Dev Thread

Artists/Designers/Programmers - what are you working on?

Woah, that's actually pretty clever.

No it's not

As long the player cant realize it is

I'm making a Dark Souls style ring for fun. I call it a Hollowed Carapace ring, the idea being the more hollow the wearer the more it increases physical defence.

This is the high poly sculpt, I'll be doing a low poly textured version

I never understood this pic. Someone explain?

the tram in the game was actually an NPC running with the tram on her head as a hat

Good job fitting the style of DS.

Yes it is, it's a unconventional solution to a problem that is hidden from the user.

There's a section in Fallout 3 where the player enters a subway train and travels to a story-related area. The engine of the game couldn't handle changing the camera perspective and locking it in place inside the train, so the dev team found another way by putting the train car on the player's head as a hat, while the player is running across the tracks. On one hand, it shows the limitations of the engine, on the other, it shows how creative the devs were with this solution.

I'm trying to learn Godot, but I get so easily confused when it comes to game engines. I'd rather just use a regular programming language, but making a game there would take up a lot more time.

what is? layman here.

Looks great, what program did you use?

Looks like something straight out of H. R. Geiger's night terrors.

max/mudbox

He's my #1 influence artistically

Work smarter, not harder, retard.

> limitations of the engine
No.
> Creative solution using existing assets
Yes.
If you think for a second that you'll be paid to hand-code every single unique system that's used only once in the game you'll be fired for wasting everyone's time.

spook

it's actually going to be a game for kids, i'm just playing with lighting when i should be modeling more stuff.

Looks like Receiver.

Make it a game for kids but give it a really elaborate easter egg puzzle to make it really creepy horror

Hey, if you want to eliminate those light banding artefacts you can apply a debanding or dithering shader. What it does is overlays the screen buffer with a very very low opacity coloured noise (random dots) filter that tricks the eye into breaking uniformity, causing those lights to look like smooth gradients.
If you're decent with shaders you could port the one from Reshade up on github.

As much as I hate Bethesda's developers, this is a clever and quick way to make a train, that will appear for one scene, on their horrible framework.

Tramlady is depressed

Cheer her up

Up to now I've been using an overlay to add a bit of extra texture and noise to my graphics, but recently I've been liking the look of it with just solid colors. Any thoughts?

aye, lad... you've boarded the wrong ship.

just looked it up and you're right. thankfully i have a person working on textures atm.
there will be some creepy parts in the game. in particular, you come across a haunted house with an npc and you both get trapped. you have to solve puzzles to escape.
ah, i was wondering about that. this helps tremendously, thank you.

hahah what the heck is going on in that pic?

is it a photoshop meme or sometthing

Basically Sid Meier's Somalian Pirates!

they're white little people, friend.

can you post just the texture? it needs to look more like folded cloth, imo.

Nah, Im talking about what Im working on

This is it, it's supposed to be similar to construction paper.

oh, gotcha. post some pics of it.

i like it, but it needs to be a bit more crinkly.

Nothing much to show now, just a bunch of GPL-model fishing boats sailing about. Im working on the system that handles all the AI boats; giving them tasks like trading, recycling them when they get destroyed, and so on.

No it isn't they're lazy retards who couldn't even figure out how to make ladders work.
If they were smart or clever they'd figure out how to make moving platforms that don't leave an actor behind, they couldn't so they bruteforced the only option available to them.

Imagine being unable to figure out how to drive a car so you call a tow truck to take you everywhere instead of a taxi or taking the bus, would you call that smart or clever? No, you'd call it fucking retarded.

Texture looks better, without texture looks better to you because you've been starring at the left for god knows how long.

I'm sure you've hard of the artist trick to flip your image after working on it for hours because your brain gets use to shit and causes you to miss things. Same thing basically, it's something new so you notice things more and it tricks you into thinking it looks better.

That's why even if you know what you're doing no matter how experienced you are it's a good idea to ask other people's opinions because they're going to see it as fresh and new.

Textured is better.

You're so utterly wrong. Of course developers can spend months programming and testing a mechanic so they can use it in one location in the game, or they can spend a day fitting it into the systems they already programmed. The fact that nobody noticed it when playing, and it's only apparent from looking at the mod kit, proves that it worked. Next you'll be complaining that explosions are just a big hitbox with sprites on top of it instead of an actual chemical and physical reaction being simulated. It's just an abstraction.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm sure your explanation is correct. At least I had the self-awareness to ask for people's opinions. I'm probably going to make the texture a toggle in the options menu but I'll make it on by default.

Its just weird that this was their first solution instead of just making a camera and the model and moving it along a spline. Like thats pretty standard stuff for vidya. Pretty sure thats how the Vertibirds work minus the camera part.

The difference is that no one actually notices, which is all that matters.

Take how both Fallout 3 and NV handle radio broadcasts. In order for sound to be played, their engine requires the audio to come from an actor/ interact able in the environment, so what they did was spawn a terminal underneath the map that allows from radio broadcasts to be heard.

Criticise Bethesda for using Gamebryo all you want, but they're good at working within the limitations they give themselves.

Yeah just another show of brilliance from the devs that still haven't figured out how to implement ladders. IT JUST WORKS!

Vertabirds are actual NPCs, hence why they can be destroyed. Bethesda also recycled parts of the Vertabird AI for the dragons in Skyrim.

That looks way too structurally complex to fit into Dark Souls.

>the difference is no one actually notices

Nobody noticed Fallout 3 was a shitty game?

>or they can spend a day fitting it into the systems they already programmed
Why couldn't they fit in ladders then? They did this because they were too stupid to figure out how, the railway system in Fallout 3 was janky shit too and Obsidian had no problem doing it properly.

Simply making the model an actor would've been easier as well, since it wouldn't require the extra steps to stop it from moving along with character movement. You're a fucking retard and you should stop arguing about things you have 0 knowledge of whatsoever.

Ladders don't fit into the systems already established. Implement models requires specific collision detection, modelling and animating climbing animations as well as ensuring that various scripts don't clash with each other. All of this requires a lot of time and resources.

Why do all that when you can give the ladders the same function as a door for the same effect? It's also why Obsidian didn't implement ladders.

>require climbing animations
Nah, they didn't think they needed diagonal walking animations, probably wouldn't have needed those either

I don't work for Bethesda but I am a professional game programmer so unless you work in the same field I can guarantee I know more about this than you do. Reducing the work load by using an existing system is the smartest thing you can do and not stupid at all. By making ladders secretly doors to loading zones, they allow you to use ladders in places where it makes sense without having to overhaul their movement system. Making the tram a character wearing the object is the smartest thing they could have done because the only types of objects they had programmed so far are static environmental objects which don't move, physics objects which are moved dynamically, and NPCS. By making it an NPC they can get it to follow a rigid path, turning the proper directions and controlling its speed, without having to add another object type into the game just for this one special case, and the only way anyone even noticed is by opening the CK.

Post more dev tricks

You don't even need to noclip to notice this. The ground itself isn't leveled so one end as longer looking legs than the other. It's as if rather than putting the table on a level surface, someone cut the legs down on one end to make it level with the slanted ground. No one in the real world would do this sort of thing.

this is a bad trick because the table looks awful, like it was custom made to sit on that exact configuration of rocks rather than a flat surface.

It's a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, they just can't actually code an engine worth a damn.

I'm not a professional game programmer, but a huge part of big projects (like making a AAA game) is not doing pointless things. It sounds obvious, but it's something people have trouble with (even I do). Making a huge train model and animating it seperately for a single cutscene wastes time AND money in something that already takes up a lot of time and spends a lot of money.

Just because you don't like Bethesda doesn't mean what they're doing is anything but smart. Sure, it's not the best way to implement a train system into your game. Sure, it's "janky", but it does the job. Obsidian probably changed the train system because they used it more in their game, and therefore could allocate extra time to making it work. I say probably because I haven't really played New Vegas that much.

But they're making what they're using work. That's what people who are defending this train debacle are saying.

Gamebryo is a shit engine. Bethesda know this. However, instead of making a new engine (which will cost a ton of money and time when they could be rereleasing Skyrim again or whatever), they just make do with it and use it to its full potential.

What to choose for 2d game Game Maker or Godot?

Neither of you are professional game programmers, it would be easier to assign the already made model as its own actor and would require less work in the long haul. If you either of you were programmers you'd know that guns were just wands from Oblivion and it gave Obsidian a massive amount of trouble giving weapons an actual ammo system rather than charges. The difference between Obsidian and Bethesda's programming is Obsidian had actual programmers.

That's because Bethesda and Obsidian wanted to make two different games. The game Obsidian wanted to make wasn't suited for the Gamebryo engine, but the game Bethesda wanted to make WAS.

Bethesda didn't know Obsidian were going to use trains in their game when they made the engine, or when they made Fallout 3. They aren't to blame.

Train sized hats powered by silent explosions because you can't figure out how to make anything move otherwise is the exact opposite of potential.

Thats not a trick, its incompetence.
A trick would be to make a cupboard out of two tables since instancing is much cheaper than rendering 2 different meshes.
But here even if half of the model is visible the whole things needs to be rendered, cant cull half a polygon and texture filtering cant be split.

Its wasted performance.

i am a programmer, (not video games though) and I can see why bethesda is so glitchy if they do shit like the train stuff. if your code calls to gameobject human moving another gameobject player, and the human part isn't good at path finding, then you risk overflow errors and the like when you could of spent one hour not making another fucking bucket to program a horizontal object to move on trigger.

But all that stuff doesn't matter for something that's only going to be used a single time. Them making a more realistic train system would be stupid for what would only be used once.

The point isn't that it's a good system in general, it's that it's a good system for the context it's used in.

Unity.
Godot 3 will be interesting though.

Bethesda has a history of taking the lazy route in most areas, which is odd considering the amount of work they DO put into other stuff. Very odd.

>Unity.
W-why?

Too bad Bethesda does neither.

Not him, but Unity is solid as fuck these days.

No it isn't and especially not for 2D. GM is much better.

now think about that shortcut mentality, but for the whole game. don't program doors, make them npc with door mesh and give them one degree of motion. If you don't properly program new functions but rely on the ones you already have, and the one you already have aren't meant for everything, then glitches and crash happen.

You know how easy it is to make something move in literally any game engine? No physics, just move. Im thinking Bethesda is filled with people who dont program, just plug shit into Gamebryo tables.

>No it isn't and especially not for 2D
Wrong

if you want to learn gmscript then go ahead.

Yeah, but it wasn't used for the whole game. That's the point. I'm not saying it's good practice for the entire game. Nobody is.

how do i learn to make games? what language i need to learn or tools to use?

there's no risk for anything really, the player character just moves along a set path with a train over it's head.

I'll bet you that rail car probably has like 90% of its code shared with NPCs (usually rudimentary stuff like collision detection and autonomous movement). So no, it wouldn't be a waste just re-using the asset instead of building another resource.

I just hope they aren't rendering the character mesh along with the car, that would be wasteful.

Fits more into Alien universe. Dark souls would be the last thing i would think of when looking at it

WARNING WARNING WARNING
THIS IS A PIRATED AGGYDAGGY
DISPERSE AT ONCE OR YOU WILL BE NODEV'D

GML is just C++ with rounded corners. It doesn't force you to use a shitty ECS like Unity does. It also doesn't require you to use some hacked together extension in order to get regular 2D rendering. For 3D of course it's shitty but for 2D it's almost perfect.

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Auto-saves are why Bethesda games are so buggy, not the use of actors.

If you just use manual saves, you won't encounter a single bug. It boggles the mind why Bethesda haven't removed autosaves from their games.

Wow what kind of shitty programmers were these guys? How lazy and stupid can you get? They should have reprogrammed the entire game just to do the exact same thing but without faking it. I hope someone got fired for this shit.

imagine your game space, with a npc train head under it and god knows what other object under the "ground" of the game. if it still has npc properties like path finding , it goes one way. but the game has other game object sometimes go under the floor too, some even the players don't know about blocking the train npc. but the train must go on its path, but the path finding won't allow it now. and im not saying this happens all the time, but for the 1 out of 1000 players, this will be really annoying when it crashes the game.

Bethesda aren't that fucking stupid. They obviously made the train NPC follow a specific path, and stopped it from doing anything but its purpose.

i'm also be presumptuous here, so they might not of done as i described, but having the game crash as often as it does makes me wonder how they do their scripting.

Dumb animeposter

what is a node v? is this a programmer joke?

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Why are they still using Gamebryo now then

wat

Because of legacy code, you don't rewrite your entire codebase, its too much trouble and so much can go wrong.

They've used it so much that getting rid of it would be pretty catastrophic, as said.

Mod tools.

TES construction set is mostly the same as it was in morrowind, it just got some new functions.

Change the engine = new mod tools and this is first of all, tons of work(dev tools aren't really user-friendly, there's lots of stuff like buttons that work only when proper windows or proper item is selected and documentation for this shit is usually hmmm... verbal, rather than written) and secondly, modders used to using the old ones won't be willing to migrate(remember NWN2?)

they only rendered whats in the view space of the camera, so it would run better will keeping the actor npc and polygons of the level.

>cutting devtime by using cheap exploits that 99,99% of the players will not spot
>normies think this is not smart
If you only knew how much smoke and mirrors literally every game is.

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Isn't it obvious? The low processing power of the N64 necessitated some graphical tricks to make it look good and fit that many character models on screen at once. Hence, most places in towns have a pre-rendered background image on the environment instead of any actual texturing. But the player still needs a place to walk around so the actual area is a series of untextured polygons with the camera fixed on the pre-rendered image. If allowed to move freely, the camera would just expose the illusion.

Doing some concept for a friend's project

i'm confused as to how someone was able to figure this out and capture it.

This.

It actually ruins games for you once you know exactly how they're assembled.

Looks good, user.

Emulators let you move the "real" camera so you can see stuff like this. You could also just turn off the part of the rendering cycle that draws the background image.