Making Games Megathread: Congratulations on releasing the horniest game of 2022

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Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

I've been racking my brains over this but I'm still a beginner at game programming and I have no idea how to do it. I'm using Monogame and C#, but the problem (and solution?) would probably be common to all the typical game/media libraries.

What I want is a tile-based engine where each tile can have multiple "properties"; At the most basic, the properties could be "ground (not interactive)", "collision (interactive)" and "top layer (not interactive)", and by splitting it into three layers, the map could be interacted with and rendered easily.

One way I could solve it would be to create a tileset for each property and render them on top of each other, but that seems like it would be hell to manage (both drawing/creating and displaying) so the first thing that came to mind was some sort of masking. Using the original tileset, I just painted over it using different colors for the different properties, green for ground, red for collision and blue for top layer to make this mockup:

Map using normal tileset

Same map rendered with the mask tileset;
I want green to be rendered first, red to be used for collision detection and blue to be rendered on top of the player

And uhm.. I have no idea where to go from here. Or if this is even the way to do it. I was thinking maybe I could render three copies of the map to a texture, each masked by their respective color but I don't know how I'd do that. I couldn't really find any relevant info on google, other than the fact that you can use pixel shaders and stencil buffers to mask things

I've looked into using a preexisting editor like Tiled, but all of them seem both too heavy and too limiting at the same time. I guess I could theoretically make my own map/tile editor but that seems beyond my current scope of just trying to make anything game-like.

_{Oh, and I'm aware that in the mockup the trees/sign would be rendered on top of the player even if you stood in front of it. Guess that's something I have to solve as well.}

# ¿ Jul 18, 2015 13:11

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:38

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

The problem is that each tile has multiple things going on. If everything was made entirely out of blocks like Pok�mon or 2D Zelda games, it would make sense to have tile-wide properties like "walkable" but that's not what I'm going for.

I know I didn't put any particularly interesting tiles in that mockup so that's my bad, but to make a comparison off the top of my head think "Earthbound" instead of "Zelda". Earthbound has 8-way free movement and uses 32x32 tiles where each tile is subdivided into 16 minitiles that have properties, so while the map is made up entirely of 32x32 tiles each tile can have several properties at once. My idea was that by using masks I could essentially have 1 property per pixel, as denoted by its color/hex value.

Also, I don't want to separate out each property as a different tile since, like I said, that would be hell to manage when there are frequently multiple properties per tile.

I appreciate the help regardless

# ¿ Jul 18, 2015 14:14

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

shimmy posted:

Maybe it's because I never saw a game like that but I don't see the advantage. If it were me I would go straight to an unrestricted model where you still have (small) tiles on the ground to paint but everything else is just objects (visible or invisible) as big as they need to be that are freely placed on top of the tile ground. Freely meaning you can go per pixel placement, or you can snap to an arbitrary grid size.
If not that, then I'm thinking I would still keep the small tiles for property keeping and then make every xth tile be a graphical tile, with tile textures being x tiles large. So that's basically your Earthbound example where tiles have information on x minitiles, but I would then write that out into a map made out of minitiles only so that the game logic runs on the stuff it cares about, the properties. Only for drawing would I care about the graphics, I would then simply iterate through the map by +x instead of +1 to draw the bigger tile graphics.

Unless you've never played a SNES game you will probably have seen this effect in games like A Link to the Past and most of the RPGs, to mention some off the top of my head. :eng101:

I think a part of the problem is the ease of map creation for me (the designer) versus ease of implementation. The wonderful thing about the SNES style minitile system is that the designer only ever has to care about a grid (say, 32x32 or 16x16) and can create maps easily and quickly while keeping everything visually consistent. It also gives the designer an easy way to just mark "this part is walkable, this part is a ladder, this part is a rounded corner" per 8x8 minitile that the tile is composed of. Since I'm pretty sure they used a byte per per minitile to tell its attributes, I figured it wouldn't be a problem to scale that up to a byte per (tilemap) pixel on a modern computer. This would make it easy for a designer to literally just "paint" the attributes directly onto a preexisting tileset. If we followed the SNES model then we would then have to render each pixel one at a time (which I guess might be a way to do it?) but I was hoping that it would be possible to do some pre-processing to turn that designer-made bitmap of tile property values + the original bitmap into different layers (collision, occlusion, etc.) to make the subsequent rendering easier to program. That way I'd only have to check collisions against the collision layer, I could safely render the occlusion layer on top of the character at all times, etc.

I hope I'm making some amount of sense, the reason I don't want to go with an unrestricted model is 1) ease of map making and 2) visual consistency. I'm going for a 16-bit style with the restrictions that come with it (so things stay within the pixel boundaries, etc.) because I'm a curmudgeon and I can't stand how all the indie pixel art games these days mix pixel sizes and do high resolution rotation and all that < :mad:

> Using tiles allows me to add some degree of automation to the map making and makes it more consistent with the style I'm going for.

Again, I appreciate all replies.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2015 23:23

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Solemn Sloth posted:

The way I would guess the snes style games work is as far as the game is concerned only the higher resolution grid exists, but when editing you are actually placing prefabs which are x*x grid blocks in size.

Exactly, yes. The engine(s) work on 8x8 blocks (the mini-tiles) and the designers work on the prefabs that are 16x16 or 32x32 and made up of minitiles. It's also a way they saved space since you could have thousands of different tiles that used the same few mini-tiles in different ways and arrangements, and just referenced those few memory addresses.

Doing it like that would require me to build custom tools however, so I'm just trying to find an alternate way of achieving (more or less) the same thing. I'm only one person and I'm (mostly) a designer which is why I thought "painting" the different attributes would be a neat idea if implementable :3:

# ¿ Jul 19, 2015 00:06

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Your Computer posted:

I'm only one person and I'm (mostly) a designer which is why I thought "painting" the different attributes would be a neat idea if implementable

I solved this and the solution was so simple it makes me feel dumb. I just preprocess the tileset by iterating through the bitmap data from the mask and constructing my "layers" from there. If a pixel on the mask is a certain color, I can then assign the corresponding pixel on the tileset that property. Et voil�, I can paint my attributes the same way I paint my tilesets! Sorry for asking such a dumb question.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2015 08:25

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Omi no Kami posted:

Very much agree. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a pretty good game, but I hated it and never want to play again, and that's purely because there's an achievement each for highest difficulty, no killing, never get detected, and I somehow decided that my first playthrough should do all three at once.

The worst design decision they made was making the tutorial enemies count for the no-kill and stealth achievements. I didn't find out until finishing the game and having none of the achievements pop up, having meticulously played the entire game (sans tutorial) without killing or getting detected even once. :suicide:

# ¿ Jul 20, 2015 10:25

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:

hello everyone

coming soon

So I guess it's finally time to put the "are video games art?"-debate to rest.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2015 02:03

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

I'm trying to port an engine I made over to Game Maker Studio to give that shot, but I'm stuck on the dumbest issue. What's the cleanest way to upscale everything for every room? The native resolution is 256x224, but I want my window size to be at least 2x that, with everything upscaled. Is there a way to do it globally and not have to add a script to every room?

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 14:15

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

So I figured out the scaling and now I'm trying to do some really basic music syncing in GameMaker and it's driving me nuts. I create all my music myself, so I know the exact bpm but I think there might be a delay between when the "audio_start_playing()" gets called and when the music actually starts. I just want to have a global "beat" event that I can tap into to sync animations to the beat, etc. to make things more lively (think Steamboat Willie) and perhaps do some synced user inputs inputs (kinda like Crypt of the Necrodancer, I suppose). I've found a couple of relevant posts around the net by googling, but it's all too vague for me to piece together

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 08:13

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

wayfinder posted:

Remember that mp3 encoding adds a bit of silence to the start of a file. Do you have the same issues when you use wav or ogg files?

I rendered the files myself and never converted them, so my problem probably lies in my timing code. I kinda have no idea what I'm doing so I've run into several problems like syncing it up to music, if I'm even using delta time correctly in GM, and making sure things fire only once per beat. If anyone with any prowess in this stuff could spare me a code snippet or proof-of-concept I'd be forever grateful. Right now I have a metronome playing a beep and a box jumping around to the beat, but the beat doesn't sync up to the music properly and something isn't working correctly because it will sometimes (for reasons I don't understand) drop beats when moving but not when playing the sound.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 11:42

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

I think I managed to get the audio sync stuff right on my own, yay! It would be nice to see if it's in sync for everyone else and not just my computer though, does anyone know of a good place to upload a .zip of the project or executable and/or would be willing to try it out and tell me if its in sync? It's a teeny-tiny proof-of-concept with a moving box, drum track and some info text on the screen.

edit: after further testing, it's not even on beat for me :eng99:

It's only slightly off, but enough that it's visible/audible.

Your Computer fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Oct 18, 2015

# ¿ Oct 18, 2015 07:34

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Your Computer posted:

edit: after further testing, it's not even on beat for me It's only slightly off, but enough that it's visible/audible.

An update on this; I tried a different approach by using "audio_sound_get_track_position" which returns the current playback position..... in seconds. It works like a charm on my short 4-second 120bpm loop, but as soon as I give it something more challenging (like a longer, faster track) it desyncs pretty quickly and I don't even understand why.

In pseudocode, I'm doing

code:

if(currentPlaybackPosition - prevPlaybackPosition > [time between beats]) {
  beats++;
  prevPlaybackPosition = currentPlaybackPosition;
}

# ¿ Oct 18, 2015 16:19

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

It's working! :shittydog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTo3sgIuFW4
(The 'Nice' and 'Boo' are from user input being on/off beat)

I got my way-smart-than-me friend to look at the code and he fixed it in a matter of seconds. Now to actually use this for something.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2015 21:35

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Babbys first attempt at 3D movement and rotation :saddowns:

https://my.mixtape.moe/jjmjza.webm

think I figured it out though, this was minutes later:

https://my.mixtape.moe/envmda.webm

I like Unity. :3:

kaffo posted:

I just got this linked to me and I couldn't stop laughing.
Apologies if it's an old one, but I certianly enjoyed it.

this is basically my post isn't it?

I'm still proud that I got it working, we all gotta start somewhere.... I tell myself.

Your Computer fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jul 26, 2017

# ¿ Jul 25, 2017 23:06

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Here's a dumb question for the game music composers of the thread; are you ever unsure if your melody/song is original or if you unintentionally plagiarized another song? :v:

Maybe it's just because I'm not very confident in my music skills, but sometimes I find myself thinking "did I come up with that melody or just pull it from memory?" and other than scanning my memory banks to see if I can remember where it's potentially from I don't really know what to do in those situations.

Unrelated: I made a chest! :3:

I'm having so much fun with this, and I'm really liking Unity so far for how easy it is
http://i.imgur.com/JpSekYS.gifv

another small question; what do you guys generally use to record video snippets like this?

# ¿ Jul 27, 2017 21:49

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Got another newbie question that I couldn't find a solution for; in Unity, what's the proper waiting a bit mid-code before continuing? To be specific, I'm working on implementing text boxes and I'd like to be able to pause in between words. To give dialogue more character and allow for dramatic pauses and stuff mid-dialogue, you know?

In my googling I've come across Invoke and Coroutines but I haven't been able to get either to do what I want

# ¿ Jul 29, 2017 01:48

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Using coroutines is completely new to me so I guess I just did it wrong :sweatdrop:

At least I know I'm on the right track now, although it looks like I'll have to rearrange a lot of my message box code. Thanks guys!

e: looked at the video and while I think coroutines are what I'm after, I just want to make clear that I'm not looking for a way to display text char-by-char but rather I want to be able to insert an arbitrary pause before any word. For example, displaying the sentance "JUST... LIKE... THIS?!" with pauses instead of '...'s. :v:

Your Computer fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Jul 29, 2017

# ¿ Jul 29, 2017 02:03

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Thanks so much! I think I get it now. My plan is to use this together with control characters so I can modify how the text is displayed in the script itself.

Also it looks like I'll be keeping an eye on that channel that was linked. I liked the dialogue tutorial and apparently he's doing a series on RPGs, which is perfect since I have no idea what I'm doing :pram:

# ¿ Jul 29, 2017 03:46

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

please be careful when rescaling models :saddowns:

https://my.mixtape.moe/zerlxm.webm

question: I'm trying to understand the Unity "avatar" concept and whether or not it's something I should care about, is it meant for creating animations in-engine? I tried changing my character's "generic" avatar to a humanoid type and setting all of that up as per the official tutorial, but all it did was break my animations (that I imported from max). Especially for such a simple, low res project that I'm working on, is it something I should even bother setting up "correctly" and if so, what are the benefits? I doubt I'll be doing any procedural animation or anything like that, canned animations are fine for this small project :v:

# ¿ Jul 30, 2017 00:55

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

I know nothing about marketing, but unless I was following a project already I think I would be a bit skeptical about placeholder art. Maybe it just means I'm a jerk, but releasing marketing materials/trailer/etc. with placeholder art and saying "this is just a placeholder, we'll make it better" makes me think "yeah they're not going to replace that" :v:

Now I'm not saying that's actually the case (with this project or others), but if that's my knee-jerk reaction then I'm sure others will be the same.

Announcing is obviously important, but a lot of people buy with their eyes and first impressions are important. Also I repeat, I know nothing about marketing so just take this as one goon's thoughts :shobon:

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 07:53

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Nition posted:

I'm making a new game mode in Scraps where you keep a vehicle over several levels, upgrading it as you go. Sort of a Roguelite thing.

But I've got a design problem. In the existing game mode, which is more like a deathmatch where you have a fixed amount to spend, you can choose from three chassis sizes:

Bigger chassis sizes are stronger and give more points to snap parts onto, e.g.

In the new mode you'll be starting with not much money, so you'll probably want the small chassis. But eventually you'd probably want to upgrade to a bigger one. And I've kinda backed myself into a corner because they all have connection points in different places so it's not simple to upgrade. A chassis change would leave some parts unconnected and others blocked.

Some ideas I have:

Oh man, this reminds me of-

Nition posted:

If you ever played Lego Racers, imagine the vehicle building in that but the blocks actually have functions.

Yes!

I think some sort of automatic/manual reconfiguration sounds the most fun. I don't know how complicated your system is, but if you could space the parts out and keep the corners it might make the manual adjusting easier for the player? Ultimately if the player is gonna upgrade to a bigger chassis they're probably gonna want to reconfigure things anyway (with the new possibilities and such) so starting blank on upgrade or being able to manually readjust where to put the old parts on the new chassis might be easier.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2017 01:19

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Mr Underhill posted:

Y'all goons have some cool and colorful projects going on, I keep coming back to this page and it's nice to see everyone progress or show off a new project.

I know right? I've been looking through the thread a bit since posting my stupid questions and I'm amazed at all the cool and neat stuff in here. :kimchi:

leper khan posted:

I support the concept of more games like ragnarok battle offline existing.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2017 11:50

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Tummyache posted:

I thought about it, and generally I'm a pixel purist, but I figured standardizing the pixel size was a lost cause with all the 3D background things going on anyway. I'm focusing on the bigger stuff for now but I may go back and redo some of the higher res looking art. Some of it looking "off" is a big enough excuse for me to redraw it.

I think it's more important to make the assets on the same scale. Things won't be the same size like you say (due to the 3D, after all) but it'll look more coherent if their original textures share pixel density. At least I'd try to make the UI and characters gel, because that's what stands out the most right now.

I understand that it's probably a ton of work though, but just something to keep in mind. Also the project is looking very interesting and I hope you post lots of updates :3:

# ¿ Aug 5, 2017 18:30

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Scoss posted:

You game looks cool.

I personally really love this style of early PS1 intermingling of low-res sprites with simple 3D environments. I think about it a lot, along with low poly 3D in general, and I am never sure if it's simple nostalgia for a formative time in my past and some of my favorite games, or if there's something more substantial and broadly appealing about that particular aesthetic.

I'm a huge sucker for low poly 3D, lack of texture filtering and mixing of 3D and sprites. :swoon:

I never had a PS1, butI probably got my sprites+3D obsession from Ragnarok Online (which I played uh... too much). Lowpoly has always been my thing though, and the Nintendo DS kindled that something fierce. It doesn't seem to have a particularly broad appeal though, or at least I haven't found many people who share my interest in the aesthetic.

The little project I'm working on right now is trying to emulate that low res feel, though I'm aiming more towards a vague in-between of the NDS and 3DS. Textures 128x128 and below for the most part, as well as a low poly count. Even if it looks simple it's a ton of work so I'll consider this project a success if I even get a single map ready and playable :v:

I've never done any environment modeling or texturing before and even with the low poly count and texture size it's... quite a job.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2017 21:16

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

SweetBro posted:

Derp programmer moment today: when I was testing my new combat damage algorithms (and their associated player info logging) and I for the life of me couldn't figure out why when two identical characters, using the same exact attack, rolling the same exact value on the "dice", are dealing different amounts of damage to one another. Clearly this has to be a bug, and logging code wasn't displaying the correct values? After about a couple of hours of re-running my tests and dropping frantic logs everywhere I found the issue: everything was working as intended. See in this game combat is turn based, and abilities are chosen and then resolved based on initiative, but with no fancy animations the only way you know who went first is based on the combat log. I had completely forgotten about the wound system that worked on tirelessly about a month ago, which applies various debuffs at various thresholds based on the damage type inflicted. It just so happened that the skill I was testing with dealt slashing damage who's corresponding wound debuff is reducing your opponents damage.

When it turns out to actually be a feature, not a bug :haw:

In unrelated news, I think I broke my project somehow and I have no idea how/why. When I open the project, Unity starts using literally all my available RAM (like 12GB+ instantly) and my poor computer starts dying

# ¿ Aug 6, 2017 13:21

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Hover posted:

Sometimes I insert an infinite loop to see if I still feel. Any obvious reasons or is it a terrible mystery?

I didn't create an infinite loop this time, I swear! I imported another (extremely low poly) mesh but other than that I have zero idea what could be causing it :iiam:

It was working fine last time before I closed it, so it really is a mystery.

Not that I had a lot going in that project anyway, and I'm assuming I can just copy over my scripts and such to a new project :v:

I've been thinking of starting fresh and re-importing everything to start using a uniform scale and such anyway, and also my map-making/environment modeling&texturing skills are turning out to be garbage so I'm wondering if I actually want to scrap the stuff I have and start over with a less ambitious style. Again, not really much lost.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2017 16:13

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Hammer Bro. posted:

Does anybody have thoughts on this kind of system? Or experience with it? I don't think I've seen real-time-with-pause applied to generally-traditional JRPG combat. I suppose Bravely Default did it to some degree, but I don't recall it feeling terribly flexible.

What do you mean by the last part? I really liked how it let you speed up or pause combat because combined with the auto battle settings (making a list of actions for your party to auto-execute) it made grinding 1000x better than in any other game I've played, especially combined with being able to manually adjust the encounter rate. :v:

Only other (non-J) RPGs I can think of with pausing are the games like Neverwinter Nights or Dragon Age where everything's happening in real time but you can pause whenever. I think Dragon Age let you make tactics for your party to cut down on the micromanagement too, and something like that might be cool with variable speed. Honestly though I'm more fond of regular ol' turn based, and I think Bravely did it extremely well. Like, I tried FFXII and it just felt like rightclicking mobs in an MMO aka. not very thrilling. I'm probably super biased since I grew up on turn-based JRPGs though :pram:

# ¿ Aug 6, 2017 21:23

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Elentor posted:

That second image looks absolutely gorgeous man.

Same with the first one, it looks painted and I love that effect. Second one reminds me of pre-rendered backgrounds and I always loved that era :3:

# ¿ Aug 7, 2017 16:10

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

WarpDogs posted:

I'm happy with how this beach zone is working out. The palm trees 'dancing' was at first a bug, but now I'm keeping it and will instead draw on some hula attire at some point

They're adorable! Can you make them alternate between swinging left and right?

Also gotta say, your project is real neat! :3:

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 01:57

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

I've been trying to find some resources on game environment modeling, but maybe I'm searching for the wrong terms or looking in the wrong places because I can barely find anything. Is it just one of those things that people don't talk about or what? There are literally thousands of tutorials, guides, step-by-steps and techniques videos on modeling, rigging, animating and texturing characters, so it's weird how little info there is on environments.

In particular, I'm looking for natural environments. The few resources I've found have mostly been on sci-fi modular hallways and stuff which isn't very helpful since it doesn't deal with any of the issues of modeling a natural environment (i.e. texturing large surfaces, making stuff blend naturally, etc.). Anyone know where I should be looking or got any tips? :shobon:

# ¿ Sep 18, 2017 00:07

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Rectus posted:

I'd like to find some too. Most of what I've done is from looking at already made stuff, and trying to match reference photos.

For getting variations on large surfaces, a common method is using a shader that blends multiple textures together based on their vertex colors, allowing you to vertex paint variations on to meshes. I think most engines have support for something like this out of the box. A tip with blending the textures together is using a modulation mask to pattern the blended areas, so it doesn't just fade linearly to the other texture. Here is an example from my ski slope with a 3 way blend between fine and rough snow and the cliffs, with modulation on and off.

Thanks! I'm aware of vertex blending textures but I hadn't thought about using a mask before. Neat! Unfortunately 3dsmax seems a bit finicky when it comes to vertex painting and I've experienced that the entire program locks up sometimes when working on that stuff

FantasticExtrusion posted:

Tutorials will take you nowhere.

I appreciate the advice but I can't say I agree with this point. Making environments is radically different from making characters (probably a reason why there's so few resources) and for a lot of it I literally have no idea how to even approach it. That's where tutorials and such help. Unwrapping and UV-mapping large stuff like that is difficult. Do you make an enormous texture? Do you break it up into chunks? If you break it up into chunks, how do you avoid seams? How do you do all of this and also avoid obvious tiling?

There has to be techniques and approaches that makes this stuff easier (for instance, vertex blending) used by people who make environments, so it's not like the knowledge isn't out there. :shobon:

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 01:27

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Zaphod42 posted:

What engine are you using? If you're doing everything in 3dsmax that sounds awful. I mean, some games used to do that, but yuck. If you're doing terrain you really want some nice blending terrain tools like Rectus said, Unreal has had that since like 2.0, WoW's engine even had that back in vanilla, 2004.

I'm using Unity. And like I said, I have no idea what I'm doing or how to even approach it :v:

Now, I admit I know nothing at all about the Unity Terrain engine but the stuff I've seen from it feels more applicable to something like an MMO (you mention WoW) than to smaller scale stuff. You can sculpt large blobs out of it but.. then what? I guess what I'm saying is that I don't get how you're supposed to get from here:

to here:

using something like the terrain engine. Again, I have no knowledge of how any of this works.

The project I'm working on is a simple (J)RPG so no open world fanciness or anything. Just moving from map to map like in the old days. I've been trying to make the maps for a little mountain village and the surrounding area but like I said I have no idea how to even approach it, so what I've been doing is just blocking things out in 3ds max and trying to figure out ways to go from there. I figured since the maps are limited in scope that "hand crafting" them in the 3D modeling program would be the way to go v :shobon:

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 01:57

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Zaphod42 posted:

Oh and just look at lots of pictures of real nature so you learn what looks right. People get used to noticing when things are off but they can't always figure out what's off about it, you gotta compare to examples. Grab some nice pictures of mountains and trees and then layer the terrain textures in the way you see, look for where there's grass or bushes or where the grass doesn't grow and the rocks poke through and stuff like that.

Maybe start by trying to re-create some areas that you have pictures of, and then move from there?

Yeah, that's not a bad idea. It's tricky to find reference photos of stuff close up though, especially if you're going for something specific. Landscape photos and panoramas are easy to come by, but in a game you'll be right in the middle of it so you need some detail :v:

Also the pictures I posted were just examples, that's not a mesh I've made or anything. Just "typical terrain engine mesh" and "actual finished map".

That said I sure didn't make things easier for myself by trying to go low res I think. I love the low poly DS-era 3D but it makes organic stuff like environments a pain to figure out. I have no idea how the wizards back in the day managed to make even stuff like N64 games look good. That's also one of the reasons I haven't gone with terrain stuff though, since I can't figure out how to reconcile that with low res assets and textures.

FantasticExtrusion posted:

Maybe that's why there are no good "tutorials" YT videos made by hacks who don't (or barely) make games. Making a chunk of a game is easy. Putting the pieces together has been so, so hard.

It does get to a point where it's like, maybe we don't have more good 3D indie games... because for some reason we started letting "has texture seams" matter. In the sense that people who would have otherwise made good looking games never do because they end up so hell bent on reproducing a specific style and quality they never finish.

Yeah... you got a point.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 02:24

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Zaphod42 posted:

One dev on an indie game I thought was real promising long ago (don't think it ever came out? or if not didn't make a splash) was advocating that games should move towards more abstract art styles and lean on shader effects so you can get by with extremely simple geometry and basically flat-texture everything.

Semi-related pet peeve; possibly due to this, trying to google for low poly will bring you literal TONS of stuff that look like this:

and almost nothing that's the oldschool type of low res hand-painted low poly stuff that I love

Then again, my love for that kinda stuff seems pretty rare. Everyone loves to poo poo on the (3)DS or PS1/N64 for their graphics and that stuff is my jam entirely. Like, people are saying Metroid: Samus Returns looks bad and that game looks goddamn amazing to me.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 04:28

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

You know, the more I think about this environment stuff the more I think that I should really learn Blender :negative:

I've tried many times to get into it, but 10 years or so of using 3ds Max coupled with how ridiculously user-unfriendly Blender is means I haven't made much headway.

You'd think making N64-era 3D stuff would be pretty painless in TYOOL 2017 but nah. I guess this is another reason why there's so little indie stuff in 3D.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 08:00

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

SystemLogoff posted:

Blender has gotten much better.

I say that coming from the Softimage XSI toolkit.

Yeah I tried it again recently and especially in terms of features it's drat solid. It just suffers from that free software thing where everything has to be customizable and editable so there's a million menus, buttons, sliders and shortcuts and you have no way of simplifying things. Heck, Blender does it even worse than most because a mis-click can screw up your interface completely all in the name of Customization, and AFAIK there's not even a way to lock the UI.

_{Pictured: Why would the program even let you do this.}

There's just a lot of stuff about Blender that gets on my nerves, which is a shame because feature-wise it's probably better suited for indie game dev than any other 3D software out there (even before considering price). :sigh:

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 08:46

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Is this still the thread to ask dumb babby Unity questions in? I'm trying to do something as simple as animating a character turning around (3D character on 2D plane turning 180 degrees, think Smash Bros) and although I think I have the right idea I can't get it to work. I assume I want to play a turning animation and, when that finishes, rotate the character's model 180 degrees but I haven't figured out a reliable way of triggering the animation or a way to wait for it to end before flipping (using animator) :sigh:

anyway here's a dumb low poly jellyfish (tentacles not included _yet)

# ¿ Jan 28, 2018 09:12

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

The Cheshire Cat posted:

If you're using the animator, you can put events in the animation itself which can be used to send some kind of message to your scripts. So you'd put a "flip model" event at the end of your "turn around" animation, which would be what actually calls the method in your script that rotates the model.

That sounds perfect! Behaviours, right? I had completely forgotten about those!

Thank you so much! That seemingly easy task had me really stumped and nothing I found on google (root motion? setting timers? target matching?) was half as easy or effective as this. Now to figure out how to properly do a "skidding" animation when over a certain speed so turning while in motion doesn't feel weird. And then re-do everything once I finish the model! :pram:

# ¿ Jan 29, 2018 06:27

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

kaffo posted:

Holy crap that's adorable

thank you! :3:

I'm currently really excited because I got stretchy bones to work properly in Unity so now I can do all sorts of dumb animations. Here's some high definition footage of it in action

https://i.imgur.com/kL82rWh.mp4

# ¿ Jan 29, 2018 22:51

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:38

Your Computer: Oct 3, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Cicadas! posted:

It's very Kirby 64 and that's a good thing, perhaps the best thing.

Well the jig is up, I totally ~~stole~~ borrowed that block texture from Kirby 64 as a placeholder :shobon:

It makes it easier for me to visualize how I want things to look (solid colored blocks suck).

I'm starting to wonder if I should just drop the tentacles and call it a slime or something since it's really hard to make the animations look good from the side. I kind of... wasn't thinking about how stuff would look from the side when making it. For example this jump:

looks pretty dull from the side

also how the heck does a jellyfish even walk

# ¿ Jan 30, 2018 08:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Making Games Megathread: Congratulations on releasing the horniest game of 2022

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