|
The Bee posted:To be fair, those basically mean the same thing. But man, one feels way worse than the other. I haven't played the game, but apparently it wasn't a bonus XP kind of thing but rather a large to massive XP penalty if you were gaining XP awards too often, independent of the size of those awards. When people figured it out, they disabled the system and doubled the amount of XP required to level. Wallet fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Nov 28, 2017 |
#
¿
Nov 28, 2017 00:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 04:56 |
|
|
Gerblyn posted:There’s a reason people complain that 4X AIs only provide a reasonable challenge by cheating in extra resources and units. I always wonder if people actually care about the cheating, or about the way that the cheating allows the game to get away with really poor AI. Civ's combat AI gets bagged on because it is incredibly bad at actually engaging in combat and makes up for this by having far more units than a player could ever produce, which warps the entire game from a player perspective, but if the AI managed units reasonably well and only cheated in reasonably sized armies, I'm not sure anyone would be bothered.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2017 17:56
|
|
|
Gerblyn posted:Speaking as a gamer, rather than a developer, I think that you're right in that a game has a certain amount of gameplay in it, and that's a different thing to the amount of content in it. If I'm playing the newest Assassin's Creed game, I might have experienced all of the gameplay the game offers in the first 15 hours, while there's enough content to drag the game on for 40 hours, meaning I'm fairly bored for the last 25 hours, and may well just not finish the game. I can't point to any figures, but it seems to me that over the last decade adding progression systems (or RPG elements or whatever people are calling them) has become more and more popular across genres. At the same time, I also feel like the gap between length of content and length of gameplay has widened in many cases, particularly in AAA open world games; I assume that this is partially a result of distributed development and the fact that more bodies can be thrown at (or rotated on to) generating content for a project while its harder to do the same for systems development. I feel like these two things may be related (progression can keep you invested when new gameplay runs out), but I could be talking out of my rear end.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2017 01:37
|
|
|
Mother posted:There's already cheating tech that works based only on what is rendered to screen. There was actually stuff that did this way back in the Quake days -- IIRC, this required that you delete / replace textures on the client so opponents would be rendered in certain colors and then the system just looked for pixels with a certain RGB range. This is still very much a thing—not just messing with enemy textures to make them easily detectable by something like AutoHotkey, but also making it possible to see through level geometry and poo poo like that. There are a number of approaches to detect that kind of thing, though. It does seem like any game that a computer is capable of playing better than a human is going to have to deal with cheating until the end of time. It's sort of like all of the goofy rear end websites that prevent you from right-clicking on images in an effort to stop you from copying them (this seems to have become less popular, at least); if a player can see it, there's really no way to prevent them from showing it to a computer that has much better reaction times and accuracy than they ever will.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2018 15:49
|
|
|
exquisite tea posted:Many console games will adopt a dynamic rendering solution for maintaining a consistent framerate when the system is under load, where the image is then upscaled into 1080p or whatever the display’s native resolution is set to. As far as I know this is less commonly used on PC since framerates tend to be higher and there are plentiful adaptive sync options. I see downsampling as an option much more often in PC games than dynamic upscaling. The only PC game I can think of that does it is Path of Exile.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2018 16:25
|
|
|
Griefor posted:It seems to me that even before those considerations, the interactive nature of games makes it harder to write a good story for it. Most great books/movies have a carefully and specifically crafted experience to get a story across. Of course there's also opportunity there to create something new and original, but it's an area that's much less developed than story creation in books/movies. Most game stories that play with the interactive nature seem to mostly be trying to hide the fact that your choices mostly don't matter rather than creating a wildly branching story with alternate paths. Which is also logical - even just 3 binary choices ends with 8 different paths, and writing an amazing storyline only to have a fraction of players actually experience it (1/8th of the players that actually finish the game, which isn't that many to begin with) is probably not a great use of good writing skills. I don't have games experience, but I do have script writing experience. There are two interconnected issues that I imagine make it very hard to write compelling dialogue for games. As Ingold points towards, natural sounding, compelling dialogue is often high context and carries most of its meaning through subtext. If you pick up your wife from work, the beginning of your conversation in the car is much more likely to look like this: You and your Wife posted:You: How was your day? Than it is to look like this: You and your Wife posted:You: How was your day? I'm exaggerating slightly, but the second one is what you see in most video game writing. Questions are a huge part of what drives narrative interest, and the first version delivers a number of questions: Who is Nancy? What is your wife's relationship to Nancy? What does your wife do? It also potentially tells me something about your relationship to your wife—she either has a potty mouth, or you share a certain candor. The second version has the virtue of giving you some very explicit information: Your wife's job title, and that your wife hates her boss. The first issue, I imagine, is that in many video games, it would be foolish to assume that players are really going to engage with your narrative or with your dialogue beyond whatever you make them do to click through it. If all of your dialogue has an appropriate level of context, there is every chance that some number of your users will be completely loving lost by the time they get half way through the game, which makes it even less likely that they will engage with your plot or your dialogue. And the second issue is one that I think Ingold, by picking the scene he did in that talk, sidesteps. He takes a very high level view of the scene from Bladerunner as he rewrites it, which gives him a great deal of latitude in writing alternative dialogue paths; all that he's attempting to carry is the general thrust of the scene. The scene, and the thrust, only works if the viewer already has an understanding of what a replicant is and has at least some inkling of how Deckard feels about them and so on. The subtext of the scene, and most scenes, builds on the subtext and context built by the scenes that came before it. Identifying the path-critical context and subtext and making sure that your players are aware of it no matter what path they take without exposition-dumping seems like a rather difficult problem. Doing that while also fulfilling whatever structure has been imposed on dialogue options (e.g. good, neutral, evil, funny) seems even harder. Wallet fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Dec 3, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2018 21:13
|
|
|
Chewbot posted:Thanks for taking the time to read my take on it, and hopefully I didn't come across as too arrogant! Thanks for taking the time to write this! Your take is really interesting. Some of the difficulties you mention are exactly what I imagined they would be, but some of them are things I hadn't considered at all. Chewbot posted:Oh hey, something I'm somewhat qualified to talk about; I wrote the Banner Saga and have worked at BioWare . . . <snip> If you're free/inclined, I'd be really interested to know if these were considerations that were taken into account in designing the gameplay of the Banner Saga. One of the things that really made it work for me as a narrative is that the mechanics of the game enforce pacing; aligning the motivations and situation of the protagonist (the caravan has to keep moving and all I can do is try to protect the people in it) with the precise motivations of the player really made the narrative resonant. I have no idea if it was actually the case, but it feels like a game that had a story before it had mechanics rather than the other way around.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2018 15:20
|
|
|
OneEightHundred posted:Rendering tech is deep in diminishing returns, content really matters far more for driving visual quality now, so content creation improvements, a.k.a. better tools, are really where the action is going to be going forward, and the rendering tech breakthroughs that do matter are the ones that make content creation easier. (As not a game developer) I do wonder how much content is actually being created bespoke for new games that aren't going for a stylized look and how much of it isn't and if that's changing significantly over time. As far as I can tell everyone is still using speedtree still—is lots of stuff moving in the direction of tools for generating assets and libraries of premade ones? I'm not particularly fond of AAA open world games, but it seems mind melting how many objects and textures exist in a game like GTA5 and I wonder how they're accomplishing that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2020 14:34
|
|
|
Rodney The Yam II posted:Thanks for the tip! The problem is that the AI is controlled by an experimental machine learning algo that runs at the physics rate to animate its body movements (none of the animations are predetermined, just the body physics). The best solution I've found so far is to run the AI on the server and just send body joint angles etc and occasionally full entity transforms to the clients. But with 12 joints per AI body, it's maybe a lot to try and keep in sync. Ends up real stuttery. I have no idea what kind of game it is, but assuming it's moving in some semi-logical way instead of just twitching (and depending on the complexity of the movement) you may be able to address the stuttering by doing some simple(r) prediction and interpolation on the client side rather than just snapping between the states received from the server.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2020 14:03
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:You won't get blacklisted for applying without whatever it is the company is looking for. And for all you know you'll be a perfect fit. It's also possible that they'll see your resume and not think you're suited for the job you're applying for but think you might be a good fit for some other position. If your resume is actually ignored because they don't think it's interesting they're very unlikely to remember it the next time you submit given just how many resumes get sent in for even marginally competitive positions.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 18:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 04:56 |
|
|
Canine Blues Arooo posted:The most egregious part of the deal definitely seems to be in breach where the developer is responsible for new development costs in the case of non-delivery. That's pretty absurd. It seems exploitable without limiting clauses, but if I sign a contract with you to deliver a piece of software and you fail to complete it I'm not sure it's absurd for you to be on the hook for holding up your end.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2021 13:52
|
|