Nvil/VoidWorld
There was also Hexagon but I'm not sure if its still around. Oh, and Silo, but it seemed to have been abandoned for awhile.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay
- Thread starter Jacksinthe
- Start date
- Status
There was also Hexagon but I'm not sure if its still around. Oh, and Silo, but it seemed to have been abandoned for awhile.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Depends on what is running when you swap. Generally if I flip on my PS4 or XO I'm not using the PC. If I need to I have my 2nd monitor where Windows throws everything.
If you aren't running a program or launching it when switching, you can switch back and forth and everything will be the same like you never switched. Open apps or opening after switching causes window position issues.
No problem!
We mix a few different scales like 1:1, 1:5 and 1:10 and figuring out the ortho math happened early on when things would crawl all the time instead of being 1:1 mapped. Drove me bonkers until I looked at how the ortho size affected the viewport.
Yeah, that's my problem. I don't know why, but I pretty much never close out of Illustrator or GameMaker. According to Steam, in just over two years, I've already racked up 16392 hours in GameMaker. I guess it's because I'm hesitant to close out of something I'm "still working on", and there's always an open project in both of those.
Jacksinthe
Banned
I am OCD in the opposite direction
I have to close applications.Icyflamez96
Member
Yay more rectangular shapes.
I have to go to a timeshare for the next two days and i'm going to have to leave my computer behind. Its a bit bothersome since I wont be able to work on learning any of this stuff in that time frame. Hopefully the break doesn't throw me off too much...
I have to go to a timeshare for the next two days and i'm going to have to leave my computer behind. Its a bit bothersome since I wont be able to work on learning any of this stuff in that time frame. Hopefully the break doesn't throw me off too much...
Were you sandbagging that, or are they stupid hard to catch?
Also what do you earn for defeating them? I wasn't aware of any significant loot system in your game.
right now these kind give +1 cannon damage, and more importantly +1% cannon crit rate, which is a stat rarely granted.
Their hp/vanish time is still fluid. At current early game power levels it's pretty tough (not impossible). The intent is that new players probably would not successfully catch the ones early in the game.
Can't you just make backups regularly?
Theanine3D
Member
Yikes
This is seriously my worst fear.The editor locks up on me pretty frequently, and it's happened a few times while something was in the middle of saving. Thank goodness nothing's actually corrupted on me yet, but I'm paranoid enough that I make backups of my entire project multiple times throughout the day.
Anybody working on a game (or other software dev project) should be using version control software. Among other things it removes the need for separate "backups", you'll have a permanent record of all changes back to the beginning of the project and can go back to any old version at any time.
Still sucks if the engine can corrupt the project and make you lose the last hour's work, ofc, but there's no excuse for losing more than that.
Interesting. I imagine a lot of players will think it's superficial or a red herring like the ghost that appears in the middle of the video. When you first shoot at it, the red damage flash isn't significantly distinguishable from the brightness flickering it does otherwise. But curious and cruel players will try to kill it nonetheless, and word will get out.
Knowing how to code is kind of like riding a bike. The knowledge and practices come back to you pretty quickly. And two days is nothing. Besides, there are very few programmers who can program without looking up at the manual every once in a while. Having to refresh yourself on the functions, methods and particulars of a given language is pretty common, not just something that happens when you come back from breaks.
What will get you into trouble is if you forget the specifics of a certain project. Mostly this can be avoided by commenting your code well and keeping some notes on whatever you're working on at the moment. Personally, I keep a log every day of stuff that I've gotten done, and at the top of the log is a to-do list. Not everything I do comes from the to-do list, but in general it helps me keep track of where I've been and where I need to be at any time whether I've been at the desk for hours or just woke up.
I used version control, of course, but I took hard backups once every week and a harder backup once a month. I believe at the height of my paranoia I had seven active backups, four of which were cloud based.
Even putting back the SVN'd version makes it die at around 73% loaded... with useless log files that don't tell me anything. Cleared out all the caches, rebuilt everything I could.
No dice.
So much for that.
I do have an older hard backup rar from last month that I know still works that I might be able to go back to.
It's missing a hell of a lot of in-editor changes, though.
At least all my code still works and compiles.
I'm so glad I'm doing a mostly C++ project.
"Putting back"? As in, you check out a totally unrelated, fresh, known-good working copy from version control repo into a different working folder, and the engine/editor still won't load it because a bad crash previously occurred with another working copy?
If that's what's happening, then there either has to be some global cache or other data the engine/editor is maintaining which is corrupted or locked (in that case it can be tracked down, manually unlocked and/or deleted), or some part of the engine/editor processes are still alive in the OS, and can probably be tracked down and killed (and will also disappear in a reboot).
The last possibility I can think of is that the engine/editor has actually overwritten its own executables / static data, but that sounds too stupid to seriously consider before exhausting other options.
Yeah.
Gone back 3 revisions, all from scratch, and now it works.
Bizarrely, those other 2 were from way before today.
Time to try and rebuild basically all my work from the last week and see what I can add before it dies.
Good stuff dude. I really need to sit down and learn how to make decent looking visuals, I always get lazy and/or freeze up when it comes to pretty-ing up something. I never know where to start or even how to get something to look just nice on a basic shape level.
Given the symptoms you've described, in your shoes I'd be concerned about whether that kind of crash could silently corrupt the actual project data in a way that isn't immediately obvious, since about the worst thing that could happen is you unknowingly working on an already broken project and committing revisions of it over a longer stretch of time.
So before proceeding with actual work, I'd probably try to reproduce the corruption and figure out a bit more about it, most importantly how to detect it when it happens, and where it resides (cache files somewhere on disk / zombie process in memory / actual project files / ...) which also directly informs you of what the minimal/fastest procedure is to clear the mess and continue development when it happens.
Sparrowhawk
Member
I'll check this out. Is Wings 3D any good?
borborygmus
Member
Wings 3D is great but slightly unconventional in how you do things. Everything is done via context menu, and you can left, middle or right click on each menu command to access various options.
It's not a full suite, so it doesn't support any kind of animation and rigging, nor is rendering practical.
I'm not an expert, but I find that I model things much faster in Wings 3D compared to other software I've tried.
I never found L-systems particularly intuitive myself. I'm interested in procedural "nature" in general and found a lot of research papers on the subject. One of them [1] I started to implement in Unity3D a while ago because it was very simple and made things more geometry based rather than rules based. I had the base trunk and branches generation working, I still have the code somewhere if you're interested.
[1] Xu, Ling, and David Mould. "A procedural method for irregular tree models." Computers & Graphics 36.8 (2012): 1036-1047.
Not sure how the whole project could be corrupted after such an error. Are you sure you really made a clean reset to the latest working state? I don't know of any cache or something that exists outside of your project directory. But I guess you already tried removing everything except the uproject file + Content & Source folders? The rest should be rebuilt automatically.
I only had such "Editor doesn't start" problems after upgrading to a newer UE4 version. Some blueprints got corrupted and I had to manually remove them from the Content directory one by one to find the corrupted ones. That was painful.
I hope you had tons of backups? D:
Also don't forget to report that to Epic so they can track it.
...wait, when was the SVN version from? You made a completely new directory with files from SVN that opened correctly before, and now it does not open? Is there any possibility that there are some local files SVN did not back up? That doesn't make any sense otherwise, unless a broken project got stored to SVN, in which case you'd start stepping back in time.
Make sure you check other locations, since UE4 might store some local files elsewhere for all I know.
*edit* Beaten hugely by everyone else, sorry. I agree with the above posters that in my opinion, you should probably spend a little time (a day?) looking into it. It doesn't make any logical sense without some sort of cache or local files and I think dismissing it and just moving on may cause you to get hit by it in the future. If a project opened a while back, and SVN backed it up exactly, then it should always open again.
There's a lot of caches in UE4, DerivedDataCache being the most prominent and it can break indeed.
That looks awesome, as that in-engine or prerendered? I really like the simplistic style, really nice AO as well.
Dead Prince
Banned
i should have started this years ago. learning right now it's harder than i thought considering my schedule but it gives me something to do on those off time lol.
Nice! Have you thought about making smaller modular elements (A/C units on windows, pipes, eaves troughs, awnings, shutters, signs/flags in windows, etc.) to give you more variety from the same 6-9 base buildings?
Pre-rendered in MagicaVoxel, but will look the same in UE4. I've noticed that the AO is pretty similar.
I'm thinking about it. Just need to find a good way of implementing it seeing how my city is randomly generated. All the building are divided in floors so I can make a couple different floors with different props at least.
I still want to keep the windows as free as possible though. I need to be able to hit the windows with the packages.
Lol... that's an amazing potential thread title.
(sorry for the messy gif)
Capra demon!
Don't tell Namco.
I've had a handful of snarky comments since Ghost Song was a thing -- Every now and then -- About how I'm ripping off Nintendo or this or that. Last night my video got a comment "This dev is fishing for DMCA notices" or something because of one vague similarity or another.
Well, for one thing, anyone who thinks using a similar mechanic or having an enemy that behaves in a similar way is a DMCA violation is fuckin' crazy. Even in AAA space every game is borrowing heavily from something before. Every FPS looks the same in so many ways. After gears, other games put in active reload. Dark Souls spawned Lord of the Fallen which has uncanny similarities, and stuff like the great looking Salt & Sanctuary which is basically a top to bottom 2D version of Dark Souls.
So there's no legal problem when it comes to something "looking similar" to something else. That's not how it works.
Another thing, though, is that this whole "it looks like Metroid" thing is working for me. It helps me so much. For every one person who views the similarities as a negative, there are probably 100 more who are starving for a Metroid game. Nintendo shitting on this franchise turned out to really pay off for me. If the game is as successful as we're cautiously hoping, then I'll have a foot in the door to make whatever I feel like next time.
What were we talking about again? Rant over.
Copyright protection is extremely narrow when it comes to making a similar product. As long as you're not calling your main character Samus, you have practically and legally nothing to worry about. There have been almost zero cases and law suits for making a similar game that was not actively re-using the same code or assets.
Anyway, messing around with shaders and visual styles.
This is using Unity4's Lighted Toon shader, modded with noambient and a very hard-edged ramp. Does anyone know how I could make the grey-ish skulls and masks look more white?
Killer7 meets Dark Souls. You sold me.
That is actually exactly what I am going for. Little bit of Shadow of the Colossus as well, with some big-ass enemies to climb and kill.
Geminosity
Member
It's always kind of weirded me out how in some cases people will call something 'copying' while in others they simple call it 'belonging to a genre.' E.g. if you make a 'first person shooter' you don't get people climbing all over you screaming "You're ripping off wolfenstein!!!"
Thank you! It's not my strong point, but I'm glad you like it.
dark_inferno
Member
Well we have have reached like 1 million different games right now. There is no way somebody can make a game that doesnt look like another game. Every idea,every story, every feature and every design in human history already used.
Sad but true. The only thing we can make is a game that holds well in todays standard and is unique for its release window. Thats when a game becomes a real gem and not a ripoff. Ghost Song looks like a Dark Souls + Metroid mix. 2 beloved franchises. So one that is barely used and one that is overflowing the market right now. But does it damage the game? No because it looks to be a really polished game that deserves any right to be on the market.
Thats what i have to say about the whole "It looks like XYZ issue".
Jacksinthe
Banned
A genre isn't a like-for-like specific system, artwork, icon, etc and yes, some do have their wings burned just a bit. There is a gap between creative interpretation and emulating, sometimes small, but it exists and shouldn't be crossed. Genres exist as a classification, not an individual IP. Not saying that about anything on this page, just a generalization.It's always kind of weirded me out how in some cases people will call something 'copying' while in others they simple call it 'belonging to a genre.' E.g. if you make a 'first person shooter' you don't get people climbing all over you screaming "You're ripping off wolfenstein!!!"
(sorry for the messy gif)
Sick stuff, I like the glowing red eyes. This a full project or just a prototype?
It's always kind of weirded me out how in some cases people will call something 'copying' while in others they simple call it 'belonging to a genre.' E.g. if you make a 'first person shooter' you don't get people climbing all over you screaming "You're ripping off wolfenstein!!!"
It comes down to how significant the differences are. There were a lot of people calling other FPSs Doom clones in the early days. But it didn't take long for people to see that there's a whole lot you can do in the first-person shooting space. Starting out, it seemed like first-person shooting was the primary tenet of Doom and Wolfenstein each. So other games copying that felt like clones. And some of them were. I'm not ignoring that. But the more first person shooters were made, the more you could see that what set Doom and Wolfenstein apart was not the control mechanics but the aesthetics, level and enemy design.
There are a lot of games right now that are being called Rogue-like that have almost nothing in common with Rogue. Some of the earlier Rogue-likes did, but not so much anymore. I think that misnomer may be on the way out in favor of more accurate nomenclature, but my point remains. Genres start out as a few clones. They turn into genres by proving themselves worthy additions and not just leeches.
This is probably a stupid question but i returned to c++ after a lot of time and now i don't remember anything! XD
About template classes and their subclasses, if i declare something like:
template <class T> class List:
{
class Node
{
T element;
...
}
...
}
element will always be of the same class T of the template class List or the subclass Node must be template too?
About template classes and their subclasses, if i declare something like:
template <class T> class List:
{
class Node
{
T element;
...
}
...
}
element will always be of the same class T of the template class List or the subclass Node must be template too?
Geminosity
Member
I agree with these points and I'm not excusing the straight-up rip-offs you see on mobile games where they pretty much lift games wholesale. I was just more bemused that games that are alike without being actually the same often get accused of being 'copies' as well until there's enough of them to slowly shift it into being a 'genre' where it's suddenly acceptable, as abe describes
Icyflamez96
Member
Yeah I imagine if you've been doing it for a while, it's nothing. I just started with this stuff and feel almost restless about staying on it. I'm sure i'm overreacting though. Welp the plans were called off so i'm not going out of town anymore anyway lol.
The orthographic camera view in Unity did most of the work for me on that front.
- Status