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happyhippy
Feb 21, 2005

Playing games, watching movies, owning goons. 'sup
Pillbug

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

We use Blender! :pseudo:

What's wrong with Blender for game making?
Have little experience with Max, trying to make some games atm myself and started to look into Blender as I can't afford to pay for the other two.

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Studio
Jan 15, 2008



If there's one thing you should do for your video game job, it is absolutely degrade your physical and mental health. This is Good Advice.

Hyper Crab Tank
Feb 10, 2014

The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation

happyhippy posted:

What's wrong with Blender for game making?
Have little experience with Max, trying to make some games atm myself and started to look into Blender as I can't afford to pay for the other two.

If you want a serious answer, there's nothing wrong with Blender besides the fact that the interface designers seem to have wandered in from a parallel universe where standard hotkeys and understanding of UX are radically different. But most 3D artists learn to work with either Maya or 3DSMax, or maybe something like MODO. Going from that to Blender might be a bit jarring and takes a while to get used to.

Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Feb 28, 2019

Jan
Feb 27, 2008

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

Studio posted:

If there's one thing you should do for your video game job, it is absolutely degrade your physical and mental health. This is Good Advice.

Sounds like you could use some more passion! :pseudo:

GeeCee
Dec 16, 2004

:scotland::glomp:

"You're going to be...amazing."

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

If you want a serious answer, there's nothing wrong with Blender besides the fact that the interface designers seem to have wandered in from a parallel universe where standard hotkeys and understanding of UX are radically different. But most 3D artists learn to work with either Maya or 3DSMax, or maybe something like MODO. Going from that to Blender might be a bit jarring and takes a while to get used to.

It's totally true that the fundamentals of good modelling carry across programs but good loving god Blender's UI and workflow is an unhelpful mess. It feels easier to pick up Houdini and it's :catdrugs: procedural workflow than to try and find simple modelling buttons that are standard in maya and max whoops sorry that basic feature isn't in blender yet go search the 20 minute long tutorial videos on youtube for a workaround.

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea

happyhippy posted:

Have little experience with Max, trying to make some games atm myself and started to look into Blender as I can't afford to pay for the other two.

Max is free for learning. I think maya is too.
https://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/3ds-max

it's a student edition that requires absolutely no proof of being enrolled in a school anywhere - because you dont have to be to be a student.

Flannelette
Jan 17, 2010


GC_ChrisReeves posted:

It's totally true that the fundamentals of good modelling carry across programs but good loving god Blender's UI and workflow is an unhelpful mess. It feels easier to pick up Houdini and it's :catdrugs: procedural workflow than to try and find simple modelling buttons that are standard in maya and max whoops sorry that basic feature isn't in blender yet go search the 20 minute long tutorial videos on youtube for a workaround.

Blender has gotten better recently but then it got worse again because "aesthetics" (make all the buttons look the same).
I'm biased but I love Houdini and procedural process it took me no time to work it out after struggling for ages with maya and zbrush (probably something odd with my brain) being able to break everything down into steps which I could freely change infinitely made everything fit together in my head but I wouldn't use it to make complex models still.

Has anyone in games asset making ever used NURBS, they seem useful but everyone seems to just do it the "normal" way even for high detail curves and things like aircraft hulls?

cubicle gangster posted:

Max is free for learning. I think maya is too.
https://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/3ds-max

it's a student edition that requires absolutely no proof of being enrolled in a school anywhere - because you dont have to be to be a student.
And Houdini has a free version you can't export from as well.

GeeCee
Dec 16, 2004

:scotland::glomp:

"You're going to be...amazing."

Flannelette posted:

I'm biased but I love Houdini and procedural process it took me no time to work it out after struggling for ages with maya and zbrush (probably something odd with my brain) being able to break everything down into steps which I could freely change infinitely made everything fit together in my head but I wouldn't use it to make complex models still.

I haven't much time in Houdini but I use the layer stack in Max a lot and that process of stacking modifiers on top of modifiers makes total sense to me, I can get a bit of the flavour of it's rather insane potential, though my thing is more characters and props so it's ultimately not as useful for me the way it would be an environment artist.

I gotta say though Zbrush's UI is an rear end in a top hat and the thing that got me over that hump after years of trying on and off was Michael Pavlovich's Intro to Zbrush series.

https://gumroad.com/pavlovich

Unfortunately, once you're past the UI so much of it is raw sculpting and ain't no quick procedural tutorial for that.

aas Bandit
Sep 28, 2001
Oompa Loompa
Nap Ghost

Slayerjerman posted:

I have to respond to this by saying this mindset is why the games industry is in serious dire straights right now and why unionization talk has started up to protect people from being taken advantage of because "games". Its certainly inspiring that someone would work so hard to do a career change to do what they love, but it's also foolish that you would put yourself through such an ordeal. I have many tales of similar situations both myself and colleagues have gone through and I can honestly state that every single time we were taken advantage of and threatened with losing our jobs if we didn't just shut up and deal with it.

Work smarter, not harder.

Edit; When I ran teams, I always ended up kicking people out to go home at the end of the day. Some wanted to stay late to "impress the boss" and I would drop kick their asses out the door to go sleep. One time, I even "sabotaged" the network server to fake an outage to send people home on time. Yeah, it really happened and no one was the wiser. I always tried to look out for my teams and make sure they weren't being abused/exploited.

A bit late, but I just noticed this response. You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions about my post.

1) It wasn't foolish in the slightest. It got me what I wanted in a very efficient way.
2) I ended up working no more than a couple of weeks of crunch the whole two years I was there. We didn't typically do a ton of crunch.
3) I made the choice to camp out there during the week because I didn't feel like driving for six hours a day, or uprooting and moving for a job that I knew would be temporary.
4) Doing so enabled me to get a shitload of portfolio work done in a relatively short period of time, thereby getting me back to a normal living situation sooner.
5) I know terrible poo poo happens in this industry, believe me, but this wasn't me being "taken advantage of" or "threatened" by anyone.

Learn to not make assumptions about other people and their "mindset".
Also, stick your "work smarter, not harder" condescension firmly and entirely up your rear end. Like seriously--make it disappear. I have faith in you.

Slayerjerman
Nov 27, 2005

by sebmojo

aas Bandit posted:

A bit late, but I just noticed this response. You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions about my post.

1) It wasn't foolish in the slightest. It got me what I wanted in a very efficient way.
2) I ended up working no more than a couple of weeks of crunch the whole two years I was there. We didn't typically do a ton of crunch.
3) I made the choice to camp out there during the week because I didn't feel like driving for six hours a day, or uprooting and moving for a job that I knew would be temporary.
4) Doing so enabled me to get a shitload of portfolio work done in a relatively short period of time, thereby getting me back to a normal living situation sooner.
5) I know terrible poo poo happens in this industry, believe me, but this wasn't me being "taken advantage of" or "threatened" by anyone.

Learn to not make assumptions about other people and their "mindset".
Also, stick your "work smarter, not harder" condescension firmly and entirely up your rear end. Like seriously--make it disappear. I have faith in you.

I’ll gladly shove it up my rear end and do a little happy dance. You are a great example of being naive.

Firstly, never use company equipment for side projects or personal work. Not because I give a poo poo about the company or its resources, but any work you do on-site is owned by said company, so making folks leave and go home to work on side projects was strangely a way to protect them legally.

One boss was a real rear end in a top hat about scooping up non-project assets if he saw side projects, especially from the art or design teams. Suddenly your portfolio pieces are now copyrighted works of the company and displaying them without permission gets you a cease and desist letter. Coders were a little easier for them to reuse code elsewhere and I know many did bring in code from past jobs... that poo poo can get dangerous.

Just don’t do that stuff while on site.

Edit: I caught one coder moonlighting and using a company devkit for some indie team freelance gig. He thanked me for not saying anything about that to mgmt, but I warned him not to let it happen again as he had a non-compete clause.

Slayerjerman fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Mar 5, 2019

aas Bandit
Sep 28, 2001
Oompa Loompa
Nap Ghost

Slayerjerman posted:

I’ll gladly shove it up my rear end and do a little happy dance. You are a great example of being naive.

Firstly, never use company equipment for side projects or personal work. Not because I give a poo poo about the company or its resources, but any work you do on-site is owned by said company, so making folks leave and go home to work on side projects was strangely a way to protect them legally.

Except that I spoke to the owner early on (after I'd proven myself to be a solid worker and good at my job) about the extra time I was spending there and the fact that I was working on my own stuff during off-hours and he gave the go-ahead, in writing, that it was okay and that he'd make no claim?

Good job proving my point about assumptions and condescension. How's that shoving going?

Edit: I'm not going to continue this derail. You're obviously a good guy, and you obviously don't want to see people abused. You gave some excellent advice earlier in this thread, and have gone out of your way in your past to look out for others. That being said, you make assumptions about what other people are doing and what they want, and you seem to just assume that you always know better than they do. That's dangerous (even if you're correct most of the time) and you should be aware of that.

VVVV Unless you're enjoying yourself and not regretting being there in the slightest.

aas Bandit fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Mar 5, 2019

Studio
Jan 15, 2008



Don't sleep under your desk to make video games

Jan
Feb 27, 2008

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

Studio posted:

Don't sleep under your desk to make video games

Don't you dare make assumptions about my choices, how condescending of you.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Obviously there are lots of case-by-case discussions to be had about lots of grey areas. Lots of people are happy to do X thing by choice. But one of the factors in play is that for any individual to participate in exploitative or abusive behaviors even by choice (or even against the wishes of management!) is to move the needle towards normalization of those behaviors. Norms shift and become expectations. "Well Bob sleeps under his desk to work here, I'm just sayin'!" Etc.

Like, I have no issue with people doing the thing that makes the dream work for them. I've done some stuff like that in my career. But in my opinion, it's weird and not normal and not really valid in a general-advice setting. Devs get dinged enough without us doing it to each other.

Slayerjerman
Nov 27, 2005

by sebmojo
Think of it this way, if it were in another industry or profession, the same behavior of lingering at the worksite would be really out of place and perhaps even illegal in regards to theft/trespassing. For example, what if some construction worker just decided to unroll a sleeping bag (or park in their company truck) overnight and use the company's tools and supplies to build something that was not sanctioned or approved? That's where it gets very wrong. Yes, many of these guys have their own tools and experience, but just because you have access to something doesn't make it okay to just go ahead and make use of it, facilities and work sites included. And yes it does set the expectations of its OK and acceptable to keep people working (especially without compensation and free dinner does not count as compensation!).

When I worked stints at various corporations, the security guards wouldn't even let people in after hours because they had orders and company policies in place to prevent after-hours theft or vandalism for good reason. The few nights we were "asked" to stay late, we couldn't leave the building because security wouldn't let us back in, even with proper credentials/ID and our project leads vouching for us. At Microsoft for a while this was also an issue with weekend work where most of contractor temp-agency RFID badges were disabled other than M-F 7am-7pm... meaning we had to have the "blue badge" employees swipe people in/out and it was a huge pain in the rear end. I believe now you have to get authorized for weekend access and evenings by having your team leads give you written permission with the security office... least that was what it was like many years ago when I was there.

We had one guy go out for a smoke break and get "locked out" so we had to throw him his car keys out the window so he could drive home as the guards wouldn't let us just let him back in. Naturally we gave him a good ribbing for that. Another time, the corporate policies locked down all elevators after 8pm, so we all had to hike up stairs after hours. Several things like that made the after-hours slog even more annoying.

I think its great people have passion and love what they do, just be smarter about it is all I ask.

Slayerjerman fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Mar 5, 2019

aas Bandit
Sep 28, 2001
Oompa Loompa
Nap Ghost

mutata posted:

it's weird and not normal and not really valid in a general-advice setting.

I agree with this 100%.
My advice was "go for it; you're not too old", not "everyone should sleep under their desk".
My post obviously sounded like the latter to some folks, so I hope this helps clarify.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Sounds good let's move on choo chooooo! :choco:

ETPC
Jul 10, 2008

Wheel with it.
idk if anyone in this thread would know this, but is it possible to license UE1 for something or would epic just look at you funny if you asked?

Stick100
Mar 18, 2003

ETPC posted:

idk if anyone in this thread would know this, but is it possible to license UE1 for something or would epic just look at you funny if you asked?

People were publishing Unrealscript games (20%) (UE3) for quite awhile after UE4 came out. Batman Arcum Knight was UE3 under the old rules (5% I believe). I don't think they still offer UE3 licenses, so no I don't believe you can use UE1,2,3 unless you already had a project going for a few years.

EDIT: Also WHY? What would you have to gain? You can just use UE4 with shaders/assets that make it look like UE1. That way you can actually publish to most platforms and don't have gaping security problems.

ETPC
Jul 10, 2008

Wheel with it.
the fun and challenge of making new things with old tech

SupSuper
Apr 8, 2009

At the Heart of the city is an Alien horror, so vile and so powerful that not even death can claim it.
You're better off modding an old game, that's how a lot of Unreal games got started, and there's probably modding communities still around.

j.peeba
Oct 25, 2010

Almost Human
Nap Ghost
Licensing a piece of technology takes a lot of work and any serious business won’t cut corners there. Legal stuff is a huge hurdle. Of course contracts and license terms would need to be drafted but there’s also figuring out what CAN be licensed in the first place: some parts of source code could be owned by third parties or under NDAs (console support, middleware) and it needs to be figured out by a bunch of lawyers and engineers.

It’s not going to happen and you’re better off using some of the already open sourced stuff like id’s old engines.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Yeah, I was gonna suggest the old idtech stuff since those are sufficiently retro but also open source.

Stick100
Mar 18, 2003

ETPC posted:

the fun and challenge of making new things with old tech

Use old Idtech like Doom1,2,3/Quake1,2,3 engine.

Chewbot
Dec 2, 2005

My Revenge Meat!
Two questions that I haven't been able to get answers to through my usual sources, thought I'd broaden my peer group:

1) Any thoughts on an engine that could handle large frame-by-frame animation sequences? Outside of Flash/Animate (god, it still lingers) I haven't really found any good 2D support from existing game engines. I don't really want to do puppeteering-style motion graphics, and most engines absolutely choke on a long series of large images. Surprisingly, most engines are terrible at just playing an embedded video, too. Unity's 2D support is half-baked at best and regarding Unreal, I had an actual UE developer tell me not to use Paper2D or Flipbook because it's being phased out.

And a related followup:
2) Anybody have experience with Godot? I've checked out some tutorials and it looks pretty streamlined. The open-source foundation is a slight concern as someone who does not code and doesn't intend to learn. Allegedly they have a Visual Scripting interface similar to UE's Blueprints, but no idea if they're content developer friendly or how robust they are. I'll be investigating myself, but any first-hand experience to share is very welcome.

Thanks!

j.peeba
Oct 25, 2010

Almost Human
Nap Ghost

Chewbot posted:

Two questions that I haven't been able to get answers to through my usual sources, thought I'd broaden my peer group:

1) Any thoughts on an engine that could handle large frame-by-frame animation sequences? Outside of Flash/Animate (god, it still lingers) I haven't really found any good 2D support from existing game engines. I don't really want to do puppeteering-style motion graphics, and most engines absolutely choke on a long series of large images. Surprisingly, most engines are terrible at just playing an embedded video, too. Unity's 2D support is half-baked at best and regarding Unreal, I had an actual UE developer tell me not to use Paper2D or Flipbook because it's being phased out.

And a related followup:
2) Anybody have experience with Godot? I've checked out some tutorials and it looks pretty streamlined. The open-source foundation is a slight concern as someone who does not code and doesn't intend to learn. Allegedly they have a Visual Scripting interface similar to UE's Blueprints, but no idea if they're content developer friendly or how robust they are. I'll be investigating myself, but any first-hand experience to share is very welcome.

Thanks!

I don’t have answers you are actually looking for but maybe I can offer some perspective since the question 1 might not be quite as humble as it appears on the surface. Long series of large images take up a lot of memory. A LOT. If you were to animate a character with hand drawn frames at 15fps you could fit one second of 1024x1024 resolution frames in roughly the same memory footprint as one AAA character model might use in its textures if it has 4 textures in 2048x2048 resolution (although the different maps are not compressed equally etc etc but let’s cut some corners here for simplicity). Once you fill the GPU memory, the performance tanks since the GPU now has to start swapping memory and that is sslloooww (IIRC how that works, someone correct me if not).

In practice hand drawn animations are of course doable but you need to do compromises with resolution and frame rate (some games use a lot of extended ”frozen” poses for stylistic effects) and/or figure out some tech implementations by yourself like texture streaming or using some altogether different approach than series of large textures.

The engines don’t provide streaming out-of-the-box that suits this case since it’s not something that can be solved generically (I think) because you have to figure out a logic for what textures to load into memory well before it is needed to be displayed and then figure out when it’s safe to unload the textures. Streaming in 3d space is much more straightforward since, for the most part, you can start streaming in stuff in the distance as you approach them and unload things that are too far away.

If the intended style suits it using polygons with vertex colors could be an option too but that would probably require ironing out a few workflow and tools issues yourself in order to be efficient in production. Signed distance field textures could be a neat way to do vector-like stuff too with a super low memory footprint but that requires some shader and tools work. If you’re lucky there COULD be some generic SDF tools and shaders available in asset store but even with those I suspect some technical proficiency would be required.

A reasonable compromise would be to just use the skeletal animations and spice it up with plenty of sprite swaps (expressions, smear frames, secondary motion etc) so it stands out from the most of the crowd who just waggle the limbs all stiff like.

I’m not surprised the embedded video support is bad if this means videos playing in the scene, not in a full screen cinematic. It’s like 10 years in the past now but when working on Alan Wake we had video support for showing stuff on the tv screens in-game but it was limited so that we could only have 1 video texture playing at a time at a pretty low resolution like 128x128 or something.

Godot seems pretty neat indeed. I haven’t dared to try it out, mostly due to its lack of console support now and in the foreseeable future, but based on question 1 it doesn’t appear that you actually want a streamlined engine but a more fully featured one. With anything that’s lightweight and lean, you can’t rely on existing structures, tech and assets as much but need to roll your own.

But actually... forget that. The course of action I recommed here, for questions 1 and 2 both, is that you adjust your expectations and start off with picking any engine that seems interesting to you, for whatever reasons, and then start making stuff that suits the engine’s strengths and limitations well. Once you get comfortable with that you can start to look into how to stretch the limitations of the engine to make a game you want to make with fewer compromises. Switching engines between projects isn’t difficult at all so you don’t need to fear the commitment of this approach either.

Pigmassacre
Nov 23, 2010

GARBAGE DAY

Chewbot posted:

...Unity's 2D support is half-baked at best and regarding Unreal, I had an actual UE developer tell me not to use Paper2D or Flipbook because it's being phased out.

Well I dearly hope that's not completely true, given that they have promised to support it (even though they're not developing it actively).

I'm currently working on a game in UE4 using Paper 2D liberally, and have ported a game to UE4 using Paper2D and it absolutely works. You can tell that Epic aren't using it themselves, sure. The workflow isn't amazing or anything. But we haven't had any showstopper issues or anything that we haven't been able to solve ourselves/with the help of Epic developers via Twitter. Performance is good too!

I selfishly wish Epic would revive Jazz Jackrabbit in 2D, as that would probably lead to some amazing 2D tools.

Chewbot
Dec 2, 2005

My Revenge Meat!

j.peeba posted:

I don’t have answers you are actually looking for but maybe I can offer some perspective since the question 1 might not be quite as humble as it appears on the surface... etc.

Yup, aware of all this, mostly it just confirms that nobody is supporting this type of work flow. I've been using Spine which is a decent middleware solution between motion graphics and swapping out key sprites along the way, and also integrates with most major engines. It's kind of angled at mobile games but it seems capable of powering a fairly simple PC project. I'm doing something quite simple, I imagine almost any engine I've used in the past can handle it, just thought I'd ask around and see if anything supports the biggest technical hurdle I see at the moment. I don't think any do because nobody really cares about frame-by-frame anymore. So sad! Thanks for the reply.

Pigmassacre posted:

Well I dearly hope that's not completely true, given that they have promised to support it (even though they're not developing it actively).

I'm currently working on a game in UE4 using Paper 2D liberally, and have ported a game to UE4 using Paper2D and it absolutely works. You can tell that Epic aren't using it themselves, sure. The workflow isn't amazing or anything. But we haven't had any showstopper issues or anything that we haven't been able to solve ourselves/with the help of Epic developers via Twitter. Performance is good too!

I selfishly wish Epic would revive Jazz Jackrabbit in 2D, as that would probably lead to some amazing 2D tools.

I didn't get the impression they intend to strip out those features but I can verify they don't plan to support it forever or continue developing the 2D tech which was added by "literally one guy who was passionate about it that doesn't work at Epic anymore". They're phasing out other stuff slowly to replace with newer versions: Cascade is also being phased out and replaced by Niagara, Matinee is being sunset and wrapped into Montage. I don't know exactly when all of this is going down, probably slowly over a long period. To clarify, his recommendations are based on our studio starting a completely new project with the current state of UE, I'm sure continuing to develop with existing UE tech is perfectly viable.

Chewbot fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Mar 24, 2019

Chernabog
Apr 16, 2007



This doesn't answer your question directly and is a bit scatter brained but I have worked on a few 2D games (as an animator) under different pipelines so here they are in chronological order:

1- Flash vector animation into custom(?) engine: This was for a Farmville-like game about 9 years ago, everything was vector based so we had really nice fidelity and it was pretty cheap to process so we could have (vector) hand drawn animation.

2- Flash bitmap cut-out animation into custom engine: This was about 5 years ago for another facebook game. The programmers made a tool that grabbed the .swf animation and converted the motion to their engine. We could then make a lot of different pieces and swap them between characters or costumes.

3- Spine into Unity: For a point and click adventure game about 3 years ago. Spine basically limits you to cut-out animation but it does it very well and gives you a lot of tools to animate and to export directly into engines. I'm not very familiar with the actual workflow after Spine because this was a freelance job so I was just providing the animations.

4- Animate CC sprites: This is what I usually default to on my most recent projects for ease of use, since you can basically do whatever you want. The main problem is obviously that you don't want to have too many gigantic sprite sheets chewing up your resources.

I think a mix between sprite sheets and cut-out should be able to tackle most projects barring something like Cuphead.

Pigmassacre
Nov 23, 2010

GARBAGE DAY

Chewbot posted:

I didn't get the impression they intend to strip out those features but I can verify they don't plan to support it forever or continue developing the 2D tech which was added by "literally one guy who was passionate about it that doesn't work at Epic anymore". They're phasing out other stuff slowly to replace with newer versions: Cascade is also being phased out and replaced by Niagara, Matinee is being sunset and wrapped into Montage. I don't know exactly when all of this is going down, probably slowly over a long period. To clarify, his recommendations are based on our studio starting a completely new project with the current state of UE, I'm sure continuing to develop with existing UE tech is perfectly viable.

Alright, interesting. Thanks for the clarification! I didn't know he no longer worked at Epic, but yeah it was very clear from working with Paper2D for just a month that it was literally just him. Sad though, the engine is so god drat good in so many areas I really don't want to have to look for another one for 2D games. Guess we can always keep working on our own Paper2D fork, it's not like it's getting harder to work with Unreal.

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
On this memory footprint / video playback discussion, would it be possible to store video frames in an atlas texture, panning the crop to each one for the appropriate frame - each atlas having about 50 frames with an overlap to crossfade between each in memory?
Seems like a plausiable approach, wondering if it's really possible.

Hyper Crab Tank
Feb 10, 2014

The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation
I feel like we have to be more clear what we mean by "video" here.

If you're talking about a fairly small sprite on screen that you need to flip between frames - say something like the main characters in Cuphead - then atlasing is the industry standard solution. In that case we're talking about a moderate amount of graphical data, probably no more than what fits inside a single 4096x4096 texture. Putting every frame in an atlas is a clean way to solve a variety of problems, but most of them aren't really about memory bandwidth - atlas or not, the textures are all going to be in GPU memory before you draw your first frame anyway. It's more about eliminating draw calls than anything else.

But if you're talking about full screen, full motion video, you run into real issues with memory. A single frame of 1080p video, DXT5-compressed, is upwards of 2.5 MB (uncompressed would be a hideous 8 MB). Leaving aside the fact that you're not going to be able to fit 50 of those in a single texture, you can't fit more than a few seconds of video in the GPUs memory to begin with. This means if what you want to do is full-screen video, you're not going to be able to preload an entire video even if you're willing to accept the loading times, and streaming is your only option.

Chev
Jul 19, 2010
Switchblade Switcharoo
For the anecdote, the way Skullgirls managed to get a whole lot more animation frames than other sprite-based fighting game of its generation and at a better resolution was to store them in the main ram instead of GPU memory, where they could be kept in very efficiently compressed form, and only uncompressed and sent the necessary sprites to texture memory on a per-frame basis.

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



There is what I believe is a Japanese system called Live2D, which also supports dynamic character animation. The general idea is to have models composed of multiple overlaid sprites, connected as a skeleton/paper doll, and it supports interpolating between poses and looping animation. Its main use is visual novels and the like.

Hyper Crab Tank
Feb 10, 2014

The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation
2D skeletal animation is a great way to reduce the amount of textures you need to get smooth animation and is used in a lot more than visual novels. It's what we've used in our games for a while now; Heist and Dig2 use rigid skeletal animation, Quest has vertex-blended skeletal animation, both with texture switches at appropriate times to do things like perspective or facial expressions or whatever.

Studio
Jan 15, 2008



You worked on Steamworld? :swoon: :swoon: :swoon:

SlightlyMad
Jun 7, 2015


Gary’s Answer
There is currently a Humble Bundle of programming books available. Looks like a nice haul, there's Rust, Java, Python, R and more. Check it out.

I am learning GDScript and Godot from the ground up. So far it looks awesome. If a doofus like me can put together a simple game and animated characters in it after a few hours, the engine has got to be good. If you have a Python background for example, the transition to GDScript is painless. I can see why people have recommended Godot. And it's open source too, free to use! :stwoon:

Chewbot
Dec 2, 2005

My Revenge Meat!
Yup, definitely looking further into Godot. So far, so good.


Hyper Crab Tank posted:

2D skeletal animation is a great way to reduce the amount of textures you need to get smooth animation and is used in a lot more than visual novels. It's what we've used in our games for a while now; Heist and Dig2 use rigid skeletal animation, Quest has vertex-blended skeletal animation, both with texture switches at appropriate times to do things like perspective or facial expressions or whatever.

Will probably be going this direction using Spine. Nice to meet you, Dig 2 was the first game I bought on the Switch store! Played the rest as well, love em.

Pigmassacre
Nov 23, 2010

GARBAGE DAY

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

It's what we've used in our games for a while now; Heist and Dig2 use rigid skeletal animation, Quest has vertex-blended skeletal animation, both with texture switches at appropriate times to do things like perspective or facial expressions or whatever.

Well, it's nice to know I'm not the only Gothenburgian gamedev goon around! :) I second the love for Steamworld - Dig 2 is my favorite Switch game!

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DreadCthulhu
Sep 17, 2008

What the fuck is up, Denny's?!
How do insiders feel about this article? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/video-games-layoffs-union.html

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