Game Development

12:23 AM

Holy shit my DJ Khaled comment is almost at 2000 up votes

I am getting a U da best message every 20 minutes

Reddit is fucken crazy

They mean it was relevant for a brief period of time

Now excuse me while I knife this guy

But really. What does "Acgoooi" mean? If anything?

It was fucked by my phone

It meant something at the time

But now I have no idea what that was

1:24 AM

Once I committed to buying anything on the Unity Asset store, my willingness to buy more has gone way up...

2:23 AM

Does this look okay?

The tooltip.

I wouldn't kiss my mother with that tool tip.

It looks alright. Maybe though make it look like a speech bubble so that the user knows which item it is exactly because it doesn't always center. Like so...

user92578

5:52 AM

@arda yeahyeah

10:43 AM

@PearsonArtPhoto it looks like the built in Unity UI textures

12:36 PM

Yeah, I suppose I should update the UI to not look quite so much like a Unity project...

user92578

1:04 PM

all right, got an email from valve, now they want a pic of my passport

user92578

did they need one from you @jgallant?

Lol

I don't have one so no

user92578

what did you use to ID yourself on the tax form?

Might have sent my drivers license I don't remember

user92578

aight yeah, just wanted to check 'cause I don't really like sending pics of my passport around

1:06 PM

Why not?

user92578

uknow, identity theft and all that shit

user92578

"Foreign Passport – Photograph and identity page only"

But you have no credit you are a kid

No one wants to be you

user92578

true

user92578

wtf does that mean?

1:08 PM

At least not yet

I'm joking.

user92578

they want a photograph of the page with my pick and info on it?

Someone could still take a loan out under your identity

user92578

it's hard to tell with you man

user92578

yeah but I don't really have a choice here do I? :)

Oh yeah the page with your pic

That is all they want

user92578

1:09 PM

like the word "and" throws me off there

They will need more than just a passport to steal your identity

Might be two pages. There is a page that gives your information

Height and shit

user92578

not on my passport

@jgallant You'd be surprised how many kids have their identities stolen, often by "parent" figures.

In any case, it's not a random group, it's Steam. You are entering in to a business contract with them, remember.

consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0040-child-identity-theft

user92578

true, still just feels wrong, which I guess is a good thing

user92578

also I'm not a child

user92578

1:16 PM

I'm legally an adult

Kevin van der Velden

@Tyyppi_77 I want to end this with: "and you're not my real dad"

user92578

lol

Q: Opengl mutiple texture in a shader

Fair enough, but if they could steal a 10 year old's identity...

Lasse

2:23 PM

2

Im using modern opengl and c++. How do i draw a number of triangles each one having a different texture in one draw call when i only have 32 texture units on my graphics card and the max texture size is 1024? My video card has 2gb of memory yet it can only hold 32 texture at a time? Why do graphi...

Why is the second answer identical?

It's just copypaste, as it is lacking the links

Alexandre Vaillancourt

The second is from the OP

"yeah that's it"

user92578

I flagged for mods

3:55 PM

God I love Linux. It's nice to be able to install a distro on an old Thinkpad and have it run like it was new again.

4:06 PM

No visual studio though

Visual Studio Code I think works on Linux

user92578

oh my god

user92578

I have a previously written reusable class for a thing I need right now

user92578

what even is this

user92578

I suggest you could have just pressed the back button, if you didnt like my answer to help the lad, rather than just say "This isnt a good question" type bs — Super MegaBroBro 2 mins ago

user92578

4:13 PM

:PPPPP

haha

he deleted it :)

user92578

yeah

user92578

maybe he should have pressed the back button before answering :)

hahah

he got the peer pressure badge though

someone upvoted that question :(

looks like it got undeleted

user92578

he undeleted just it

user92578

4:19 PM

also no guessing about the upvoter anymore really

hehe

user92578

that analogy is irrelevant and silly — Super MegaBroBro 27 secs ago

user92578

he did not appreciate my awesome and totally relevant analogy :(

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I suggest you drop it, guys :P No point in whipping a dead horse.

what if it's fun

user92578

4:24 PM

what if I'm coming up with awesome analogies?

it was a good one

@jgallant I'd like on the workshop page, and "in progress" filter. Showing levels I have partial solutions for. :)

Good idea

Main issue with filtering is that I poll 50 levels at a time

ah right

So for a filter that doesn't exist with steam api search

ok yeah, makes sense

4:28 PM

It kinda fucks up

you store the progress locally?

Yeah and it sucks

or is that not searchable?

Progress is stored locally. But even cloud save wouldn't do anything

user92578

isn't it easier if the progress is stored locally?

4:29 PM

I can't say return me the next 50 that are not completed

user92578

oh right

Steam has no concept of if that workshop item was completed or not

yeah

tell them to fix that shit

;)

Well that is what I want to know. Should I prescrape all workshop data and then filter?

And if yes what if I have 10000 items to scrape

It just seems kinda fucked

yeah

you can filter by name on steam search

4:32 PM

The best way would be to removing pages

can you filter by multiple names?

@jgallant Press F.

And just have a scroll

user92578

you can't add like hidden tags or somethong?

No.

4:32 PM

like, keep a list of names of levels locally with incomplete solutions, then ask steam to give you levels matching those names?

Per user query

@Almo the ID would be better here.

But that would be 1 query per level

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I suggest he drops it..

That is why there is no completed filter right now

yeah makes sense

Shoot. No 32bit editor for Ubuntu...

I wonder if I can run the windows version under wine. Not sure if Unity Windows comes in a 32bit flavor though.

4:36 PM

With a scrollable list I could filter on the fly and continue to poll data as required

But fuck

sounds like a lot more coding. but it could be nice

user92578

and while you're at it, build a reusable open-source C++ library for this? :)

Alternatively I could try to do this with the paging

Haha haha

@jgallant you could use a bloom filter to catch most of the incomplete puzzles

and then only have to query the puzzles that are marked as possibly complete by the bloom filter

that way you can query one bloom filter for the user, and use that to approximate the status of every puzzle

(A bloom filter provides an approximation where the "No" result is always exact, but the "Yes" result has a controllable chance of being wrong. So you only need to query the "Yes" results with that)

Which should be significant savings because a user will complete about N puzzles

While the community will contribute about infinity puzzles

So your bloom filter only need to support the average number of puzzles a user finishes, and it can scale forever with the unlimited workshop puzzle list size

Ehhhhh

4:47 PM

Also you can extremely cheaply combine bloom filters, so you could trivially merge someone's filters from different devices into a single entry

Bloom filter is a steam api thing?

Also, you could not ask for an easier algorithm for this task lol, it's literally an array and you set a random item in it to 1, to mark the puzzle finished lol

And Idk what steam's api offers, but it's definitely a good api thing, as in all the cool kids use them these days

Yeah my issue is not the filter

But the data polling

The data could return 50 items that are filtered out

urgh. I know

I'd have to keep querying until I get 50 non filtered items

4:51 PM

Why does everyone think I didn't already think of what they are thinking before I spoke :s

Do I have to explicitly say it? (Trick question: then I'd never get to the main point trying to scan the infinite detail tree)

OK so the point of the bloom filter is that you're gonna download a bunch of results

I can only get 50 at a time. Steam api rule.

But you don't want to query all of them if possible, since mostly a user can't even finish half of all the possible puzzles

So a bloom filter is a per-user thing, it's less than 1kb

And it will give you a "Complete / Incomplete" answer for all infinity puzzles

But the catch is when it says "Complete" it might be wrong

But if most of them are incomplete, then you get 50

And maybe 30 are incomplete, you can show those in your UI immediately

Then you can decide if you want to query for exact results on completion, or query more puzzles

So no, it doesn't solve your problem, but it does solve your problem 80% of the time, maybe

Which is pretty good considering that a bloom filter is like 10 lines of code, and uses only around a kb or so per user

(f**k cell phone keyboards, btw)

Bloom filter

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not, thus a Bloom filter has a 100% recall rate. In other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with a "counting" filter). The more elements that are added to the set, the larger the probability of false positives. Bloom proposed the technique for ...

get it?

looks freaky

In that example you pick 3 random indices for each puzzle

you set them to 1 when the user finishes the puzzle

chances are another puzzle (w in that pic) will not have all indices set, only some

woa

in IRC about Vcash crypto coin, this was just said:

<xCore> no
<xCore> some are still missing
<xCore> but the communication part seems ok
<xCore> w/ the bloom filters & co

5:01 PM

lol

I had never heard of bloom filters till just now, I don't think

Dev got pissed and walked off, price tanked, someone has taken over, price is recovering.

They are a real lifesaver if you get stuck dealing with big data (or with extremely expensive resources like API calls as in this case)

I don't think that will work though

It would if I wasn't sorting and filtering the data already

"More generally, fewer than 10 bits per element are required for a 1% false positive probability, independent of the size or number of elements in the set."

woa

that sounds pretty powerful

Pretty sure heroes song (game) is using my world Gen

5:06 PM

(jon I swear I'm not insisting, just outlining the tradeoffs) a convenient property for cases like this where lets say a user can finish 1000 puzzles in their life, then you can calculate that a 6kB filter per user using about 4 taps should give you less than 5% error

So you expect to only have about 3 errors in each set of 50 you get from steam

And if someone finished a puzzle, it's guaranteed to be marked as finished

So you could just use it as the "check" and pretend it doesn't error, and the only downside would be that depending on what puzzles a user finishes, they might never get to see 5% of the workshop puzzles

dam i lost progress on my picross touch game

I think I closed it without exiting the level or something

Lost progress?

@micklh I still don't understand how I would apply a bloom filter to data I don't already have

Well you should probably explain the issue to me because I've got a hazy view of it still lol

I was sortof responding to the point about "polling the server for completion status of every puzzle" in isolation

Well the server is not mine.

I assumed you're using steam's server

5:18 PM

So I can only query by certain orders

Sorted by popularity / votes / downloads / etc

I should ask first: Can you store a few kb of data about each user's game progress on steam's servers?

And I can only grab 1 page at a time.

Cloud saves yeah

And is downloading packs of 50 at a time acceptable?

or is that already broken lol

I dint have a choice.

It is 50 or nothing

lol

Ok so how do you currently query if a user completed a puzzle or not?

5:21 PM

I store the level id

In a save file locally

Can you just copy that list of IDs to the user's cloud save?

Eventually that is what I want to do

Well if you can afford the straight up list of IDs, that gets you 100% accuracy :P

though you'll probably spend 32 bits per puzzle

Can't filter by ID

Oh steam provides filtering?

What options do they give?

(I mean is it just lame sorting, or do they actually have some kind of filter API)

5:24 PM

You can filter by tag

I can't get access to the documentation right now

How big can the tags be, and can you use wildcards / patterns?

Tags are not viable here.

Hmmmmmm...

Fucken shit I could tag it with the id

But fuck...

Ok so assuming there is no useful tag options, and sorting is the best you've got from steam....

You could sort them all by Date, so the order never changes, and then just download the entire list locally

And then just do incremental updates each boot up

Then you just have the list locally and you can do whatever

Not a bad idea.

I'd have to implement the text filter myself

Eh it can't be that bad, I mean even if it is literally that bad you can just grab SQLite and pack the DLL in with your shit and just use SQL

But I mean there's not gonna be billions of puzzles or anything, right?? lol

5:30 PM

It is at 1100 now

Worse case it will reach 100k

I think that'll totally work then

Sucks to have to pull data on 30 plus pages of levels the first time someone clicks workshop though

It isn't that fast

Just do it in the background

And only show 20 per page lol

Why do you have to have so many pages at once?

Filtering

Sorting

The solution here would be to have a copy of the workshop data locally

5:33 PM

I'm sorta shocked still that steam doesn't provide any form of query filtering whatsoever

You can't do that server side somehow?

The UI would have to be locked until all the data is pulled

Ewww no do it in a thread

Waht if I filter by votes? And I'm missing 50% of the levels. Just shuffle the UI around

Yeah do that thing where new ones just slip in for the first 10 seconds lol

5:34 PM

You could have a background thread that pulls it from the moment you open the game up... And updates it periodically somehow.

like oh nothing to see here, just a new item sliding in on position 3

I'll look at the steam api docs again and see if I missed something

If you want to be fancy, when you only have 20% of the list, mix in 4 random blank "loading tiles" in with the results, to show that you expect more to show up

They are behind a authentication wall

And then just replace the blank tiles with real ones as you get them, and delete the last ones if any are left when it finishes downloading

(I mean 4 random per 1 real, because at 20% that'll represent the other 80%)

(1:1 @ 50%, etc)

lol I love that cosmetic real time info stuff

I mean really you could take that idea pretty damn far with some really basic statistics homework

(ie, fill in the entire UI with the expected value of everything so it looks ready, but a blur/gloss over it to let users know it's still "fading in")

Ok I'm triggered. @jgallant You have to train a giant neural network to predict what puzzles people will vote for, and take multiresolution statistics on the entire board and download them progressively so you can use them early (ie all cells have X% chance of being set, 4 quarters of the board have X% Y% Z% W% chance of being flipped, so on)

5:43 PM

Fuck that

then you can generate statistical approximations of the puzzles themself, and then use the neural net to rate them

Jon I'm triggered you have to do this

I'm not getting paid for this

You can keep all your users in a matrix of AI generated and AI rated puzzles meant to approximate the human generated and human rated puzzles

And so even if their internet is out, you might be able to trick them long enough to seamlessly get internet service back and update the list while they play a puzzle they thought was highly rated by humans

@jgallant don't be lazy, your users need you

One of them just asked if picross Touch would be a valid game to speed run

Do you have any monetization plan?

5:45 PM

Jon. Think of the women and children you'll so coldly be forcing into buying in-flight WiFi :'(

99 cent level packs on mobile

So have Steam do the work of getting new levels, and sell them on mobile?

Yep.

I've got a confession to make. I've never made a 2D game. Well I did a tutorial but that's it. I feel like making one but don't have any good ideas for one.

Interesting strategy.

5:46 PM

Install base is growing

So I think it could work

Do you have a way to filter out duplicate levels?

I can't tell you how many completely black ones I've seen...

I could easily write that

I don't know. Selling user made content seems sort of off to me...

Oh yeah I'm patching to fix rhat

@Sie It's fine. FBGM.

5:48 PM

Eh. Just smells like Skyrim Paid Mods a bit to me.

Also, I'm wondering what Steam has to say about that...

@Sie See, you FB, and then you GM.

I don't see a problem with it.

If you want steam levels on mobile

You can pay or not get them

user92578

Who owns a level that's made?

Well as long as users know that may happen and Steam is ok with it.

5:49 PM

You can also play it free on pc

It's my data

@Tyyppi_77 Read the EULA.

It's hosted on Steam though. So I don't know.

Most likely Steam owns everything

They cannot claim ownership of a 10x10 pixel art

They can possibly try to claim copyright though

5:50 PM

Steam can do anything they want with it yeah

Apple claimed ownership of swiping your finger a certain way.

The combination of the art and the name might be...

@Sie Apple isn't a good example, they have so much lawyer money that they get to re-write the law to suit them on the fly

Those kind of moves only apply after you're well above the millions range, poor little millionaires and below still have laws lol

> Implying St. JG isn't a quadrillionaire.

Anyways if someone wants to freak out over it

I'll deal with it then

5:53 PM

I'm 99% sure that the only people can lay claim to your stuff is Steam, @jgallant

And that the users are like double fucked, except you're probably a nice guy and didn't make them agree to an EULA lol so only single fucked

I'm not worried about it

Why not, you've already used a name of questionable legality, what's using artwork as well?

How is that questionable

The picross trademark by Nintendo did not stand in court

It is too widely used. They failed to protect it.

And artwork?

Wtf are you talking about. It's rendered in my game there is no art. It is data

It is literally a series of 1 and 0

Jon I'm gonna give you some zeros and ones... it's not the KFC secret recipe, just some zeros and ones.

Every level created is created with software I made

user92578

6:00 PM

I couldn't find anything for or against this on a Steam agreement thingy

It ultimately is my ip

And I can pull it offline and slap a price on it anytime

@MickLH gimme

Nothing anyone can do about that

A photograph is just 1s and 0s.

If I were you, I would at least clean up the names of the levels, and try to change all of them, unless the level name is trivial.

First of all, they need it anyways, and secondly, it would give you more of a case.

or just make the users accept an EULA (one that grants you ownership of all their content created on or for your tool, and disallows all content that falls outside your EULA, and frames anyone going outside your EULA as either unfair competition or unfair marketing on your brand so that you're entitled to the money still as damages)

6:17 PM

Mobile version won't have names.

Just puzzle and a number

So anyone doing Ludum Dare?

I am planning to.

not me, i have too many projects already to work on without blowing a weekend on that. :) I think it's a cool thing for otehr people though

I've had some ideas floating around but I'm hoping this will kick start my imagination.

Figures that when I finally get some time off I have no idea what to work on. Once I go back to school I'll have a brilliant idea and no time to work on it lol.

:D

gizmodo.com/…

You Can Stop Worrying, Disney Figured Out How to Make Perfect CG Sugar

6:39 PM

So a problem that never needed solving?

well obviously it needed to be solved.

rendering things in ever-more-realistic ways is big business.

It's actually really awesome that we're getting there

I get that but still. Sugar of all things?

I've been following this volumetric particle shit because I want dirt in my game

Like real dirt

That you can blow up and dig and shit

It's not just sugar. it's Efficient Rendering of Heterogeneous Poly-Disperse Granular Media

sugar is just one example

6:46 PM

I think sugar is actually significantly more difficult than dirt, or most wet things, because apparently when the grains are all spread out evenly and not sticking together, there's basically no corners to cut in the math if you want a reasonable simulation

sand would qualify, maybe snow

ahhh feels SO GOOD to delete messages and not have them actually disappear

Lasse

You have a script that deletes everything you say right after you say it?