I'm having a bit of a conundrum:

I want to be able to instantiate prefabs via a lookup from a string.

And also not have it be as bad as doing an instantiation from a non-loaded prefab (one that's not referenced in any script).

The easy way to do this would seem to be a dictionary with strings as the keys and GameObjects as the values.

But Unity doesn't play nice with that in the inspector.

@nwp I'd love to, I'm TheMaskedRebel#8854

I'd like to come in, I'm TheMaskedRebel#8854

@nwp hi

Hey.

I tried to join the lounge regulars

@nwp

I see. Will probably not work out though.

Why? @nwp

It's a cultural thing. You need to have a certain level of jadedness and etiquette. And this and constantly pinging people really doesn't fit.

Will I be able to get in?

no

Why exactly?

hooray! \o/

what's the week been like?

but if the ruskies ever come again you will be ready :D

I've been spending the last two weeks getting legal stuff ready for the formation of my studio as a JSC. Man if anybody told me that I would have to go trough all this just to have my own indie studio to make games...

not only that. I have to worry about budged and staff payments, interviews, legal stuff, intelectuall property rights

good thing my co-founder is a bussiness person and does most of that stuff

it just never ends. There is always a next thing to solve or figure out. Man I just want to code stuff and make a game :D :D

I already got "fans" asking me on facebook yo when does the game come out.. I'm like: Bitch we aint even started grayboxing yet! :D :D

yeah it is

got some new artowork

looks good!

I cant wait to go international and see if the "SJW", femist crowd would have something to bitch about our character

@UriPopov Don't worry, there will always be someone somewhere that will complain for something. Heh.. humans with a microphone...

Something I just thought of about character generation in RPGs: Presenting players with skills without demonstrating what those skills do is pretty bad design.

:D

It's one thing to say "Strength makes you do more damage".

Thermodynamics skill from EVE-Online: "Advanced understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. Allows you to deliberately overheat a ship's modules in order to push them beyond their intended limit. Also gives you the ability to frown in annoyance whenever you hear someone mention a perpetual motion unit. Reduces heat damage by 5% per level."

@Tyyppi_77 o/

It's another to show the player "this is the sort of change increasing your strength will have" by demonstrating a high strength vs. a low strength.

@Tyyppi_77 @Garan can we chat in the discord server

shrug

I've seen you mention your discord... probably at least a dozen times and I'm not around nearly as much as I want

Same. I don't use Discord normally.

Also, your basically going "Hey small community of gamedevs, I want to take you for my own community."

chat.stackexchange.com/…

You also randomly go join my server without any other relevant information like the fact that it's a discord server~

What server?

?

@AlexMitan @AlexandreVaillancourt I already have some of the books included in the bundle, here's my thoughts: I read the 1st ed of Level & liked it. Personally, I found the section on camera framing really helpful. The Kobold guide to Game Design is also a solid title for anything rpg-ish & if you like it, I strongly recommend their guide to Worldbuilding. On the therhand, their guide to board game design didn't really land for me, but maybe I expected too much given their other titles.

@TheMaskedRebel Of course, this does not show all the mentions of if that you removed.

different search: chat.stackexchange.com/…

@AlexandreVaillancourt @AlexMitan Personally, I think the bundle is worth $15 for the Kobold Game design book, esp if you're not into rpgs, quests, world building. Even though I already own some of the titles, I'm probably going to get it for Ignacy Trzewiczek's two books & the updated section to Level Up. YMMV.

@Pikalek I purchased it for the books at the $15 tier. :)

I also keep forgetting the I've read Koster's Theory book. Every couple of years I find it at the library, think "this is well regarded work, I should probably read it", bring it home & discover past me already did that.

@doppelgreener Feel free to chime in with any earl impressions you have of any of it!

Haven't been able to start reading yet, but will do when i can. :)

@Pikalek Thanks for the tip, I think I'll buy it, and @doppelgreener thanks for the pin!

\o/

Not sure when I'll read though :/

I have an list of buildable structures ( houses, towers ) ... but not everyone of those should be buildable for every player... some should be unlockable... some require a specific item in the players inventory and other ones need special rights to be build... any ideas how to implement that using a database ?

@genaray why does it need to be using a database?

Because i store all my building types in a db table to make it more generic ( stats and so on )

but like, you could just have a player-to-building relationship table to record whether they can or can't build it, and what conditions they need to meet to build it

when the player starts, based on their starting conditions, you set a handful to "can build" already

that sounds logical ... but wouldnt this table be huge with many buildings and even more players ? :)

yes

well, the table schema will not be huge, but the table will be huge

your schema would be: player_id, building_id, can_build, conditions_for_build, conditions_for_unlock

don't know how you'd want to store conditions for building ("must have a specific item") or conditions for unlocking, that might be a blob of some serialised game logic data

Well ok... ill give it a try :) Thanks !

Okkk next topic... private messages... well my players should be able to send pm's to other players... nothing special, just a "short" message, without a topic or title. The server should also be able to send those Pm's to other players in the same way ( events for example ) ... when receiving such a pm, players should be able to answer it... that means you can have multiple pm-conversations at once... how would you do that ? :P those messages shouldnt be persistent for the first

I have trouble with the realisation... should i use one big "Message Manager" with some kind of hashmap to store those messages with a reference to each player ? Or should every player object have such a PM-Manager ? How should i link the messages to know what submessage belongs to what pm ? Should every message get some kind of ID and if.. just a random one ?

Thanks for your help :D ... but how would i store that data server side ? Database of course... but should i put every message ( once received ) into the db ? That would cause massive lag...

No ? I thought database is a good approach for storing such kind of data ... it would just get the messages on server restart

Well if i use mysql and save every message alone into the table it takes about 250 ms...

So atleast it took about 250 ms to save other stuff into the db

Okay... i guess i should start playing around with it :) thanks !

250ms really does sound like something is seriously wrong

Your database should probably be able to comfortably do an insert in 0.25ms. 2.5ms would also be OK, but would indicate you're on not-so-appropriate hardware. 25ms would be concerning. 250ms is outright alarming.

It is OK to "persist" information by keeping it in memory in a running server program. The server will periodically back up necessary state elsewhere. For games like Starcraft, if the server crashes, all games in progress are completely lost -- this kind of catastrophic failure is OK. However, it should not lose information about a person's overall win/loss records and stuff, so that stuff gets backed up. (It's also handled by a different server to the one hosting games.)

For games like World of Warcraft, a server crash should be restorable with maybe a few minutes at most of lost in-game progress. This means the server should back up state every few minutes so that if the server crashes, people lose a few minutes and raids/instances end, but they still save their characters within a few minutes of the crash.

So someone might lose the rod they picked up 5 seconds ago, but they won't lose the rod they picked up 10 minutes ago.

@doppelgreener Thats like i do it currently... every minute i iterate once over the online players to look up if their boolean "someThingChanged" is true... if so i write their stats into a big MySQL query and take a closer look at the other variables (Inventory etc) if their boolean "someThingChanged" is also true, i write the data into an other MySQL query... once iteration is over, the data will be saved with a few big database inserts...

probably i should change the system to use lists instead of checking for booleans btw

yep... no idea why i implemented it like this...

Well if player are standing somewhere and are idle... just chatting in global chat... well those players are doing nothing ^^ ... but i need to rework this someday... those flag checks are too complex

Guess you are right :/

Taking 250ms every minute to store state sounds fine, as long as you're doing it asynchronously

Due to my server framework... yep thankfully i didnt needed to implement everything on my own :)

I lost 10 rep due to a user deleted :(

@AlexandreVaillancourt I sometimes loose 10 rep due to a troll answer I gave once :D

Michael House kindly deleted my troll answer before I could get too badly hurt by it. ;)

My answer is to a question that is "Is it possible to do N"

and my answer is :" Yes, it's absolutly possible to do N"

Hahaha. Yeah, I'll admit, the asker kind of brought that one on themselves a bit. ;)

ah there it is stackoverflow.com/questions/39388589/…

now I have no idea why it says noone downvoted it I rember loosing about 30 rep from this one

oh btw I mabe a chain today :D youtube.com/watch?v=oJa2-iP8Sfc

@DMGregory yeah, I kind of stopped doing that since I'm a mod :/ I often have to resist the urge to troll...

@AlexandreVaillancourt yeah, now that people will figure out my streams for DbD are from one of the team, I can't taunt people who bitch at me for camping in the endgame chat anymore. :D

@Almo Hehe yeah!