Game Development - 2012-01-30 (page 1 of 2)

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12:02 AM

There's a whole suite of ancient "Where can I find people" questions that were just bumped by someone promoting a web site. According to meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/702/… "where can I find people" questions are off-topic for this site. Close votes, I guess?

sigh, an other advertiser eh?

12:26 AM

Woot! Enthusiast badge earned

woo hoo! game released: isotower.com There's a free demo for anyone who is cheap, it's basically the same as the paid version but it has a lower floor limit and less starting money.

8

Sweet

Congratulations! Now where is your dusty bottle of champagne?

I plan on opening it after 23 sales (which will give me a million Zimbabwe dollars)

Congratulations, thedaian!

Thanks. Hopefully I get some sales and have a reason to keep working on it beyond just my own stubboness.

12:35 AM

I've found that my own stubbornness is a better motivator than sales, personally. ;)

But sales are good, too!

sales let me know that someone else out there cares enough to put down money for it

my own stubbornness is useful otherwise

Congrats on the release.

Hopefully I'll have something to release in the future.

Hopefully everyone who's working on something will release it in the future.

Heh. I've been working on my own game for almost four years, I think. Can't imagine ever finishing it. But finishing would be nice.

to be fair, Isotower isn't finished either :P

and it's been about 2 years

though a lot of "off" time in that

12:46 AM

Could probably finish it if I took six to eight months off work to do it. That's probably about what it'd take, working full-time. But I'm only able to spend maybe two hours a week on it at the moment.

I'm currently experimenting with XNA / Gleed2D and its going well. With a tool like this available for use I feel like I should be able to accomplish something in a rather short amount of time

If I actually dedicated time to it anyway

@thedaian Congrats!

1:18 AM

@thedaian Awesome!

Now the fun part: starting up the press machine

and playing the waiting game

(Finger clicks download button) :D

@thedaian Your game is awesome :D

haha, thanks

gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/23095/… lol

user4704

1:50 AM

I don't think it's necessarily as amusing as it first looks.

it's a weird question to be asking...

user4704

I think he might be playing around with home-made circuit boards and is consequently trying to find an "engine" that doesn't need D3D or GL drivers.

I think it's more a problem of difficulty with english.

user4704

It's still going to go precisely nowhere, of course, because that code would need to be compiled for his custom chip and hardware, et cetera.

Not games engines but I think Flash or HTML Canvas would be a good direction to send this fellow

1:53 AM

overall, it needs more information

user4704

yup

to figure out what the guy is actually trying to do, and what he's asking

2:20 AM

So while I've begun to get into XNA and how easy it seems to develop for it given the tools available I start to wonder why I don't see higher quality games on XBox Live Indie Games. Any thoughts?

@tylerrrr07 To be honest, it's because the money isn't there.

And Microsoft seems determined to shove XBLING into the corner where no one will see it

@thedaian I guess as a hobbiest I knew that but ignored it. I'd just be stoked to release something.

And to your second point I definitely noticed that with the latest update

it's really easy to release something on XBLIG, just pay your $100 to Microsoft and bam, you've released a game there

Yeah. I figured if you release something there that actually becomes somewhat popular... it opens up windows to "porting" to Steam, etc.

So that provides motivation to make something good

I do often wonder why it's free to distribute an XNA game on PCs

2:31 AM

heck, even if it's not that popular on XBLIG. a few games that didn't sell that well on XBLIG got a steam release and made tons more money

@JohnMcDonald Microsoft can't control the PC platform

Yeah. I heard the hard part is GETTING the Steam release.

Yeah, but if they wrapped a licence around it, they'd at least be able to go around suing indies into the ground

That would be bad form for Microsoft.

People just wouldn't use it at that point

yeah, maybe they allow it because you still need windows?

@tylerrrr07 You know you can edit your messages, right? (see?)

Haha no I didn't. Thanks for the tip

2:33 AM

getting the steam release is tricky, but a polished game + unique game will give you much higher chances

Press Up to modify your previous message, or just click on the arrow

Keyboard shortcuts! Even better.

@thedaian ahh the dream

We can do it, right?

Indeed we can!

I'm pretty optimistic that if I don't give up in the middle I should be able to do it.

2:35 AM

*looks at how many "simulation" games there are on Steam

welp :(

Working on an 2D adventure game similar to the style of Monkey Island but with a little more "Action Puzzles" as I'd like to call them.

@tylerrrr07 Cool. Do you know about Adventure Game Studio?

I do not... googles it

@thedaian You looked at the other categories?!

there's a lot of games on steam....

I do think that the final/polished version of Isotower would have a good chance, though

2:37 AM

Alright. I don't feel bad for not knowing it! I'm getting away from "Point and Click" and going with a control scheme more like Action RPGs

@tylerrrr07 Fair enough, that's also cool!

@thedaian I definitely appreciate the tip though.

Simulation: 284
Strategy: 504
Indie: 356 (Wow!)
Action: 792

@JohnMcDonald Indie isn't a genre... that bothers me to an extent

heh

2:40 AM

As long as the games inside Indie span other genres its fine... but if it IS the genre that's a problem

Well... most of those are the only release by an "indie" studio

What actually defines "Indie" though?

yeah... it's more of a category than a genre

Indie is more buzz word than anything now

yeah, the "indie" category is less of a category at this point

or... meh. it's not really a genre, most of the indie games show up in other, proper genres, too

but it is a thing on steam

That works for me then

Day[9] is starting... :D

holy cow I feel like a noob - just learned something awesome watching a video (something the guy didn't even cover because evidently its that basic...)

you can set booleans such as
bool isSomething = (isSomethingElse == isSomethingElse2)

user4704

2:56 AM

Mm, you already knew that.

user4704

You just never thought about it in that context.

In theory

I just assumed it only worked in if...else statements and looping constructs

user4704

Well it works in those because they require an expression that evaluates to a boolean value, which x == y does. ;)

Right! It totally makes sense and I just can't believe I didn't think of it

user4704

This is why I rage when I see: "if(x == y) return true; else return false;"

3:00 AM

I can understand now

Though thinking forward I think I would still break it down if it gets much more of a complex comparison than that

Just from a readability standpoint

heh, i learned something today, too :P

anything worth sharing or very specific to you?

no, just the same thing you learned right now :P

@thedaian Really?

What's even one step beyond that is that you can do:

if(myvar = (1 + 1))

You can, but most modern compilers will throw a warning, since it's so easy to typo that when you meant ==.

(Also, that's not a useful 'if' anyhow, it'll always evaluate to true!)

3:15 AM

I noticed that too. :)

The really good compilers will throw a warning about that, too. But that's less common. ;)

I assumed he meant if(myvar = (something == something2))

err

the two somethings should be different

there... fixed

A more common practical one might be "if ( object = ObjectAtPixel(x,z) )" But as I say, compilers will warn. :)

as in a check if there is an object at pixel (otherwise null?)

Exactly. Return the object, or NULL if there isn't one.

3:19 AM

Gotcha. Just making sure I understood the logic right.

But really, it's not noticeably nicer than "object = ObjectAtPixel(x,z); if (object) ... "

but its neat to say the least

2 hours later…

5:42 AM

@TrevorPowell yeah, I completely agree. I really dislike when people use assignments inside conditionals

Clarity should be the objective of any line of code

6:06 AM

It's like people who don't use parentheses in math statements, on the basis that they think they know operator precedence. ;)

6 hours later…

11:56 AM

@john it save lots of reading time, based on how much you are familiar with this assignments;

you can also see some will use a[i++] or a[++i] to reduce number of lines.

and they can beneficial in their own way

2 hours later…

2:27 PM

I like the function of post/pre increment/decrement, I just don't like the syntax of it.

3:08 PM

11 views, three upvotes on my comment. :D

-1

Q: Using Torque3D for an MMOFPS

After weeks of reading, trying, failing and going nuts, I decided to look for a commercial game engine that would include graphics, sound and network to start really working on my first MMOFPS. Right now, I'm thinking about 2 options: Torque3D and Source. Which of the two is better? And is ther...

Cute.... hehe

&closed

He's a rude one. :P

3:48 PM

Yeah he didn't like your comment evidently

My comment did have a point though. Looking at his other questions, he has no idea how to even handle a multiplayer game.

hmmm, rude response, this guy is a winner

user4704

4:11 PM

The "GFYS" comment?

yeah

that's just not nice

user4704

Nope.

user4704

I take comfort in the fact that he will not likely succeed in any of his efforts.

Woot Woot.

lol

user4704

btw I found a rendering bug in your game.

user4704

4:17 PM

I managed to get one of the empty floor tiles that was above and to the right of a hotel room tile to render overtop the hotel room tile

if it's the one where sometimes rooms appear on top of each other, yeah, that's known. stupid painters algorithm

user4704

ok cool

Oh that reminded me... I had a comment on the web site! The game looks neat, haven't played it but as far as I can tell it's kind of like a Sims game or something...

but that's just it. Based on what I saw on the web site I couldn't figure out the objective of the game.

Just build...

user4704

Pretty much.

@tylerrrr07 Fair enough. There's not yet an objective, and there's honestly not that much in the way of gameplay yet either. Next month is the "add more stuff to the game to give people a reason to want to play it" month

that's why I haven't really done much in the way of sending out press releases, either, since there's just not yet enough there

4:20 PM

Gotcha. Do you have a plan though or are you experimenting with that a bit yet?

I do have a bit of a plan, but part of it is experimenting

Sure.

the final goal is to have a plugin system with scripting and stuff, which could mean allowing missions/campaign, or fairly complex stuff at times

That would be neat. I like the idea of allowing custom content.

yeah. the plugin system is something I've planned from the beginning, though it's going to be one of the last major features added...

4:29 PM

Looking back do you think it would have been easier, the same, or more difficult to have implemented the plugin system right away and then implement many of your features as plugins?

Is this an interview for a magazine or something? :P

Most of the features I've implemented so far won't even be in the plugin system, but my plan is to add the plugin stuff once I get to adding those features

That will likely start to happen in a month or two, at which point I'll have to hope that my plan for the plugin stuff actually works

Haha... That makes sense. I was thinking maybe the elevators, etc. could have been implemented as plugins but maybe not. You're the best judge for that. :)

yeah. all the room types are implemented as "plugins" right now, but anything related to pathfinding is in the core game code because of speed

(plugins being XML files that load a few values at the moment)

That makes sense. Seems you had it all figured out already :)

4:55 PM

oh man that guy is still going at it with the rude comments

welp, he just got another -1 from me for the same reason.

...and I accidentally "liked" his reply.... darn it

where are these rude comments?

Which question?

-5

Q: Using Torque3D for an MMOFPS

After weeks of reading, trying, failing and going nuts, I decided to look for a commercial game engine that would include graphics, sound and network to start really working on my first MMOFPS. Right now, I'm thinking about 2 options: Torque3D and Source. Which of the two is better? And is ther...

I can only find his "GFYS" comment

4:59 PM

That one. One of the comments has been deleted, I'm guessing the other one will be deleted soon enough

yeah, ok

thats a second one... the first one seems to have disappeared. hence "GFYS 2"

Can we just delete the question?

probably...

Oh, ok. So he reposted the same comment, I was wondering what the "2" was for

yeah it was just directed towards a different user

5:01 PM

:(

poor guy

his previous comment was something like "i didn't want you to ask me any questions" directed at Mindworx

I think we should all band together and create an MMORPG Toolkit and sell it to everyone only to only have their dreams crushed because even if they made the game they wouldn't have any infrastructure to support it! We'd be rich though.

3

I believe that's been done before.

@tylerrrr07 That's called Hero Engine

Haha

5:03 PM

Then that should have been the answer to this dudes question

though its still off topic

Never saw that engine before. Looks like a neat concept

user4704

I flagged his first comment as offense. The second one, too, now.

and all the comments outside of Noctrine's are gone

probably for the best

yeah...

user4704

Yeah. Strange he hasn't seemed like such a complete jerk in his previous interactions here.

5:09 PM

I think a lot of people get defensive when they're called out on their whole "i want to make an mmorpg/fps/puzzle game as my very first game" thing...

Reality hurts!

yeah, but we don't have to be rude about it, :(

We're programmers. We excel at being rude.

Geez, Blender is so much better now.

want cheat sheets? have some cheat sheets: devcheatsheet.com

5:16 PM

This looks to be an awesome site

Blender cheat sheet is a broken link though :(

yes. yes it does.

:(

awww, it's links to external cheat sheets. that's disappointing, and potentially less useful

5:32 PM

Hey. Does anyone know how to calculate player's new position when I need him to create step back?

@Martin When dealing with collision detection, I'm guessing?

@thedaian eh, no.

@thedaian gun recoil

ah, ok

How is stepping backward any different than stepping forward?

@TreDubZedd I even don't know how to step forward. I need to do it programmaticaly

5:38 PM

I think I'm'na need more context before I even attempt to answer your question

@TreDubZedd Actually, I am creating 2D Top-down game. I need to apply recoil when I shoot from my gun, by moving player back a bit

I need to calculate new position of my player after shooting

So player (gamer) won't move but player on the screen will for a second

user4704

Well, you know the direction the player is facing, right?

user4704

Assuming that vector is normalized, invert it, scale it by some factor representing how powerful the recoil is, and then add that vector to the player's position vector. That's the new target position.

@JoshPetrie yes, mouse position, and rotation

@JoshPetrie Actually I want to move the character by 2 pixels only

user4704

Well, you should be able to figure out the appropriate scale factor.

user4704

5:51 PM

The vector math bit still holds.

@tylerrrr07 HeroEngine gives you the infrastructure.

Oh. That's disappointing (for everyone else)

Its point of killing you is realizing that even with a lot of the things in place, making a properly working MMO is still quite a bit of work.

@JoshPetrie can you show that in pseudo code?

recoilVector = -forwardVector.Normalize() * someScaleValue;
playerPosition += recoilVector;

5:55 PM

As a side note, it might be worthwhile to have your player input affect a movement vector, which then gets applied to the position.

forwardVector = direction = mouse position (rotation is based on mouse pos)?

forwardVector = characterCenter - mousePosition;  (or mouse - center?)

@TreDubZedd hmm, actually player's input isn't affected by this recoil

I'm saying that both player input and recoil affect the position...which indicates the summation of vectors.

If your mouse position's range is from (-MAX_X, -MAX_Y) to (MAX_X, MAX_Y), which implies that the center of the screen is the origin, then you can determine a "forward" vector.

(Actually, you can determine a forward vector regardless, but this is what I'm assuming you're doing)

Hmm

There are twice as many Unity3D questions on SO than GameDev...

6:02 PM

wow

And you know what? That's probably because they didn't know this site existed

Most of the people asking them are new users, so it's very likely

Especially since, like the one that just came up in the ticker. They are a bit better suited to here.

I found this website by keeping up with the XNA tag on SO then saw that one of the questions was migrated

Been here ever since

1 hour later…

7:05 PM

Hey!

My comment was removed! :(

user4704

lol

It did have a point. :(

8:01 PM

Down to one last floating point error bug for my stupidly big coordinate system!

Specular light is getting garbled away for some reason even though I'm doing everything in view space now.

note to future self: don't use stupidly big coordinate systems in the future

So present self is allowed?

And past self

if you knew how to get a note to your past self, you'd probably be rich by now

If flame wars happen in comments I usually find it better just to nuke everything @MindWorX, even if your comment wasn't inherently inflammatory

8:08 PM

@Tetrad Makes sense. :)

8:21 PM

I hate progress bars without progress. You know, those ever moving looping animations, no indication of % of progress or some arbitrary 2342/213223 progress.

So basically every Windows startup screen since 95?

Ironic you should say Windows. I was referring to Zune firmware updater. For my new Windows Phone. ;)

haha

windows has a long history of looping animations that don't do anything

8:50 PM

@Gajet, did you end up trying AO?

9:44 PM

... I just got the Guru badge for explaining triangles. :D

Triangles are complicated!

hahaha

you are a Guru at triangles

Triangle Master!

Except I borked the code and eBusiness had to fix it. :P

Btw congratulations @thedaian. I'll buy a copy just to support you. :)

yay! it'll be my second sale....

20 more until a million zimbabwe dollars

9:51 PM

The order has been placed. :) Lots of <3's and congratulations for you

Yay! Thank you!

hmmm, maybe i did get more sales today, since i didn't get any "order happened" email from your order...

i need to configure stuff and add something to let me know how many people are downloading the demo

Well, my order was placed through paypal, so it might be a bit slow to arrive.

hmmm, maybe. i dunno

ah, ok. Yep, it's in "pending". hopefully I do get a proper email about it, that way I'll know it's working.

XNA is SO WEIRD

How so?

10:06 PM

have a full complete toolset to do complicated tasks such load models

but, there's nothing to make a manual model like a cube

That i can do easily with OpenGL or DX

No control over vertex buffers?

Yes you have, but wow, it's painful

Letting code make its own art assets is the first step toward the singularity.

@TrevorPowell Not the point, it's because I dont want to have a model file for just a cube.

Or s/the singularity/SkyNet if one prefers. ;)

10:09 PM

@TrevorPowell the demoscene, advancing the singularity one 4k demo at a time

Conjecture: SkyNet is just a surprisingly slow version of the singularity.

lol, the thing i found about a guy making a cube on XNA

he is using 36 vertices, instead of 8 and use indices

I can see using 24. Not sure why 36?

Oh wait, I see why 36. That's silly.

blogs.msdn.com/b/dawate/archive/2011/01/20/…

Yeah..

Well.. I guess by using 36 you don't need an index buffer. Might actually be faster, I guess.

10:13 PM

Hello wonderful people

Any mods around?

We're curious if you guys want this question:

1

Q: In the N64 Pokemon games, why was it required to save in a Pokemon Center

Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Stadium 2(I am unsure about the GC and Wii games as I do not have them readily available to test out anymore), it was required for you to save your portable game in the Pokemon Center in order to access anything involving your party or boxes/save data. Why? Was it a ...

pokemon nintendo-64 save-points pokemon-stadium

IT's off-topic on Gaming, but seems like it could be a good fit for game-dev

@Wipqozn It might be at least.

Explain how triangles work
Reputation gained: +345 (33 votes, 1 accept)
Total votes: 40
Badges gained
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@Wipqozn eh, any answers by gamedev would be mostly guesswork, at best

We usually try to steer clear of "Why" questions related to specific games. There's no real way to answer them, unless a dev on those games happens to be a member.

@TrevorPowell yeah, that's what we were afraid of

10:14 PM

I don't think it'd really be all that useful here, either

points for the MLP avatar, though

@thedaian THank you :)

@thedaian No! Don't encourage him!

haha

I mean, if it was rewritten to "What are the advantages of only allowing the player to save in specific places?" then maybe that'd work.

@TrevorPowell Well, if the asker is interested on it. I think he only want to know about the game in specific.

10:16 PM

@MindWorX there we go, got the "order received" email. now I know that it works, so I can madly hit refresh on my email in the hopes that another order shows up

@Gtoknu That's my impression from the question, too. It seems more like a complaint that's been phrased as a question, to me.

@thedaian, Make a refresh program that'll show you sales in the taskbar. ;)

I'm definitely making one for my DeskForm project to monitor sales for me. :P

lol

Pretty active the chat today, huh

no

10:19 PM

Not much more than usual. The weekends gets quiet though.

decently active for gamedev chat

@Mana How rude.

@Mana just needs some huggles.

@Wipqozn I'm sorry, I just thought the flat no would be amusing in this context.

huggles mister @Mana

10:21 PM

huggles back <3

huggles eh?

How about... a brohoof?

brohoof anyone?

brohoof.

Look under your chair...you got...A PUNCH TO THE FACE!!

@thedaian brohoof

@Mana brohoof

@Mana boot to the head!

10:22 PM

sigh.

I feel the same way about bronies as I does with gay people. They're alright, just don't be pushing your beliefs/way of life on me

So, @thedaian, you should change your gravatar to one of the ponies... we already have Applejack, Twilight SParkle, and Fluttershy.

We just need 3 more + spike!

there's already a fluttershy? and twilight sparkle? well, that's most of my choices...

@thedaian ah, dang.

@thedaian, I got a variant of the "windows loading hell". This one has an indicator of progress, but it moves about a pixel every 10-15 minutes...

10:25 PM

@MindWorX ouch, that's even worse :(

cya, gotta go

Yeah, installing the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK.

Takes forever.

ah, fun

bonus points when the progress bar is one of those that resets randomly because it needs to install something else

Well, it is a 6 of 10 kind of deal, so I need to watch it go 10 times...

lovely!

10:28 PM

I occasionally have a problem with OneNote where when it syncs its basically like Zeno's Paradox. It syncs about 50% of the way... then another 25%... then about 12.5%... so on.

And it keeps spinning up the optical-drive. For whatever reason.

And then it never syncs...

haha

10:40 PM

the fun part about only having a few sales: it's really easy to say you've doubled your sales!

@thedaian Theres something to tell your investors! :D

Why is it you have to pay to develop apps for personal use for all the mainstream smartphones?

Android.

I know $99 isn't really much, but still, just for hobby development?

Don't they require a fee for development too?

nope

I think only to publish on the market

development is free

10:48 PM

Neato

either that or I was doing something illegal and didn't know it O_O

But I'm not a big fan of Android devices, so I think I'll just pay the $99.

lol then your question is irrelevant :P

the main reason is because it's a closed platform, and also that's how they make some/much of their money

Ah

So it's a way to get money from people who don't even get to the point of release? :P

10:51 PM

I guess it's also a way to prevent kids from putting "Hello world" apps in the market

Yes, and yes.

Well, release fee is fine by me

But what if I want to make a personal fart button?

Pony up the $100, fool!

:(

Or get an Android :P

10:53 PM

But then I'd have an Android device. :( There's a reason I've been using iPhone over Android this whole time. :P

To me the following is true
Android == Linux
iOS = Mac
Windows Phone = Windows

And I'd still use a Mac over Linux if I didn't have Windows as a choice.

yeah, I can say that I'm a Google fan-boy

iOS is Unix, no? OSX is based on the Unix kernel: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X

User Experience wise :)

Android is not a console app, it's got a GUI just like OSX or Ubuntu or Debian or Gnome

You seen it in action?

@JohnMcDonald I'm so confused as to where that came from

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