Nice, XNA?

Depends. Currently exploring other things besides game dev, but I have experience with XNA and LWJGL.

yeah if you want to make games, I don't recommend making your own engine. see this awesome blog post: scientificninja.com/blog/write-games-not-engines

I think Josh wrote that. he's one of the mods here.

Unity is probably the general purpose leader as far as engines go, but it entirely depends on what you want to make. they all have strengths and weaknesses.

The main differences between engines is who programmed them :P

XNA isnt really an engine

XD

its a toolchain, and a rough framework

yeah I'd call it a framework.

Well it is called the "XNA Framework"

so

seems reasonable

kind of, anyway

@ToddersLegrande yea, but is one just better than the other? Like, if i create a terrain with a 4K texture in unity, will it look better if i created a 4K texture in Unreal or CryEngine?

@EliteGamer I think the question you have to ask yourself is. why would things look better?

Well, same texture :P

@EliteGamer the answer is, how things look has fuck all to do with the engine, and everything to do with your shaders, and your data

It shouldn't just automagically look better. It might be easier to apply certain kinds of polish in some engines over others thanks to prefabricated materials, effects, etc.

@EliteGamer the engine choice is not about output quality, but about iteration and content creation

@EliteGamer how things look is your problem

lol @hasherr

@EliteGamer certain engines do certain types of content well. there are certain problems that certain engines solve better than others.

@hasherr get back here or I'll force you to watch your favorite youtube video again

games can look and feel slightly different based on the engine, but that's just default settings, to put it simply. some people have noticed the "Unity feel" lately, as an example. all of that can be changed, though.

I swear, officer, they had a gun, they just hijacked the whole thing and then went on a rampage!

@EliteGamer but when it comes to final output quality. thats your graphics team's issue

@ToddersLegrande This one? youtube.com/watch?v=wWLhrHVySgA

and finally

Ok, i understand.

that makes a lot of sense

@hasherr That's the one!

people with shitty tools can make awesome things. often being constrained by your tools means you need to innovate to solve problems.

so if i tried very hard, i could make a game in unity look better than one in Unreal etc. ?

Haha.

@EliteGamer wrong metric. do you have a similar sized art team? do you have budget for people and assets?

@MattD that is not the point lol

@ToddersLegrande dont remove ;(

That was obnoxious lol

TOO LATE

NOT TO LATE

send me link

and ill post it - LIKE A MAN

XD

@EliteGamer no, the point is correct. the engine is just the way you get crap on screen. how you render it is your problem.

ahh

@EliteGamer i could make a game in unreal using cubes

yea

@EliteGamer you could make a game in unity using fully skinned models

@EliteGamer How much experience do you have?

some, but not much. That is why i am asking

does this mean unity is better than unreal now? no, it means the content you put in it is better

BUT

@EliteGamer Do you have professional experience? Or are you just a hobbyist?

if i did the same in both engines...Which would look better? @MattD

they would look exactly the same

@hasherr of course, hobby

Okay.

same shaders, same models

same camera code

Have you ever made a game before?

@MattD THEN why do people choose other engines?

imagine engines are like glasses. unity might be a stien glass, unreal might be a martini glass

@hasherr a small one...small

if you put the same orange juice in both. it tastes the same

]@MattD NICE. haha

gtg

How small? Describe it, was it 2D, what kind, how long did you spend on it, language, etc?

to get away from the metaphor - it's development experience. ease of use.

punctuation is hard.

i need coffee

@IcyDefiance Words are hard. You'll learn, though. :)

noooo coffee is bad.

btw, has IXD or whatever his name was come back yet?

No idea.

I was expecting him to be back by now. Maybe tomorrow.

My programming teacher gave me a 2GB flash drive yesterday :)

@EliteGamer Force and cocos2d.

@IcyDefiance im here

lol

you the same guy?

yea

my logo just changed

and name?

i am about to do eat

yepo

Elite Gamer

People on the internet have funny names...

i dont

What you talkin about? Who names themselves after a rug? Matt... hah

@ToddersLegrande /thread

An extra T to throw us off the scent too

silly billy

@ToddersLegrande Why is your name italicized?

Room owner

Are you really?

I thought this was just a general room. Didn't realize that you own it.

things you learn

Cost me my life savings

$2.50

@IcyDefiance didn't you play FFXIV for a bit?

Lol, when people ask you your profession, you say 'Stack Exchange Room Owner'

It's totally on my resume now

but go ahead... star something trivial.... I DARE YA

Do you get special priveleges or anything like that?

he gets a bobblehead of jpetrie

@MattD worth it

:D

how do judges in a game jam know if the game code or content was created within competition time?

its usually pretty easy to tell

when you've been doing this for long enough you can kind of feel out how much work you can actually do in the time period

but that's guessing

sure, but if something is riduclously pretty, then you can look at timestamps

I think it was Icy that mentioned a kid that won a game jam with a ridiculous amount of content

but what do you mean timestamps?

files usually have a created on, and last modified by

if there's money involved. i'd probably setup a repo that people had to use for the competition

so you could easily check timestamps on commits, which would show up any pulling of existing content

but usually since its just for shits and giggles, its more a "do you want to cheat your friends?"

okay, but participants can work around that

hard proof is difficult, but if someone uploads 10gb of data in the first 10 minutes...

its also why you dont see these things happen for money ;)

(at least very often)

mostly they're just fun for experience and portfolios

I need to get something porfolio-wiorthy

I don't have anything so far.

But I think I have a good idea for a mobile app that I want to build once finals are over.

@hasherr you're doing ld?

I would, if it wasn't the weekend before finals. :(

Sadly, making games is not of my priority this weekend.

@ToddersLegrande nope, haven't touched that series, though I've heard good things about it.

I think someone in here has I just can't remember who

I guess I'll try it just to see what I can come up with.

@hasherr You ever participated?

No, I've always wanted to.

I will next time.

i really WANT to do LD

i love LD with all my heart

i often hang out in the chat and try and help folks even when im not doing it

and one day, ill meet mike and the guys and buy them beer

doing LD's is what taught me how to make games

so, i have a lot of love for the work those guys do

back when i was doing LD, there were like 30-50 people doing them

Get a good game like UT and mod that. good place to start with LD.

(Level Design)

back in my day

laughs

:D

back in my day, we had to roll everything in c++ from scratch on the fly

engines, hah, this was before you could even get hold of something like unreal. the best you had was ogre3d in its very early days

Back in my day, we had a keyboard just like today, but everything was either 0 or 1. We'd code like that.

i spent 6 hours trying to find a bug, re-writing my flocking like 3 times, only to eventually find when i'd typed in my math code, i'd missed a * on a parameter to a matrix function

these days, with unity, you can make some truley lovely shit

I know that pain as well. Python's IDLE was a cruel mistress.

it was fun though. you really had to work hard

I want to do the LD sooooo bad, but they put it on the worst date of the year for me.

I REALLY HATE HOW EXCELL OPENS SHIT IN THE SAME WINDOW

laugsh

I haven't found anything better, though

sup jp

LibreOffice is nice, until you try to use a template, or even just a header/footer, then it goes batshit.

im trying to piece together 3 different excell spreadsheets to work out how to structure my database tables

i really shouldve pushed harder to write a tech spec for this project. ugh.

will there be pie?

Anyone have any recommendations for cloud based databases?

@Grey Google App Engine?

@JoshPetrie Cool. That'll be good

@Grey More specifically, Google Cloud Datastore

I have a little data I can dig up on what Like Clockwork was using in the way of the datastore to give you an idea of how much you can use for free

Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't use databases. I'm not that familiar with Javascript so meh.

You mean SQL?

Databases in General and using Javascript to interact with them.

@Grey That's because you don't use JavaScript to interact with a database :P

I didn't even know you could use JS to interact with them, but I guess with node.js you can, and maybe Unity

@JohnMcDonald Yes Node.js

@ToddersLegrande MongoDB

Ah

and mongoose

what

O:

As long as you aren't expecting client side JavaScript to interact with a DB then fine :P

considering node.js is server tech or something along those lines

@ToddersLegrande It is.

3/0/18 orianna mid

:)

What does that even mean Almo.

It's LoL

3 kills, 0 deaths, 18 assists

means he did a good job

yeah, people will assume that JS == client-side JS. You should say node.js

:)

@JohnMcDonald ++

k

@ToddersLegrande ASSUMED

ziggs was my opp in the lane

@Grey rightfully so

no

Agree to disagree then

pizza time soon i think

@Almo mine's in the oven :O

//was going to post meme

turns oven on

but then I stopped

:D

@Grey put in a pizza. Then we can pretend to be the ninja turtles

@ToddersLegrande Narrrly DuuuuuUuuuuUUUd3

RADICAL

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES echo echo echo

/o/

T-U-R-T-L-E POWER

well that was fun

until next pizza time

js is terrible at the best of times, i dont understand why anyone would want to use it for server stuff

I haven't had pizza in 5 ever

I guess if its all you know then maybe, just maybe, you think its a good thing

JS is great when used properly

Still gotta finish that book.... lol

@MattD I am starting to fall in love with JS

but you've got c#, with its fantastic tools

that is not a trivial task, but when done, it's good.

C# can be used server side

@JohnMcDonald lies. jQuery

puts on glasses

jQuery!!!!

@ToddersLegrande heh, my bad

@ToddersLegrande moar

needsmorejquery.com

ill take a debugger every day

I'll take strongly and statically typed languages any day.... @Grey :P

Matt gets debuggers on the daily :>

i used debugger in JS

@MattD JS has a debugger.

Breakpoints and all

@ToddersLegrande must correct... semantics!

for server side stuff? that's decent?

don't recall if it was chrome or webstorm

and not GDB?

jumps off building

i mean, chrome has a decent debugger

for client side JS

@MattD Ok, I don't know if node.js has a good debugger, but client side stuff is great

@JohnMcDonald Chrome Tools ftw I hate debugging in FireFox

@Grey I <3 FireBug (for Firefox)

I have fire bug but meh

It's basically the same as Chrome's debugger. Pretty sure they stolez it

CHROME DEV TOOLS FTW

there's some really cool client side tools, like knockout, which do really awesome things (actually quite a lot like the .net asp stuff but on the client side). I think JS can be used well for that, but im hoping one day we can run CLR stuff in the browser and I can use a proper langauge with proper debuggers and typing and super happy fun times (think c#) rather than one which is very hard to structure large complicated code.

@JohnMcDonald Go Native

or hit the road.

Steroids.js is amazing

and Phonegap

You can basically create a website with mobile capability(with bootstrap for example) then you can port it as an app to your phone with steroids and phone gap.

yeah, its slow as hell though

@MattD Oh Steroids?

all those cross platform thingies tend to be quite slow.

:V I THINK YOU ARE over generalizing sir.

Phonegap works sufficient for apps that aren't games. My company "uses" it

:D

We don't really sell much mobile though

ok, im in a web house atm, and we dont use phonegap because the performance for complicated stuff isnt there.

you're better off just having a responsive site

or an actual native app (which we rarely recommend anyway)

HTML5 or Native

The debate.

for web? HTML5

yeah, I've been meaning to make Like Clockwork work better on phones + tablets. It's actually really close to usable

@JohnMcDonald Look into Steroids.Js and PhoneGap nao

With the help of Bootstrap

eventually, we'll get CLR stuff in the browser using canvas as the render surface

im calling it now

@JohnMcDonald Bootstrap is awesome. ++ for using it.

Not sure I really want/need a native app

@JohnMcDonald It's more convenient if you ask me.

yeah. Could be fun to try.

@MattD Security issues.

Gr

but it will probably happen :>

@Grey ATM, yes, eventually, we'll get there.

Maybe after I get it working with straight up HTML5 on my SII

@Grey thats the real goal of the c++ -> js type runtime stuff going on atm

eventually, we'll be writing application code in c# (or something) which runs in the browser in a CLR which uses canvas as a portable renderer, with some HTML stuff for markup but mostly application style development.

(and possibly some webgl stuff too)

That would be awesome, and I would definitely like to be involved in that kind of R&D. I need to get my web dev skills up to date.

But before I do that I'd really like to learn the in's and out's of C#, because right now I'm a jack of three languages master of none :p

and when I get into technical conversations with others I'm like, super lost. It's not a good feeling haha.

C# and the .NET Framework in General. There's so much stuff I haven't used. That's why they call it general-purpose :p

So I guess I should probably ask, How did you guys memorize these concepts? I know majority of the knowledge comes from reading and talking to other developers?

How good you are comes from practice, I know :p

syntax is syntax. the real fun in programming is not languages, but ideas, concepts, and strategies for problem solving.

the real fun is math!

@Grey I don't memorize anything. I despise memorization. It's worthless. Instead, I try my best to understand the concepts.

I mean I can always google them later.

Understanding them helps a lot more with figuring out problems that can't be found on google.

anything I do have memorized just happened that way. it's not like I wrote it on a paper 20 times to make it stick in my head.

most of it is because I've used it

Yeah you just kind of take it day by day

You become good at what you use

And ignorant to everything else :P

My ignorance in some areas is just silly

@IcyDefiance Yup. Totally agree

Everything I've "memorized" for a test, I've forgotten

Okay idea time

YOU GUYS MIGHT WANT TO SIT DOWN :>

Lol

whenever I get around developers a topic that always sprouts up is version control systems

long story short github is like the holy grail of social networks for developers. It all revolves around the creation of good software.

Generally using an Agile Software Methodology.

but, developers need users right? If there are no users there are no developers, so to speak. GitHub is nice, but it's not streamlined for feedback, from users. You can report issues and that's it.

@ChristianCareaga yes, alternatively you could also do

dx = -dx
dy = -dy

same thing

yes in python i just did dx *= -1

@Grey That's not really the purpose of GitHub, and most certainly isn't the purpose of version control.

want feedback? make a website with a comment form.

or a forum

@ChristianCareaga be sure to move whatever it is you're moving out of the way or it will get stuck

@Grey I guess I don't consider github a social network really =/

Yeah i use rect.copy()and reset it to its coordinates right before it collides

Technically I could see it that way

Do people actually go to github to be social? like the hardcore OSS peeps?

version control is a form of backup combined with some tools to help multiple people work on the same project together. Git is one system for version control. GitHub is a place to host your Git repository, with a couple management features added on top of what Git already provides.

it's a very easy place to share your code with the world, but it's not a place for conversations

That's how I was feeling on it

And agile really has nothing to do with git, github, or version control

aye

TFS on the other hand gives you some tools that allow you to incorporate your development methodology into it

I do see version control as a kind of qualifier for programmers. Right now, it's a useful line between "I once wrote a program for class that had, like, 3 buttons and a textbox" and "I'm serious about this. Programming is my thing."

but I'm not in a position to hire anyone

alex made most of the game jam one, and I polished it

D:

what is this, TF2?

yeah

fair enough

I can't really make an ad, though. way too busy with final projects.