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Question: If I have the time and money at this stage in my life is "Because nothing like it exists and I want it to" a good reason to make a game or doomed to failure like some half finished classic car restoration?
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Nov 22, 2018 03:27
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ShadowHawk posted:Treat your indie game like a hobby and not like a new business venture, because the odds are very high you won't make money on it. I don't want to make money I want a game to exist in some form so it stops taking up room in my head.
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Nov 22, 2018 04:26
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Thanks for your replies and encouragement. Of the 2 free-ish engines Unity and UE4 which one can handle high Newtonian physics calc loads better? Mainly for solving thousands of simultaneous collisions, ballistics etc such as a fragment field from an explosion.
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Nov 23, 2018 07:29
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Akuma posted:FWIW I'm working on a very physics heavy game in Unreal at the moment that needs to recreate something from real life very accurately, and we had to write our own physics implementation because out of the box Unreal just couldn't be manipulated into producing fairly rudimentary realistic results... As long as it can handle lots of simultaneous high speed collisions between point objects against low speed 3d objects without the points slipping through between a frame or other shenanigans it would be fine.
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Nov 24, 2018 02:58
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:Reporting in from a couple months ago when I asked about game dev jobs, people said that hiring was almost entirely about your portfolio, which I expected. I had very little digital art experience so I decided to go back to school, I'm at a college a fair number of successful industry artists have been to (Riot, Pixar). I'm not a game dev but my experience with portfolios is always put just your best work in it and make it about the area you want to work in. It needs to make an impression so don't put a bunch of half finished or generic milk run pieces in it. I'm not sure if its the same for game devs but less is more other people have to spend time looking at the portfolio so you don't want to waste it. This experience was from when you handed a portfolio to them on a VHS so it might be different now. Flannelette fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Nov 28, 2018 |
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Nov 28, 2018 06:56
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ETPC posted:how come writing is seen as so tertiary and often unnecessary still in the gaming industry? or is that a falsehood? Maybe almost every person who does game dev thinks that they are bad at writing so we'll find someone else? Except for the devs that did writing before being a game dev. Pixelante posted:Any suggestions for a practical Christmas gift to a 20-year-old who is super into game development? He's currently saving up to go back to school, and already did a Digipen summer program that he loved. I'll probably just give him a Steam giftcard, but I like the idea of giving him something that builds skills too. This is more general but if he's super into it you're probably better off asking him for things he wants instead of guessing because he'll probably have a few things he really wants and already have the rest taken care of.
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Dec 3, 2018 06:17
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Dec 3, 2018 06:18
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MissMarple posted:
No, just put all your story in little text pickups or terminals the player finds, everyone likes that! Question: Is there a community or board where I can do little game dev "jobs" (art, animation, code, debugging, anything really) for free for people who are making little non-commercial personal projects so I can practice with more random things and maybe help someone too?
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Dec 3, 2018 15:43
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Chewbot posted:
Thanks for the good write up In my small sample size of people I've talked to there seems to be one "trick" for games writing, if you can make the player feel smart for figuring out something not obvious in the story they seem to think the writing is better even if it isn't.
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Dec 4, 2018 03:29
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CJ posted:How does draw order work with respect to particles and effects? In Dark Souls 3 i noticed the bloodstains draw on top of the fog doors. I assume that the fog doors are drawn after geometry and before other particles and doesn't update the z buffer so when it comes time to draw the bloodstain the engine still thinks it should be visible. But that got me wondering how games draw particles from multiple sources in the right order. Does it work out the depth of every particle on the screen then sort them and draw them in a painter's algorithm way? They're both translucent effects which run afoul of the z buffer (last time I checked, raytracing gpu might start solving this issue in future) so you have to use a more expensive way to sort or a-blend them (if at all) so you'll often see order errors with multiple transparent polys (glass behind smoke, glass behind glass, etc).
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Dec 27, 2018 16:16
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Metal Meltdown posted:I believe Cuphead also sculpted some of its background assets, like the Egyptian city you can see in the background of the genie fight. ShadowHawk posted:How much of 3d modelling is photogrammetry of physical objects these days vs pure computer designs? Very common perhaps essential depending on what you're trying to make. It's much faster to photogrammetry a whole bunch of photo realistic rocks or plants or a tree stump or just some dirt than it is to hand model them one by one or try to procedure generate them (or a nice looking burger like above that was probably someones lunch then they scanned it for fun). It's really useful for making environment art look un-repeditive and realistic without having to spend the time it would take to hand make it. And anyone with an iphone and enough disk space can do it now with a bit of trial and error. Even things outside environments use it heavily now, it's not going to replace modeling but it's well established along side it.
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Jan 6, 2019 07:57
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Can anyone explain the effect where you have a flat image at the front of the render that is an overlay or outline of a 3d model in the frame, it used to be used a lot for x-ray vision for seeing people through walls or highlighting things it's like a stencil but positioned right over the 3d model.
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Jan 22, 2019 04:05
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CJ posted:Do you mean this? http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Silhouette-Outlined_Diffuse Yeah like that Used to show up a lot for xray vision  And for top down games where characters could be behind the scenery but still needed to be seen. I was wondering what the story behind this optimization that you sometimes see when you're not meant to for RB6S https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1R_UQdZXpA Flannelette fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 04:40
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If they're distorting the vertexes then its odd that it's squishing the whole character down and not just the parts pressed onto the wall and drawing it onto the other side but it's probably what it is. I thought it might be a way characters are drawn if you don't have vision to them.   Speaking of vertex normals There was a really good info doc that had all the reasons for having your normals pointing 90o from the adjacent face ( extra normal vectors) and all the reasons when to have them pointing off at a tangent but I can't find it now. Flannelette fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 13:10
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Curious about how some mods and small dev team games can produce huge amounts of new high quality models and animations but then other small dev teams (mainly in non english speaking countries) say that they can't afford more than a handful? Is it just if they have someone who can churn them out for free or is there an easier supply of artists in some places I would have though it would all be even where-ever you are on the web?
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Jan 25, 2019 15:03
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Superrodan posted:
These 3d model assets that you can get for free or bought always seem not at all useful for a game dev, unless like you said, you make the rest around them or they're things like rocks or something you buy a pack of so they don't stick out. But buying a high detail weapon or tank model just seems like it would be unpractical and would be better made to order, buying textures and such seems ok because it's easy to alter them a million ways to suit your game. I had a question about making the interior of a vehicle which I've never tried: Since its concave so I can't "sculpt inwards" is it optimal to model all the individual convex or nearly convex pieces and then put it together? Discendo Vox posted:I'm curious if anyone would care to share their own experiences regarding the sorry story of Starbreeze: Flannelette fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Jan 29, 2019 |
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Jan 29, 2019 05:24
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I had another dumb question: Anyone know how the screen space decals that bloodborne and DS3 uses work? 1: They seem to have a ridiculous upper limit to them (make hundreds of them, walk across the whole game and come back and they're all still there as long as you don't use a bonfire to reset the world) and you can just keep piling more and more decals and it doesn't seem drop the frame rate like you'd expect? 2: They can run across separate meshes so if your character gets blood on their face and mask, if you take the mask off the bit that wasn't covered by the mask with still have the decal on it. These are neat tricks that you'd think other engines with SS decals would use but they all seem to have the standard decals that vanish after there's 30 of them or 30 seconds thing.
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Feb 4, 2019 07:04
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Emerson Cod posted:I'm one of the leads on Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil, so I can answer this at least for mods. The majority of our 3d modelers are students building a portfolio, along with some hobbyists and a couple people actually in industry. We attracted most of them by either specifically contacting them based off their other work or they heard of us through word of mouth. Some of our modelers started out as total beginners and learned over the course of the project and some came in as experts. A big factor in attracting and retaining modelers and other members has been the reputation that we've built as a project that is not vaporware which has been a really hard sell with something of that scale. Most mod teams also only have a handful of members, Cyrodiil alone has 100 members total only a fraction of which are active at any given time. Are there communities where modders can ask for help from amateur artists/programmers etc and stuff like that? I'm more interested in the programming part of making games but I used to use maya and houdini for boring non game kinds of things (so I can't do textures and materials even though I still have access to the software) and thought it would be cool to learn it in a way to could casually help others as well in my spare time.
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Feb 24, 2019 03:31
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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 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.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:55
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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.
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If you're struggling to figure out what the union should do and how to do it once it's formed, that's one functions of a union. They let information flow between people in the industry independent of the work place power dynamic, if you aren't in a union you're only going to have your own info (from experience or the web etc) and the people you're in contact with. With a big union you can have lots of statistics from all across the industry and then process it down into a easily distributed form that you can inform and empower the industry workers with. Trying to keep workers in little bubbles of information that only directly relates to their work is pretty standard anti-union, anti-worker practice.
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Apr 7, 2019 03:06
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Game question about game dev for a change of subject: Why in recent times do devs still attach mechanics to the frame time instead of to an independent clock like the one the system comes with? I can understand doing it in the past where you want to squeeze every bit of memory out of the system but there's been lots to spare for a while now. So you still have games that can behave drastically differently if the frame rate dips or rises.
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Apr 17, 2019 05:58
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Star Warrior X posted:One really good reason to do this is in fighting games, where a huge amount of information is carried by the animations. When things like invincible frames, blocking frames, precise hitboxes, and so on are all tied to the animation frame, it makes sense to time various moves by frame as well. That's a good reason, keeping everything tied together so it's not suddenly dealing with constantly changing timing. Hyper Crab Tank posted:Do you have a more specific example of a game you feel behaves this way? The question is a little confusing to me, because "frame time" can mean different things and memory has nothing to do with it. It's also worth mentioning that FPS dips can cause wonky behavior no matter how your timing works. Usually it's things like every x frame(s) check/do "something" then if you double/half your framerate it will now check it twice or half as often and for things that run over a certain period of real time they suddenly happen twice/half as much. I can't think of any proper examples but mainly it means you can often run/jump further if you increase the framerate and collision checks happen more/less frequently which usually does nothing but sometimes breaks the game, googling it brings up fallout76 having its physics break at higher framerates (seems like physics is the most common victim of it with lots of changes over time) . It seems like it's just easier to do it this way because you don't have to worry about interpolating and synchronizing 2 timelines (one for constant paced things and one for the changing framerate) and having one wait for the other but it just goes wrong sometimes and they just hope it's not game breaking.
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Apr 17, 2019 14:17
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Found this when looking at other things about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he02vJvKaRs Just an interesting thing I remember people doing but didn't know how it was actually doing it. djkillingspree posted:However, there's a couple problems with this - first, when you make a simulation continuous instead of discrete, you have to deal with what happens "in-between" simulation steps. This is a common problem in physics and collision systems, where objects moving too quickly can interpenetrate or tunnel through barriers. These problems can be solvable but require pretty thorough testing. There are also knock-on problems with things like physics, where doing a continuous check on one object can cause changes in another object that should technically be resolved this frame, but you can't follow that chain of interactions forever given that you have limited frame time. This is why most games that don't go into slowmotion (wait for the simulation and I think old games did it too since they had no buffer?) have backface areas on all the colliding parts that will shunt things back out onto the right side if a simulation step ends with objects penetrating?
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Apr 18, 2019 05:24
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What kinds of ways are there for getting accurate looking high speed collisions that don't wreck the frame rate? For the production simulator type things I've used and some niche sim games the frame rate will drop readily below 1fps (often less than 1 frame a minute for a pure simulation) to make sure everything is done right. But for almost all games today they can handle lots of very high speed collisions through Havok or physx etc without losing playability and without the physics being noticeably weird. There must be some reliable tricks now that look right 99% of the time for all situations but don't bog down the game much. While before most games had things like you could break out the of the level geometry if you went fast enough and even things like the source engine and rage(bullet) engines built in physics don't mess up as much as the used to.
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Apr 19, 2019 05:55
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While they don't seem to reveal the exact methods it seems a main trick for high speed physics is to try and predict and solve the impacts mathematically before the frame when they would happen so objects can't get inside each other as their locations are solved ahead of time. And older style collision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnU7DJXiMAQ Flannelette fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Apr 19, 2019 |
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Apr 19, 2019 11:33
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djkillingspree posted:This isn't exactly the solution most games use - there's the idea of "sweeping" a collision volume, which essentially extrudes out the volume's path over time as a shape and then checks for where that shape intersects with collision objects to determine the point of collision. If anyone's ever wondered why when a video game physics object quickly slides over a flat surface made of multiple objects and but catches and bounces up on the "flat" seams this is usually the culprit where it's predicting a collision with the edge of the next piece since the prediction is using a simple quick algorithm to be useful in realtime.
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Apr 20, 2019 04:20
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Goreld posted:For collision detection, Bullet can for example use Minkowski sums, which is the convex hull of all space the object could have overlapped during the time step. Semi-Euler and Verlet should be enough for fast paced game physics where you don't mind if it's wrong aslong as it looks good and RK4 is more expensive and has its own problems (isn't sympletic) it just doesn't seem worth using unless you have a really stiff spring or something which probably why it doesn't show up. I've asked about collision for 3d/modern 2d games but anyone know how different it was is back in ye olde days with sprites (where everything was explicitly just a grid of pixels)? Flannelette fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Apr 21, 2019 |
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Apr 21, 2019 05:11
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When the term Tickrate is used in regards to a game engine is it the same as Tickrate for hardware? The smallest interval when any state in the game engine can change or are there things that can happen sub-tick in the same way things can happen between frames? I'm trying to find a paper on the game technique that I like but I don't know what it's called to search for one, it's the thing that metal gear rising and a few other games, plus any modeling software has where you can split a mesh with a plane and it will generate 2 new closed meshes procedurally.
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Apr 29, 2019 07:39
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Mooey Cow posted:I mean, has anyone actually dug into the code to verify that's how it works? I think the boxes are just a visual aid for the video and the real effect isn't a real box like in bounding box collision, just an imaginary hitbox like volume around the tri made from the opposing vectors of it and the player.
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Apr 30, 2019 20:26
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Big K of Justice posted:Speaking as a person who used Houdini since uh... ancient times.... Are there any good formal houdini courses I have only used it for a few years or just keep using it to get better?
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Jun 14, 2019 00:10
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Little question for graphic performance, if I have an animation in a single flipbook image file does it take a more draw calls than if I just had a static image I "animate" through messing with its movement and transparency thresholds etc or just more VRAM.
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Nov 14, 2019 00:40
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Yeah pretty much, just checking if there was anything too it beyond the file is usually bigger on a atlas.
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Nov 14, 2019 06:01
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32GB isn't that expensive these days and then you have overhead for most any memory hog stuff like having 3 monitor's worth of windows and a virtual machine open. Higher than 32 is for if you need to render simulations which you probably won't be doing.
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Apr 16, 2020 06:30
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Have another graphics question which sometimes people here can help answer: Does anyone know how a ribbon/trail particle works? I know how to make them in most engines with fully featured particle tools (you click the tick box that says ribbon and you're done) but I don't know how to make one without a pre-built toolset. To clarify I'm talking about things that can put long trails behind a bullet or something that aren't made of a stream of little particles but are instead a single graphic that stretches or tiles out from the back of the emitter as it moves and if the emitter changes course enough it is stopped and stitched onto the next segment of it as the emitter continues moving. I have seen them used in PS1 games so they aren't exactly new. For example you might want a cigarette with smoke that follows it in a long string as it moves and isn't made of individual puffs that are too far apart if it suddenly moves quickly. I was having trouble visualizing in code how to have the graphic be "fed" out in a string behind a moving emitter and then change direction to follow it.
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Apr 23, 2020 12:02
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j.peeba posted:If you want to do it programmatically look up triangle strips. You need to procedurally build a mesh out of vertices and triangles which may or may not be camera-facing depending on the case. You don't need to move the triangles themselves to get the smoke flowing since you can animate the UVs. I'd guess during the PS1 era they mostly were pre-built meshes instead of particle systems which is still a valid but more limited approach. If you just need a smoking cigarette and not much more with the technique I'd do it the simpler way: include the modeled strip as part of the cigarette mesh, and maybe add a bone or two there so you can animate some wobble and stretching on the smoke, and then move the smoke trail UVs in shader. Ok that cleared up something I was wondering about it. TooMuchAbstraction posted:Particles are basically just textured quads with some rules on how the quad transforms. Ribbon trails connect the particles together with more textured quads arranged as a, well, ribbon. If you want the ribbon without the particles, disable the particle renderer and leave the trail renderer enabled. Thanks didn't know about the COC thread.
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Apr 26, 2020 04:09
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I'll be the "voice from a different perspective" guy for the learning maya/3dsmax/blender thing: Yes Maya and 3ds max are the go to in the industry but the industry now has a big small studio part to it now and they often love the free Blender for things so being really good at blender could give you an edge if your goal is to join a small tight team working out of a garage but obviously you should train the way you intend to fight so only do it if that's your goal. Also echoing the portfolio thing for any sort of creative work. And while I don't recommend it you can do basically anything with Houdini if you really want to (probably not Substance designer stuff). Flannelette fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 07:20
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