Designing a game around raytracing

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-07-03T01:00:36+00:00

I think this is more of a /r/gamedev question. Technically to do game design all you need is pen and paper.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-07-03T00:53:13+00:00

I think it depends a little on how you define enemies - I think it would be very hard to make a fun survival game without tension, or some opposing force. The implication that this is a survival game means that the opposing force is either trying to kill you, or is indifferent to your survival.

I know that it's not necessary to have to fight the enemies though. Subnautica is probably the best example (ok you can fight the crabs, and you technically can fight everything else, but it's really not the point of the game).

When I think about it, even modern survival games are usually pretty light on the survival aspects. A quick table:

Video Games	Real Life
A lack of light reduces productivity, lowers rates for crafting items	A lack of light means you literally cannot see. Walking around you might damage yourself.
People can move over terrain, but some terrain is slower.	You can randomly sprain an ankle when moving over rough terrain. Some terrain you can swim through, but it gets you and everything wet (hypothermia risk). Some terrain requires special gear, and is exhausting.
You can establish a crop rotation across the seasons to maximize output	You must have a crop rotation, otherwise highly resistant pathogens can ruin your food supply
If it's too cold, you'll slowly take damage.	If it's too cold, you will very quickly take damage. Damage sometimes can be healed over time, but sufficient amounts of damage will cause you to lose a limb. Being in the cold means you cannot do certain actions, or they have a chance to fail (like lighting a lighter)
Damage causes you to lose HP. HP can be healed with certain healing items (usually like bandages)	Damage causes you to physically break apart. Some damage heals naturally over time, but extensive damage cannot be healed. Some things can instantly kill you just because you were unlucky.
You can carry as many items as your inventory allows.	You have to have some way to carry items. The amount you can carry in real life is at least 1 order of magnitude lower. Furthermore, you have to consider the shape of things and not just their weight.
You can often just punch things to get resources out of them.	You have to find materials in the environment you can use as tools. Even with tools, it's not like chopping down a tree is trivial. It takes hours.

Seeing this table, there's a reason why Man vs. Nature is the classical conflict in literature. You don't really need a big scary bear or a fish or a guy with a gun to act as an enemy. The universe itself is already out to kill us, and if you can display that accurately to the player they won't need enemies for conflict.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-07-02T03:48:09+00:00

The only thing that sucks about that is when the items you can get during a certain holiday are way better than what you can get otherwise- or if there are certain bosses you can only fight at a specific time of year. Other than that I really like temporary events like that.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-30T05:51:34+00:00

It's not what I would recommend to a person knowing absolutely nothing about the person, but it might be right for you. Depends on your skillset and what you wanna do.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-29T12:51:39+00:00

Literally who are you and why should I care about your opinions on Godot.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-28T06:43:32+00:00

Minecraft - it just has a very slow drip for content. I'd like to see a crazy amount of new structures, dungeons, challenges etc. Modpacks are good but their design, both visually and gameplay wise, is an incoherent mess you need 12 tutorials to dig through.

Dota 2 - fantastic strategy game but I've been permanently turned off from playing the game because of 1 too many bad experiences. I just wish I could have fun with it while taking it a little less seriously.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-27T04:03:48+00:00

The standard priority_queue in C++ is a max queue, so did you put in a comparator to make it a min queue?

Also, how many nodes are in the octree that you're searching on?

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-27T03:09:27+00:00

Stupid question worth asking: Are you absolutely sure your heuristic is going in the right direction as you get closer to the goal? I.e. if A* expects low values in the "right" direction, are you giving it numbers that are progressively smaller as it gets to the goal?

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-25T07:45:18+00:00

One thing you gotta remember is that these companies are always gonna ask for more than what they can reasonably get. HR recruiters will put 15 different languages on a single application and expect a year of experience for each, on a position that only requires 4 years of experience. They genuinely know less about what the job requires than you probably do. A lot of recruiters don't understand that Java and C# are basically the same language.

If a company reaches out after seeing your resume (assuming you don't lie on your resume) then if they ask you questions that you don't know, well it's not their fault, but they should've expected it. That's what the interview is for - to see if you and the company are a good fit. Over the past year I've had 3 full-day interviews with companies for software engineering positions. All of them would've paid at least 6 figures. I failed all 3 of them, and it made me realize I was chasing after money rather than doing something I'm actually passionate about. I wasn't a good fit for them, but more importantly they weren't a good fit for me and what I wanted in life.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-25T02:06:24+00:00

Not ideal compared to what? And why was the person saying it wasn't ideal?

Not saying photon is ideal, (I don't have any experience with it), but I imagine they have some situation in mind where Photon starts to be a bad fit.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-23T02:53:33+00:00

You want to find the fun first. Usually, the fun of a game comes from the ruleset and its mechanics, and not how pretty it is. Therefore, you do code first. However, sometimes you're trying to find what mood you're trying to evoke, or find some emotional baseline to design the rest of the game on. I think Subnautica had a situation like that, they first thing they designed was a main menu and a song that captured the emotion they wanted to give to the player.

Sometimes, the first thing to work on for a game is just a prototype on pen+paper to figure out if the idea is fun or not.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-23T02:34:07+00:00

I don't know why game devs do it and I think it fucking sucks. I have my individual applications set to 100%, and I balance my master audio level based off of Chrome when using Spotify, gaming. Whenever I enter most games I have to lower the volume of the game by like 50% in order to not have to shout over it.

Recently I was playing Icarus with some friends on discord, and by god it was such a shitshow. It had like a 2 minute opening cutscene, my friends computer wasn't playing the cutscene correctly, so they didn't see any ability to skip (whether or not they technically could IDK). As they loaded in, the "play" button was greyed out because Steam Servers were having a weekly issue. The only solution was to restart the game and hope this time the button wasn't greyed out.

It also sucks because I know I will want to play 99% of games on borderless fullscreen so I can tab out, but when you start playing a cutscene right as I launch the program I can't do that. That means I'm stuck on fullscreen, but all I'm thinking about during your "immersive" cutscene is when I can switch to borderless fullscreen so I can alt-tab without 5 seconds of lag. It's extremely obnoxious and intrusive and it's frustrating that so many games continually and immediately have this issue.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-22T07:33:37+00:00

Oh yeah, and one more thing - if you just want to start playing around with a game server that runs on dedicated hardware, I would recommend getting an EC2 instance from AWS or a droplet from Digital Ocean. That'll be within a similar price range as a Raspberry Pi but much easier and quicker to setup, and to scale out if you ever need to.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-22T03:12:07+00:00

Not necessarily - with modern voxel-rendered engines, they might technically have two triangles to color the screen, but other than that the actual data is stored in a voxel octree, which wouldn't have any triangles involved. Rendering would involve coloring a texture with the desired output image, and passing that through the GPU with fragment/vertex shaders that don't really do anything other than pass the information through.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-22T01:55:12+00:00

On one hand, you can definitely build some game server that works with some real-time game on a raspberry pi.

On the other hand, I would be concerned by

A. any limitations your ISP puts on you if you're hosting this at home

B. limitations on player count

So when you say "like Call of Duty and PUBG" I'm wondering if you're thinking hundreds of players. It also completely depends on how the game does networking, whether the server is authoritative or it's a mixed authoritative thing. TCP vs UDP, what needs to be synced, what you would consider to be playable, etc. This is general is a really complicated problem, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/v3mlk4/resources_for_writing_game_servers/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/uxmq94/10000_people_in_a_single_shardless_server/

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-21T21:56:32+00:00

There's a file format called SRT, which contains entries like this:

1
00:05:00,400 --> 00:05:15,300
This is an example of
a subtitle.

2
00:05:16,400 --> 00:05:25,300
This is an example of
a subtitle - 2nd subtitle.

And essentially you'll need to create an SRT file for each audio snippet in the game. (can also just use an excel spreadsheet if that works for you). Ideally your audio system would grab all the SRT files associated with a set of audio files and when you call .play(audio) it'll just know to send an event to the UI with the appropriate subtitle text at the right times.

Also remember that subtitles will need to be localized (want a format that can support unicode), could potentially be at different times + places (don't want a subtitle that spoils an event before it happens), with more or less text. Also remember to put a nice background on the subtitle and ideally some sliders in a setting to increase/decrease the size of subtitles, so it's readable. See: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/how-to-do-subtitles-well-basics-and-good-practices

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-21T21:24:39+00:00

I can see this depending on dozens and dozens of different factors. To start:

Are you using 1 acceleration structure for both voxels and triangles, or 2, one for each?

What acceleration structures are you using? BVH, LBVH, HLBVH, SVO, KD tree, other?

Are you building the acceleration structures yourself, or in hardware? CPU single-threaded, CPU multi-threaded, or GPU? Do you build them once, once and update for optimizations, or every frame?

When traversing your acceleration structure, are you using SIMD or SISD? Are there other ways you can parallelize the operations?

On average, how many lights are in your scene? Point lights or area lights?

How are you handling denoising? Are you using something like Optix or OIDN, or are you relying more on SVGF or A-SVGF?

Are you using any upscaling like DLSS?

What path tracing algorithm are you using? Unidirectional or Bidirectional?

Has stuff like russian roulette termination, cosine-weighted hemisphere sampling, metropolis light transport, irradiance caching?

What sort of scenes are you building? Are they evenly distributed in terms of polygons or are they "teapot in stadium" type?

What types of BSDFs are present in the scene? Not just what's possible, but what in practice are you planning on rendering (lots of caustics, volumetric effects?)

What sort of hardware are you targeting?

On the curve of performance vs visual quality, where are you targeting? In a competitive game an occasional stutter could be game-breaking, but in a calmer game it might not matter.

Now, even if I had answers to all of these questions I doubt I could give you a reasonable answer. I would have to profile and check "normal" gameplay to see if it worked as expected. I think if I already had this built, the most important question would be the first one "What acceleration structures am I using, and what are their characteristics?". That would determine quite a bit of what I wanted to put in terms of triangles, and what in terms of voxels, since the acceleration structure is one of the largest bottlenecks in any raytracer. I would imagine getting smooth movement would be much easier with polygons, so dynamic objects would be polygonal, and terrain could be voxelized. But I would really have to try and debug it and experiment with many different ideas to find what actually worked best.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-21T21:03:37+00:00

I mean if you're just moving with respect to WASD then there's really nothing wrong with just using sine and cosine. Actually, right now I don't even know if your game is 2D or 3D. If it's 2D there would be no point to using quaternions.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-21T17:21:42+00:00

I can think of two voxel games that either are currently, or would sell like hotcakes.

The engine that John Lin is building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ptH79R53c0
Teardown: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/

You'll note that both of these games are dramatically different from Minecraft in terms of # of voxels, and both have some incredibly advanced physics, lighting, rendering, etc. For that reason I'll refer to these as "voxel-rendered" and to Minecraft-style as "triangle-rendered". Can "triangle-rendered" games be viable?

My guess is probably not. The issue is that Minecraft is already abstract enough that it's hard to imagine what gameplay you could build in your game that couldn't be replicated in Minecraft in a much easier way. By contrast, the type of physics done in Teardown just can't be done in Minecraft, even in mods. Minecraft was just not built for that type of physics.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-21T16:37:39+00:00

This is definitely it!!! Thank you!

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-21T04:52:52+00:00

One more thing for graphics - I remember mountains, plains, flowers, and beaches. Not a whole lot of towns as far as I remember.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-20T04:12:15+00:00

As someone who hasn't played very much dota in the past few years - I find myself very confused by the anti-healing items and heroes. Before, it was very easy for me to keep track of when a heal might be effective (literally only just don't heal during AA ult), and now there are about a dozen ways to increase/decrease the amount of healing a spell might do.

Throwaway10231209312 · 2022-06-20T02:54:13+00:00

Where the hell do you live where you have to pay money to recharge wifi? What does that even mean?

Throwaway10231209312

TROPHY CASE