Game Development

12:32 AM

there should be a law against serving minty brownies with other food if there's no way to know that the brownies are minty

whether you like mint or not, one bite of that and the rest of the food is ruined

maybe not a law, but like a social norm or something

people who break the rule get death glares from middle-aged ladies

SpartanDonut

1:09 AM

You know what I hate... the "ebola crisis"

This retardation needs to stop

Pip

@SpartanDonut huh.... interesting

SpartanDonut

ikr

Pip

my older model only has a regular size SD

Alright all, heading to bed

night!

SpartanDonut

The ending of this video is awesome - youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU

Almo

but

@SpartanDonut yueah

SpartanDonut

1:25 AM

I was reading an article about this nurse that was released from mandatory quarantine (as if she doesn't know what the symptoms of ebola are or what she should do when she exhibits them) and then subsequently there was a little video that automatically came on and told me all about how 94% of people polled (whoever that is) agree that these people should suffer mandatory quarantines

ThePhD

@JohnMcDonald Don't forget to PM me the jam starts. Also making sure you see my name!

SpartanDonut

1:59 AM

@ThePhD you should get an email with your words when it starts

Icy Defiance

apparently that rocket that blew up was made by a private company called Orbital Sciences, and because of it their stock is down over 15% after hours and still falling. google.com/finance?cid=419621

Almo

2:14 AM

good time to buy them if you think they'll recover

@IcyDefiance one game?

Icy Defiance

all right

BlueBug

Unity just corrupted my project

HOW DEAR YOU! I HAD FAITH IN YOU!

U R NO GAME MAKER!

Almo

heh

version control man :)

BlueBug

aye. ty git-hub-god saved me this time, again. Back to 2hours ago.

Almo

at least it's not last month :)

Icy Defiance

2:19 AM

make it 20 minutes, since you know what you did

BlueBug

start to type at maximum speed!!!!

shit I think it did again.

corrupted my project.

there's something wrong with baking Android APK... I must be using not so fitting version of APK for Unity.

AttackingHobo

4:17 AM

Messing around with 360 degree rendering. gfycat.com/FirsthandFormalGalah

2

Aidan Mueller

4:46 AM

Deployed 2/3.

AttackingHobo

Aidan Mueller

Cool m8.

AttackingHobo

check out the animated version above

SpartanDonut

@AttackingHobo ++ as usual

AttackingHobo

@SpartanDonut you like?

SpartanDonut

4:54 AM

Always

AttackingHobo

hahaha

gonna look at it on my google cardboard

with a 360degree viewer

SpartanDonut

Sounds fun :D

I think I'm going to hold out for a consumer release of the OR

Maybe...

AttackingHobo

get the note 4

SpartanDonut

I'm up for a new phone in January... not sure what I'm going to get

There's a part of me hoping MS comes out with something nice by then

Otherwise I'm likely getting an Android of sorts

AttackingHobo

note 4 has the best screen of any phone to date, has the pen, amazing multi window technology, optical image stabalization. 60fps 1080P. 4k recording. super fast procressor, 3gigs of ram, and you can use it for VR with low persistance images

Gonna be getting one soon

►

SpartanDonut

5:00 AM

Ooooo

AttackingHobo

►

hahhaa

you can split screen vidoes

Aidan Mueller

@AttackingHobo Looks cool.

SpartanDonut

I personally am not on the "largest screen possible" hype train for phones

Aidan Mueller

It also looks like you recorded it with a security camera or something. The static actually looks cool this time.

SpartanDonut

I understand the usability but I don't use my phone a whole lot

Aidan Mueller

5:11 AM

SpartanDonut

My phone is basically calls, texts, emails, IMBD, and occasionally Youtube

AttackingHobo

what mod is that?

SpartanDonut

And of course some googling / web browsing

but nothing excessive and never multiple things at the same time

AttackingHobo

@SpartanDonut web browsing is so nice on a large screen

Aidan Mueller

Now all of kerbin can experience satellite tv.

@AttackingHobo Which one?

SpartanDonut

5:12 AM

Meh

AttackingHobo

what mods are you running?

honestly the note 4 is not that big

Aidan Mueller

LOL. Hold on a second.

AttackingHobo

people are just wierd about it

its only slightly bigger than a gs5

SpartanDonut

my HTC 8x has a 4.3 which I'm quite happy with

AttackingHobo

Im getting it for the screen and the VR mainly

SpartanDonut

5:14 AM

I hear ya

Such a phone wouldn't get the love it deserves from me

The one thing I would look forward to from an Android phone over a Windows phone is Coin

Other than that.... ehhhhhhhhh

Aidan Mueller

OK:
RemoteTech2.
MechJeb2 (for info windows, I don't use it to cheat (unless I'm being lazy in sandbox)).
EnvironmentalVisual Enhancements.
Kerbal Attachment System.
Procedural Fairings.
Chatterer (totally useless, totally fun!).
NavHud.
Action Groups Extended (super awesome -- because who doesn't need 250 action groups).
Distant Object (makes satellites look like white dots in the night sky depending on sun position and what not, and renders on-rails vessels).

@AttackingHobo I totally recommend all of these mods.

AttackingHobo

@AidanMueller 0_0

SpartanDonut

Kerbal use Steamworks?

AttackingHobo

I fear my fps

nop

don't think so

SpartanDonut

damn

One game I would seriously consider using some mods for

Aidan Mueller

5:20 AM

@AttackingHobo I don't even have a good computer. Most of these mods don't affect FPS that much.

SpartanDonut

I should really play again either way since they didn't have missions or anything back when I tried it

Steamworks would make it that much better though

Aidan Mueller

Maybe EnvironmentalVisualEnhancementns, but that's it.

And distant object is pretty light weight too.

@AttackingHobo Oh! I forgot the lazor docking cam. I only have the docking cam, not the rest of the lazor stuff.

At least get chatterer.

AttackingHobo

@AidanMueller I sent an email to my future self to download and play those mods. I don't have time at the moment, but I really do want to get around to play some kSP

AttackingHobo

6:00 AM

@SpartanDonut @AidanMueller

Icy Defiance

6:58 AM

geez, what is it with games and quick time events for final bosses. just saw it for the second time this month.

really disappointing

why do people think this is a good idea?

Stack Exchange

0

Q: I belive this question should appear on GD stack

I am a Ukrainian game developer and we are about to run a croudfunding campaign for our first title. For quite a while I was looking for ways to run the campaign on Kickstarter (it does not support Ukraine), but could not as there are zero information on the web about it. Our only option was to r...

discussion

Lasse

7:26 AM

@IcyDefiance "it's casual! others do it too to get the casual attention for the game!"

that's the usual one I hear every day at work when making design decisions

and I god damn hate it

Icy Defiance

casual players don't pay attention to anything other than madden, CoD, and a few phone games

if you're not one of those things, casual players are not your market

oh, and mario related things

Lasse

7:49 AM

still every game tries to get their attention

well, almost

Roy T.

8:41 AM

Damn, someone answered a question I had on SO 14 months later. Before that 0 answers or comments, and damn its the correct answer!

user92578

10:36 AM

Hey

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

@IcyDefiance Generalization much? :P

user92578

10:57 AM

Game's dropping frames a lot and I have no idea why... :(

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

11:14 AM

Profile that fucker!

user92578

11:29 AM

I did... no usefull info

snake5

@Tyyppi_77 dropping as in "some frames are not rendered" or "low fps" (or both)?

user92578

low fps

snake5

if CPU profiling didn't provide any useful info, it's got something to do with the GPU

try disabling things one by one to see what makes things slow

user92578

I didn't touch the rendering so it should not be GPU

snake5

what do you mean, you didn't "touch" it? does the game not render things using the GPU?

is it some kind of html5 canvas / software rendering/rasterization-based game?

user92578

11:38 AM

I did some refactoring over the weekend and after that it the frames now vary a lot

user92578

I did not change the rendering code

user92578

hence no GPU stuff changed causing the slowdown

snake5

then the profiler should provide useful info, assuming that it can read the debug symbols / call stack

user92578

the profiling info was pretty much the same as before

user92578

same stuff showing up that are done loadtime, not runtime

snake5

11:41 AM

ignore that

just hide/remove all data related to loading

can't tell much more without seeing the data

user92578

really annoying to do stuff to improve the environment to dev in and it results in performance problems... I don't feel working on my game now at all

Roy T.

@Tyyppi_77 if its not CPU related, maybe you changed how data is located in memory?

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

That's why you have source control and only change small pieces at a time.

Roy T.

@Tyyppi_77 could be a GC or chache coherency issue

@William'MindWorX'Mariager you cant always change small pieces when refactoring

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

True

Hence, Source Control :P

user92578

11:46 AM

@William'MindWorX'Mariager I have VC and you can't do a total refactor on Entities with small pieces

snake5

@RoyT. that's not going to make a big difference usually

Roy T.

@snake5 thats a dangerous statement

Data is king

@William'MindWorX'Mariager true, source control is also king! :P

snake5

@RoyT. no need to add drama

on PS3, cache timings were really big

Roy T.

Pools are the righteous leader trying to take their rightful place by driving away the evil ursurper

snake5

for CPUs made in the last few years, the timings are extremely small

not that big of a performance hit if you do things suboptimally

Roy T.

11:50 AM

Damn, wait, I see I used cache coherency wrongfully here

Me and my big words

I meant cache misses

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

array[x,y] vs array[y,x]

snake5

@RoyT. yeah, those are not that big of a deal until you miss every time you access the memory

Roy T.

@William'MindWorX'Mariager that could have a big impact indeed

snake5

assuming new CPUs, of course

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

@RoyT. Indeed

snake5

11:53 AM

@William'MindWorX'Mariager doesn't look like something to do on a loop, every frame, though

Roy T.

I've seen games crumble to a stand still, that were running at 60fps after someone started investigating how data was layed out

user92578

The biggest change is that all the parameters that the entity class had are now separated in different stucts that are then the members of the entity class

snake5

@RoyT. what does that mean?

Roy T.

@Tyyppi_77 C#, C++/

user92578

C++

Roy T.

11:54 AM

@Tyyppi_77 are structs allocated on the stack in C++? That could be it. Passing around pointers is a lot cheaper than passing whole structs

But I dont know enough C++ to make sure this statement is 100% accurate

user92578

They are stored as pointers

snake5

@RoyT. not going to be a bottleneck anyway

Roy T.

@snake5 does what mean?

@snake5 according to your last few comments nothing is going be a bottleneck :). Something has to be the bottleneck

@Tyyppi_77 thats not it then :)

snake5

@RoyT. do you mean that games became slower once someone started to look at them? that's more like quantum physics

@RoyT. yes, algorithms

Roy T.

@snake5 I used to believe in big-oh... but then I started working at game companies :P

Its definitely a factor, but data layout, and constant factor are so important

snake5

11:56 AM

@RoyT. for which platforms?

Roy T.

You can even often find algorithms which have a slightly worse computational complexity that in practice (given that the number of iterations is not extreme) are almost always faster, because they play nicer with the PC architecture.

@snake5 PC and Xbox360

user92578

The method that gets called the most in my code is the destructor of a vector

snake5

@RoyT. x360 being slow because of cache misses I can understand

not so much with a 2012+ PC

@Tyyppi_77 doesn't sound so good

Roy T.

Latency difference between cache and memory is still a thousand fold (if not more)

user92578

and that's only 0.15s Exclusive

snake5

11:58 AM

@RoyT. I measured it, doesn't appear to be

user92578

@snake5 that's been there from the beginning of my project, so nothing new there

Roy T.

And GPU memory latency is more

Eh

You measured it?

user92578

snake5

@RoyT. things like this: stackoverflow.com/questions/21369381/measuring-cache-latencies

Roy T.

@snake5 Intel i7 cache latency is 5 cycles (lets assume a 3GHz CPU, thats 5/3 000 000 000

@snake5 memory latency is 1 ns (DDR3)

snake5

12:00 PM

@RoyT. some instructions are that long (and even longer, like sin/cos)

Roy T.

Oh wait that is CAS, thats not when the data is actually at the CPU

snake5

for the PS3, it used to be about 200 cycles, if I remember correctly

Roy T.

Anyway, we can argue this, but I have actually rewritten algorithms to take in account memory layout. Simple tweaks such as row first or column first, and they had affect

snake5

@Tyyppi_77 why the hell does a 2d vector have a destructor?

doesn't seem like the problem but worth mentioning

user92578

Will it be faster if I take that one out?

snake5

12:02 PM

@RoyT. of course

user92578

@snake5 yeah

snake5

@RoyT. such loops would miss cache A LOT

Roy T.

true

Oh wait

are we on the same side

snake5

not likely with simple object traversals

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Considering he's using a component system, there's plenty of loops to miss caches in as well.

Roy T.

12:03 PM

I wasnt arguing that a single cache miss would be measurable

I as talking algorithms

snake5

@RoyT. I don't think there should be any sides

Roy T.

fair enough

snake5

I'm simply saying that cache misses aren't as important as they once were

even more so with new CPUs

@William'MindWorX'Mariager not likely to miss cache for a million times, as would be the case with a wrong order of pixels while iterating a big image

Roy T.

brb

Martin Sojka

12:41 PM

Cache misses are mostly something you keep in mind while profiling, not so much during development.

Like, when two same-looking loops perform orders of magnitude differently, you know where to look.

(Or even the same loop on slightly different hardware)

user92578

Found my old Gui thingy for an OpenTTD clone that I never made:

user92578

Almo

1:36 PM

what I want in the fluid webgl thing is the ability to draw in some solid shapes

@SpartanDonut @IcyDefiance beware playing LoL with me... I've won 7 of my last 9 games now.

sorry 5 of the last 6 for ranked

7 of 9 includes other game modes

8

Q: Is vanilla JS still considered a library?

I very recently found out that VanillaJS (document?) is a library that's just bundled with 99% browsers and isn't exactly native JavaScript (shock of my life). While writing a lib of my own I normally avoid all helpful things, mostly libs. Now I have three questions: Is VanillaJS still consider...

javascript libraries third-party-libraries dom

user92578

hmm, my shaders for an old OpenGL project have stopped working...

Almo

rewrite them

should be fun right?

user92578

It's somethng about the version tag

user92578

changed from 330 to 410 and it works almost now

user92578

gl_FragColor seems to be deprecated

user92578

1:49 PM

how do I fix that?

user92578

just out a color? out vec4 fragColor?

Almo

I have no clue; never wrote a shader

I have only directly messed with polygons a few times

I'm usually on higher-level stuff than that.

user92578

now it works!

Almo

good deal :)

but I still say rewriting it would have been more fun

must say something witty... all my starred messages have dropped off the starboard

user92578

but the model is completely gray :(

user92578

2:07 PM

(or pink, depending on the ambient color)

user92578

seems like the way to do gl_FragColor in version 410 is to use out vec4 FragColor

user92578

But this doesn't seem to be overriden or something

user92578

ah, there we go

Almo

Pu ray stay shion may ta ru soo la imu eh dee shion

►

MickLH

3:17 PM

@Tyyppi_77 gl_FragData[]

user92578

but out vec4 FragColor works too

MickLH

It's an order of magnitude less functional

Also, this is the future: glBindFragDataLocation

But support for it is still hit and miss

Here, gl_FragData[0] is the same thing as gl_FragColor

Except when rendering to multiple textures at once, you can use gl_FragData[1] for the next layer, and so on

But they are mutually exclusive, use one or the other, never both.

So in effect, gl_FragData[] is just a better gl_FragColor

but as long as you're requiring those high versions of OpenGL in the shader, you might as well use opengl.org/sdk/docs/man3/xhtml/glBindFragDataLocation.xml

MickLH

3:32 PM

@Tyyppi_77 If you ever wonder why I gave up on you, rest easy knowing this message was the straw that broke the camels back. -- It appears that you're resisting information because you're proud that it barely works. -- I hope it doesn't hurt in a few years when you look back at your code and realize that only the learning was valuable... And realize that you're wasting time you could use to try every strategy, instead caring too much about polishing your turd.

And in case it's not clear, I am not calling GunHero a turd, it looks like a fun game and I even want to play it

user92578

@MickLH I was just happy to get my really old program to work again, just to see the monkey head rotating once again. I'm not interested in what is good practice or what is the newest standard. My main goal was to fix the bug that was causing the program not to launch... And do you believe that when I look at that project in a few years again, and check the shader code, the standards have not changed once again?

user92578

BWT that was not for GunHero

MickLH

@Tyyppi_77 I'm about to block you, so if you value my input then realize you're on extremely thin ice. I don't care what the standards are going to be in 2 seconds when they all change again. I care about your attitude.

user92578

I have no idea where all this hostility comes from

user92578

I was just trying to make a program work

user92578

3:37 PM

An abannoned program, that I do not care of

MickLH

There is no hostility, I am just informing you that I wont allow it to get to hostility. Hence blocking.

user92578

If this was for GunHero, I'd definetely be interested in hearing what's good

MickLH

I just don't really believe it because if you were hungry to learn then you would always value knowledge. And I've observed this pattern in the past many times anyways

user92578

That might be the case

MickLH

I'll try my best to not block, but man I'm easy to rub the wrong way lol

user92578

3:39 PM

I'll try and see what I could do to improve myself on that area

user92578

@MickLH To be honest, I have no idea where this came from, but okay?

MickLH

Ugh you're too sweet about it. Makes it hard for me to be mean

user92578

I don't try to be hostile, I just probably sound like it

Noctrine

Why not make the old program work with the new knowledge? Seems like the best place to try it out

user92578

I don't really care to do that work... doesn't seem worth it... also I'm not planning to do any OpenGL stuff in future... but I guess would benefit from it in the future when I eventually do decide to pickup OpenGL

MickLH

3:44 PM

If you ask questions about things you don't care about, then I am offended that you view my time as a toy to just burn away at for no reason.

So either way, reason to block in my eyes

user92578

sure, go ahead

user92578

Looks like all I actually get from you 50%+ times is some weird conversation about my attitude

MickLH

I told you I am trying not to, I said that to imply that I can see you're not actively trying to grate on my nerves.

It would make me sad to, but I feel that there's a good chance it will save me from frustration in the future. I am not trying to hold it over your head.

I just would be hurt emotionally if someone were to block me without warning and reason.

user92578

Yeah, I appreciate that you're telling my why and also notifying me about the block

Robert Harvey

Why did this get a downvote?

-1

Q: How should I collect user behavior data in an MMO?

In an MMORPG, and I'm trying to collect data about user behaviors for the purpose of tweaking the game rules to achieve maximum user satisfaction. Clearly one way to do it is to hand-roll specific things into an application, much like one might use Console.WriteLine() to view the contents of a v...

mmo

John McDonald

3:54 PM

:) The word randomizer is ready. This is going to be fun

@RobertHarvey All I can tell you is that there's also a close vote against it: "Unclear what you are asking"

user4704

I just edited it to address that.

user4704

Oh, apparently I downvoted it? I must have fat-fingered it when I did my initial title edit my phone. Sorry.

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