Lanth posted:

Just started looking this up out of sheer interest about your situation, could you use the ribbon count to implement breaks outside of code?


https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PartSysTrailsModule.html

If you're shooting straight you probably won't notice, if you start turning the ribbon breaks off?

KillHour posted:

You can use sub emitters to have several different ribbons.

quote:

Honestly, I'd recommend switching to the visual effects graph - it's faster and more powerful.

Hammer Bro. posted:

You're going to do that on purpose at least one, right?

'cause

KillHour posted:

You can use sub emitters to have several different ribbons.

Honestly, I'd recommend switching to the visual effects graph - it's faster and more powerful.

quote:

Not supported
Multi-pass rendering
Single-pass instancing
Tile lighting
Deferred rendering
Volumetrics
Render and viewport scale

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

EDIT: Twitter pushed me too far.

baby puzzle posted:

Any of you folks nominated for your state's IGDA Best Indie Game (Team size < 10) AND Game of the Year? No? Just me? Hmm!

e: actually I wouldn't be surprised if some goons got these kinds of nominations but let me have my moment ok.

Zaphod42 posted:

That's awesome.

When you say coding spaceships, you mean the game itself would be coding to play it? and so your 'programs' are like, interpreted at runtime? Or are you building like a visual programming language out of blocks or... what?

KillHour posted:

Burst is loving magical, you guys.

I changed my code to have several conditional jumps that take different paths and loop different numbers of times depending on the input values and a small test system to generate different random input for each entity.

With a 1000 of these entities, my performance plummeted - 30+ ms for the code execution. Orders of magnitude better than I had with the old system, but still far too slow for the scale I wanted. I sighed and thought about coming back to it after doing some more research on optimization and maybe manually handling chunks instead of letting DOTS try to do it. That is, until I realized I had disabled Burst compilation so I could debug my code as I wrote it (you can't use the Unity debug callbacks with burst enabled). Checked the magical box and the exact same code was running at 0.06-0.08ms per frame. On a 7 year old 3570k! In the Unity editor! It actually takes (slightly) longer to generate the random numbers than it does to run the code interpreter. And since DOTS scales so well across cores, I bet a modern 8+ core CPU could handle high 5 figures of active components - well more than should be reasonably possible in the scope of the game I'm planning (OK, never say never - Factorio players exist).

Edit: 10k entities is sub 2ms with 100% CPU utilization across all cores.

baby puzzle posted:

This advanced graphics stuff makes me uncomfortable with having my own mediocre game engine so please add trigger warnings to these posts thanks.

Tempora Mutantur posted:

When you say DOTS, are you also using ECS or just Burst Compile? If you're using ECS, how are you handling rendering with DOTS? Are you writing your own system or doing a mix of DOTS/the non-DOTS existing Unity renderers?

I'm really liking the rendering system approach shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTw_fXsvC6I (one video out of a 12-episode pretty thorough tutorial on implementing ECS, he uses a mesh and material and then renders sprites onto them with basic z-axis sorting based on y positioning, and uses quadrants and jobs to keep things multithreaded/passed through to a shader for processing, all of which the pre-optimizing fool inside me craves) but balk at the thought of trying anything 3D with physics using ECS, though it may be since I'm new to Unity anyway (picked it up because I love ECS architecture, and I gotta admit Unity makes it feel way easier to aim for multiple platforms than LibGDX).

e: and yes burst compile is loving magic, I had a similar "HOW THE gently caress IS THIS HAPPENING" moment on my 2500k when running that tutorial's rendering examples with 10/50/100k+ rendered entities at once and my machine didn't explode

Tempora Mutantur posted:

...but you made Sequence Storm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYe6qIWiN3A), an awesome technical and design achievement, and also is actually a game? and looks and sounds amazing, but again, Is Actually A Game, which is like, what counts more than anything.

Your Computer posted:

awesome little project! You got an impressive amount of stuff done in that short amount of time.

that's great to hear!

my difficulties are mostly of my own creation First of all I'm still pretty new to gamedev (this is as far as I've gotten in a project before) so I'm learning as I go along, but I'm also not making it any easier for myself by trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Unity has so many tools to let you make sleek-looking modern games with realistic physics and PBR materials and all of that but I specifically want to do away with all of that, so I'm basically fighting the engine at the same time as I'm trying to learn how to use the engine.

As for coming up with a moveset, my first source is other games in the genre. What moves did I like? What moves did I not like? What moves would suit my character(s)? For example, attacking is often very awkward in 3D platformers so I always preferred the Banjo/DK64 rolling attack. Also, when it comes to 3D platformers I feel like the moveset absolutely has to precede the level design, because it's such an integral part in what makes the genre what it is. You reach different collectibles and objectives by using different moves, so having a moveset to refer to when creating levels makes the whole process work. That doesn't mean it can't go the other way a bit too of course, if you come up with a really clever puzzle or obstacle but you can't quite figure out how you want the player to interact with it you might come up with a new move, but introducing a new move after you've already created other levels would be a pain since then you gotta decide whether to go back and redo the old levels with that new move in mind or to only use it in newer levels (and I believe it's more fun for the player if most of their moveset unlocks relatively early)

Imhotep posted:

I don’t see many 3D action games in here and this is sort of a dumb question, but as I move from being a Blender novice to working with Unity and putting together some rough project with assets, I’m trying to think of what sort of game I want to make, and I always thought I wanted to make a platformer but now, almost all of my favorite games are basically melee based action games. Let’s say I wanted to rip off Sekiro, would that be stupidly hard? I don’t mean every mechanic, just the sword based combat with the back and forth, rally system that’s based around a system like posture and deflecting and attacking. Or even just a dark souls-like, has anyone had experience making a game like that? I guess my question is really just like, is it possible/worth it for a complete noob to aim for something like that for their first project? I’m just trying to make something for fun, and not like hoping to release something, fwiw.

Imhotep posted:

But I guess I was sort of talking about more nebulous ideas for levels, and I could be wrong, but it feels like a lot of that sort of thing could be modular to a degree? I mean, certain levels absolutely require it and are based around moves, but I mean the general ‘vibe’ of a level, or a general aesthetic assuming that you’re making a level that’s going to be played by a character with that general move set, or it seems like with Mario 64 style platformers where you don’t learn more moves, you could possibly do a modular thing, but I have no idea. I agree tho and didn’t think about how important those moves that make it fun to move around are, like the long jump, talon trot, the rolling move from Yooka Laylee.

Imhotep posted:

(did you play Yooka Laylee, and what did you think of it?)

Imhotep posted:

I don’t see many 3D action games in here and this is sort of a dumb question, but as I move from being a Blender novice to working with Unity and putting together some rough project with assets, I’m trying to think of what sort of game I want to make, and I always thought I wanted to make a platformer but now, almost all of my favorite games are basically melee based action games. Let’s say I wanted to rip off Sekiro, would that be stupidly hard? I don’t mean every mechanic, just the sword based combat with the back and forth, rally system that’s based around, posture and deflecting and attacking. Or even just a dark souls-like, has anyone had experience making a game like that? I guess my question is really just like, is it possible/worth it for a complete noob to aim for something like that for their first project? I’m just trying to make something for fun, and not like hoping to release something, fwiw.

Imhotep posted:

Let’s say I wanted to rip off Sekiro, would that be stupidly hard? I don’t mean every mechanic, just the sword based combat with the back and forth, rally system that’s based around a system like posture and deflecting and attacking. Or even just a dark souls-like, has anyone had experience making a game like that?

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Imhotep posted:

I guess seeing stuff like this: https://youtu.be/ShJP0oyrJrg made it seem a bit easier than it is, simply because I’ve seen a few demos like this made by a single person.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Either that dev ripped their animations from an existing game (or I guess purchased a "Dark Souls-style Animations" asset pack), or they're a professional-tier character animator, which is one of those skills you can specialize in and do basically nothing but that for a job. The same goes for the enemy model, their sound effects, particle effects, etc. You're looking at that video and thinking "one person did this", I'm looking at it and thinking "if one person actually did this then a) they've spent a lot of effort on developing a lot of disparate skills, and b) they spent a lot of time on that demo. More likely they made* this, and that asterisk is pretty loving important."

Basically, that demo represents a lot of work. Whether one person did it or several, don't underestimate how hard it was to produce.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Either that dev ripped their animations from an existing game (or I guess purchased a "Dark Souls-style Animations" asset pack), or they're a professional-tier character animator, which is one of those skills you can specialize in and do basically nothing but that for a job. The same goes for the enemy model, their sound effects, particle effects, etc. You're looking at that video and thinking "one person did this", I'm looking at it and thinking "if one person actually did this then a) they've spent a lot of effort on developing a lot of disparate skills, and b) they spent a lot of time on that demo. More likely they made* this, and that asterisk is pretty loving important."

Basically, that demo represents a lot of work. Whether one person did it or several, don't underestimate how hard it was to produce.

Zaphod42 posted:

Also shipping a simple game > abandoning a complex game

KillHour posted:

I think this probably depends on what you're doing it for. If you're doing this to sell games and make money, I 100% agree with you. If you're doing this as a hobby and your goal is to work on fun and interesting stuff, sometimes you learn more and have more fun from an ambitious project you have to abandon than a simple one you finish.

Basically, is it the destination or the journey?

Edit: Although, I will say - while my dad was in surgery a couple days ago, I killed an hour making an ASCII breakout clone in Python with Curses and it was pretty cool to have something actually playable at the end of it all.

Zaphod42 posted:

IDK, I've never had any illusions about making money off my games, (and am fortunate that I don't need to) but being an artist and working on art that nobody else ever sees or appreciates is rough.

Imhotep posted:

Thank you for the replies, very good advice. Really tho, Monster Hunter is more simple than Dark Souls style combat? [...]

Zaphod42 posted:

Yeah IDK, "There's got to be a better way!"

I was thinking about the same myself. You'd think some UI system would exist for embedding images in text and formatting the text around it to fit in a space... that seems like such a basic, universal thing.
There's either something on the Unity Store that handles it for $5 that I'm not aware of, or there's an opportunity for someone to make it and sell it.
It would be a pretty big headache trying to handle arbitrary sized images and arbitrary sized text... but its totally doable.

The approach you've described does seem sensible and as you've mentioned, there's lots of good free texture packer tools that'll generate JSON with coordinates or whatever you want. But man... feels like more of a hassle than it should be...

E: Eh, I guess baking all of your UI images to a sprite sheet isn't really that crazy, now that I think about it... Although 500 images makes it a huge pain for you, jeeze.

KillHour posted:

I guess as a coder, I don't really have that same problem. I just like making cool systems.