Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub |
- Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub
- Interactive Gaming Ventures has joined forces with Epic Games to identify independent game developers building promising titles using Unreal Engine 4, up to $5,000,000 in potential funding.
- Making AI for an FPS is a lot more complicated than I thought it'd be
- Excellent list of game programming books in a workflow
- I need advice on motivating myself to take game dev more seriously.
- Seed Of Andromeda and Vorb Engine are now Open Sourced (Planet-Scale Voxel Sandbox)
- Clarification on Authentication of Players.
- Color Theory in Games (An Overview)
- Movement around a sphere / trying to understand quaternions.
- Looking for some guide for Press Releases
- Questions about creating sprites
- How Important is Youtube to Game Sales?
- Burning out, in desperate need of help
- Took quite a detour and finally got some GPU particles worth showing
- Simulating electrical circuitry in Unity
- Converting LibGdx output to an EXE problem: Error: Could not find or load main class DesktopLauncher
- Need help finding an API of a racing game
- Looking for a large scale performance testing service
- How to make engaging platforming combat
- Marketing Monday #224 - Presentation Overview
- Privacy statement? What goes in when?
- Entry level salary in Southern California?
- Started work on the final assets!
| Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub Posted: 03 Jun 2018 11:46 PM PDT |
| Posted: 03 Jun 2018 10:50 PM PDT |
| Making AI for an FPS is a lot more complicated than I thought it'd be Posted: 03 Jun 2018 03:25 PM PDT So, I have a game where I'm trying to make what I thought was some basic AI. I'm going with omniscient AI so walls are no obstacle to knowing the player is there. Makes it easier, right? Here's the expectation:
Here's the reality:
Getting to the point where I had to finally implement AI wasn't all that terrible. Coding some of the gameplay mechanics, which are pretty much done, took a few weeks. Creating a random level generator using pre-built prefabs (Unity) was pretty interesting. But AI? Damn. I've been paying attention lately to how AI-controlled units behave in almost every game I play now and can sorta guess how they're solving the problems I've run into.
Coding is my strong point in game dev. I like it. But for some reason AI is driving me nuts. My gold standard for gameplay is Doom 2016 and plan to have at least 6-24 enemies active and trying to mow you down at one time, so they all need to be pretty efficient at their death march. The graphics are stupid simple and right now with 10 enemies, it runs at about 500 FPS with incredibly simple level architecture. But it looks like I need to go back to the drawing board again a little bit since step 2 is pretty much responsible for the reality of watching AI blow itself up. (That and my pathfinding solution right now lacks local avoidance.) Eventually I may just bite the bullet and let enemy units fire through other enemy units. I did decide to make one enemy not damage another if it's the same "class" of enemy, which may open me up later to implementing infighting. That really wouldn't be difficult but it means enemies need to be more careful about triggering it. Anyone have similar/worse/better experiences writing FPS AI for the first time? I've done randomized AI for a turn-based RPG and that is nowhere near as complex. [Edit] Wow, this blew up. Thanks for your replies! [link] [comments]  |
| Excellent list of game programming books in a workflow Posted: 03 Jun 2018 07:44 PM PDT |
| I need advice on motivating myself to take game dev more seriously. Posted: 04 Jun 2018 10:17 AM PDT Title, basically, but I'll give a bit of background: I work 40 hours a week at a fairly unchallenging software job, and am in an area where there isn't much I can do to find something else that pays similarly. I've wanted to make a serious game since forever and have made plenty of small projects + done a few game jams, but for the first time in awhile I've thought of a project I want to work on (and have already) for more than a few months. The problem is that I want to really go at this: I think I'm willing to dedicate 3000-5000 hours and years of my life to this, but I know it isn't going to be fun and will probably involve me working 12-14 hours on a computer every day, including my day job. I really want to release a game in 5 years or less starting today, but have no idea how to realistically go about this without burning out after a couple of months. I'm over doing small games, and really want to shoot for something and give it everything I have. Has anyone had experience with doing similar? I guess I'm really just looking for resources, strategies, and any kind of help I can get into turning a hobby into a full on commitment while losing as little of my mind as possible. Anything at all would be appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Seed Of Andromeda and Vorb Engine are now Open Sourced (Planet-Scale Voxel Sandbox) Posted: 03 Jun 2018 03:49 PM PDT Most of Regrowth Studios is either employed full time somewhere else, or at school, so we don't think its likely we will ever really continue the project in its original form. For this reason, we are open sourcing everything under the MIT license for you to use! Hopefully some aspect of this project is useful to you, even if only as a learning device :) Screenshots: https://www.seedofandromeda.com/images Videos showing what the game is capable of: Star System: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIy8ZQ7vDZQ&t=1s Massive Cellular Automata Physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKQYRFYXCWk Procedural Gas Giants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPgKbKLAf4k Procedural Stars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REDKCg7P9t4 Old Dev Blogs (Includes technical blogs): https://www.seedofandromeda.com/blogs Source Code Follow the instructions on SoACode and it should properly clone submodules. SoACode: https://github.com/RegrowthStudios/SoACode-Public SoAGameData: https://github.com/RegrowthStudios/SoAGameData SoADeps: https://github.com/RegrowthStudios/SoADeps Vorb: https://github.com/RegrowthStudios/Vorb VorbDeps: https://github.com/RegrowthStudios/Vorb-Deps NOTE: A lot of code is commented out due to this being mid-refactor. Commented out code is typically something I was intending to rewrite, but it is still functional. Might even be worth reverting my last refactor. Click here for an announcement video and some high level discussion of features. You can PM me or comment here if you ever have any high level questions about parts of the code. I can at least look and try to remember what the hell I was thinking. [link] [comments]  |
| Clarification on Authentication of Players. Posted: 04 Jun 2018 09:37 AM PDT Building a multiplayer game so I want to be sure I've got this part right. 0) On Registering: 1) Username sends Name/Password (and others like e-mail etc) over a POST Request to the Server over SSL 2) Server parses the data 3) Server generates an unique salt per that user 4) Server hashes password+unique salt 5) Database then creates a row with Username/HashedPass/UnhashedSalt/E-Mail etc If the users clicked a 'Remember Me' button, the server would create some form of secret depending on what you use, stores the key for it in the same row as the user, then sends the encrypted copy over to the user who would store it locally on their computer somewhere // This is a part where I'm not 100% sure 0) On Login // If Remember Me 1) User sends Auth to the Server 2) Server decrypts Auth with Key stored in the row of the User 3) If correct, user is logged in. 4) If not, user is informed about stuff. // If No Remember Me 1) User sends Name/Pass over SSL 2) Server grabs User in database 3) Server grabs unhashed salt in user row 4) Server hashes received pass + unhashed salt 5) Server checks that against the hashed password Notable things: E-Mails etc are used to reset passwords. Important to get at least one contact avenue for these cases. While the server hashes the passwords, the server itself doesn't have the key to de-encrypt them. Instead it checks a value it has hashed against a previously hashed password. This means if the database is somehow breached, all is not necessarily lost. An already hashed password is pretty useless since the server will rehash it if sent through a login request. If I have misunderstood anything, I would appreciate any and clarifications. Thanks for reading. [link] [comments]  |
| Color Theory in Games (An Overview) Posted: 04 Jun 2018 05:50 AM PDT This post was originally made for a blog I'm developing, however, I thought it would also be relevant to r/gamedev so I decided to repost it here for everyone. Hope you all enjoy :) In this post, we will be going over why it is important for game developers to have a good understanding of color and meanings associated with color. As we know video games are one of the most visual platforms in existence. They require 3D models, textures, sprites, or even pixel art to build a world and communicate that world's functionality to the player. Game Designers, Artists, and even Programmers should have a basic understanding of color usage when making games so that they can effectively communicate to the important world information to the player. Main topics of this post are: What is Color used for in Games? What is color used for in games? Color is one of the elements of a game that gets taken for granted until one has to think about it. In a game, color is used for more than just drawing the world. Color is used to build visual harmony (or dissonance) throughout an environment. Without color, a player may not notice what is interactive versus what is part of the environment. The player may also not realize that instead of a friendly being next to them it is actually an enemy. Without effective color systems games wouldn't be able to visually guide players to suggested actions and gameplay would be inhibited. Color for Visual Appeal Let's face it, games can look really good. Along with unique creation techniques (such as modeling and pixel art techniques), a game's visual designer can use color to make a game visually appealing and distinct. One post-processing technique which helps to keep a game's visual style cohesive is color grading. Color grading can be defined as: "Color grading is the process of altering and enhancing a game's perceived colors" An example of using color grading to enhance the coloring of a game would be LUTs or Look Up Textures. The Unity Manual describes LUTs as: "[A] Color Correction Lut (Lut stands for lookup texture) is an optimized way of performing color grading in a post effect." By utilizing color grading and other techniques to manipulate a game's on-screen color scheme, game developers can build unique, cohesive visual styles. Color for Signifying Faction When we see certain colors we instantly have thoughts associated with those colors come to mind. When you see red you may start thinking about fire, stop signs, or passion. When you see blue you may have thoughts associated with relaxation or sadness. The psychology of a color can "hint" to players an object's faction (good versus evil). When most gamers see a red crosshair on their screen they instantly think to fire. However, if the player sees a green crosshair they know that it is a teammate and they shouldn't fire. Combining the crosshair of a sight with a color that means danger instinctively makes a player want to shoot at the target. While using a color that's more natural and softer signals a friendly relation to the player. Color for Communicating Function Game developers can also use color psychology to communicate to players what the purpose of an object is. This can range from red or green for objects that have to deal with health to using blue for objects that deal with shield or mana. Effective color systems for games use both players' biases towards certain colors in relation to games and the designer's intent with an object to communicate with players. Color for World Building and Traversal Color may also be used to build the actual world within a game. Think of a game such as Limbo where the background of the game which the player can't interact with is white, while objects that are interactive use dark, black shades. Another example is classic Super Mario Bros. The background is blue and mostly empty while the foreground and even the player's character is orange and warmer (the complementary or opposite of blue) to show that it is in the foreground and thus immediately relevant to the player. By offsetting, colors with each other designer's can help build a perceivable world for players to enjoy. Color for Emotion Building Our emotions or perceived "mood" can be directly affected by the colors that we see. Remember those moments in games when you saw a sunset and felt more relaxed? Or what about when you were traveling through dark, almost-black hallways waiting for something appear? Games use color to build emotion and immerse players in an environment. By manipulating the colors in an environment developers can make it seem more mysterious (purple), colder (white/blue), radiated (dark/bright greens), or any other feeling. Conclusion Colors like sound, code, and art are vitally important within the context of a game. They can make or break a game's visual appeal. They can help immerse players in an environment or they can even communicate to players an item's use. By understanding how to use color for different purposes a developer can build a better communication between the game and the player. Thanks for reading and if you'd like to view the original post to see the different sample images that were used from various games like SuperHot, Limbo, Runbow, and more you can check it out here: Color Theory in Games (An Overview) [link] [comments]  |
| Movement around a sphere / trying to understand quaternions. Posted: 04 Jun 2018 11:04 AM PDT Hello, r/gamedev, I have a problem that I just can't seem to solve. What I'm trying to do is something very similar to the old Xcom ufo defense game, the Geoscope part. Using THREE.js, I thought it was rather simple, I'd have a sphere for the Earth and then maybe a 2d dot to represent something like a plane or a city/base/waypoint. Then I would have the planes just move around on the sphere. Towards each other or towards bases/citys/waypoints/etc... But... its not that simple. My original thought was to use spherical coordinates and just have the radius + a little height for the r part of the equation, but through a bunch of research I read a lot about quaternions and how they are the perfect solution to this. Basically just use SLERP to create a smooth flow from one point to another. I have been able to get some info that seems helpful, but I can't find a tutorial for how to use quaternions the way I want to. I've found a few examples of cameras orbiting targets and a few examples of 3d objects moving across the surface of a sphere, but nothing helpful. A lot of the examples with the camera go something like var newQuaternion = THREE.Quaternion(); THREE.Quaternion.Slerp(camera.quaternion, destination.quaternion, newQuaternion, 0.07); then something like camera.setRotationFromQuaternion (newQuaternion); but I don't know how to build these quaternions. in my testing I had var earth //sphere mesh with radius of 5 var testObject //again a sphere but with a radius of .5 and a vector of (5.1, 0, 0) just a little above the sphere on the x axis var wayPoint // a 3dObject (because a vector doesn't have quaternions) at (0, 0, 5.1) if you rotate 90 degrees on the Y axis this is where you would be. then I would do var qa = testObject.quaternion var qb = wayPoint.quaternion; var qm = new THREE.Quaternion(); THREE.Quaternion.Slerp(qa, qb, qm, 0.07) testObject.setRotationFromQuaternion (qm); but qm is always (0,0,0,1) or(1,0,0,0) I don't remember I don't understand how this is even suppose to work. Should one of quaternions be the earths? how does it know my rotation axis? I know I can use the cross product of 2 vectors to find that. For the past week I've been reading all kinds of articles on quaternions. Mostly unity articles and super complicated 4d math stuff, but none of it is helpful. I can't even find a tutorial on the basics of what I'm trying to do. Can someone point me in the right direction here? Maybe a tutorial, example, or someone else's code that done something similar. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for some guide for Press Releases Posted: 04 Jun 2018 08:34 AM PDT Hey, as someone who never made a press release yet, i would appreciate any videos/written articles on that topic (how should they look, examples/places to post them to/send them to) [link] [comments]  |
| Questions about creating sprites Posted: 04 Jun 2018 10:39 AM PDT I'm interested in making a game. I decided making a 32-bit game would be the simplest thing to attempt since I have zero experience. So far I've only created the sprites for my character without even considering resolution. My little boy is currently 34w/56h but I'm going to make him 32 wide. I am concerned about whether or not the height is okay to remain as it is or should I change it? How will this affect the resolution? Also when he runs he breaks out of the 32 frame. Should the run also be confined to 32pxls? [link] [comments]  |
| How Important is Youtube to Game Sales? Posted: 04 Jun 2018 08:06 AM PDT Is getting your game in front of Youtubers the best strategy for someone who can't afford to use some of the more traditional avenues of advertising? (When I say can't afford.... I mean.... I got more Ramen than I got dollars.) I am about 6 months from launching a game I have been working on and I am getting to a point where I need to start doing a bit of advertising. I am considering focusing my advertising efforts on nagging Youtubers into doing a Let's Play series on my game. I am obviously not going to be able to get heavy hitters, since I can't pay them, but maybe I can annoy enough of the smaller channels to play it so that I could enough eyes on it that it would make an impact on release day sales. What are your guys' thoughts on this? How much effort would you put into recruiting Youtubers to play your game? If you think this is a horrible idea, which it probably is, what avenue would you take instead? [link] [comments]  |
| Burning out, in desperate need of help Posted: 04 Jun 2018 07:26 AM PDT TL;DR: I'm either starting to feel symptoms of burnout, or it has already happened. How do I deal with this? More detail below, because I need to vent: I'm very proud of my progress in the past 6 months, I broke out of my "sit around and do nothing all day" phase back in November, finished my first few games in GameMaker, then went on a search for a game engine that I'd get the most out of. I've already made a few small games, so I promised myself I would publish a full game in 2018. Over the last 6 months, I've learned 8 programming languages with the intention of learning to make games. While it has allowed me to learn most fundamental programming concepts, I've never once been able to stay with one engine/framework. Whenever I see a new opportunity, my mind says "oh this engine is pretty cool, you should use it over your current engine" and no matter how much I try to hold myself back I always jump into that new engine without looking back. It's always been a frustrating habit that I wanted to rid myself of. But now, after 6 months of trying, I feel done. I'm tired of trying to hold myself back from jumping into new engines, and I'm tired of learning new programming languages. I'm tired of learning new code, I'm tired of trying to solve problems in my code, and I just want to publish a game like I promised myself. But somehow, I'm just unable to do it. I normally have a positive outlook, and I'm normally ready to tackle any problem. But trying to be "productive" every day for the last 6 months is starting to take its toll. Except I don't want to stop, because I need to publish a game. I don't know what I'm supposed to do at this point. If anyone has been in a similar position, what did you do? Any help is appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Took quite a detour and finally got some GPU particles worth showing Posted: 03 Jun 2018 12:49 PM PDT First off, here's a video of my end result. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1dnCglicoQ GIF version (without the pause and camera fly-around in the video): https://i.redd.it/zd0m3e52cu111.gif Here is the GitHub page for the source files specific to this example. I took quite a detour to get all the foundations required to put this demo together. At first, I started with the idea of trying out GPU particles. I wanted to do both particle initialization and simulation in compute shaders, so first thing I set out doing was the random functions in shader. Multiple sources I found all referenced this "canonical shader random function" that combines Another thing I had in mind was producing a turbulence effect, so I wanted to be able to calculate Perlin noise and simplex noise in shaders. I ended up utilizing a modified version of the noise functions from webgl-noise, which I learned about when coming across Keijiro's work on translating it into HLSL. These functions just compute the normalized first octave (roughly speaking, the "noise period" is about one unit length), so I wrote some helper macros to compute the end results of custom scale, offset, and multiple octaves. Here is a video showing the noise being used in fragment shaders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESu2E5ZmJxI Next, as an experiment, I wrote two flavors of compute shader utilities that compute chunks of noise with uniform grid samples and arbitrary samples. A look at one of the source files probably gives a better picture of what I'm talking about. Depending on how hard I want to provide CPU fallback alternatives in the GPU particle library I plan on working on, I might come back and implement the CPU version of all the noise functions I have. Here's all the noise stuff I've done so far. Here's a video of a test scene for the noise compute shaders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_hBKmsROiE At this point, I thought, most of the non-particle groundwork has been completed. Finally onto the particle part I was looking forward to. I started writing the particle struct: Oh, crap. What data type do I use to represent rotation? I didn't want to use And the particle struct looked like it was shaping up well. At this point I had a clear picture of what kind of demo I wanted to make. I wanted to make turbulent rainbow cubes (as shown in the video above). Oops, looked like I still needed more utility. This time it was a function that converts HSV color format to RGB. Because with it, generating smoothly changing rainbow colors is just a matter of sliding the hue value of the color. Using this formula, here's what I ended up with. OK. Everything was good to go. I moved onto finally assembling the particle initialization and simulation in compute shaders, and a geometry shader to create cubes on the GPU on the fly. Then the main script is pretty simple: just use the compute shaders to initialize and simulate the particles, and the material shader to create cubes & render them, only needing to update shader constants and never needing to touch the underlying particle data. Here's the resulting demo video again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1dnCglicoQ As the next step, I want to use this demo as a use case to build a better-structured and sensible GPU particle library around. [link] [comments]  |
| Simulating electrical circuitry in Unity Posted: 04 Jun 2018 08:18 AM PDT I'm trying to create a small game about electrical circuits which uses resistors and capacitors. My game as of right now has wires which are purely visual, but I really want to change it so the wires can actually carry "current". I've tried using a grid because I was going to have a wire in one grid space look for other wires or parts around it to pass information to, but I'm not sure how to relate the coordinate of the grid to the gameobject at that grid space. Any ideas where I can go? [link] [comments]  |
| Converting LibGdx output to an EXE problem: Error: Could not find or load main class DesktopLauncher Posted: 04 Jun 2018 11:41 AM PDT Hi there... I have been trying to convert a game i made in Android Studio using LibGdx into an exe using Launch4J for a few days right now. The exe is created but I get the following error message in Launch4J when I press the play button: "Error: Could not find or load main class DesktopLauncher" Not much I found on the new regarding this issue, however this is what I did: 1- In android studio in the terminal I typed: gradlew desktop:dist 2- I made Launch4J point to the jar file generated at desktop/build/libs folder 3- set the JRE version 4-Pressed the gear icon, build successful, no error 5-Press Play, got the error. went to class path tab and went to custom class path, and no matter what the value I enter nothing works. I have no idea what I am doing wrong. If i try to select the MainClass it asks me for the JAR. if I select it, the name of the class appears. But still gets the same error. Any advice is highly appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Need help finding an API of a racing game Posted: 04 Jun 2018 11:40 AM PDT Hey everyone! So this year i'll start my master thesis in AI/Games and i wanted to do a self driving racing car (maybe using deep Q learning, conv. neural network, idk that's still not decided yet). And i wanted to apply that algorithm to an existing game, maybe DiRT 3 , Rally, F1 etc.. but i need something to extract data and inputs control inputs - an API. Is there some API freely available? Is it hard to work with an API? I never worked with one, so i'm curious to know what challenges i might face! Any suggestions? Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for a large scale performance testing service Posted: 04 Jun 2018 07:53 AM PDT We're currently in the process of scaling up our game servers for a couple thousand CCUs, but would really like a test run. Do any one of you know of a service where we can hire a couple thousand of people to log in for 1 hour or so and just try out the game? [link] [comments]  |
| How to make engaging platforming combat Posted: 04 Jun 2018 11:00 AM PDT |
| Marketing Monday #224 - Presentation Overview Posted: 03 Jun 2018 08:26 PM PDT What is Marketing Monday? Post your marketing material like websites, email pitches, trailers, presskits, promotional images etc., and get feedback from and give feedback to other devs. RULES
Note: Using url shorteners is discouraged as it may get you caught by Reddit's spam filter. [link] [comments]  |
| Privacy statement? What goes in when? Posted: 04 Jun 2018 10:10 AM PDT I wanted to integrate play services in my new game and noticed my other games where removed due to needing a privacy statement since they require reading and writing to storage. I did a bit of research on the topic but it's still a bit unclear to me. My games use this read write permission to write scores and settings to disk and I'm not retrieving any data from them. So I guess I just need to state this in the policy? However, I do use Google Play Services. Leaderboards and achievements do store and retrieve data from a user in a place he does not have full access to, but since I have no full control over that data either I guess it's Google's responsibility. Now some questions.
[link] [comments]  |
| Entry level salary in Southern California? Posted: 04 Jun 2018 09:59 AM PDT Hi all, I graduated in 2016. Was a junior government programmer for a year making $57k. Transferred departments/got promoted last month and making $88k. I'm looking to move into the gamedev industry. I'm in LA, but I would like to stay in/near the Long Beach area since that's where I live. I absolutely hate working at my current job. I hate the traffic, I hate the lazy work culture (fourth week here and I barely have done anything), and I'm not interested in anything I'm doing. I'm hardly learning. So I'm working to up my C++ knowledge (just bought C++ Primer), will make projects in Unreal, and apply to places. The only thing I'm concerned about is the salary I'll be able to land. I support a single mom/brother while living by myself while paying off debt/loans. Living off of $57k for a year was absolutely miserable (often had <$100 in my bank). So my recent promotion has lifted a lot of stress, and I'm able to save some money. I always hear the game industry underpays. Is this true? For someone with my experience, is it possible to land a comparable rate in SoCal? Thanks all. [link] [comments]  |
| Started work on the final assets! Posted: 04 Jun 2018 09:30 AM PDT |
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