Game Development

12:37 AM

I think the main issue with water levels is they can break the flow of the game too easily... no pun intended... but swimming mechanics have always generally slowed down otherwise fast gameplay

There's probably more to it than that but that's my high level observation

user4704

They can also be sort of an afterthought.

user4704

Or tacked on by design without actual proper code support.

user4704

Resulting in poor feel.

user4704

Anecdote: youtube.com/watch?v=wxCTy78LaX8

user4704

The rafting sections in Super Adventure Box in GW2.

user4704

12:44 AM

GW2 does not support moving platforms.

user4704

At least not ones that detailed. But the designers really wanted to have a moving platform.

Noctrine

Woah, amazingly different than what I was expecting to see

user4704

So they made a stationary platform.

Noctrine

Is the world moving around the platform?

It looks like the world is moving around the platform

user4704

Then they had the artists animate the entire map around the platform.

user4704

12:45 AM

(this destroys the ability to do occlusion culling incidentally)

user4704

We all were pretty O_O when we found that out.

Noctrine

This makes me curious, what is a less detailed moving platform than that?

Where GW2 would support it?

user4704

There's, I think, one in the final boss battle.

user4704

And maybe some have been added to the jumping puzzles.

user4704

They are extremely performance-intensive and so don't get used often.

Chris

12:53 AM

@JoshPetrie That's a cool way of doing that

user4704

@Chris Clever, but a horrible idea.

Chris

hehe

user4704

The entire feature almost never shipped because of it.

Noctrine

Maybe they just finished that Dark Matter Engine episode of Futurama :p

BlueBug

1:13 AM

;_;

doing stuff with framebuffer is not available on Unity Free

I am so cheap, so instead GPU, I do slow CPU rendering, OTL

SpartanDonut

What are you making?

BlueBug

@SpartanDonut fluid 2d, like the one in PixelJunkShooter, i want to do render technique they did here : youtube.com/watch?v=7q8s7DMOOD4#t=11m10s

"Render particles to a low-res offscreen but with a luminance texture, blur it, scale up with bilinear filter and use the resulting texture as fluid "

hasherr

@IcyDefiance Same

SpartanDonut

1:28 AM

Yeah I'm not sure how I'd implement that

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9289442/Fluid/Fluid.html

From forum.unity3d.com/threads/205291-2D-dynamic-fluid-simulation

Looks like MPM might use a buffer as well

hasherr

Jeez

Best buy took 5 days to ship my order

BlueBug

oh man that looks super sweet.

Vaughan Hilts

1:57 AM

@hasherr That's nothing. Look at my order right now: DELIVERY ESTIMATE: Monday May 26 2014 by 8:00pm

hasherr

Ouch

Idk what you're getting, but you would think that Best Buy might have a copy of Win8.1 laying around somewhere in a 100 mile radius of me

Vaughan Hilts

It'll go down, I think. I think it's the pre-orders throwing it off.

hasherr

Oh, I see

Well, they have to import that stuff, right?

Vaughan Hilts

Nope.

hasherr

No?

lol

Ouch

Vaughan Hilts

1:59 AM

Why would they?

These are in English :p

hasherr

Oh

Vaughan Hilts

STOP ASSUMING HASHERR.

hasherr

WAHH

I do that too much

My computer parts are all sitting in a cardboard box next to me

And it's really sad

Vaughan Hilts

It's okay. It's probably a fair guess for me.

hasherr

They're lonely because they don't have their cpu buddy

Vaughan Hilts

2:01 AM

Why not put everything together minus the CPU?

hasherr

No.

Because CPU normally goes on first

And it's hard to work around already put together parts

Vaughan Hilts

I never put my CPU on first.

In fact, I always mount it \last\

hasherr

No?

Vaughan Hilts

Indeed, I do.

I mount my I/O plate, motherboard on rises

Then graphics card

Connect modular supplies

Install HDDs

Wire it all up, and then drop the heat sink / CPU in

hasherr

Well I'm going to put my board together (CPU, RAM, CPU Fan) first

And then drop it in

And then install the rest

HDDs, GPU, etc

Vaughan Hilts

2:04 AM

shrugs It's your choice. I find it's too much of a hassle when I'm trying to put the risers on and line it up with the I/O plate

BlueBug

weeee

hasherr

@VaughanHilts What's a riser?

lol

BlueBug

I fixed an error message, now going for night walk

Vaughan Hilts

@hasherr When you install your motherboard, you'll put them on these screws to prevent it from touch the case

hasherr

You mean the standoffs?

The things that hold the motherboard up?

Vaughan Hilts

2:05 AM

Yes, also known as a "riser"

hasherr

Or, attach it to the case.

Oh, I've always called them standoffs

SpartanDonut

I fail and put the motherboard in first every time

hasherr

failure

Vaughan Hilts

@SpartanDonut It's easier that way imo

hasherr

I'll probably actually put my power supply in first

Vaughan Hilts

2:06 AM

It's a bloody nightmare trying to line the board up imo

SpartanDonut

Actually hash wins... PSU first. Forgot about that

hasherr

But before I do anything I'm going to do an outside of the case test-boot

Hook up RAM, CPU, PSU, and GPU to a monitor

And hope for an error

Vaughan Hilts

I'd be careful about that, of course.

hasherr

Yeah, you have to be careful about everything

But it'd be an enormous pain in the ass to have everything installed in the case, and find out I messed up or had a defective part

So that's why I'll do it

I actually have a problem in that I am now using a wired internet connection, but I have a wireless adapter that came with my mobo

So I'm stuck with it until I sell it

On that note... If anybody need a 300mb adapter still in shrink-wrap, I got you haha

MickLH

3:09 AM

I got a gamedev gig, but I'm a little bit skeptical

It's totally informal, felt too good to be true but then again I did ask the universe for it lol

Icy Defiance

yeah but the universe is a jerk, so...

MickLH

I don't know man lol it's been pretty cool with me

BlueBug

you must ask universe using butterflies technique

Nov 12 '13 at 23:11, by Lasse

using this butterfly technique, a programmer can achieve anything.

Lasse

3:45 AM

morning

Chris

hi

Lasse

'sup

Chris

Playing Hearthstone. I need a nap but my kid doesn't want to have hers -_-

SpartanDonut

Infinity Wars > Hearthstone

Infinity Wars is still beta though

Lasse

I'd need to turn on my desktop to play hearthstone, too much hassle

Chris

3:48 AM

Lemme google it, havent heard of it

Lasse

I'm waiting for the android version

SpartanDonut

My only complaint about IW, looking past its buggy beta state, is it does need more cards which will come with time. Number 1 priority is fixing all the bugs for them right now

Chris

IW does look interesting at least, I might try it for a taste

SpartanDonut

Coming from MTG, Hearthstone just lacked depth to me. IW scratches the itch better for me anyway. Mileage may vary, of course.

Chris

Yeah HS is quite random and not extremely tactical

It is something for me to click on when I am tired lol

Lasse

3:54 AM

I had a morning coffee and was reading stuff with my tablet about different rendering stuff, and now that I sat here my head is just empty :|

meh

Chris

I had a good few hours coding after I woke up but then yeah, blehhhhh

SpartanDonut

@Chris No doubt. I had a good run with HS for a while.

Chris

It's fun, I remember when it first came out, had quite a blast, these days just seems rather slow-paced

SpartanDonut

Oooo... may have found a candidate for wall decorations for my home office - inprnt.com/gallery/aled

Particularly I like Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt, Zelda, Mario Kart, and I'm on the fence about Sonic and Street Fighter

Chris

Those are very silly!

SpartanDonut

4:04 AM

I also kind of like the lemmings one...

Eh.... maybe not duck hunt

I also like the zelda images here (first four) - inprnt.com/gallery/nate_hallinan

Lasse

4:30 AM

booyah, I got rid of the ~500ms lag spike when uploading vertices by moving it to background thread

Icy Defiance

whoo

MickLH

smoking on that gangster sauce I see

Lasse

it's now bugging weirdly though, sometimes I see one vertex that goes to infinity from the last generated chunk, and the chunk is not completly visible

I guess it's still uploading to the gpu at that point

let's flush!

yep, that fixed it

MickLH

lol so in what a night you've fixed the problem Wardy spent what, months? on

Lasse

5:03 AM

Months? I did the background thread thingie in 30 minutes

I guess its just the power of C# and OpenTK

MickLH

Wardy was trying to use C# too, but with Unity instead

Lasse

public class BackgroundWorker
{
	public delegate void WorkDelegate();
	Thread thread;
	EventWaitHandle context_ready;
	INativeWindow window = new NativeWindow();

	ConcurrentQueue<WorkDelegate> workQueue = new ConcurrentQueue<WorkDelegate>();

	public BackgroundWorker (GameWindow gw)
	{
		context_ready = new EventWaitHandle(false, EventResetMode.AutoReset);
		gw.Context.MakeCurrent(null);

		thread = new Thread (new ThreadStart (Start));
		thread.IsBackground = true;
		thread.Start ();

		context_ready.WaitOne();

It's not hard

I guess that should be renamed to BackgroundGLWorker

or something

I guess the magic of opentk is half the work there, since it automatically tries to share contexts

I'm not sure if that's GL feature or not to automatically share them, but still

BlueBug

5:18 AM

@Lasse how do you post so many lines at once? If I try too long chat message, it won't send.

Lasse

I'm using multiline

or the fixed font thingie or whatever it is

BlueBug

multiline
like
that? sweeeeet

Lasse

multiline
like
this

click the fixed font

yeah, that

MickLH

I swear I read like 5 curse words in those 4 words

Lasse

lol how did you manage that

5:32 AM

metaballs?

nei nei. Plane blob.

looks like metaballs

aye. Cheaper/easier than metaball.

Lasse

cool

BlueBug

5:34 AM

:D <3 ty bro.

SpartanDonut

In Unity?

BlueBug

Aye. In Unity. It's burning CPU. OTL.

SpartanDonut

5:53 AM

Follow a tutorial? I'd be interested in a link just to read up on it

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Is it just me, or has Facebook become pretty spammy with advertising?

I keep seeing suggestions for all kinds of stuff that doesn't have any interest to me at all

SpartanDonut

I always get ads for things I've purchased

Or web sites I visit...

BlueBug

@William'MindWorX'Mariager They even made ad section slightly larger

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

It's getting a bit ridiculous.

BlueBug

@SpartanDonut Tutorial Part1 , Part2

SpartanDonut

5:58 AM

Oh I thought you said you couldn't accomplish what you wanted with that so I assumed you found a different approach. Thanks though :P

Chris

well, if your electricity costs go up this month, you know why :P

too many blobs

BlueBug

That's true. I need GPU to follow the tutorial. I just, for now, mimic GPU operation on CPU.

Lasse

6:23 AM

greater than log 2 max width , height + 1

what's this supposed to mean

what's the actual equation? :D

GL.TexStorage3D(TextureTarget3d.Texture2DArray, miplevels, SizedInternalFormat.Rgba8, t.Size.Width, t.Size.Height, textures.Length);

that throws InvalidOperation

opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/docbook4/xhtml/glTexStorage3D.xml

and the manual says my levels number is wrong

but it's 1, so I'm kind of baffled

joapet99

8:12 AM

@Lasse you aren't at top of the list anymore at HWO

Lasse

I'm aware of that

SpartanDonut

8:57 AM

I've managed to edit the Side Scrolling template for UE4 to use animated sprites for the player instead of the default mesh! - youtube.com/watch?v=Li0zAE6B7g0

Turns out it wasn't so bad

Chris

hehe nice

SpartanDonut

I had a stupid issue with the rotation of the sprite (that spinning paper mario like effect is the result of the 3D mesh actually rotating.) where the player spawned invisible because it was rotated the wrong direction... after futsing about with all sorts of rotation settings and whatnot I finally realized I could just rotate the player start location and everything was magically better

Now I need a few hours of sleep before I have to do real work... night all

Chris

byee!

Alex M.

you know

since I caught a serious cold

Chris

please dont sneeze on me

Alex M.

9:03 AM

I think I won't go and stay until 20:00 at work everyday

Chris

probably a good idea.

Alex M.

instead I'll go to my doctor and get a sick leave paper thingy

and still get my money

Chris

yeah if you need to, do that

Alex M.

yup

Chris

Is it possible to invite a user into the chatroom?

Or do I have to leave them a comment on their question lol

Alex M.

9:07 AM

hmm

Chris

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/39110/fabian
he's asked a couple of questions, I answered one, but it feels like some instant chatting would be super helpful for him!

Alex M.

he has to be in a chatroom I think but if you want you can start a chatroom with just him and you

I'd still just invite him here via comments

Chris

Alright, we'll I've commented with a link here

Alex M.

if you two discuss thing and come to what could be a good answer to any question of his on the main chat, be sure to post it as an answer there so the question doesn't stay unanswered :D

Chris

yeah def

I think his question is, a lot of stuff could be possibilities, too long for me to try and type out all at once

Dont want to take stabs in the dark with a big answer I'm unsure of, and the comments are so squished

Alex M.

9:11 AM

yup

the DA:I boxart is pretty neat

Chris

cept for the EA logo ;D

Alex M.

yeah that one ruins the mood

Chris

the Dragon Age games are okay

lol

Alex M.

it also messes up the layout

everything else is centered

Chris

aye, fail

Alex M.

9:13 AM

it's just like EA though

Chris

I remember when EA was cool

Alex M.

come later, ruin everything, get the money

Chris

buying like Sim Ant on floppy disc off their website cuz it was on sale

Alex M.

lol man I loved FIFA 99

and the old NFS games like NFS 3

and Underground 2

Chris

(wait I'm thinking of Maxis I think)

before they got bought

Alex M.

9:14 AM

maxis are the guys with the sims

Chris

yeah

Alex M.

I loved the sims too

Chris

the latest SimCity sounded like a giant flop

I wanted to like Spore but it fell short; the Sims games have been good mainly, apart from umpteen expansions hahaha

Alex M.

it mostly was

hmm I'm also lucky that I got the cold at my parents' home

that means I can stay here for a week and they'll pay for everything

Chris

lol

Alex M.

9:21 AM

and with my habit to spend everything at once I'll save so much of this month's salary

Chris

what do you do for work?

Alex M.

holy shit next month will be awesome

I develop games for little kids

Chris

cool

Alex M.

anyway wanted to mention that I reached the pinnacle of buying useless things several days ago

when I paid ~$12 for an assassin's creed keychain :\

Chris

hahahaha...

Alex M.

9:23 AM

yeah that's sort of my biggest problem

I see things and I want them

joapet99

@Lasse whats your next move

Chris

I buy pikachu dolls for my daughter lol

Alex M.

I throw most of my food away because I only buy it because it looks interesting

so I never get to eat all of it :\

I just keep on wasting money

Chris

that's rather silly

Alex M.

pikachu dolls are kewl

yeah tell me about it lol

Alex M.

9:36 AM

PC Gamer
12 hrs ·
Here's Kerbal Space Program creator Felipe Falanghe's rig, which looks like the cockpit of a rocket heading straight to Mun. http://bit.ly/1pnjTQS

Alex M.

10:00 AM

music drop

►

Chris

Cool
I'm listening to GoldFish atm http://open.spotify.com/artist/0uRdK8gy7fXJGRywrlmPM7

Alex M.

Sorry, this content is not available.

oh yeah

Chris

;(

Alex M.

I'm in romania

Chris

bloody country restrictions

Alex M.

10:13 AM

hahaha

gotta love romanian game review websites

they made a review of farming simulator 2013

and one of the comments was

"it's not realistic at all, I've been playing for an hour and so far no gypsy appeared to steal my grain."

made my day

Chris

lol..

Alex M.

it's true though

at my dad's vineyard, gypsies stealing grapes are a bigger issue than animals damaging the plants themselves

Chris

That is lame, lol

Alex M.

yeah

Martin Sojka

Poor people. Hard for them to break out of the social construct of their family, harder still when they face general mistrust or even outright racism with the local majority.

Alex M.

10:18 AM

wat

Chris

Stealing isn't cool

Alex M.

dude are you high or something

gypsies form a network

all of their stealing feeds their "kings"

who build houses like these

Martin Sojka

@AlexM. I'm aware. Did you somehow miss the "social construct of their family" part?

Alex M.

just call it family obligations and structure

I suck at parsing overly formal english

Martin Sojka

Most of them are exploited by those "kings" as you call them, even if through conditioning they might not even realise it.

So, those are the "poor people"; misguided by their own peers and reviled and shunned by others around them.

Alex M.

10:23 AM

bahaha

this is another gypsy house

the text on top says

"dan the nice guy 2003"

not sure how to translate it 100% properly though

Martin Sojka

The best bets are on educating their kids - so as to give the next generations a chance and perspectives. But that means spending a hefty amount of money on the underdogs of the society (not something places where they are a problem, like Romania or Slovakia, have; and not something popular there) as well as enforcing - if in doubt, by actual force - that those kids get the education they deserve.

Chris

It's a tough battle

Alex M.

I'd rather they just didn't exist, sorry

it's hard for me to think otherwise after living in a neighborhood near them for 20 years

Martin Sojka

I'd rather quite a few problems of the world didn't exist. Wishing it doesn't make them go away though, so it's better to deal with it as humane and as effective as possible.

Chris

^ finally redid my souls / levelling-up sequence

Alex M.

10:26 AM

it's a custom of theirs to write their name on the front of each house

@Chris that looks neat

Chris

ty

my alternative to levelling-up without using a GUI!

Martin Sojka

@Chris Do you have a choice there? Drink the red fluid or the blue fluid?

Alex M.

matrix references are sooooo last year

or the year before

or maybe pleistocene

Chris

haha. I am staying away choices actually; there are three vials

Martin Sojka

Chris

10:37 AM

Alex M.

where did those bottles come from

Chris

red health, green attack power, and purple will give you a random passive ability (which I've yet to implement)

Alex M.

I thought it was a matrix reference :(

Chris

The weapons you find in my game Tallowmere have different fighting mechanics.... so those are the different "skills" you can use

the rest, like stats and passives, come from levelling-up, and gear (still WIP)

it's a big action roguelike platformer, so lots of randomness, just kill as best you can and try not to die lol

different every playthrough

Alex M.

by the way it looks

I can certainly see it on steam someday

Chris

10:41 AM

thanks :) I am hoping it will get there, but I've still a lot to do on it

and don't want to rush too early with a greenlight listing

sold like 30 copies already from other stores

Alex M.

you're selling it already?

LINKPLAX

Chris

www.tallowmere.com

Alex M.

brb I must venture into the netherworld

to search for my card

right

the service you use on your site declined my card

google wallet declined my card

paypal forced me to make an account and then declined my card

wth

Chris

:(((((((

How do ya make a private room

Alex M.

there are no private rooms

all are public

Chris

10:54 AM

Email me

I'll sort out something for ya

Alex M.

paypal charged my card 1 usd for confirmation I guess

Fabián

Here I am, trying to make that debugcombo work

Chris

hey, hello

Any progress? Lemme find your question..

Fabián

I did a pause just for 1 hour, I'm back xD

Chris

@Fabián http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/73822/error-when-using-getcomponent-object-reference-not-set-to-an-instance-of-an-obj
Right, so, kreys' answer sounds pretty plausible

GetComponent will return null if the component you want doesn't exist

Fabián

10:59 AM

Yes, but the component is actually there

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