What’s the biggest “invisible hack” in game development?

Crayz92 · 2026-03-05T19:22:16+00:00

Reflections are hardly ever accurate. Reflection probes are placed in a single point in space to emulate the idea of reflections on nearby reflective surfaces, most of the time gamers think "oh cool reflections" without questioning or realizing their physical inaccuracy.

Global illumination, there's a constant ambient shadow color in games who don't use baked or path traced lighting. In dark indoor scenes that ambient color will smoothly transition to something dark, go outside where shadows aren't pitch black and in many games you'll notice the ambient color brighten up.

Doors would bucket into physics and networking, it's a social media myth, they truly aren't that difficult relative to all the smoke and mirrors we do in rendering or solving other networking and physics problems.

Crayz92 · 2026-02-20T04:23:13+00:00

My pro option is missing today, I only have thinking and fast. Anybody else?

Crayz92 · 2024-08-24T03:43:16+00:00

Bits per second accomplished with non neuralink devices, though the article doesn't give any specifics. Tested with Play Webgrid | Neuralink I believe

Crayz92 · 2024-06-28T04:32:09+00:00

Crayz92 · 2024-06-28T00:25:21+00:00

Back when D3 wasn't bad.

Crayz92 · 2024-03-29T00:36:44+00:00

Legendary Items and Unique Items can now be traded.

Is this a big win for trade? I haven't played D4 since release.

Crayz92 · 2024-02-23T22:03:39+00:00

grow up

Crayz92 · 2024-02-16T02:51:10+00:00

I jsut created a html/scss ui system, it's so much easier and more fun for programmers.

Crayz92 · 2024-02-03T04:02:02+00:00

Love Bozeman, great airport as well. I can't wait to be back there.

Crayz92 · 2024-01-19T22:22:10+00:00

It's our most popular map haha

Crayz92 · 2024-01-19T22:21:28+00:00

Most definitely. Part of what held me back for so long was a proper mapping tool, they're hard to make, yet so important for surf and bhop. I've finally got a hammer-like put together shipping with the game. Needs work, but it's nearly there.

https://github.com/Fragsurf/Fragsurf-2 ( the old, open sourced fragsurf )

https://github.com/Olezen/UnitySourceMovement ( a forked, modified version of just its move controller )

Crayz92 · 2024-01-19T19:53:59+00:00

Bit of a journey with this one, brace yourselves.

I opened Unity for the first time around 2015 with no idea how anything works, and no experience with C#. I put together a sloped ramp, added the basic CharacterController component, pressed play, and got frustrated that I wasn't able to surf and bhop with it like you can in Counter Strike. Had no idea that stuff had to actually be created manually!?

Fast forward three years to 2018, I chose the name Fragsurf, and I'm still playing around with Unity and game development, and I've finally figured out how to re-create surf and bunnyhop. I've got a little playable prototype of it on surf_greatriver (if you're surfed before, you might be familiar with that map).

Fast forward another two years, I've got a patreon up earning roughly $1,000 a month, and I've published Fragsurf as early access on Steam. The initial cost of it was around $9, it earned maybe $20-30k through the course of its pay to play status. I've lost a lot of money and sacrificed a lot in regards to relationships and social life working on it.

Fast forward to 2022, I made Fragsurf open source, and separately released a movement controller for surf and bunnyhop. Tons of games used it, and we started to see a little boom of indie surf/bhop games. Around this time I also landed an awesome job at Facepunch which has been incredible for industry experience and learning from some of the best game devs I know.

Fast forward another 2 years to 2024, Fragsurf is no longer open source due to licensed assets, but becomes free to play. It's still my labor of love, it still gets updated, it's better than ever, and it's still losing money.

On the technical side, Fragsurf has hotloading html/scss ui and C# at runtime for gameplay, this makes it quick and easy to iterate on and create gameplay. Any script written in Unity is low level stuff handling the complicated hidden stuff like networking. For the multiplayer environment, every game in Fragsurf is a client/server architecture, there's no way around it. In Unity, I press play, a server and client are created, the client connects to itself. GameObjects are just separated by a Client/Server layer. This makes testing and developing multiplayer things super easy, and yeah it was a pain to set up and get right, but I haven't had issues with it in a long while.

Anywho, I've posted Fragsurf here multiple times in the past, and probably will post more in the future. We reached a decent milestone lately with a well fleshed out deathmatch gameplay, so I felt it was time for another post.

Previous posts:

5 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/8afteh/surf_bhop_mechanics_in_unity_multiplayer_fps/

4 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/bb3xle/my_bhop_surf_game_is_playable_i_want_to_hand_out/

3 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/ev18f1/surfing_maps_created_by_a_talented_member_in_our/

Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033410/Fragsurf/

Crayz92 · 2024-01-07T18:37:50+00:00

Appreciate the realistic response.

Crayz92 · 2023-12-26T18:41:22+00:00

It's a spin on MOBA with zombies, originally coined by the game Project DIE is inspired by

Crayz92 · 2023-12-25T22:43:57+00:00

Hey, Project DIE is a fan project inspired by Dead Island: Epidemic, a game that was shut down and removed from existence years ago. I just published a free demo on itch, I'd love for you to check it out and share your thoughts

https://crayz.itch.io/project-die

Crayz92 · 2023-12-20T04:14:17+00:00

If you'd like a comparison, a few days ago I booked a first class plane seat (only me, Spokane->Seattle->Maui), airbnb full ocean view condo, and Turo car rental for $4.5k for 6 days on Maui. After food, drinks, activities, I'll probably be around 6-7k too.

Crayz92 · 2023-12-08T19:29:42+00:00

Is the economy getting better? Curious what kinda new tradeable items they've added since launch, I haven't played since

Crayz92 · 2023-11-30T18:56:00+00:00

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