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    Tuesday, March 27, 2018

    Anti-Cheat. How does it work?

    Anti-Cheat. How does it work?


    Anti-Cheat. How does it work?

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 05:43 AM PDT

    Edit:Thanks everyone for explaining! Seems like this is a very complicated issue, but still is good to know how it works

    Hello, I am just getting into game dev and there is one thing that I never understood. It's cheats and how does Anti-cheat systems deal with them? I do understand how things like "No recoil" scripts work because they simply just adjust the controls, but how the hell can you get something like wall hacks and Anti-Cheat system does not detect them?(Psst, "VAC...") Like they are messing with the game files and what not, so how does the anti-cheat system not detecting it?

    Also, how would implementing an Anti-cheat system look like? I presume for things like "Fly hacks" It would be just checking the speed of the player. Right?

    submitted by /u/edgarinskas
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    Are there any tutorials for minimalist pixel art (similar to Risk of Rain, but more examples inside)?

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 07:50 AM PDT

    By now I am perfectly aware that pixel art is about as difficult to produce as any other kind of art, so I preface this by saying my interest in the pixel art style is not because it "looks easy".

    So, I am enamored by the style and it would fit my project and future projects like a glove. Any help?

    Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/gJhJ7

    Thanks.

    submitted by /u/alessamason
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    Valve is going to open source 'GameNetworkingSockets'

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 11:36 AM PDT

    Learn the OOP principles from awesome projects: OGRE Graphics Rendering Engine case study.

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 03:16 AM PDT

    Alpha Post-Mortem: Hide or Die

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 04:48 AM PDT

    We finished the alpha about a week ago and we have had some time to digest everything that happened. We'll detail the good, the bad, and the ugly with images and videos!

    Let's start with the lead up to the launch of the alpha. Our discord had something like 600 people two weeks before the alpha launch and 1,000 a week before the launch. We were so excited with the influx of people, so we requested an additional 1,000 keys from Valve and were approved. We definitely expected to have left over keys that we could hand out to members to send to their friends; we were wrong. Each morning I wake up, I have personally read every single discord message our fans had posted from the night prior. I'll never forget the morning we were at 1,500 discord members going into the weekend before the alpha and I woke up to so many members that when I was scrolling through and reading messages I realized that today would be the last time I would have enough time in the morning to read every single message. Swanton (Lead Artist) and I talked about it over coffee that morning and felt a bit sad about it to be honest, but motivated that there was so much interest in what our team was building. The discord eventually grew to over 3,500 people by the launch date!

    Fast forward to March 11th and we had a pretty stable build of the alpha that Sunday night (SGT, we're about 12 hours ahead of EST). This left us with a little more than 48 hours before the alpha would launch March 13th, Tuesday at 9pm our time. Here was the change list before that build.

    https://i.imgur.com/tu5jJg5.png

    We were happy with the state of the alpha at that time, there were a few rare game breaking bugs in that build, but we figured we'd be able to clean them up during the alpha test. Our plan was to push this out to our og-crew, whom consist of some senior members and people who were helping us test internally, and playtest over the next 48 hours to help us get a list of things we would make sure were in a day one alpha patch. This would ensure we had a pretty stable build at launch, and be well prepared to have a list of issues/bugs that we could work on over the next 48 hours and have ready for a day one patch.

    We didn't follow our plan.

    In that 48 hours we submitted 47 change lists to our source control: https://i.imgur.com/tjEJgwr.png Instead of branching off the build for a day one patch we just thought we could squeeze in all the stuff we wanted before the launch. We were on fire, we were so happy with what we were able to get into the alpha build and a shout out to our og-crew who really helped us in those 48 hours to implement features, fix bugs, performance optimizations, and try to wow people. Wow people we did; "Shit. Wow. This alpha has some serious problems." We'll get to that part in a bit.

    We built a discord bot that would distribute alpha keys to users if they posted a !GiveKey message in the discord. We had tested this on a small scale and it seemed to work perfectly. It would log who the user was, the key issued, and wouldn't allow them to request an additional key. We didn't expect what would happen next. During the hour of launch our discord saw 9,473 messages.

    https://i.imgur.com/uyeWEpx.png

    The overwhelming majority of those I assume were in the 15 minutes leading up to the launch and the 15 minutes after. This calculates out to more than 5 messages a second! A lot of !GiveKey commands which was the command to receive an alpha key. It was insane. You can see in this video (My wife recorded and it was so hectic I didn't even notice) from the launch the sheer number of messages flying by in discord, the number of people online, and you can hear the panic/stress in our voices. (Turn it up a bit so you can hear /u/Swanton007 in the background.

    https://streamable.com/brj4d

    We had originally planned to only distribute 250 keys a day during the alpha so we had a nice controlled rollout, but at the last minute we decided to throw 1,000 keys at the bot who unknown to us at the time was going to be slaughtered right then and there. It couldn't parse the list of keys fast enough, sent multiple keys out to the same user, and utterly failed in every measure possible. We didn't follow our plan and keeping with the theme we failed.

    By the time we got some alpha keys out and actually redeemed, we had major problems that I alluded to earlier. Here is a great clip showing TrU3Ta1ent from twitch playing on alpha day one.

    https://streamable.com/eayaq

    There were over 1,500 people watching him struggle with our fuse boxes because the radar was showing and floating in front of the survivors blocking their view of the switches (A bug added in that final push unfortunately). In addition to that, the fuse box was glitching out. The first headache from stress I have ever had in my life while watching it live. But I did what any developer would do, I popped a few aspirin and submitted a change list.

    https://i.imgur.com/A4SAIDJ.png

    We had many problems, as you can read in my change list, like only one server showing in the server browser for players. By most measures the launch was an utter disaster. We worked hard on fixing what we were seeing and our last change list was 2am the next day. But there was a sliver of hope, because as we watched other streamers play the alpha (after a couple of hotfixes right after launch) we actually saw people enjoying the core gameplay and being understanding of what an alpha is and what it is designed to do for us and the game.

    We woke up the next day on March 14th feeling pretty defeated and decided to recover from the slaughter the day prior, collect our thoughts, did some minor fixes, and make a plan for going forward. We had major bugs to fix, UX to fix, and needed to figure out a better method for distributing our second batch of 1,000 keys. We decided that we would personally dm keys to people who asked for them. We gave out over 1,000 keys by dm that day. It was the only way we knew it could be done correctly, and done now. It was kind of a well-deserved punishment for our mistakes on launch day. It ended up being a blessing in disguise because we just didnt just crtl+x & ctrl+v but instead took time to apologize for our mishap and try to connect with them each personally. We got so much incredible love in return. It really helped us feel better about what we were building and connected us with our community. Some of the most common feedback we got was how we actually interacted with the community and listened.

    The next day March 15th rolls around and we executed on our task list that was created on the 14th and hammered out 37 change lists that rolled into the next day with our last change list "for the day" being submitted March 16th at 4:26am. Like most other indie devs we have full-time 9-6 jobs so as you can imagine you're basically running on fumes 24/7. We put everything we had into improving the alpha as much as we possibly could and over the course of the testing; we submitted 104 change lists and pushed out 10 patches in a single week!

    We made a lot of mistakes leading up to this alpha, we rectified a lot of our mistakes, and we learned a great deal. The streams, the screenshots, the videos, and the detailed bug reports from our fans and discord members are more important than we can articulate. They really pushed us and we appreciate it whole-heartedly. Now to end this on a little fun note with some stats from the alpha! Unfortunately we missed a large chunk of stats from the launch day because we made mistakes, but we still got to capture some good info. Enjoy!

    Kills: https://i.imgur.com/Ujchlnh.png

    Escapes: https://i.imgur.com/d386KfD.png

    Fuse Boxes Activated: https://i.imgur.com/wvmhZ7E.png

    Total Games per User: https://i.imgur.com/4NDN99D.png

    As you can see a couple of our devs made sure to play a lot of games with the players so we could get feedback real-time and we really enjoyed it. We had a total of 1,798 key activations, 1,396 users who played the alpha, and 3,742 matches played. 433 people who had the game wishlisted received and activated an alpha key which was 24% of our alpha key activations. Sadly it seems about 400 people activated the game but didn't even launch it. So some of those keys went to waste. We look at this as a waste of 400 possible new wishlists lost.

    We had some more stat tracking like total playtime, time survived, and time in hideables, but unfortunately some of that didn't track properly so the leaderboards have some crazy outliers. A stat we are very excited about is our wishlists on Steam. From the week leading up to the alpha from March 6th - March 12th we received 1,033 wishlists! The week of the alpha from March 13th – March 21st we saw 2,018 people wishlist! We only saw a total of 67 people remove the game from their wishlist during the alpha. This brought our total wishlists to 9,908 with 33% of them coming from the week prior and during our alpha test.

    Thank you for taking the time to read through this post-mortem, and if you appreciated this post feel free to check us out at our very WIP subreddit /r/HideOrDie

    Thanks!

    submitted by /u/HideOrDieDev
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    Unity / Microsoft / Universal GameDev Challenge

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 10:53 AM PDT

    ECS Newb seeking clarity

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 06:51 AM PDT

    With the Unity ECS announcement I have been trying to wrap my head around ECS and where it can/should be used and where it can't/shouldn't. I had some questions I will list below it would be great to get answers to, but would also love to hear anything else people have to add about ECS and notable different's from Entity-Component models similar to what Unity HAS been using. Things like gotcha's and potential pitfalls are what I am going for but as I'm still fresh on the idea anything you could offer I would be willing to hear. If there is a guide/article I should be reading that would help with things like this I would love to hear about it. So far been just googling what I can and piecing together what I find.

    The questions I have are as follows:

    1. Everything I have read talks about calling Systems sequentially. Things like calling "MoveObjects", then "DetectCollisions", then "ConsumeCollisions", etc. Is that the standard way of doing things in ECS? This makes sense to me for smaller scaled games but it sounds like that would get very cumbersome very soon as you start adding more and more systems to the model. Is this the correct way to look at it or are there more scalable ways of doing this?

    2. I see many places where people talk about how ECS lends itself to multi-threading more so than other models but very few if any talk about why or how. What EXACTLY makes threading easier in ECS? If I have a system iterating an array of 100 items do you just add logic to let other threads hit the array at the same time or is there some better way of doing this?

    3. When reading any ECS related article I have seen people talking about a "Struct of arrays vs Array of Structs". Could anyone provide more insight into this? I haven't been able to find too much information about this. Which is better? Is it better all the time or are there cases where one out performs the other?

    4. This ties into 3 I would imagine. I watched the Unity GDC vid that talks about the Unity ECS systems and it looked like the systems should have an array for every type of ComponentData that system requires. Is it better in ECS to get multiple arrays each holding the data required or should I have a single array of a tuple that holds the data in it?

    [EDIT]: My original post was not clear. I only speak to Unity ECS because it is how I first heard about it and in the past have done work in Unity. I am asking though so I can implement ECS in my own customer engine so I need to know more about the though processes behind the system not, "Let Unity do it's thing"

    submitted by /u/Pysassin
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    How to bring life into your characters using Spine

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 12:55 AM PDT

    How Nintento 3DS was made: An Interview With Hideki Konno

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 12:25 PM PDT

    Tales From a Crowdsourced Game Design

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 12:24 PM PDT

    Any good books or resources on scene setups?

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 12:17 PM PDT

    I mean in broad terms and specific. So broad would just be like the layout of a town or something along those lines. Then specific would be the decor inside a house, like random stuff: trash, instruments, technology, books, art, colors, all that stuff that tells a story by just looking at it.

    One game series I think does this well, is Fallout. Every room I go into tells a story of who or what lived there.

    Any advice or resources would be much appreciated.

    submitted by /u/ArmoredBattalion
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    Sharing object between client/server in C++

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 07:42 AM PDT

    Hello,

    I'm thinking of a design choice where I can avoid repeating myself from the server and client code.

    Imagine an account class (server side), it has a lot of information (name, email, ...). This class has also some function for persistence, when a client request to update one of the setting, the object save its state into a database.

    In the client code, I also need such a class, but it will obviously do not need to take the server code and all the database access function. But this will require to rewrite the account class in the client code without any functions. On the other hand, this client code also may take additional data such as images, sprites, sounds which are not needed on the server.

    Then, imagine a grid where those players may move. On the server side this grid will require a list of server account classes to perform another set of operations (damaging, moving).

    On the client, nothing has to be done, the grid is updated from the server state updates. This also complicates the process. We can't have a generic grid class that contains polymorphic account object, we will need a lot of dynamic_cast (which is definitely a design error).

    So I'm guessing how can I separate all these issues without having to re-copy all classes that has to be shared between the client and the server.

    submitted by /u/markand67
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    Designing a Minion ? - and not the small yellow ones

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 10:51 AM PDT

    Hi all you fantastic people of Gamedev.

    So we are building our first PC title and I am looking for some inspiration on the "minions" of the game.

    Quick backstory: The game is about you(the player) as the Guild Master of a adventuring guild and your adventurers (minions). In the game you will end up having ~200 minions.

    So this is where i would love some indput, as designing each minion individual is not plausible or a smart thing to do (at least not for us as an indie studio) and we have been going back and forth on the design.

    Artstyle The game is in a Disneyisk / WOW cartoonish style and we are building for fun and humor so the design of the main characters are following this also. They should be humanoids as set is a DnD world. we have set the game world in the somewhat generic Elfs, trolls and ogre world of the RPG / DnD genre.

    What we have been doing: We have been working with the idea of having a set of "heads", "torsos" and "feet" based on the class of minion that the Unity will randomly put together and spawn a minion. we have had some tests designs that kinda worked, they just looked so.... boring! So it works in code but as I said... the design is difficult to narrow down and so I am looking for inspiration.

    The question:

    What do you think of when you think of: - Guild minions, Fun, wakky design, adventures and adventurers. ?? Feel free to link to art you love or think would fit but please let me/us know WHY you think that is fitting. what is it that works for you.

    Obligatory disclaimer: English is not my main language so forgive any misspelling or weird wording.

    Thanks.

    submitted by /u/Cixxar
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    Plugin workflow improvements in the Magnum C++11 graphics engine

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 10:01 AM PDT

    Are there any current games using Monte Carlo Tree Search for A.I?

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 09:08 AM PDT

    I'm doing some research for my senior seminar. I have been studying Finite State Machines usage in video game A.I. and am having some trouble finding any games that use Monte Carlo Tree Search for A.I.

    Any help is greatly appreciated.

    submitted by /u/subless
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    A MUST WATCH 3h video for all indie devs, regarding marketing your game, PR, social media (i.e. which hashtags to use etc.), trails etc.

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 08:59 AM PDT

    Why is game balancing important and how best to describe it's importance?

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 08:49 AM PDT

    Posted this in /r/Gaming, which was probably the wrong place for it.

    I'm an academic looking at formal mathematical ways to aid game balancing. As part of a presentation I'm to give to the formal analysis group (who do not play games) at my university I need to explain why game balancing is important. My current plan is to show a series of angry forum threads and perhaps to list games that have died recently, in part due to poor balance efforts. Before that though I was wondering if anyone here had good examples of extraordinary game balance (good and bad) I may have missed or even anecdotal reasons for why game balancing is so important. For example, counter strike is still played by a huge player base when a series of more polished shooters exist - is this due to good balancing?

    Also, any developers with experience of balancing big multiplayer games, it would be really interesting to get insight into how industry go about tackling the issue.

    Cheers!

    submitted by /u/Kavanagh-01
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    Setting up and Texturing an Axe in Substance painter. My personal tips.

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 04:25 AM PDT

    Where to start?

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 10:05 AM PDT

    I've been doing some java and other random bits of coding but how would you guys recommend starting to make a game. By game i just mean something simple somewhere to start I understand I cant just launch into it. Thanks! looking forward to feedback

    submitted by /u/Plonky_Donk
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    Is Facebook Marketing Still Viable For Your Indie Game?

    Posted: 27 Mar 2018 03:26 AM PDT

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