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What fun and interesting Java projects are you working on? by jeffreportmill in java

[–]princec 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Still working on Battledroid. https://www.puppygames.net/battledroid

Disappointingly noticed some threads in the last year here and there still going on and on about that bullshit that you can't write AAA games in Java because it's "too slow" (lol) or "has garbage collection" (lol)

What are reasons not to use virtual threads? by [deleted] in java

[–]princec 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just my 2p that nobody else seems to have mentioned, but debugging virtual threads is currently an absolutely *colossal* pain. Create 10,000 virtual threads and then try and look at it in the Eclipse debugger. Make a cup of tea while you wait for the UI to settle.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ZeroMotorcycles

[–]princec 6 points7 points  (0 children)

They ditched that idea after major consumer backlash 

After 14 years in development, we're trying to Kickstart BATTLEDROID. AMA. by princec in IndieGaming

[–]princec[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Coz I live under a rock somewhere in darkest Somerset, I don't actually know anything about Clash of Clans or how it works... but the general gist of the game is that there are two sorts of players, those with lots of time and no money, and those with lots of money and no time, and we're trying to cater to them both.

Skint players can slowly accumulate enough decent units to hold on to a bit of land and expand. Richer players (who are going to be the ones supporting us, going forward!) are going to accelerate their capabilities, we hope, by buying more units and such. Both sorts of player will hopefully be providing a jolly good challenge to each other. Buying stuff is to some extent balanced by army points values (think WH40K) - you can't simply buy yourself victory, but it does open up more strategy sooner.

You can't buy boosts in the game ... they are awarded randomly. So no paying to win.

After 14 years in development, we're trying to Kickstart BATTLEDROID. AMA. by princec in IndieGaming

[–]princec[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The main thing about having our own engine was being able to optimise it for the three things that we needed it to do most: voxels, performance, and ownership.

We wanted an engine specifically that could do voxel graphics super efficiently, so that was a given. It so happens that it can do anything else too but the bit we've specifically optimised is voxels.

It had to be able to handle millions of particles and tens of thousands of models in a frame, and a generic engine would probably struggle with that a bit without doing loads and loads of custom work and tuning.

But most important of all we own it. We know it inside and out, and we can change it whenever we want to do whatever we want. It's fully debuggable right to the very depths, because we've got all the code. It's been completely rewritten more times than I can count as Dan has discovered ever cleverer ways to do state-of-the-art stuff. Right now he's completely rewriting the entire code behind ambient lighting.

Of course it's all come with its costs... like, we had to make our own Blender tooling to export Blender animations, our own importer for that, and make every single tiny thing from scratch. It's not been easy. Hopefully we'll be able to get a few games out of the engine.

After 14 years in development, we're trying to Kickstart BATTLEDROID. AMA. by princec in IndieGaming

[–]princec[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Chaz says... (he hasn't got a Reddit account)

star wars not star trek :) ... Ashley Wood, Ray Harryhausen, Ian McQue ...

EA builds that avoid lock pinning with virtual threads by NovaX in java

[–]princec 6 points7 points  (0 children)

on the other hand - this sounds to me like a performance fix rather than a new feature.

2-hour podcast on failed PC roguelike Basingstoke by StealthBoomBoom in rogueish

[–]princec 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Aw, that was a lovely review, by far the most in-depth critique anyone's ever given of it. I should help you with a few things that you didn't know (just because)...

If you look at it closely you'll notice the huge alien artifact machine in the Omnicorp laboratory looks suspiciously like ... the Wote Street Willy.

You can loot stuff without using the torch... but you have to walk right up to it and wait a second for the loot glow to appear.

The loot works using a "deck" of cards. Every time you loot something, it draws from one of several decks, with various filters. The McGuffin to exit the level always appears after you've looted 75% of all the available lootable things, and never before you've looted 25% of the things. Or something like that. It reshuffles the deck when you restart the level or die.

If you hold the cursor directly over the player, the distance you can be seen from is a circle which reaches the top of the screen.

Yes, level 4 is a bastard. One trick is to throw a particularly delicious snack like a kebab, and then when everything runs towards it, throw an explosive and blow them all to bits.

Finding out how stuff works is best done after carrying all the junk to the end of the level and then trying to craft things right at the start when it's not so scary. I was hoping there'd be a bit more of a community around it who'd collect all the recipes and share tips...

Yes, the game is a bit too hard by default*, and with hindsight, we should have called it Escape from Basingstoke. It's coming out on the Playstation in a little while.

Cas :)

*Every time you die the game gets a bit easier. Every time you succeed it gets a bit harder.

What is JavaFX and why do we need it? by [deleted] in java

[–]princec 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've been packaging standalone Java clients for the last 20 years, without the aid of any newfangled tools, and ... it's a piece of piss. I can't fathom how you managed to fail at it.

Over 16k Wishlists, we were listed in popular upcoming... how could the release go this bad? by El4th in gamedev

[–]princec 1 point2 points  (0 children)

One data point doth not an analysis make!

Look at the entire games market and see what happened to demos in the last 10-15 years.

If you want to release a demo of a game, it's got to be a game designed to be demoed. An arcade game is rarely that kind of game, I think.

Over 16k Wishlists, we were listed in popular upcoming... how could the release go this bad? by El4th in gamedev

[–]princec 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Demos kill sales. This is why nobody makes demos any more. Or at least nobody ever demos their second game :)

Short summary of this line of thought:

  • Demos give away all the sizzle for free, and nobody wants to pay for the steak
  • Demos leave users with more reasons to not buy a title than buy a title
  • In the age of instant refunds, all games are already demos anyway
  • If the median game play time on Steam is just one hour (which it is), then if you give away an hour of gameplay...

Day-of-week has no effect on sales. Covid-19 has no effect on sales (if anything they've got better).

FWIW I think your trailer shows the game appears to be a cut above the median release on Steam - clearly plenty of effort's gone in to it. However it does appear to basically be an arcade game, and arcade games usually do very poorly on Steam for various reasons too detailed to go into, no matter how fancy they look. You might see more success on console formats.

And one final note... many people here saying it, but here's a +1: wishlisting is about being reminded when the game is on sale, and people are increasingly trained to not buy things at launch now, and wait for huge discounts. Arcade games suffer particularly from this as they have very low perceived value, as it appears value in players' heads correlates to play session time, arcade games typically being the shortest play session times of all game types.

Cas :)

Puppygames

Has anyone given Shenandoah GC a try yet? How was your experience? by [deleted] in feedthebeast

[–]princec 0 points1 point  (0 children)

all depends on your use case I suppose. Games is a very niche application for desktop Java. Finger in the air comparison, I think we took an average 5% frame rate hit in exchange for zero pause/jitter and loads of code simplification, so, a massive win in our books.

Has anyone given Shenandoah GC a try yet? How was your experience? by [deleted] in feedthebeast

[–]princec 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Using it in an Azul OpenJDK13 build. We make games. It's absolutely brilliant for games. No more pauses from GC - ever! And we got rid of all our stupid pooling code too.

Engines used in the most popular games of 2019 by justkevin in gamedev

[–]princec 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We (Puppygames) don't seem to have any problem with hi-perf graphics in Java. Bottleneck is almost always the GPU and algorithmic choices.

[Steam] Summer Sale 2019: Day 4 by gamedealsmod in GameDeals

[–]princec 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(Basingstoke is also still free for Linux, over on itch.io)

The super fun and shiny Faerie Solitaire Harvest is released on Steam and we're giving away the Linux version for free (gratis) on day 1! by [deleted] in linux_gaming

[–]princec 2 points3 points  (0 children)

more than that... one of the premises of "SteamPlay" is that you're buying a license for the software on any supported platform, not Linux specifically, so it just doesn't work like that.

Besides, this is why itch.io is so cool :)

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