Game Development

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Benjamin Danger Johnson

02:50

good morning.

13 hours later…

Pikalek

15:31

Still good morning.

DMGregory

15:42

Still good morning. 🌄

brug

Morning

Pikalek

@DMGregory Are you on mobile when you drop the emoji or are you flexing unicode skills?

Benjamin Danger Johnson

Evening

DMGregory

Windows key + semicolon

brug

😎

WinKey + . also works

Pikalek

15:51

Oh neat. Didn't know that was in there.

I'm considering either shelving or abandoning shader tech for my app. In the process of separating some of the ops, just to see I used the C# parallel, seems like that might give me enough of a performance gain.

Shaders might be faster yet, but I'm not sure how much I would need to change in order to make use of them.

At any rate, pleasantly surprised by how conveniently C# had packaged that up & how well it did in the trial run.

DMGregory

Hey sweet! A win is a win.

Pikalek

My thoughts as well. When I demoed the prototype stuff to a game dev artist a few years back at a conference, he's strongest piece of advice was to package it in a usable format. As an app, time might be better spent on UX rather than speed at this point. As an API, it'd be nice to avoid mangling things just to get shader support.

I still need to run some proper benchmarks to see if it runs well in general. Sample size of three is kinda lacking.

What is on the respective agendas for you fine community members?

Benjamin Danger Johnson

16:10

For me, sour plum beer and Unity tutorials.

Pikalek

@BenjaminDangerJohnson consuming, producing or converting?

Benjamin Danger Johnson

drinking, I already converted my money to beer at the store.

DMGregory

Need to prep a lesson for my students on Monday related to gathering game telemetry.

To do that, I need to get a system set up to collect their telemetry data, so that's a new area for me. Learning about databases...

Pikalek

@DMGregory I've never been into DB. I respect the work that goes into query optimization, data storage & everything required to make them tick. But never developed cravings for them the way I did for other stuff. What flavor DB are you using?

DMGregory

Likely Postgres SQL

Benjamin Danger Johnson

16:18

Sounds a bit complex for students.

DMGregory

They won't have to touch that part, it's just the back-end to collect their data.

I'm going to give them a simple function like Telemetry.Log(eventName, position, attribute) and then stuff what they give me into a DB row.

Benjamin Danger Johnson

I figured that, but game telemetry is pretty advanced unless your trying to get into tools programming.

DMGregory

It's a class on uses of data in design, so I figured I'd be remiss if we didn't even touch telemetry.

We did an exercise earlier in the semester with some fake telemetry data from a sim, but I'd really like them to be able to gather something real.

Benjamin Danger Johnson

data in design. Is this like tracking player trends or heat maps for levels?

DMGregory

A bit of both.

Benjamin Danger Johnson

16:23

Sounds not fun, but should be very helpful for tuning and balancing games.

DMGregory

It's a whole semester, so I'm covering the gamut from balancing tuning data in Excel to running playtests and developing recommendations based on analysis of the results.

Pikalek

Provided they have some scaffolding, I think it's a good idea. I've seen kids that were just sort of thrown into using GitHub. While the exposure to any version control at all was a benefit, the particulars of how it was used really burned a lot of students.

Sounds like they already have some exposure & prior examples to fall back on though.

Benjamin Danger Johnson

Source control has to be the least fun lecture possible. But that would be a great thing to teach people. At least 20% of my day is helping junior team members check in and pull code from random git tools.

brug

Ohh that sounds interesting.

Pikalek

Yeah, I didn't really think that it was the sort of thing that one should just assume students would figure out at year 1.5 of a 4 year program.

brug

16:32

I always wondered how playtesting is done.

Pikalek

Giving them the exposure to real world tools is a great asset to their education. But if you create a wash-out class in the process, I see that as a problem.

Benjamin Danger Johnson

I only learned it from internships after my second year. I wish I knew it earlier, it would have saved lots of homework trouble and made team assignments much easier.

Pikalek

@brug If you have a place nearby that allows site visits, you should totally check it out. I got to visit a Microsoft UX lab once. It wasn't for their office apps, not game dev stuff, but it was still super fascinating.

brug

ohh that sounds cool.

DMGregory

Yeah, most problems that came up over our most recent Design Week (kind of a week-long game jam break from regular classes) were Git snags.

Pikalek

16:40

It was pretty neat, esp back then, as they were on the leading edge of incorporating researchers who had no programming backgrounds - psychologists, graphic designers, etc.

Well good luck & strong skill to everyone today whether you're putting in work or balancing your life with some recreation.

1 hour later…

DMGregory

17:56

Say, I'm not fluent in C++, but I think what's going on in this question is that they have an array of Uint32, but the index they're giving it is a byte offset, so they're zooming through the array 4x faster than they meant to:

Q: How to read ARGB pixel data from SDL2 surface and store them in an array?

I've been trying for hours now to figure out why this piece of code is giving me seg fault, but can't figure out why. void pixel::Texture::LoadTexture(const char* filepath) { SDL_Surface* image = IMG_Load(filepath); SDL_Surface* formattedImage = SDL_ConvertSurfaceFormat(image, SDL_PIXEL...

Can anyone with some C++ knowledge confirm before I embarrass myself by saying something completely false in an answer? 😉

1 hour later…

DMGregory

19:18

Well, I posted it, so if I got this completely wrong I'll appreciate a correction after the fact. 😅

OKprogrammer

19:29

Today wasn’t my most productive day, but thankfully now I can legally operate a gun or bow. So that’s pretty cool.

@DMGregory Don’t worry, I don’t know any C++. 😉

DMGregory

Thank you so much! It works now — Fudge Racoon 34 secs ago

Well, it looks like I wasn't too far off. 😁

OKprogrammer

So, how have you been today?

DMGregory

Procrastinate-y.

But got a lot of StackExchange answers written!

Yourself?

OKprogrammer

Well, this whole hunting thing has taken quite a while (around 7 hours today) but when I get home I think I’ll start getting to work again on my game. But I’ve been procrastinating on that too. 😐

I think I may use a slider for that attack mechanism though, and I also found the resolution issue. It’s still a bit blurry, but I’ll try to fix that later on.

DMGregory

Do you have your textures set to nearest/point filtering, instead of bilinear?

OKprogrammer

19:42

Yup, every texture uses point.

DMGregory

Hmm... if you're on windows, what's your display scaling set to? I noticed that could make my game window look fuzzy at times.

OKprogrammer

My monitor is 1080p and my game is set to run Maximized Window Mode.

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