What do we think of questions on non-game-making topics which are being asked in order to create a game simulating those topics?
In meta we had a similar conversation about a specific question (the characteristics of real-world weapon systems) here, but the discussion on that topic was very spec...
(Does XNA specify a model format? If it was a C++ question where there's no such "standard format" I'd probably vote to close as not-a-real-question, but I don't know whether XNA actually has such a beast)
Yeah. It's now mostly at the state where "invert" means "do the opposite of the preferences of the game's producer". ;)
Although Microsoft has been really good by setting standards and setting invert preferences for different types of games at the user profile level, on the X360.
that was indeed a great user-preference-setting moment in gaming history
Unrelated: somebody from my alma mater is writing to me asking about working conditions in game programming. I know I work 10-12 hours a day, but I'm at a startup pushing out the first title. What are working hours like for you veterans? in here?
@michael.bartnett I was actually just kinda curious (I'm a CS major with an option in game development) and I have an awesome (3.94) in-major GPA and a shitty (2.97) cumulative GPA and was wondering if I can round the 2.97 to a 3.0 when I apply to companies =P was hoping maybe a hiring manager from a game design company was in here
@Dave The name's a bit special, so we're keeping it under wraps until we start alpha testing (which should be in 2 months). Thank you for asking though :) It's a 3D in-browser kart racer
@Dave we actually took a long hard look at that one. sadly it barely ran on my laptop so we had to test it with my boss's tower. the customization aspects are cool, but the racing seemed unnecessarily hard to control. i may also just totally suck at f1 games lol
@michael.bartnett Working hours vary a lot between studios. I've worked places that mostly stayed 9-5, I've worked places that expected 9-7, I've worked places that crunched for only a week or two and only at the end of a project (where 'crunch' only meant an extra hour or so per day), and I've worked places that crunched for the last five months of the project, mandating 12-hour days 6 days a week.
(My time in the industry was back when everything was physical. You had to release at a particular time in order to synchronise with the dates that marketing was taking out ads, and which you'd hired time at the CD pressing plants and stuff)
I guess with downloadable games and stuff, dates can be a lot more fluid now.
@Andrew Probably not, hence my follow up comment :P Portfolio though man, portfolio. An engineering recruiter from Activision specifically pointed at a game project on the resume I was handing him and said, "Did you make this project in class or in your spare time?"
Actually, I've worked on movie tie-in games which had the same thing; have to hit the stores two weeks before the movie comes out so that you get the boost from the movie's marketing budget, but not have your sales hurt if the movie bombs when it hits the theatre. For example. :)
@Dave Companies want to hire self-motivated people who take initiative and are naturally inclined to make games whether or not they are working at a game company.
@michael.bartnett I wish people asked me questions like that. I wish they asked me questions that were technical, too. I keep getting interviews (second or third round) where I get regurgitated behavioral questions from round 1. It's getting to be more than a little insulting.
A buddy from work and myself are wanting to get into the indie scene for game development. I've done a few tech demos demonstrating different ideas and approaches for various problems. Now, I feel it's time for us to commit to a project in order to develop a portfolio for later down the road.
I'...
ive seen one epic interview where the guy asked the developer why he made bad choices rofl ! i love interviewers that speak the viewer's questions that the devs dont want to answer
One of my questions in the "Do you have any questions for us?" segment is always "What is the company's policy on work-life balance?" I'm holding out hope that someday someone will give me an answer other than "We try to minimise crunch time as much as possible, but sometimes it's unavoidable". I don't know exactly what answer I want them to give, but.. it's such a non-answer. :/
specifics. users hated the fact they made the maps small so he said "why are the maps small?" guy replied " because pc will lag" the guy said " worked fine for me..." then it was awkwardness xD
"Do you have any questions for us?" "Yes, can you tell me about a time when you felt that one of your employees was wrong about something -- how did you resolve the conflict?"
The deadlines were never the stress for me. The stress always came from being unable to do work, either due to lack of design, or bureaucracy within the studio. Or, I guess, once I burnt out trying to figure out how we were going to get something done for a game that was absurdly underbudgeted in terms of how much we'd promised in my absence, and how soon we had to deliver it. I guess that one was kind of deadline stress.
Tycoon games are extremely unpopular with companies at the moment. Right now, almost everything is combo manshooter-covershooter with a dash of rpg elements. And adventures are maybe having a kickstarter comeback, but don't know if that'll flow over into the AAA market.
I've played a little of Resonance, recently. Which is kind of interesting. The simultaneous-multiple-character thing is interesting and clunky at the same time, the way that simultaneous-multiple-character always is.
@Dave Nah, they're hugely complicated because you have to balance giant mathematical systems under the GUI to produce a fun game. Plus, of course, you need huge amounts of GUI, which is the least fun thing in the history of the world to program. ;)
/me is in the process of writing a Tycoon game with huge amounts of GUI, so knows what he's talking about there. ;)
The problem with simultaneous-multiple-character is really that Suspended.
@Dave "MMORPG Tycoon". It's a tycoon game in which you're building an MMO. The simulation is pretty deep; down to individual players + their characters actually playing the game. I've abstracted away inventory, but everything else is there; quests, levels, character classes, gaining abilities as they level up, etc. Most complicated thing I've ever worked on.
Yup, personal project. Been working on it in my spare time for about four years.
Had a major breakthrough a few weeks back, when I realised that the technical challenge which I'd been assuming was impossible and had been designing around since right at the start... actually is pretty easy. And so the game looks very, very different today than it did even two months ago. ;)
@michael.bartnett Which demo was that? The version 1, the version 1.1, or the version 2 milestone? :)
(I need to set another milestone for myself. I always work better when I have deadlines to work to)
1.0.16 is the final version of the game that I made for the TIGSource competition. It was highly abstracted. Players were simulated, but monsters were abstract. Players just wandered around "fighting monsters". :)
Version 1.1 was the next generation of the MMO simulation engine, which simulated monsters as well, real (simplified) combat, and had procedurally generated quests in all towns. I put out a demo of 1.1 before I scuttled it to start working on version 2. But I don't know if there's still a version of 1.1 anywhere (though I could probably rescue it from version control if I went searching)
Version 2 is fully 3D. It adds real MMO-like combat rules and statistics (abilities, include toggles and DoTs, but no charges or AoE yet, with configurable sets of statistics), terrain sculpting, quest editing.. and it adds the ability to "log in" yourself and actually play.
I wasn't talking in terms of sales, but in terms of trends. Yes, League of Legends is big, but it's only one game. And Dota2 is another. But compare the number of MOBAs being made against the number of covershooters and then let's talk. ;)
The big trends at the moment are toward manshooters (with cover), with the usual niche racing and sports titles (niche in terms of there not being many of them, not in terms of their audience base). There was a brief spurt of music games for a while, and the current crop of dance games seem to be trying to serve that same market.
It'll be interesting to see whether those dance games are still around in another year or two, or whether that market has turned into another niche that'll only support a single franchise and everybody else drops out.
(Mind you, we could have an interesting discussion about whether the manshooter market will support more than one franchise, itself. Current evidence suggests 'maybe no', but that hasn't stopped people from trying)
@snake5 so what about all the fuse there is about opengl? like valve recently claiming it's easier to develop for opengl drivers, or linux is the next gaming environment?
@JohnMcDonald ah... You see i'm developing a real time game, so i guess i must use UDP. And i guess it would be easier to use TCP for sending stuff that needs to be received 100%
if the size is known and small, UDP is more effective (though a small layer might have to be built on top of it, if it's important to know that the message has been received)
I mean if your game is an action/ fast paced one, you should consider using UDP and you have to bear with all it's weaknesses. otherwise TCP is the way to go.
Well... I think of it this way. IF you're using UDP for a game, you need to write the following: - Manual buffering and ordering of packets - Manual delivery confirmation or some kind of reliability layer - Heartbeats
Well, in any scenario where you're trying to do an important action on an entity that doesn't exist. Either because it's already dead, or because it hasn't been created yet
@snake5 aka. sending partial game state instead of changelog. besides why don't you think about the cases when a packet which is sent by client drops? in this case server's will be unreliable and it's server which need to be updated!
@snake5 Chunk was laying out a scenario in which earlier keypresses affected what later keypresses did. We're trying to say that ordering these makes life easier
how many shooter games do you know which require 100+ APM to play competitive game? also consider the games created using War Engine (for example dota)
@snake5 besides when I'm talking about 100 or 200 APM, I'm talking about meaningful actions, not mere repetitive clicks on same place hoping your units move faster!
Hey there. I'm relatively new here so I just have a question about the forums. Is it standard practice to downvote an answer that was a legitimate attempt at solving a problem?
Any .net people in the house? Found weird behavior in SortedDictionary with a specificed IComparer that I want to make sure is a quirk and not me being silly
Then @JohnMcDonald | @ToddersLegrande is this expected behavior: I've got a SortedDictionary<Tuple<T1, T2>, Tuple<T1, T2>>, and I passed it an IComparer in the constructor that checks a T2.CompletionTimefield and returns -1, 0, or 1 depending on the result of that comparison.
Problem is, when the values are equal and I return 0, I get a "key already present" exception when I .Add() an entry
This is technically Unity, and thus really old Mono instead of .net, which is what prompted me to question that behavior. Figured I could check with some of you in here before I boot over to windows to try it out on .net proper.
If you can check to see whats in the dictionary at the point of failure to confirm if its a duplicate key or not... that should answer the question. If you know its a unique key that hasn't been added to the dictionary then you've got something weird going on.
Yeah, it is Sorted, but I figured the key comparison would be via a typical Dictionary method, with the Sorted part just keeping a linked list in order or somethign
Well it makes sense - its going to use it as the comparer by default for sorting. So its convenient! But because it sorts by keys, and keys have to be unique, you still can't have duplicate keys
If you want duplicate keys a dictionary is not for you
Doesn't seem to matter much then. If a bad person has access to the computer at which somebody else is logged into your service, there's not a lot you can do to protect it beyond not displaying the password in cleartext. You can calculate a hash and use that so you don't have their actual password lying around in memory if you're bothered by that.
Got this in the review stack and though it was pretty borderline. The question asks about a basic implementation of applying an acceleration based on a key press. Here's the answer:
you need to make the acceleration happens over time (per game tick)
gradually.
you need to time the ac...
Got this in the review stack and though it was pretty borderline. The question asks about a basic implementation of applying an acceleration based on a key press. Here's the answer:
you need to make the acceleration happens over time (per game tick)
gradually.
you need to time the ac...
