Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Hag]

I never liked the sprite for the boars. I reworked them. I think these guys look better. Also, I made the tusks a separate layer and as the boars level-up they get bigger tusks.

I realize that I don't really know what a boar's shoulder muscles look like and I kind of based these off human deltoids. It looks OK from the side but from head-on, it kind of looks like one of those perverts who's into dressing up as animals.

Old one looked like a piglet.
New one like a warthog. Its sprite is overall nicer and makes for a good enemy, but a boar should have a thick fur and smaller head.
I believe you're right about the shape of the back muscles.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Welp, nobody even attempted to help with the buffs question here.
A non gamedev programmer looked at the problem and immediately recognized a priority queue solution.
Instead of counting time on all buffs, just keep them sorted and compare the time with the lowest one. If it hasn't expired, means the others haven't either.

 

[what am i doing]

SDL has its own main for easier cross-platform support (which is main its reason for existing).

That does not seem a very convincing excuse.

It's not an "excuse" because what SDL does is not a bad thing. It doesn't need an excuse. I'm just explaining to you why it's like that.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Got a client who presented me with a UE5 bug. In blueprints, he passes a struct to a function. In the function, the struct is always zeroed-out. Great.

This is in blueprints, obviously. Not debuggable, not fixable, unless you're Carmack who can step through the blueprints VM and figure out what got corrupted and how.

 

[std::namespace]

Welp, nobody even attempted to help with the buffs question here.
A non gamedev programmer looked at the problem and immediately recognized a priority queue solution.
Instead of counting time on all buffs, just keep them sorted and compare the time with the lowest one. If it hasn't expired, means the others haven't either.

well he is obviously wrong... cause buffs are not just about timers ticking down...
Idea 2: make some kind of manager on a separate thread that would tick timers and send events to the main thread when the timers ran out? A bit difficult to manage, because buffs can be renewed, etc.
is the right approach except patterns!1

the manager doesnt tick and poll buffs
the buffs are "live" and push messages when they change state
the messages can be in a queue

 

[what am i doing]

Welp, nobody even attempted to help with the buffs question here.
A non gamedev programmer looked at the problem and immediately recognized a priority queue solution.
Instead of counting time on all buffs, just keep them sorted and compare the time with the lowest one. If it hasn't expired, means the others haven't either.

I saw "in UE5" and my eyes glazed over the rest of the post, personally.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Got a client who presented me with a UE5 bug. In blueprints, he passes a struct to a function. In the function, the struct is always zeroed-out. Great.

This is in blueprints, obviously. Not debuggable, not fixable, unless you're Carmack who can step through the blueprints VM and figure out what got corrupted and how.

I think if that happened to me, I would find other ways to pass the information to the function. Send the members of the struct as separate args, or create an entirely new class that has the same variables and create an object of that class and send it, or something.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Got a client who presented me with a UE5 bug. In blueprints, he passes a struct to a function. In the function, the struct is always zeroed-out. Great.

This is in blueprints, obviously. Not debuggable, not fixable, unless you're Carmack who can step through the blueprints VM and figure out what got corrupted and how.

I think if that happened to me, I would find other ways to pass the information to the function. Send the members of the struct as separate args, or create an entirely new class that has the same variables and create an object of that class and send it, or something.

I told him to delete Intermediary and Saved and it fixed it. But there are other times it doesn't help. A blueprint can become corrupt. No point in trying to get around the bug then, because others problems can arise, you can't trust a corrupt bp.

A couple of times I had a circular dependency bug in blueprints. Circular dependency is allowed by design, but in reality once in a year or two it'll make your project impossible to compile or do some other wonky shit. The worst is when it affects only shipping builds. Figuring out which blueprint is the culprit takes weeks. You slowly cut out blueprints one by one, fix the errors, recompile. Then once you found the culprit, you change some stuff around and it works again. But the trust in the engine erodes.

Nowadays I use a circular dependency detection plugin and avoid them, at the cost of much time and energy.

I wonder if anyone could share their experience with Godot that way. Would be interesting to read.

 

[Hag]

It's not an "excuse" because what SDL does is not a bad thing. It doesn't need an excuse. I'm just explaining to you why it's like that.

Well, I do agree SDL is great. But this macro stuff strikes me as bad practice. However, I'm not a great developer and if you know more about the rational behind this trick (besides "It's convenient") I'd be happy to learn.

 

[what am i doing]

It's not an "excuse" because what SDL does is not a bad thing. It doesn't need an excuse. I'm just explaining to you why it's like that.

Well, I do agree SDL is great. But this macro stuff strikes me as bad practice. However, I'm not a great developer and if you know more about the rational behind this trick (besides "It's convenient") I'd be happy to learn.

SDL is written in C, so it's done C-style, which means macros and such.
In the interest of avoiding language wars in a gentlemen's thread I won't make any judgments on C and just say that's the way it is, and when using C libraries you do tend to encounter such code on occasion.

IIRC you can disable it and use your own main if you want (at a risk of reduced portability to some platforms), but I forget exactly how.

 

[Hag]

IIRC you can disable it and use your own main if you want (at a risk of reduced portability to some platforms), but I forget exactly how.

You have to define SDL_MAIN_HANDLED before include the lib. Easy enough.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

And now something completely unrelated to the game I'm working on.

The youth at our church didn't get to run in their cross country competitions because all of their meets were held on Friday, which is when have our church services. (We live in the Middle East, and Friday is the day off, so that's when we hold our services.) So we had a 5k on a Saturday and invited everyone. This was the official clock, on a TV we pulled out to the street.

 

[Hag]

I remember writing small C programs fifteen years ago to draw fractals. It was not difficult but was kind of lame, with encapsulated loops settings pixels color on a SDL_surface one by one. Now I can just draw a quad and have the fractal pixel algorithm in the fragment shader and it all works by itself. Takes a couple minutes to write. Faster to render.
It is not always in IT that shit does get better but sometimes it feels really good.

 

[Edward Doyle]

Probably better to post here for frequent updates rather than a thread.
The art style is finally finalized and enough content for a demo is almost done. Currently reworking the stealth system and will fine tune the combat as the content development goes on.

The progress of the tileset + UI:

Apparently the art is very inspired by PC98 games, and managed to integrate Fallout-inspired Skilldex in the UI:

But yeah the project is an action RPG that will heavly lean into some CRPG elements.

Had a good progress in the last 2 months:


- Finished building the tileset for the first indoor area, it's expanded to include many indoor items to be used elsewhere as well

- Got the designs for about half the characters that will be in the demo

- We have also finally overhauled the Dialogue Box. It looked like this*:

* Not an actual text, testing the dialogue tool.

- We went the Disco Elysium way, or perhaps the Iron Tower way?

*Not an actual text, just a Mock Up

Utilizing the space to allow for more text per line and also not covering the majority of the screen proved challenging, that's why we chose left side and decided to show the portraits of the other characters in-place of the pc during dialogue.

- Some more WIP portraits:

For the upcoming months, we will focus on refining combat, getting animations for some of the demo characters and hopefully get it to a presentable state.
Moreover, will get a tileset for an industrial area and some more characters.

Here's the current playground:

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

After a 2 weeks sprint, tried compiling a UE5 project. 50+ errors, "unknown struct". Apparently blueprint structs can get corrupted real easy if you change the order of variables in them or if you move the structs to a new directory. Was already pulling my hair. Then tried renaming them and it fixed it. Sheesh. This engine would be amazing if it didn't give heart attacks.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Exploring a different direction with a potential 'sequel' to DLR. Decided to try top-down exploration similar to Ultima / Mugen no Shinzou / Quester and a different world structure -- a few continents with a bunch of towns.

The combat will remain similar to the original DLR, except you can see encounters roaming around on the world map and in dungeons and sneak past them if you want to avoid combat. I'm still figuring out the exploration-related skills, but ideally, I'd want to have situations similar to what I encountered in Unlimited Saga during my last session -- you're trying to pick a lock on a door and see that a huge monster is slowly approaching your position, so you hurry the fuck up and get out at the last moment.

That, and I'll probably focus on one player character + 3-5 mercs/monsters with their own exploration and combat skills.

It's still early, so it's hard to say if it'll survive past the prototype phase, but I've been longing for a game that I can keep stuffing with content until I consider it done. You can blame Ysaye for reminding me about Mugen no Shinzou, btw.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Implemented both solutions for buffs: timers vs. heap and profiled.
It's not even relevant. They're both basically free. Adding 10k buffs in both systems takes 66 and 55 ms respectively. So for one buff, that's a difference of 1 microsecond. It's not important. The game logic behind adding 10k buffs would crash the editor, because of how many times the stats needs to be recalculated.

 

[Twiglard]

Update: The codebase doesn't compile for a week straight because of the stupid WIP walls rendering. To ease the pain of having to fix everything at once, I've made an extensive amount of tests for wall atlases. The only things that remain untested inside the atlases are the exact values of vertex positions and their UV's/texcoords.

It should be able to render something as the walls within a few days.

Not sure what to work on next. Hopefully something more fun than wall atlases that I'm implementing now. Technically there's everything needed to start working on preprocessing the level to enable cover & movement between cover for combat AI.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

cover & movement between cover

What great RPGs had cover in the top 10 of all time? If none, then why make it?

 

[Twiglard]

cover & movement between cover

What great RPGs had cover in the top 10 of all time? If none, then why make it?

Want to have Stalker-like/Zomboid-like gameplay.

Edit: I used the std::ranges::zip_view while doing the wall stuff. The horror. By now, compile times are only a pain most of the time.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Was walking around a book store while waiting for my wife to get her nails polished. Stumbled on this book: "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler"

Leafed through it. It tells you how to reinvent various kinds of technology, as the title suggests. I thought that was an interesting notion for world building, kept leafing through. Eventually concluded that it's mostly aimed at kids.

The Russian cover got me fooled:

It looks like it's a manual full of technically interesting details.

American versions:

Clearly for kids. American cover is more honest.

Putting on my to do list to find a book about the history of technology. A good world building needs to be rational.

 

[Hag]

Here's today WTF reminder to not trust Stack Overflow : someone has a common input issue with SDL, the only answer should work but allocates a 1GB structure to hold keypresses (the correct size is 512 * sizeof(uint_8), as returned by SDL_GetKeyboardState(int*)).

 

[Lance Treiber]

Started a new project. Its goal is to capture lightning in a bottle.

Spoiler

Christ, the video quality is really something in twitter embeds.

I know twitter is a dead platform for this type of thing, but do you know of any tags other than #screenshotsaturday that I might add when I have something presentable to show?

This video is just for the 'dex.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Putting on my to do list to find a book about the history of technology. A good world building needs to be rational.

Meh, if the world is cold they'll invent fire first and if it is warm, they'll invent refrigeration. Not so hard.

 

[Lance Treiber]

Took a marketplace product that I happened to be familiar with, because I helped a client with it. It's an MMO kit, but within two hours I made it into a single player RPG Kit. It lacks some functionality, but mostly it's all there.

Some difficulties encountered so far:

- Only Characters possessed by a PlayerController can be moved through Add Input Vector in UE5. Meaning that non-player characters can only move on the NavMesh, which is ridiculous. Had to rewrite a bit of the standard engine classes.
Now I "fake possess" any number of party characters.

- Drawing the hex-like cursor above all surfaces, but behind the character, was a bit of a challenge.

- A lot of design to consider. Porting Fallout 1 into 3D is not obvious. Settled on allowing verticality. Notice hexes exist above each other. I expect a lot of pain in the ass to hide geometry between the camera and the character in the future:

I've been at it with this project for a few days now, the progress is great. Tomorrow custom A* navigation to run on hexes.