Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Nathaniel3W]

I wanted to redo the cheap crappy autosave animation I had. So I made this.

I couldn't just take an image and rotate it. No, sir. That would save me far too much time. I had to go into AfterEffects and actually render spheres, and pre-render the spheres together as an object, and then rotate the object, and get the lighting consistent so it's always from the top-left, and create a bezel for the ring, and rotate that, and make sure its lighting was consistent. And the icon that actually shows up in the game is 1/4 this size and it spins faster so it's not like anyone will actually notice unless I shove it in their face like I'm doing right now.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I wanted to redo the cheap crappy autosave animation I had. So I made this.

I couldn't just take an image and rotate it. No, sir. That would save me far too much time. I had to go into AfterEffects and actually render spheres, and pre-render the spheres together as an object, and then rotate the object, and get the lighting consistent so it's always from the top-left, and create a bezel for the ring, and rotate that, and make sure its lighting was consistent. And the icon that actually shows up in the game is 1/4 this size and it spins faster so it's not like anyone will actually notice unless I shove it in their face like I'm doing right now.

Crom

 

[Catacombs]

I wanted to redo the cheap crappy autosave animation I had. So I made this.

I couldn't just take an image and rotate it. No, sir. That would save me far too much time. I had to go into AfterEffects and actually render spheres, and pre-render the spheres together as an object, and then rotate the object, and get the lighting consistent so it's always from the top-left, and create a bezel for the ring, and rotate that, and make sure its lighting was consistent. And the icon that actually shows up in the game is 1/4 this size and it spins faster so it's not like anyone will actually notice unless I shove it in their face like I'm doing right now.

Ah, the long way around. Always the best option.

 

[Bad Sector]

There is an MS-DOS game jam going on these days and it ends in a month (so you can take your time and perhaps manage to make something that is somewhat complete - many older DOS classics were made in such a timeframe), so i thought to try and make something for it. I'm thinking about a simple 3D platformer/adventure - kinda somewhere between Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia. I've just coded a simple engine and added animations the last couple of days, here it is running in DOSBox:



(it also runs at ~15-20 fps on a 133MHz laptop i have, but i can't capture that - only use my phone's awful camera)

Of course like most of my projects i might just get tired of it before finishing it :-P.

 

[Bad Sector]

Here is another video with animation blending, actual environments and real collision detection:



Actually i have more videos on the channel, i'm adding those almost daily but i don't want to spam stuff here.

However it turns out that the more stuff you add to a game (and its engine), the slower things go. The game now runs at ~10fps on my 133MHz laptop. Weirdly enough it doesn't feel as bad as a 10fps game on my main PC - i *think* it has something to do with the screen.

I do not plan on spending much time in optimization since i want to do a bunch of other stuff before the deadline in 24 days - i need to write a level editor and of course the levels themselves (and hey, the game jam is about making a game for DOS, it doesn't mention any PC specs :-P). Also so far i haven't touched audio at all. But i did try to optimize things a little anyway (those 10fps are *after* my optimization efforts :-P). However DOS profiling is, well, in a garbage state tool-wise and after spending a lot of time trying to get it work i abandoned that idea. Instead i finally decided to install Linux on an emulated Pentium 1 machine via 86box and try to use the profiling tools from there.

This also meant that i had to port the game to Linux, though fortunately that wasn't hard since SDL 1.2 was essentially made for porting DOS and older Windows games to Linux. So here is the game running under an emulated 300MHz Pentium MMX running Slackware 14.2 (which provides out of the box support for such old "hardware" - funny how the emulator also emulates the f00f bug too):

Worst case i'll pretend to be Bethesda with Redguard and say that yes, technically it runs on a Pentium 166.

 

[JarlFrank]

I like classic Tomb Raider so I have an interest in this.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I like classic Tomb Raider so I have an interest in this.

Have you played Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine?
https://af.gog.com/game/indiana_jones_and_the_infernal_machine?as=1649904300

Strangely wasn't that popular/widely known.

 

[AdolfSatan]

One can only wonder why it lost in the popularity competition against tomb raider.

Guess we'll never know.

 

[Wunderbar]

I like classic Tomb Raider so I have an interest in this.

Have you played Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine?
https://af.gog.com/game/indiana_jones_and_the_infernal_machine?as=1649904300

Strangely wasn't that popular/widely known.

it wasn't popular because of horrible clunky controls.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

One can only wonder why it lost in the popularity competition against tomb raider.

Guess we'll never know.

What is the deal with the contrast in those screenshots? Is that just in a particularly dim part of the game? It looks like someone took a screenshot, put it in Photoshop and then put a 30%-opacity gray layer right over the top of it.

 

[JarlFrank]

I like classic Tomb Raider so I have an interest in this.

Have you played Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine?
https://af.gog.com/game/indiana_jones_and_the_infernal_machine?as=1649904300

Strangely wasn't that popular/widely known.

Yep, also Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, both of which were pretty good but not quite on the level of the best TR games (but better than TR Chronicles for sure).

 

[Bad Sector]

I like classic Tomb Raider so I have an interest in this.

Have you played Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine?
https://af.gog.com/game/indiana_jones_and_the_infernal_machine?as=1649904300

Strangely wasn't that popular/widely known.

it wasn't popular because of horrible clunky controls.

From what i remember at the time, many Indiana Jones fans were very salty that this was a major IJ game that wasn't a Lucasarts-like adventure game.

The controls are ok, not any worse than other Tomb Raider clones (and there were much worse - e.g. Prince of Persia 3D), but honestly i do not think any other game with classic TR-like controls ever got them as good as even TR1. Classic TR, especially the earlier ones, are mediocre at several aspects - especially visuals - but they got two things right: controls and level design (though in after TR1 the level designers increasingly become massive trolls). Other games that took after TR reversed this: they polish almost everything (especially visuals), except controls and (to a lesser extent) levels.

(and sadly, yeah, mine isn't as good as TR1 either - i'm not Toby Gard and making controls as good as TR1 is stupidly hard... but i *think* i've got it better than other attemps - having grid-based levels helps massively though and the only other game i can think of that had grid-based levels was the PSX-exclusive Duke Nukem game(s), but those had awful controls)

 

[Bad Sector]

Here is a different video: making a "turn around" animation and implementing the action in the game:



...for anyone who likes to watch videos of stuff being made :-P

Make sure you watch it at 1080p (even if you use a lower resolution), otherwise the code would be unreadable.

 

[Ninjerk]

Bad Sector are you actually making a game or just tooling around?

 

[Bad Sector]

Bad Sector are you actually making a game or just tooling around?

I'm making a game for a DOS Game Jam which ends in... uh... 1 month and 23 days. It used to be just 23 days, apparently it was extended a month. Weird. I'm not sure i want to spend two months on this, perhaps i'll just pretend it ends in 23 days and use the extra days only if i don't manage to do it in time.

 

[Ninjerk]

Bad Sector are you actually making a game or just tooling around?

I'm making a game for a DOS Game Jam which ends in... uh... 1 month and 23 days. It used to be just 23 days, apparently it was extended a month. Weird. I'm not sure i want to spend two months on this, perhaps i'll just pretend it ends in 23 days and use the extra days only if i don't manage to do it in time.

Nice. I like the in-production Playstation-esque look to the whole thing.

 

[The Avatar]

Made some armors and a paper doll system. Very WIP still. Someday I will think of a name for this game.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Someday I will think of a name for this game.

Codex: The RPG

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Made some armors and a paper doll system. Very WIP still. Someday I will think of a name for this game.

did you do the modeling yourself?

 

[The Avatar]

did you do the modeling yourself?

Some of them I modeled from scratch, others are retopo'd daz models to save time- which is pretty important when you want to have 4+ races with male and female versions. Fortunately, I started off in games as a 3d artist so I can do unique pieces where needed.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Made some armors and a paper doll system. Very WIP still. Someday I will think of a name for this game.

Looks great. You know, this might be a bit early in the process, but you might want to start thinking about it: Change the underlying mesh when you change equipment. Oblivion let you mix and match your equipment and it resulted in a lot of wasted triangles being rendered. So because you could theoretically wear any pants without shirt or boots, all of the pants' mesh had to be drawn. But players usually wore matching armor, so the chain shirt that covered the chain pants down to mid-thigh could have just been one combined mesh with no triangles wasted on a detailed crotch area. And that was the approach Bethesda took when making Skyrim's armor, and apparently the approach you're using too.

But are you also drawing the naked dude beneath the clothes? It could save you a lot of triangles, especially if you have lots of NPCs on the screen, if you can cull the naked body when you put clothes on.

Also, I'm playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance now, and that game apparently doesn't cull the meshes very well. You have several layers of armor in that game, and maybe it's because my graphics settings are so low, but they all seem to clip through each other. They seem to do a better job with not layering too much on the NPCs, but then occasionally you see collarbones with nothing under them when someone is wearing a shirt with a wide neck.

I really like the pixelly, non-anti-aliased aesthetic by the way. Are you running a post-process filter to bring out the outlines? Everything looks great except the details on the face are a little muddled though.

 

[Bad Sector]

Nathaniel3W triangle count isn't as much of an issue for GPUs as it was 15+ years ago (unless we're talking about obscene amounts or extremely heavy vertex shaders, but usually these aren't issues), if anything it is actually better to "waste" triangles and reuse meshes (and textures!) since this way you can keep more stuff in VRAM. Many games nowadays have characters and environments made up of modular pieces and if you can disable collision in them you'll notice that many of these pieces heavily overlap and clip into each other - it is better to have the same mesh drawn 10 times in weird clipped out orientations (even if you cannot see all of it) than create perfectly culled unique instances.

You can try to merge things, but you'll find that at best you are not getting any difference (any framerate bottleneck wont be in your triangle count and you just wasted your time) and at worst your changes impact the performance and/or resource use negatively since what previously would be shared resources now become replicated (though one caveat: your engine also needs to take advantage of that and not all engines do).

(also FWIW i wouldn't worry about performance until *after* it has proven to be an issue - bigger developers can afford to spend time on microoptimizations, but for smaller and solo developers it can be a waste of time and it is often better to focus on flexibility at the expense of performance)

 

[The Avatar]

Yeah, I'm not drawing the stuff under the armor. Less of a concern about optimization and more of a concern about stuff clipping through, especially since this is pretty low poly. This is D&D style armor though, so I can get away with having one main armor instead of a bunch of piece-mail slots. For each armor, I make versions for each race and sex combination, and I can still swap out the mats for the face/hands for skin color customization.

 

[LESS T_T]

All of Unity's learning material will be free to access for the next three months: https://learn.unity.com/

I believe there are things not so Unity-specific too.

 

[Catacombs]

All of Unity's learning material will be free to access for the next three months: https://learn.unity.com/

I believe there are things not so Unity-specific too.

This is great. Does anyone know if it's possible to download all the materials for later?