Post What's on Your Mind

[moog]

I still think Trump has a real chance of ending up president.

Lol

 

[Xilef]

Been watching videos of Stardew Valley. If I were to make a pixel-arty "2D" game I'd make it fixed resolution and I'd make it 3D with an orthographic projection so people think it's 2D sprite game right up until the camera interpolates to a perspective projection and moves into the player's head when they use a camera to take a photo in-game.

I bet that would blow everyone's mind when they see it for the first time.

Characters would be 2D sprites traditional, but their shadows would use a rough 3D volume of their shape to cast correct shadows with real time lighting.

Yet another idea to explore once my current project is out the door.

The other idea is a Doom-style FPS maker in the same line as RPG Maker so people can make FPS games without needing to learn complicated engines. Both ideas need development and depend on how the market goes.

 

[Jason]

Aren't there already quite a few FPS makers out in the market though? I remember downloading one (Illegaly of course) YEARS ago (Like, maybe even before I came here... or just after I joined), it was kinda' cool, like the level creator from the Timesplitters games, if you remember them, lol...

 

[Xilef]

Aren't there already quite a few FPS makers out in the market though? I remember downloading one (Illegaly of course) YEARS ago (Like, maybe even before I came here... or just after I joined), it was kinda' cool, like the level creator from the Timesplitters games, if you remember them, lol...

Been thinking about this for a while and the conclusion I had is that there's two factors;

• barrier of entry (how much skill is required before you're even capable of making anything)
• ceiling of limitations (how far you can really push the engine)

FPS Creator has a moderately high barrier of entry and it's incredibly limited in what you can do (it's literally generic FPS only).
Raycasting Game Maker has a very low barrier of entry and it's absolutely restricted in what you can do (You can barely do a Wolf 3D clone)

After that it's traditional FPS engines; Unreal Engine, Cry Engine, Source Engine - high barrier of entry, very high ceiling of possibility.

I would say most people are best of using Unity, which has a moderately high barrier of entry and the ceiling of possibility is contained within the engine itself (you can't push beyond what Unity gives you, but Unity gives you enough to make any kind of traditional game you want).

I love pre-MV RPG Makers (VX Ace and earlier) because they have a very low barrier of entry (you can instantly test play the default project) and pre-MV titles can be expanded massively via Win32, so it had limitless potential covering all range of skills. MV lost that with the switch to JS/HTML5, but gained a lower barrier of entry for the scripting side of things.

The maker I have in mind would aim to be the RPG Maker of Doom-style FPS, so I'd have it support both Wolf3D style block-maps (Raycasting Game Maker got that right) and Doom style sector maps (it's very easy to make maps in this style due to them all being 2D, but it's certainly harder than Wolf3D style).
To remove the ceiling of limitations, I'd have DLL/DyLib/SO support for the hardcore developers and it would all be bound together in a scripting language.


All this needs major thinking and development, which is why it's in the bucket of ideas. This FPS Maker came from a few people asking me to write a tutorial on making Doom style FPS engines and it turned into a discussion on the perfect, modern Doom-style engine.

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

Been watching videos of Stardew Valley. If I were to make a pixel-arty "2D" game I'd make it fixed resolution and I'd make it 3D with an orthographic projection so people think it's 2D sprite game right up until the camera interpolates to a perspective projection and moves into the player's head when they use a camera to take a photo in-game.

I bet that would blow everyone's mind when they see it for the first time.

That honestly sounds incredible.

 

[moog]

Juan why do you think Gaia is a terrible game

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

Juan why do you think Gaia is a terrible game

I honestly don't think it's a terrible game. I was being too harsh. I just think it's overrated. The story is a little too muddled and convoluted, the battle system is way over simplified, the Dark Knight becomes completely useless once you get Shadow, and it lacks a tremendous amount of RPG elements such as equipment, inventory, shops, etc. I will say that I think the story has incredibly mature themes, such as human trafficking, which I found amazing. However, I was so excited about playing it, I felt a little disillusioned after beating it.

 

[Ellie]

I thought you meant Gaia Online for a minute.

 

[Xilef]

I spent a bit of time today stealing various artworks off the internet trying to find a style that matches what I want.

I stole this one and just fell in love with it;

Matches what I had in mind. Road represents beginning of a journey, cute anime girl with a suitcase about to start the journey, fantastic blue/green colours. Big world of adventure out there. Also mirrors the act of walking, and this game is all about walking.

Obviously I can't use this image, so I'm not going to, and there's a load of things I'd change (make the path thicker so the green GET STARTED button doesn't blend with the green grass), but the general idea feels so perfect and got me excited about this project.

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

That's really nice, though the red text looks alarmingly awful.

 

[StrawberrySmiles]

I don't think he's keeping the red text. XD

 

[Jason]

I don't think he's keeping the red text. XD

And I don't think he was being serious :wink:

 

[Xhukari]

Reading said text. I don't think Xilef is keeping the image that said text is apart of :p

 

[Xilef]

Fuck it all I'm cancelling.

 

[ZenVirZan]

Fuck it all I'm cancelling.

Cancelling what? D:

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

Fuck it all I'm cancelling.

Cancelling what? D:

I'm also wondering.

 

[ZenVirZan]

For network interactions, I'm sending ints and floats over a binary socket and reading them based on the first int in the packet contents. To read a message, I first test for the first value, then proceed to read the values using getNextInt(), getNextFloat(), etc. because I know that message will always have the same order of data types within it.

I want to use utf8 strings, but the data is being received as byte[]. There may also be regular ints and floats within that content before or after the strings being included. The strings are fixed width both on send and receive though, making them readable.

The question is, if I know a utf8 string will be 20 characters long, how far do I increment in bytes to get past that chunk of data, because utf8 has a variable length in bytes?

EDIT: oh hey, utf32 exists
EDIT2: man i wish i could just send all plaintext strings instead fuck me this is boring

 

[Byron]

Fuck it all I'm cancelling.

Cancelling what? D:

I'm also wondering.

Probably his game cause he's having trouble with it.
Or his life cause he's also having trouble with that.

 

[Xilef]

The question is, if I know a utf8 string will be 20 characters long, how far do I increment in bytes to get past that chunk of data, because utf8 has a variable length in bytes?

Check out the String constructors and see String(byte[], String)
So if you shoved a string encoded in UTF-8 into the packet, you can pull out the bytes and tell yourself "this is UTF-8!", clap your hands, then construct the string from the byte array with UTF-8 encoding.

// byteArray is your string in byte[] form

String utf8Text = new String( byteArray, "UTF-8" ); // Make string from bytes, interpreted as UTF-8

EDIT: The cancelling comment was supposed to be a subtle joke about how I'm not keeping the red text and I'm not keeping the background image, so fuck it I'm not keeping any of it.

 

[ZenVirZan]

I know how to make a UTF-8 string from bytes, the problem was more of "If I have a string 20 characters long, how many bytes of the total packet contents do I need to send to String() to reconstruct it".

I'm rolling with UTF-32 for now, I can worry about the encoding once I've actually got the networking working.