're going to make something from scratch in miniature just to digitize it, you might as well just make it digitally from the get go! The only photoscanning that really goes on is digitizing things and materials that already exist in the world, and even that is limited because you need to build a team and procure equipment and then you need to physically travel to the stuff you want to scan, or have the things shipped to you. It makes more sense for a series like Battlefront since they could just go to Skywalker Ranch and scan all of the actual on-screen miniatures that already exist or go to the actual old filming locations and scan poo poo there. The other digitizing that goes on even more than environment and prop assets, of course, is human scanning, and that happens a TON on realistic games. Between scanning people's faces, expressions, and bodies and performance capture, a huge majority of that info is captured from irl sources, again especially for realistic styled games. Now, that said, I think there's a cool potential for a game to make the stylistic choice to build and scan miniatures, but that would be doing extra work to achieve a unique visual style.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2019 06:18
|
|