Thanks! Correct, that's Unity
.I started developping the game on XNA but gave up after a few months and switched to Unity.
-
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.
Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
- Status
Thanks! Correct, that's Unity
.I started developping the game on XNA but gave up after a few months and switched to Unity.
BlastProcessing
Member
This is what cool sounding code names are for!
Jacksinthe
Banned
Mecanim? MECANIM?I haven't messed with Unity in a while. New job is kicking my ass.
I love all the work I see. And I must be one of the few who likes mecanim.
FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU YOU SLIMY PIECE O...
I'll be fine, I'm calming down. I just...
MECANIM?
XD
electroflame
Member
Probably due largely to the fact that (in it's current form anyway) it's garbage.
A lot of systems rely on it, or tie into it heavily, so it's kind of annoying that a lot of times Unity tries to force you into using it.fuzzy_slippers
Neo Member
Mecanim is pretty half assed. You can definitely use it in a game but its also full of a lot of dumb workflow decisions and it can be quite buggy.
I think mecanim, like a lot of Unity features, has a honeymoon period before it drives you nuts. At first it seems awesome but as your projects go on you'll see all its warts and how little of it you can fix yourself.
Things will be improving a lot in 5.x but if you have a 4 license you won't be seeing it without upgrading. I'm also not sure if the mecanim improvements are going to hit 5.0 or just sometime in 5.x.
I think mecanim, like a lot of Unity features, has a honeymoon period before it drives you nuts. At first it seems awesome but as your projects go on you'll see all its warts and how little of it you can fix yourself.
Things will be improving a lot in 5.x but if you have a 4 license you won't be seeing it without upgrading. I'm also not sure if the mecanim improvements are going to hit 5.0 or just sometime in 5.x.
Ha, this is exactly my experience with a lot of Unity.
I haven't done much animation within Unity yet, so that's probably why I haven't started hating Mecanim yet.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Yups. We have several animations we just control in code instead of mecanim. Mostly for timing critical situations where mecanim has failed us the most. Since all of the main character's actions are sprites it is easy to on-demand statistics if we need on any frame which, with the pacing and action in later levels, proves useful.
Mecanim is OK. That's it. Not good, not great, but OK.
Mecanim is OK. That's it. Not good, not great, but OK.
Mystic River
Member
Ahh... taxes... please let us know how you managed it , I don't know where to start yet with that but I think I should start the application process to get exception so I don't have to pay US taxes since I am not a US citizen nor living there, anyone selling through steam for example and living abroad?
On the other side, I am still working on my game and finished something today, here is an image and some details about it....
Green areas have enough supply of oxygen, while red are very low or almost depleted, fire in red areas will extinguish itself after a few minutes but if the supply of oxygen continues it will still spread around.
If you want to see more details check my indiedb news that will be published in the next few hours with more details about it.
Don't worry, mecanim loves you and soon it will capture you through the use of its skillful touch. You'll be a regular customer in no time.
TheHollowNight
Member
Hello everybody! It's been a while since I've posted in here!
But thankfully, I have a lot to show this Saturday!
Firstly, we have a new devblog post detailing the creation process of our main character, Freja!
http://devblog.monothetic.com/post/94830612735/designing-freja
Next up, a bunch of new images! Yay images!
One of our themed 'Loot Rooms', treasure rooms that have the potential to spawn inside a level:
An overview of a fully generated level!:
One of the new enemies not tied to a faction:
And some new concept art for one of the 3 main 'factions' you'll encounter in the game:
But thankfully, I have a lot to show this Saturday!
Firstly, we have a new devblog post detailing the creation process of our main character, Freja!
http://devblog.monothetic.com/post/94830612735/designing-freja
Next up, a bunch of new images! Yay images!
One of our themed 'Loot Rooms', treasure rooms that have the potential to spawn inside a level:
An overview of a fully generated level!:
One of the new enemies not tied to a faction:
And some new concept art for one of the 3 main 'factions' you'll encounter in the game:
Jacksinthe
Banned
So we literally coded about 90% of our SHMUP last night. Waiting on our artist to put it all together but I will say testing the game playing as a box that shoots other boxes with boxes is hilarious. Reaching that 50x point multiplier is difficult but rad and addicting.
Candescence
Member
So, slight progress report, I feel dumb for not figuring out how the mecanim transitions work. But I've got worse problems at the moment. Movement is working properly (though walking/running is slippery and jumping always causes forward momentum for some reason), and I've got a basic lock-on function (target is based on what you're looking at), blocking, and a dodge roll animation.
Now I need to implement attacks... And a combo system. Hoo, boy.
Now I need to implement attacks... And a combo system. Hoo, boy.
Your art is beautiful!
------------
Since it's Saturday I thought I'd share some of my own progress. To get more familiar with Unity I've been making a multi-player FPS modeled after UT99 and Quake.
Here's a screenshot and quick WebM of what I've accomplished so far. I modeled the level in Blender, the gun is a Blend Swap I found, and all the textures are free from the Asset Store.
I present, SlaughterFest99, (working title
)Be sure to enable audio!
http://a.pomf.se/caaptg.webm
Next up for today is elevators and more modeling for the towers!
Some gifs of the game I'm currently working on: FreezeME
:O Loving the look of this! As I saw the gifs I was thinking how it resembles a N64-era platformer, and then I read the end of the post, looks excellent!
Crossposting from the ScreenshotSaturday thread:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Today I'll be posting some screenshots of newly added decoration for one of the themes for Beat Beat Shooter, introducing: Planets for the space theme!
Colors still need some adjustement based on the different palletes in the game, but overall I'm satisfied on how they look, as they help add some variety to the background.
James Coote
Neo Member
Spent the last week making a trailer for my game. A lot of the feedback on the video was that it wasn't obvious how you play, so I created this gif:
Thinking gif's might be an effective way for showing stuff like this where a full-blown video is overkill
Thinking gif's might be an effective way for showing stuff like this where a full-blown video is overkill
James Coote
Neo Member
I know there are a whole bunch of sites that post up the weekly/monthly eShop deals as news articles or on forums, so wonder how much is to do with people finding out about games by just looking at those posts?
This is awesome to see the process. Thanks for sharing!
HellBlazer
Member
Interesting how that works. I would also bet that if the current sale price was just the regular price, it wouldn't sell as much, just because of that deal mindset.
"What do you mean we need to rotate our coordinate system when exporting 3D models, that sounds like too much work."
TheHollowNight
Member
So graceful, so majestic.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ld30-theme-voting-round-1-of-5/
Round 1 of next weekend's Ludum Dare voting has started! I didn't like most of these themes so I only voted up the following:
Round 1 of next weekend's Ludum Dare voting has started! I didn't like most of these themes so I only voted up the following:
- Everyone Is A Monster
- For Science
- It's A Trap
- The Power Of Machines
Absolutely. Nothing says buy me now like "SALE". I now wish instead of launching at 2.99, I would have launched at 3.99. 1 dollar difference of course, but when combined with all sales, adds up to quite a bit in difference
If there's one thing I can't get enough of, it's characters doing in-game actions while in their reference pose. I think it all begun when I found a YouTube video of a modded Left 4 Dead server where zombies moved around like that and didn't even attack (they only got in the way of the players), and it culminated in spotting background characters in their reference poses in a scene of the Argentine theatrical release of Foosball.
I guess I just love it when games manage to break badly, but not to the point where they stop working.
Candescence
Member
bwahahahahaha
Also, noticing the dialogue window, considering I'm intending to go with dynamic, out-of-cutscene dialogue the vast majority of the time, I'm trying to think about how to handle it for both 2D and 3D. The basic requirements are:
- Can be read and understood without the need for voice acting
- Readable (duh)
- The speaker can be easily identified
- The speech can be easily read within a reasonable time frame
- The text and any accompanying graphics don't cover up anything that might be important
I was thinking of using speech bubbles, and while they do work reasonably well in 2D with a large/zoomed out view, the problem of when the speaker is out of frame is probably the obvious one. Hmm. Might be best to have a semi-transparent dialogue window at the bottom of the screen (maybe with the speaker's portrait), with a few bubbles below it or to the side that store the last few pieces of dialogue just in case, the dialogue window in the gif actually looks pretty ideal.
I really proud of this one
Is that little green glint from the scarf "kicking up" the grass?
Yeah, the problem with the whole off-screen thing is that the speech bubble could come in basically anywhere, and potentially block/be blocked by another piece of the UI, or important in-game elements.
For reference, that GIF is heavily cropped. The actual screen-size of my dialogue box is proportionally smaller, see:
Candescence
Member
Okay, I see what you're going for, and it does look pretty good. Though the screen resolution is a bit odd - you're using Unity, right? That would probably explain it. Nice interface aesthetic, really fits with the feel of the game.
While Unity's current GUI system can be a bit of a bitch to work with (until they finally release 4.6, good grief), the actual interface is probably the easy part - the hard part is figuring out how to store and grab the various dialogue sequences. Probably in some sort of external file format, while Unity webplayer can't use those, that's not really an issue for me, I suppose.
not only that, there's grass bits that kick up as you walk around.
Stunning. I love the little details.
I look at the way things are built, and I decide "mmm, not enough" and this is what I come up with.
- Oh, that's just a cropped version of the Unity editor. The game is a proper 1080p.
- 4.6 is supposed to be decent; I believe it's an integrated version of the nGUI system...which is what I'm currently using. Presumably Unity hired the nGUI dude? Not sure. But nGUI is good.
- Basically what I do is import a bunch of audio into the project, numbered..."m3voice19.mp3", for instance, is the third mission's nineteenth bit of dialogue. I then have a text file for each mission that contains all the subtitles for that mission, in order. I load all relevant voice files and subtitles (sticking those into an array). Then, via my event system, I call a VoiceEvent and feed in an integer. It then plays the audio file, loads the relevant subtitle into the text field in the GUI element, and voila! I also check for when the audio file is done playing, and then hide the GUI element.
This approach is not ideal for games with lots of branching dialogue...if that were the case, I would make a special tool to help me build tree-structures of sentences, and have it save into a nice file format. But my game is largely linear, so it makes sense to just do things mostly sequentially.
Kitbash
Member
The NGUI guy joined Unity in November 2012 and left November 2013. I don't know how much the new system has in common with NGUI but it sure would be nice if they'd release it already!
Candescence
Member
- Yeah, I pretty much figured that.
- Actually, yeah, it is. The NGui guy was working for Unity, and he even gave a presentation last year on how 4.6's GUI system is literally an improved version of NGUI. Which is why I'm not buying NGUI, as it's basically gonna be official in 4.6 anyway. Lets hope it doesn't take too long.
- Interesting idea, but it's not ideal for my needs, as what I'm trying to do has a dialogue wheel system. I'm personally thinking of having at least two XML files - one for the dialogue wheel sets, the other for actual sets of dialogue. Each option and each line of dialogue has its own properties (speaker, portrait, sound file, length of time the dialogue is up, etc.). But the main issue is that external files would have to be encrypted if you don't want players messing with them.
Also, having a lot of dialogue would require huge XML files, or a lot of them. Though it may be ideal to have multiple XML files anyway for organization purposes, such as individual files for various categories, such as conversations with a single character, NPCs/events in various locations, and other circumstances, though knowing which files to grab might be a bit of a bitch.
okay, pencils down. game's ready for tomorrow's video. gonna chill a while and then record the thing. gonna be similar in concept to the original video -- continuous gameplay recorded all in one take, bookended by minimal text. It should also be a roughly similar length.
room transitions are still a bit jarring sometimes, as before, (because of the assets being loaded) haven't figured out the best way to do this yet, but other than that it's looking pretty good I think! can't wait for all to see. been putting this sucker off for long enough. Most of what causes the delay is waiting on like -- stuff around the edges. most the core assets (at least for what's in the video) have already been done a while. Just a matter of getting those final pieces done and put together, which involves going a bit sideways in service of releasing a progress video.
room transitions are still a bit jarring sometimes, as before, (because of the assets being loaded) haven't figured out the best way to do this yet, but other than that it's looking pretty good I think! can't wait for all to see. been putting this sucker off for long enough. Most of what causes the delay is waiting on like -- stuff around the edges. most the core assets (at least for what's in the video) have already been done a while. Just a matter of getting those final pieces done and put together, which involves going a bit sideways in service of releasing a progress video.
For reference, I think any files located inside the Assets folder gets added to the big .assets file upon build, and are as difficult to extract as any other file in your project. Which may be easy or hard, I don't know.
Candescence
Member
Eh, good enough. I know it's there's no point overdoing that sort of thing, people will figure out how to get the file one way or another if they really want to.
Now, I just need to figure out how to structure the XML files to grab whatever information I need out of them in the best fashion, and that's not always obvious. I'm gonna have to think on that in the shower, methinks, might write down a template structure and post it here to see what you guys think.
Edit: Well, I wrote something up, it's a bit simple, but they are both likely functional.
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8">
<DialogueSets>
<Dialogue>
<Name>Example</Name> // the string identifier for this set of dialogue lines.
<LineCount>1</LineCount> // zero-based number of lines
<WheelTrigger>Example</WheelTrigger> // if this is not null, override the current dialogue wheel with the named wheel instead.
<Line id="0"> // each line is listed and triggered in order.
<Speaker>SomePerson</Speaker> // the text displayed in the name tag of the dialogue box.
<Portrait>SomePerson_Neutral.png</Portrait> // specifies a particular character portrait.
<Duration>5</Duration> // the length of time before the next line is triggered.
<Sound>ExampleLine.wav</Sound> // if not null, trigger the specified sound file.
<Text>This is a line of dialogue.</Text> // the text for the dialogue/subtitle.
<Line>
</Dialogue>
</DialogueSets>
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8">
<DialogueWheelSets>
<DialogueWheel>
<Name>Example</Name> // the name of the wheel.
<Option id="0"> // the id identifies the option's place on the wheel, starting from the right side and going clockwise around the wheel.
<Name>ExampleChoice</Name> // the name of the choice. Probably not important.
<DialogueSet>ExampleDialogue</DialogueSet> // triggers a set of dialogue.
<Text>This is an example dialogue wheel.</Text> // the option's text, preferably shown in its entirely.
</Option>
</DialogueWheel>
</DialogueWheelSets>Thanks, I love the art of your game too! The palette chosen and the 2d designs are just great!
Thank YOU for the nice comment
Diablohead
Member
Just flag it as a known shippable and patch it in 6 months, no one will notice.
blastprocessor
The Amiga Brotherhood
Can anyone recommend a 3d game engine book or a site? I'm not looking at using an off the shelf 3d engine such as cry engine, unreal, unity etc.
I know the basics already such as matrices, transformation, lighting, gouraud shading, back face culling, painter's algorithm (l know it's garbage lol but familiar with z-buffer). I experienced this back at Uni (some time ago l should add) and also played around with Open GL in C++.
What l want to learn
Imagine i've got a 3d maze with some basic cube objects. What l want to do is learn how traverse through the scene with basic collision detection for the maze and the cubes...
If l have this knowledge then l can really starting playing around with some ideas using the Oculus Rift R2 kit i've purchased recently.. I'm not looking at anything fancier than this.
I know the basics already such as matrices, transformation, lighting, gouraud shading, back face culling, painter's algorithm (l know it's garbage lol but familiar with z-buffer). I experienced this back at Uni (some time ago l should add) and also played around with Open GL in C++.
What l want to learn
Imagine i've got a 3d maze with some basic cube objects. What l want to do is learn how traverse through the scene with basic collision detection for the maze and the cubes...
If l have this knowledge then l can really starting playing around with some ideas using the Oculus Rift R2 kit i've purchased recently.. I'm not looking at anything fancier than this.
You might want to check http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=858082 , not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for.
- Status