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Bean posted:Okay, so. Out here in quarantine, I'd like to try making a game. I'm a baby programmer. Years ago, I used Game Maker. I'm mostly interested in 2D stuff like jrpgs and action games. I thought maybe I'd try unity, but it seems to be geared more towards 3D. You can definitely 100% make 2D games in Unity, no worries there. I quite like it for 2D development. Things like Game Maker or even RPG Maker would let you get further without having to learn more programming and get stuck up in the programming. Although that said, Unity being so popular means there's lots of tutorials and lots of marketplace content, so if you can find (ideally free) modules you can use existing work and not have to do as much code yourself. That said, we just recently had a big discussion in the game development thread about how RPGs are kind of a pain in the rear end to build because there's so much menus and you have to be careful about your turn-based state machine and consistency of the design. Its not really because RPGs are especially hard to make, but more because there's just so much content out there for FPS or 3rd person character platformers, you can basically create one of those games without ever writing a line of code. By comparison, an RPG... you need to know your programming. So... if you don't wanna learn programming and want to make an RPG, see if RPG maker can get you to what you want IMO. Otherwise you're going to be spending time learning programming and not spending time working on your RPG. A 2D Zelda-like game in Unity isn't too hard to throw together (I did it myself last year) I haven't worked with Game Maker but I do think its pretty popular, but Unity is obviously mega popular too. Check out these threads regularly: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2692947 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3506853 you'll learn a lot just following the threads of conversation.
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Oct 6, 2020 04:07
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The Unity Hub has some example projects for RPG stuff too, alongside all the Learn stuff being free now. RPG Maker still relies on RGSS/Ruby for extending it past the basics though I don't think it's quite as bad as it used to be for that.
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Oct 6, 2020 08:02
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I like gamemaker 2 its great for learning how to program. Though while it's quick to get something up and running it's not so good with plug and play assets. If you want something you have to make it yourself.
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Oct 6, 2020 22:41
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If anyone bought the BLM mega-pack that itch.io put out a few months ago you own a poo poo ton of tile sets and sprites you may have forgotten about. It's 59 pages of projects and just going through randomly every page has at least two asset packs.
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Oct 6, 2020 23:32
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Bean posted:Okay, so. Out here in quarantine, I'd like to try making a game. I'm a baby programmer. Years ago, I used Game Maker. I'm mostly interested in 2D stuff like jrpgs and action games. I thought maybe I'd try unity, but it seems to be geared more towards 3D. Take a look at Godot https://godotengine.org/ Kinda right in-between GameMaker and Unity complexity-wise, but with an interface and scripting language (or visual scripting) I prefer over the other two or C#. It's a pleasure to work in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAbG8Oi-SvQ
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Oct 9, 2020 22:10
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Work basically told us we are WFH permanently now if we wish, they are doing surveys on the percentages of people who want to go into the office every day [when Covid realistically gets under control whenever... a year or so from now] to plans to allow people to work from other states as employees. I was sorta looking around for work since I was planning to move back out west and needed a plan B just in case they wouldn't allow me to keep working remote but it looks like that isn't the case anymore. That being said I interviewed with one place who was pretty sure they'll be back in the office [In West LA] by this November, at which point I did a spit take and kinda wrote that place off since everyone I know in LA is working from home for the most part until next summer.
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Oct 28, 2020 06:09
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If that interview was in the last month and a half that's insane.
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Oct 28, 2020 06:28
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Chatter around the industry is that most companies made peace with long-haul WFH near the end of summer. I'd also be wary of any company that is pushing hard to get back to the office asap. Enough games are shipping now with remote teams that there's enough data to show it's doable, and I believe the WFH genie, at least part time, is out of the bottle for good.
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Oct 28, 2020 06:34
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Both Sony and Microsoft managed to deliver their consoles this year doing WFH (or at least predominantly WFH) so it’s insane to me that any place would think they have an excuse to rush back to the office
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Oct 28, 2020 07:15
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I'm seeing some evidence that WFH is impacting game teams productivity pretty significantly. Interestingly for other kinds of software it appears (from limited data I have seen) it doesn't have much impact. But for games specifically, it sounds like it's in the neighborhood (extremely roughly) of a 50% drop. So, yes, "doable", but probably not economical for medium to large teams. Though somebody does need to do the all-up calculation of cost/benefit. If you can cut costs by as much as half by not maintaining an office and paying people less, maybe, but at first glance that feels like a big reach to cut costs by that much.
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Oct 28, 2020 07:28
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Fair enough. On the backend/platform side it doesn’t feel like it slowed us down much if at all. E: Thinking a bit more, I can definitely imagine not being able to collaborate in-person would impact a discipline like game dev much more than us cushy backend folks, so I’m fully prepared to eat my words. Still insane to go back to the office anywhere in the US tho dads friend steve fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Oct 28, 2020 |
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Oct 28, 2020 07:34
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DancingMachine posted:I'm seeing some evidence that WFH is impacting game teams productivity pretty significantly. Interestingly for other kinds of software it appears (from limited data I have seen) it doesn't have much impact. But for games specifically, it sounds like it's in the neighborhood (extremely roughly) of a 50% drop. I'm incredibly dubious of these kinds of results given that the current situation isn't really "WFH" it's "surviving at home in a pandemic". There are numerous additional factors that are likely contributing to performance drop that don't usually exist during "normal" WFH. Any parent would tell you that schools / daycares not being fully open is creating significant difficulties that aren't normally a factor when WFH under normal circumstances.
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Oct 28, 2020 07:37
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Yeah, it's been REALLY variable for us, but it feels like we're around 80-85% of our normal capacity right now. It helps that we're an established team and we're used to just doing our individual work without a lot of collaboration. Parents are hit a lot worse than people without family members to care for. Some people have run into infrastructural stuff like "we don't have separate places for people to work" and "our internet data is capped" but the company's been good about helping where they can. I wouldn't want to be in the commercial office building business right now. We're looking to aggressively downsize and transition to majority WFH and I can't imagine we're alone.
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Oct 28, 2020 07:46
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Yeah it's reasonable to expect that right now is the worst it would get and efficiency would improve under more normal conditions plus as teams modify infrastructure and work patterns to better accommodate WFH. It's striking to me that there does seem to be a difference with "normal" web/software development and games though. One thing that jumps out at me is that in games you need a badass desktop machine locally connected to your I/O devices. If you are remote desktopping into that it's gonna be worse. If you do have it local, you are still dealing with a likely less than optimal desk setup and definitely less than optimal network bandwidth compared to a company office setup (which matters a lot if you need to regularly sync and send gigabytes of game files). For smaller teams and games this stuff probably doesn't matter as much but for AA and especially AAA I have a hard time believing we will reach productive parity any time soon.
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Oct 28, 2020 08:28
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Yeah, our studio owner even commented that there is a difference between WFH and WFH during a pandemic and we already had a few out of state people working from home before COVID, it's just the model we used to scale up. The folks stuck in apartments and having roommates is who I really feel for one of the guys on my team has his poo poo in his bedroom with his gf and roommates and it's cramped. I'm lucky I rented a house and had a spare room that I turned into an office which is a luxury a lot of folks didn't have. I'm planning on buying a house next year and the priority is to get 2x 20 amp circuits dedicated to the office to run all the equipment I have. I'm hitting the 15 amp capacity with the poo poo I got now and trip breakers now and then. Also some WFH tips, get good chairs and ergonomic poo poo. Works sending people Aeron chairs and ergotron arms to mount on desks, it helps a lot when you got a ton of monitors and little desk space. Ebay's great for getting used ergotron stuff since that poo poo can get pricey quick. On another note, I've used mostly node-based shader stuff in my career except for a bit of Renderman early on. I'm picking up HLSL/GLSL just to familiarize myself with it and port stuff to unity for testing, etc. I'm currently using ShaderEd as editor/compiler of sorts for that, any other suggestions? Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 03:10
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When the pandemic started I bought the “cheap” steelcase series 1 and it took like 3 months to get here. In terms of energy usage, I’m real glad I don’t need to spec out the amperage at my apartment to do my work. Another backend guy at our office has collected old workstations from folks who have left or upgraded theirs so now he has a cluster of 4 under his desk at the office he runs VMs on. It’s nice but we’re just waiting for the day the power goes out lmao dads friend steve fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 05:39
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Other than "surviving at home during a pandemic" concerns, I miss the office for the social aspect. Also VPN is terrible and I have too much poo poo on/next to my desk.
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Oct 30, 2020 13:31
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I moved to a new team a few weeks ago and I haven't met anyone in person and I only talk to four people daily and I have no concept of the size or culture of the team, it feels weird. I feed off that social energy and it's been hard for me to connect with the new team as a result. It all makes me rethink the whole "we're all going to be WFH after the pandemic" idea because humans are social animals and like in-person work.
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Nov 2, 2020 00:50
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Vino posted:I moved to a new team a few weeks ago and I haven't met anyone in person and I only talk to four people daily and I have no concept of the size or culture of the team, it feels weird. I feed off that social energy and it's been hard for me to connect with the new team as a result. It all makes me rethink the whole "we're all going to be WFH after the pandemic" idea because humans are social animals and like in-person work. We've hired like 40 people since March, and I don't have any idea how they're making it work. It's gotta suck.
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Nov 2, 2020 01:24
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Vino posted:because humans are social animals and like in-person work. Turns out I, in fact, do not.
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Nov 2, 2020 01:35
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mutata posted:Turns out I, in fact, do not. Diddo. If I could kindly just work from home forever, I'd be extremely OK with that.
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Nov 2, 2020 01:36
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Vino posted:I moved to a new team a few weeks ago and I haven't met anyone in person and I only talk to four people daily and I have no concept of the size or culture of the team, it feels weird. I feed off that social energy and it's been hard for me to connect with the new team as a result. It all makes me rethink the whole "we're all going to be WFH after the pandemic" idea because humans are social animals and like in-person work. I'll skip the Kumbaya's if it's saving me 10 hours a week commuting. Plus time with my family during the work day is far more for this social animal than standing next to a coworker at a stand-up. Now I'm going to go calculate how much commuting costs on terms of car, and then how much is saved in terms of less hours worked and be even happier.
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Nov 2, 2020 03:25
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Between not paying to commute or for childcare I've felt positively rich during this whole thing. Turns out £700 a month on nurseries and after school clubs ain't nothing.
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Nov 2, 2020 21:12
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Wfh good. I just want to do other things besides Be Home
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Nov 3, 2020 10:35
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As it's been said above this is not WFH, this is WFH-during-a-pandemic. I got tired of stating this to my coworkers and managers specially. Obviously your milage may vary depending where you live and other real life stuff. Disclaimer: I work at ~30ish game studio in a third world country, we are mainly a mobile developer (or atleast "mobile first") but our games have been ported to PC and Switch. We had our first confirmed coronavirus cases on March 13rd and we went fully remote. At the beginning there was no school, daycare or anything so if you have kids you were pretty much hosed. I have two kids and it was loving hard... it lasted three months and we are back to a "pseudo normality" since end of June or beginning of July. In general we didn't notice an impact on performance and a survey was done and pretty much everyone wants to keep WFH for ever. The studio is considering going full remote or atleast have a smaller office for people who wanna work from there or if people want to randomly show up to work. The office has been open since the end of September and I think ten or less people have been going regularly. Work-wise we have learned/adapted to work this way (having never done remote since it wasn't allowed before), though I do miss the social aspect a bit but this can be remedied with external activities whenever the world goes back to normal.
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Nov 4, 2020 13:32
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Oh yea I'm not going to argue that everyone wants to be in an office building. Obviously untrue. I'm very enjoying working from home in many respects. Still, do you really think that when the pandemic is over everyone is going to say, "Now I have to find another excuse not to go see people?" A lot of people will say that but not enough that we all work from home forever now. Though judging from this thread I guess game developers are maybe mostly that type lol
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Nov 4, 2020 15:43
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Vino posted:Oh yea I'm not going to argue that everyone wants to be in an office building. Obviously untrue. I'm very enjoying working from home in many respects. Still, do you really think that when the pandemic is over everyone is going to say, "Now I have to find another excuse not to go see people?" A lot of people will say that but not enough that we all work from home forever now. I'm high in management at my studio. I've stated to all from VP to direct of directs that my plans will be WFH 3 days, come in the office in a shifted environment 2 days (1p - 7p drive in during lunch.) I imagine that a lot of people are going to be doing the same or similar. And even that 'WFH' as pointed out above can be Work from Starbucks. Work from a Park. etc...
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Nov 4, 2020 17:14
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Is raytracing a sham like so many articles lately have been claiming?
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Nov 4, 2020 19:43
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ikanreed posted:Is raytracing a sham like so many articles lately have been claiming?
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Nov 4, 2020 19:44
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With upcoming AMD cards that support a more open-source-ish raytracing library it should pick up a little more steam beyond gratuitous tech demo. Even just throwing in one quick raytrace pass for global illumination (and sticking to faster methods for reflections and other junk) is huge.
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Nov 4, 2020 21:23
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There aren't a ton of games that implement it, and of them Minecraft and Quake seem to be the only ones with a near 'complete' implementation. I think Quake is the only """"true""" path traced game right now, which makes sense since that is really expensive. Minecraft does look great though and hints at what could be with a more complete implementation as cards get better and/or techniques like DLSS make up ground lost to render time.
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Nov 4, 2020 21:37
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ikanreed posted:Is raytracing a sham like so many articles lately have been claiming? Raytracing is used for movies because its better than Raster rendering. But Ray-tracing is more expensive to compute. To the point where its never been worth it in real-time applications. Ray tracing is not new, it is a technique from like, the 80s. If anything, Ray-tracing is the more obvious solution, its the straightforward way of simulating reality. Raster is clever tricks and had to be developed over time. Look at it like this: You can have a PS4-level graphics with Raster, or you can have a PS2-level graphics with ray-tracing. Which one do you pick? For the same hardware, the costs of ray-tracing are so immense that you'd have to lower the rest of your rendering budget MASSIVELY to make up for the difference. (This is why some of the best ray-tracing demos right now are Quake 2 and Minecraft. Think about it.) And for what? Better reflections? We've come up with really good raster solutions to almost all of the things where ray-tracing has a significant advantage. Its not infeasible someone could make a game, Indie or AAA, which focuses on ray-tracing and is willing to make the graphics trade-off because the gameplay is specifically based on really good reflections everywhere, or something like that. You could use an artistic style to hide the lack of detail. But... nobody's done something like this so far. So in general, ray-tracing is cool but too costly. However! The thing you're hearing about now is not a full ray-tracing solution. Its a hybrid raster rendering solution that uses ray-tracing for specific elements. How good it will look will depend entirely on the developer implementation and even which elements are ray-traced. Battlefield for instance uses ray-tracing (if you have it) to make the reflections better. In most games, you get what are called "screen space reflections". That means the game can draw a reflection using any part of the scene you can see, since you're already rendering it. But what if a mirror needs to show something that isn't rendered, like behind you, or around a corner? It can't with raster screen-space reflections. Instead you get a blurry cubemap to make up for it. Most players never even notice these shortcomings, but if you sit and test the game's reflections, you'll notice these inconsistencies. If you turn on ray-tracing reflections, all the windows and pools in Battlefield will now show accurate reflections; regardless of if they're on-screen or not. You can actually see a soldier around a corner using his reflection on a window! That's super neato. But... is that really all that important? That's kinda up to you. Also note that turning on those ray-tracing reflections will cost you around 10-20 fps. The only video cards that can do ray-tracing are super powerful cards anyways... but still. If you have a 144hz monitor, you may only be getting 144fps already, so is it worth running at like 100-120 instead? Maybe? Maybe not? Its a personal choice. Some people still game at 60fps  Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoQr0k2IA9A But, not all games are ray-traced equally! Another game using RTX real time ray tracing is Metro, and they didn't do reflections but instead used rays to create Global Illumination. GI is a system for real-time lighting in videogames that attempts to capture how light bounces around a scene. In raster, its a hacky solution. Using ray-tracing you can do the actual physics of bouncing light and get much more accurate results. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms7d-3Dprio To me, that's actually HUGE. That's a pretty solid "holy grail". The ray-traced GI looks significantly better to me than trying to use artist-placed light sources to approximate the same. I could see a future where this becomes fairly standard to all games. But it'll require everybody to get beefy RTX cards. Hopefully that answers everything 
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Nov 4, 2020 21:38
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It's certainly not a sham but basically most of the history of real time graphics has been shaped by the need to go around ray tracing because it wasn't viable for real time yet due to being a performance hog (more like a performance giant-god-pig-possessed-by-a-tentacle-demon, in fact) and kinda still is, and so it's gonna be selectively used. You can see that in the PS5 Spider-Man demo for example, where they use it for character reflections but a number of other reflections are still done in non-raytracing ways, SSR and environment maps and the like. There'll probably need to be a couple more years before the hardware and software really catch up, and in the meantime it's mostly gonna be an excuse to sell new graphic cards with ever more rays and tracers in them.
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Nov 4, 2020 23:06
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Hughlander posted:I'm high in management at my studio. I've stated to all from VP to direct of directs that my plans will be WFH 3 days, come in the office in a shifted environment 2 days (1p - 7p drive in during lunch.) The key in my opinion with this is that everybody needs to be on the same schedule for those 2 days a week or whatever it is in the office. There is ton of value in walking over to Katie's desk to talk to her about something rather than email or DM. Or overhearing Jim talk to Jorge about that bug you know something about. Or running into Jess in the kitchen and remembering you wanted to talk to her about the widget implementation. There are analogues for these things in remote work of course but they don't achieve the same organic level of depth of communication or interpersonal connection building. Zaphod42 posted:Raytracing is used for movies because its better than Raster rendering. But Ray-tracing is more expensive to compute. To the point where its never been worth it in real-time applications. A+ Pro post here.
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Nov 5, 2020 06:35
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You'll wind up seeing most games using it just because SSR's failure cases are just awful, but it is kind of a wash. It is definitely beneficial, but side-by-sides are deceptive because people playing the game aren't getting to see that alternate experience to make the comparison, and while it helps a lot in low lighting conditions in particular, it's also those conditions where it lacks a "hook" the most. The high-poly geo stuff that Epic demo'd has way more obvious benefit for instance.
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Nov 6, 2020 06:13
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Anyone have a way to talk to your non gamedev friends about why games (and specifically updates) are so much bigger these days? Like I think it was CoD that announced that their next-gen versions are gonna be 40 gigs larger. I see that and think "texture go up" but I don't think most people who play games get that
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Nov 6, 2020 08:51
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Show them a lovely jpeg at like 50% compression and then show them the same image at PNG compression, then show them the file sizes. Explain that as image and sound quality get better, file sizes increase.
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Nov 6, 2020 09:06
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Commander Keene posted:Show them a lovely jpeg at like 50% compression and then show them the same image at PNG compression, then show them the file sizes. Explain that as image and sound quality get better, file sizes increase. It's more like "when you say you want it in 4K, this is what you mean" but I think people really think that "graphics" is a function of how fast processor go, whereas improvements in hardware basically just mean you can push 4x as much textures through the pipe now, so everything is 4x bigger also I think people's brains got broken some when the disc the game came on wasn't the entire game anymore. like even in 360 days, since they didn't assume internet access, you couldn't waive a submission failure by saying you'd patch it unless it was online only, and even then, you have 8MB for a patch, so if you're on a data-driven engine, let's hope you have delta-based package loads already. now a 40GB update is normal, because they added some skins for Halloween
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Nov 6, 2020 09:14
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So im not a game developer, not a programmer of any sort, but I am very much a consumer of games. The first thing I think of when you tell me a game will be taking up a fuckton of space is: "one metric buttload of textures and audio, no mention of plotline, story or balancing yet. I wonder if they'll have time to make the plot this time once they are done rendering". Are you telling me that you are primarily running into people who don't think 99% of the development is visuals and audio? For the record, I am aware that my 99% number is pulled directly out of my rear end. I don't know poo poo about hardware, so to me a graphics card is a graphics card like any other, right up until the game is reduced to 1fps on good days or the magic smoke leaves the box of wonder.
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Nov 6, 2020 09:20
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They're bigger because AAA is a production quality arms race above all else, and they'll use every ounce of hardware capacity they can get. Games are bigger because storage/bandwidth are abundant.
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Nov 6, 2020 15:40
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