Game Development

Vaillancourt

12:34 AM

Results are in, congratulations to @Almo and @Evorlor for their new shiny diamond!

Almo

thanks! :)

Vaillancourt

And to @liggiorgio too, you got good results!

Almo

:D

Evorlor

12:56 AM

Yippee!

GDSE Meta

2:15 AM

3

Q: 2021 Community Moderator Election Results

Game Development's fourth moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the two new moderators are: They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes! For details o...

nwp

6:23 AM

@Evorlor No, someone just linked it.

nwp

9:18 AM

@GDSEMeta Congrats Almo! Or my condolences, not sure which.

And Evorlor too, but I don't think I've seen you before.

DMGregory

1:37 PM

The diamonds look good on you two. 😁

Pikalek

PSA: Epic has acquired ArtStation & made their learning content free for the rest of 2021.

user92578

The free drop feels like somewhat of a call-out... :D

Pikalek

And reduced the marketplace fee from 30% to 12%, though I suspect if that applies to you, you probably already knew about it :P

@Tyyppi_77 Yeah. It certainly plays to their "we're the good guys here" narrative w/ respect to certain litigation at the moment.

user92578

Yeeep

Pikalek

Though I suspect it has more to do with fostering artists early on w/ the intent of having stronger buy-in from them down the road in their careers.

Either way though, it seems like a positive move for the art community.

DMGregory

2:01 PM

Sweet. Letting my students know about that too!

Almo

It's a callout

pumping over a billion into free stuff doesn't make them look like someone who wants new players to have access to the market

Feeds

3:00 PM

Vaillancourt has removed Almo from the list of this room's owners.

Vaillancourt

You don't need that anymore ;)

Almo

3:13 PM

hahah :)

nwp

Just don't fail your probational period now!

OKprogrammer

3:29 PM

@Vaillancourt Could you possibly y’know, give that ownership to someone else? 😉

Vaillancourt

Yes, eventually :) I assume you volunteer to take the job?

user92578

Assumedly we actually already got +1 user with roow owner priviledges yesterday even with the removal of Almo's explicit permissions :)

Vaillancourt

Yep :)

Almo

3:48 PM

ooooh the Delete button!

must not touch

DMGregory

Truly, modhood is a study in which buttons not to press.

2

Almo

So true!

Vaillancourt

There are only a few of those buttons that don't allow a "revert" though.

Evorlor

whats this big red button do?

lets find out

Vaillancourt

;)

Evorlor

4:03 PM

...didnt we used to have more than 5 users on gamedev stackexchange? oh well

Vaillancourt

I chat? Yes, a few years ago there were more users here.

user92578

... I think that was a joke about the button deleting almost all site users :)

Vaillancourt

Ah, hahah :P

Evorlor

:-p

please, hold your applause

DMGregory

Thinking of those famous words from Ellen Ripley...

Pikalek

4:20 PM

I thought the quote was "dust off" rather than "take off"

But the internet says I'm wrong.

OKprogrammer

@Vaillancourt Sorry, was busy with work, but yes, I sure am. :)

Vaillancourt

@OKprogrammer Noted :) We'll take that into account when we feel we need more room owners here!

Almo

5:09 PM

:D

Wasabi

6:00 PM

I've been thinking, how am I going to do a "decrease graphics quality"? My game is going to be multiplayer, but people must play in "parties". So, there won't be any multiplayer where a chinese person could wind up with a Canadian person, and they'd have quite the difficult time working things out. So by making a party, everyone should probably know eachother, which likely will increase the chance of cooperation, since they already know eachother, at least somewhat.

user92578

I don't see how anything you described prevents people from different parts of the world playing in the same party, and what even is your concern there? Ping?

user92578

Also what does the multiplayer grouping have to do with graphics quality?

Wasabi

But I never thought about decreasing graphics quality. I plan on having it so that decreasing the graphics quality will decrease things such as the complexity of shapes. My bullet holes are beautiful, they are legit holes (unlike every other game I've played, which just uses black dots), and the bullet hole actually warps the metal. But I want it so that decreasing the graphics quality would, for example, turn the bullet holes into simple black dots, for slow computers.

Multiplayer? Here's what I mean: Take a haphazardly created wall, made of metal beams jutting out all over the place. Now, with graphics quality 0, the metal beams won't even stick out. So for someone with graphics quality 20, they'll run into a metal beam sticking out of the wall whereas someone with 0 will not. This means that the one with 0 could get closer to the wall than the one with graphics quality 20.

DMGregory

You're taking about next year problems again. 😉

Vaillancourt

You're working on the wrong issue.

Wasabi

6:06 PM

Alright, alright.

user92578

Graphics quality should not affect physics andor gameplay.

Wasabi

Well, it can speed up gameplay.

But you're right. I should stick to something very, very tiny. Like degrading bullet holes.

user92578

I assume you mean speed up FPS, not the actual simulation speed?

Wasabi

Well, yes.

DMGregory

Usually we'll separate the collision representation of an object from its visual mesh. The collision representation will often be lower-poly, or even a collection of primitive shapes like spheres and capsules.

Wasabi

6:07 PM

Oh, right. I forgot about that.

I can make he bullet hole beautiful but keep the collider primitive.

DMGregory

This goes further into separating the logical representation of your game content for the purpose of the game rules from the way it's visualized/presented.

Wasabi

I do that a lot, for concave objects, such as buildings. I have to manually place a whole bunch of boxes.

*I meant I make primitive boxes and capsules

DMGregory

You will want to establish some metrics though. "Here is the collision volume for this object. Visual variances should not exceed this volume by more than x cm to ensure it looks consistent"

Wasabi

Shouldn't I make the bullet hole adaptable? By this I mean I take a bullet hole, but make it able to be applied to any surface. To actually put a hole in it. But how that would work with a curved surface, I'm not so sure...

I see.

Vaillancourt

@Wasabi Are bullet holes part of the core gameplay of your game?

Wasabi

6:11 PM

Well, if you shoot a plane and you don't see bullet holes, one would assume that they'd either missed, or the bullets bounced off of the target.

By seeing a bullet hole, you know you hit something.

Or, you also know if something hit you

OKprogrammer

But, not essential. You could tell if you hit something with a ping noice, target image or something along those lines.

Wasabi

Luckily, the B-29's walls are too thick to put a hole so deep that it'd be visible from the inside. That'd be catastrophic, since the plane is pressurized.

user92578

Likely you don't actually need to see the tiny hole made and a black dot + some smoke would do just fine?

Vaillancourt

^

Wasabi

True, true.

@OKprogrammer no ping noise, that'd be crazy, since there's dogfighting and a whole bunch of MiG - 15's and P-51 Mustangs zipping all over the place, you'd have no idea if the ping sounds you're hearing came from that P-51 Mustang over there, that MiG-15 back there, or if you actually made the sound.

Vaillancourt

6:14 PM

The way you work now could be nice if you were to make a movie or something, might want to focus on the gameplay first and stick on it what's needed once you got it fun to play :)

Wasabi

Oh, is it irrational to make a 15 cal. bullet shoot out of every 15 cal. turret?

Right.

user92578

Probably unnecessary since you can't see the bullets anyways

Wasabi

Actually, you could.

But It'd go by so quick... Yeah, actually you're right. I should make my 15 cal. bullet low-poly. For higher fps.

DMGregory

I'd do the bullet holes with a decal, using shader tricks to render a depression that's not really there in the geometry. That way I don't have to modify meshes at runtime or deal with boolean-ing holes into curved surfaces.

Most games render the streaking of bullets in flight more like a particle effect than an actual mesh.

So, you'd only need the bullet mesh as a prop for set dressing on the interior. Once it's in flight, it's something else entirely.

Wasabi

Great Idea!

DMGregory

6:19 PM

For sound, we can use spatialized audio to help the player distinguish where sounds are coming from, and master background sounds softer than the sounds of bullets you're shooting or being hit (or almost hit) by.

Wasabi

Can I still do real bullet holes on an object that actually has the bullet holes in the first place? Like a piece of a plane/part of a plane that is supposed to be damaged?

DMGregory

It's also common for shooter games to play an extra sound when your bullet hits something, to help sell the connection.

Wasabi

I see

DMGregory

You could, but only if it matters. It might matter two years from now. Today, it does not matter, so don't spend mental energy on it.

OKprogrammer

6:30 PM

I haven’t worked on my game for like 2 weeks and I feel horribly lazy for it.

Vaillancourt

What have you done instead?

Wasabi

Oh, I'm going to reveal part of the game story: At one point, when the player(s) progress into the story, (when the storyline really begins) At one point, on a cloudy day, the player(s) are flying a B-29, on a cloudy day, (yes, there's a bit of icing encountered at the altitude) a fleet of MiG - 15s encounter them and manage to shoot the plane down. The players have to rush to bail the flaming B-29, and open their parachutes. They land in Russian territory, and within 2 minutes, they are found by Soviets, and they become POWs. Then the story transitions to the player(s) trying to escape the…

Almo

None of this matters yet. Work on the gameplay.

Wasabi

see the bottom

Almo

We all want you to have the best chance of success :)

Wasabi

6:34 PM

Right, So do I.

DMGregory

That's a one-off prop you can make next year, not something to worry about today.

OKprogrammer

@Vaillancourt Sports and school and some web dev learning.

Wasabi

@DMGregory I'm great (or at least I think) at making Airplanes, and so I'd be happy to tell you that I already made that airplane.

Vaillancourt

Looks like legitimate reasons for not working on your game ;)

user92578

Web dev is fun in small enough portions :P

2

OKprogrammer

6:36 PM

HTML doesn’t seem so bad. Finished that course in a day. Next up is CSS.

DMGregory

@Tyyppi_77 This sounds like a calculus statement. "As epsilon approaches zero, we find that fun obtains a positive value in the limit"

Vaillancourt

You can make more money faster with web dev, compared to game dev

DMGregory

You'll probably remake it twice more as you learn about what your game needs, so don't rush to do all your asset creation up-front.

OKprogrammer

Yes, but game dev is a bit more fun.

user92578

Integration of the full stack by very small parts... :D

OKprogrammer

6:39 PM

I know some people who program in FORTRAN.

user92578

@OKprogrammer CSS and JS is where things start to get more hairy, and then we start slapping on parts of the modern web dev stack with data binding libraries, state management, ...

DMGregory

@OKprogrammer "Fun" in approximately this sense

user92578

I think FORTRAN is still maintained and developed, and mainly gets its bad wrap from the main industry use of maintaining massive ancient legacy code bases that don't quite fit the feature set of the language

DMGregory

My mother was still coding in COBOL till she retired last year.

Vaillancourt

@DMGregory Those people typically make lots of money!

DMGregory

6:43 PM

She did not badly. 😊 Being pretty much impossible to replace has its upsides.

Vaillancourt

yep!

DMGregory

She was finally able to retire after the mainframe did. 😜

Wasabi

Do those look like good bullet holes?

Vaillancourt

Ah... "Could you give us one more year please?" "Well... you've asked me that for the last 10 years... I'm 75 now"

Wasabi

Or should I add some black burnt stuff around the holes?

The bullet holes aren't simply holes, they do press the metal inwards, if you look close enough.

DMGregory

6:50 PM

I'm not going to answer questions about aesthetics until you have some gameplay to demo. ;)

Wasabi

:)

Almo

7:06 PM

@DMGregory My thought

You psy kick

DMGregory

It's one of the diamond powers. You'll get the hang of it in time. 😉

Almo

@DMGregory :D

Wasabi

7:27 PM

Lol

Hey @DMGregory I just thought, could it be offensive to a Russian who plays the game? I mean, they'd have to be in an American plane, shooting their own country's planes, with their own country's people in them. Same for Japanese, but worse. Not only do they have to shoot and kill their enemies, which are in many cases Japanese Zero-Fighters, but they also have to drop 20 tons of bombs onto their country.

Almo

That's not for us to answer

do market research

see how people feel about existing WWII games

there's actually a lot of discussion out there about this topic

DMGregory

Particularly around the game Six Days in Fallujah recently.

Almo

yeah

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