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00:02
is it a bad idea or something worth exploring?
I'd say that using a physics engine should be your first step.
00:20
I've used physx before
but depends on what you mean with using. Haven't gotten to car physics yet.
Building a car/vehicle-based game could be a good learning experience.
aight I am thinking about that too :)
00:32
What is the most challenging part about car physics? If I would make something like wipeout/Fzero would that make it easier or harder than something like gran Turismo?
Difficulty is subjective, and depends on your comfort level and your specific goals.
Tuning all the values of the joints and friction properties so that it behaves the way you want is a hard part.
00:48
Getting a sense of speed and good control feel tends to take a lot.
hmm
I might do something like Fzero then since those controls and speed sense feel really great
plus they go in interesting directions rather than xz plane only
Sounds like a good idea.
 
2 hours later…
Nice work!
 
10 hours later…
13:34
The PSA post on meta gave the effort a good boost. I saw a number of fresh icons in the edit review.
14:06
That's great to hear! Thanks for keeping on top of that.
 
1 hour later…
15:28
@xcrypt building your own engine is an invaluable learning experience. Unity and unreal are just tools. The knowledge isnt all that transferrable. Building your own crappy little engine will make you better for the rest of your career
that said, after you build your own engine, you should switch to unity or unreal :)
In fact (and IMHO), one should start by working with an actual existing okay engine before writing their own. (Then, as you propose, switch back to using an engine after building their own.)
no wrong answer! (as long as you build your own engine at some point)
i agree with @Vaillancourt. It would be easier to write your own engine after having experience with another. Personally, i recommend MonoGame for its barebones as a first engine
what was your first engine @Vaillancourt?
mine was a crappy little java program that my professor wrote with stubs like UpdateLogic() and UpdateRender(), where the entire program would go into those methods
Myself, I've found knowledge to be very transferrable between engines. I've found the skills I use in making games with an engine to be quite distinct from the skills I use designing/implementing engine features, so I don't agree that engine-making is a necessary component of learning game development.
@Evorlor Errr. What was it? Hmm. zzlib, a home-made c++ library for nintendo DS :P
interesting. I am biased, because most of my understanding comes from building my own engines. Good to see the other perspective
@DMGregory what was your first engine?
15:41
I don't think engine making is necessary either. My view on this is probably as such: "use an open source engine" because when something you use in the engine is not clear, you'll open the engine up and be able to understand the inner workings and better work with it.
im such an outcast :-p
First engine I worked with, or first engine-like project I built/contributed to?
your very first game - what engine?
minigame, prototype, even if you never finished
i find it interesting how everyone starts so differently, yet we all end up in unity :-p
user92578
I don't know about engines but I do believe writing a game loop can be really helpful when getting started and understanding how things work
3
My first games were in QBASIC without anything that could even charitably be called an Engine. ;) Then some RPG Maker and Flash.
15:43
@Evorlor I'm not yet using Unity ;) (And I don't make games, so it probably helps that :P)
user92578
And the nice part there is that you also need to know how to write a loop and some minimal code, which is what I think a lot of people stumble with Unity: Really no programming skills
im changing my answer! my first engine was warcraft 3 map editor!
Ah, well my first game was probably in VB6, actually...
thats a double edged sword with unity. You can make an entire game without writing a line of code. And although ive never done it, it sounds very limiting
Hey folks, mind helping me double check if a question I'm about to ask is on topic for gamedev? I'd like to workshop it otherwise if that's cool

"What techniques or methods exist to map branching dialogue before coding?"

To be clear, I'm not looking for anything close to implementation, I'm purely in writing stage right now. My organisation system sucks, and I'm looking for a good alternative, but I'm afraid this question is too listy, or too "what's your favourite"
15:46
at once point when i was starting in unity, i was thinking to myself "why am i spending time writing code? I can just download assets from the unity asset store and put them together". I am glad i got that out of my head
We had a fellow here, Lasse, if I recall; his team was "pretty advanced in the project" where they realized a feature they thought would work like "X" did not work like "X" and they had to rush to find an alternative, hard to implement solution.
thats a big question @AlexF. Can you narrow it down?
@AlexF You're right, that's too broad for the site.
what do you want the end result to look like? skyrim dialog? mmo game dialog? chat room like this?
I'd avoid questions that demand a plural. That basically means the question is never resolved, because you could always chime in with more techniques. So, I'd try to focus on "How can I map [my specific use case of] branching dialog?"
15:50
@Evorlor For sure. Basically, I'm trying to write an RPG with branching dialogue functionally similar to Divinity: Original Sin for example. As I'm writing it, I have a bunch of text blocks linked together via IDs, for example "text block 1" has the options "response 1 - go to text block 2", but as it expands into a tree my file becomes very difficult to read.
I'd like to know how to better organise it, be it via a flow chart, or some UML diagram that might be totally industry standard but I've never heard of
Have you tried something like Twine? This would also give you a playable prototype for the same effort you're spending building the diagram.
opinion incoming:
step 1 would be to write the code behind. Write a node based system, where each node has the dialog text, as well as a list of other nodes that become "active" when that dialog option is set
step 2 would be to write a GUI editing system tool, which could be represented as a flow chart
step 3 realize this is reinventing the wheel...a really big wheel. Then use someone else's wheel
@Evorlor Spectacular. I just finished step 1 and was about to start step 2 when I figured gamedev would set me right XD
@DMGregory Never heard of it before but I'm giving it a look now, this looks on first glance like exactly what I need!
It's pretty flexible. And the output is HTML/Javascript, so you might even be able to set up a data converter that parses the Twine content and converts it to your custom in-game data so you don't have to write it twice.
I've heard good things about inklewriter too, though it's designed to be a bit more familiar for novel or screenplay writers, where it presents things linearly rather than in a flow chart.
15:59
Much appreciated, I'll give that a look too. Guess I can skip posting the question then!
If you find a way that works well for you, you could still post your question and answer it yourself, walking through the workflow you're using. Then we'll have a good reference to point to direct future users toward.
Good call, I'll do that once I land on a final decision
@Tyyppi_77 I do feel like the volume of "I don't understand C#, fix/code my Unity game for me so I don't have to learn things" questions we get has gone up lately... 😟
I'm suspecting a lot of it is folks following YouTube tutorials that basically say "copy the code I'm writing" instead of explaining any of the fundamentals of what it means.
its because they never wrote their own game engine :-p
jk
16:15
I definitely don't want to be elitist/gatekeeping, but I do wish folks would learn the basic syntax before posting here. It really sucks to have to go through several rounds of comments and clarifications to find out the problem was just that the person didn't understand what the red squiggles in their IDE meant. 😫
i know what you are saying. But its all relative. I just spent 30 minutes yesterday walking someone through saving a text file to their desktop...
user92578
16:33
Yeah, I do think the accessibility is great but it does often lead into a gap in knowledge and incapability of closing that gap
17:08
@Evorlor :(
I mean, I also sucked at C# and at Unity when I started with each of them. But I understood that when things didn't work, it was because I needed to do something differently, so I researched or experimented to find out what that was and ensure I understood how to avoid the problem. It seems like those steps are getting skipped a lot in favour of "my Unity's broken, fix it for me". 😞
yeah
17:36
it's probably time for me to do a Cognizer update where I just upgrade the engine.
I plan to keep it current as long as I can
When was your last update?
17:53
maybe version 2018?
I try to do it every 2 years
onto an LTS version
Makes sense. I've been using 2020 LTS and very much enjoying it. Reorderable lists/arrays were a godsend for my jam last weekend. And I like that the serializer has better support for generics and references now so we don't need as many ugly workarounds.
I'm setting up a new IDE, VSCode, but the problem is that it wants a CSharp extension. So, what is the default code VSCode is made for? Or does it not have a default?
Why is that a problem?
No no, just wondering.
user92578
17:57
> In Visual Studio Code, we have support for almost every major programming language. Several ship in the box, for example, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, and HTML but more rich language extensions can be found in the VS Code Marketplace.
Also, @DMGregory thx.
"the problem is..." --> "I'm curious about..."
@Tyyppi_77 I see.
0
Q: Tag synonyms and "version specific" synonyms

liggiorgioLike user Polar asked 8 years ago, I too tried to propose a tag synonym for game-maker since I meet both the rep and the question score requirements. However, I get the error: Failed to propose synonym: Version specific synonyms can only be created by moderators I want to suggest game-maker-stu...

@DMGregory Oh. Yeah, I'll do that next time. :)
18:43
lol my plane AI is working now. But not really. It circulates, then swoops in, and then instead of shooting, it goes straight up and then divebombs a little ways away in an explosion (no explosion, but there would have been)
 
4 hours later…
22:24
@AlexF Hey there. I saw you got some help with your question, but I wanted to add that you might be able to find some good answers over on Writing Stack Excheange which explicitly allows tool requests and a ton of posts on branching narratives.

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