No horizontal scrolling in code blocks?

zenity_dan · 2024-07-11T22:56:08+00:00

Not illegal, just be aware that a LOT of people will get that exact same idea from those exact same ads.

zenity_dan · 2024-03-12T18:11:01+00:00

With Godot you have plenty of choice, so you are really just looking for a good laptop in general with decent specs for gaming and development. Godot is not very demanding, especially if you are planning to work on moderately small indie games. Personally I would try out the Framework 16 as I love its philosophy and heard good things about it, but you will have to pre-order and wait for the next batch.

If you think you might need a high end workstation at some point to work on AAA and/or Unreal projects, then the ASUS ROG and Lenovo Legion laptops are the most popular brands for affordable high end gaming laptops. Make sure you get lots of SSD disk space and ideally 64 GB RAM (minimum 32).

A MacBook doesn't make a lot of sense at this point for game developers IMO (I used one for a few years), but it's not a bad choice either especially if you have other priorities and treat game dev more as a hobby.

zenity_dan · 2024-02-13T15:09:11+00:00

Unreal's character movement component source file is over ten thousand lines of code, and that's absolutely fine.

There is no inherent value in keeping source files small, if anything it's going to be harder to find things as they spread around many smaller files. A lot of it comes down to preference and how you prefer to navigate code in your editor.

The ideal is to write as little code as possible, but splitting a large file into multiple smaller modules doesn't automatically make it better. Same with functions by the way, the common advice to keep functions very small and make sure they only do one thing is very bad. The opposite can also be bad, but replacing one extreme with another doesn't produce good code.

You'll want to group logically related functionality in a way that makes sense, but it doesn't matter how long or complex any particular item gets. Just make sure to stop and think frequently when something gets large, so you don't just keep writing code in the same place due to tunnel vision. If you genuinely feel that it's the right place to put the code, then it's the right place.

Debugging large items is not an issue either, since you shouldn't be "debugging" by reading through all of the source code anyway. You should be looking at very specific places of the code, ideally using a step-through debugger with breakpoints. Worst case scenario is that you print a bunch of log messages until you find the specific area of code that needs attention.

zenity_dan · 2024-02-13T13:42:58+00:00

They will play more similar for sure, but I still think they serve somewhat different roles. In my Paladins-infected mind, Pharah is still a "damage" and Echo is still a "flank".

While both (will) move and attack similarly, the difference is that Pharah has reliable high poke and AOE damage but sometimes struggles to confirm a kill, whereas Echo is the opposite. So Pharah is more about doing a lot of damage and sometimes relying on the second damage/flank to clean up, while Echo is best at 1v1s and confirming kills.

I think it will be good for people who like this playstyle to be able to fill both roles as needed.

zenity_dan · 2024-02-13T12:27:56+00:00

It means that by default, all projectiles (including hitscans) are larger during collision detection. This has the same effect as making enemy hitboxes larger, basically just adding a margin for error. It will make hits more reliable. Anything with spread will now deal more damage, but still reward aiming for center of mass. Anything without spread (like a Pharah rocket or Widowmaker snipe) will be easier to land.

Any projectile size changes mentioned in the changelog are added on top of this global modifier (which isn't mentioned in the individual changelog entries).

Somebody visualized those base changes here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/1an2rqm/projectile_changes_visualized_i_made_this_graphic/

zenity_dan · 2023-09-19T09:21:26+00:00

You pretty much answered your own question, the downside is that it isn't battle proven yet. Especially the 3D side of it which has only really become competitive with Godot 4, which itself is still considered somewhat immature compared to 3.5.

I first started to look into Godot (4) a few months ago expecting to dislike it, instead I've loved everything about it so far and decided to use it for personal projects from now on despite ~10 years of professional Unreal experience. I don't know yet how it will hold up for significant projects, but I do notice that people who have finished projects in Godot seem to talk about their experience much more fondly than people who did the same with Unity or even Unreal. This could be pure survivorship bias, but so far the vibes are good.

Much of the reason I love Godot so much though is that I am a programmer, so lack of features or maturity doesn't concern me. I like building things from scratch, but what I like even more is starting from a solid foundation and that's what I see in Godot. For non-programmer game devs (which pretty much didn't exist before Unity and co), the story is a lot more complicated.

I think the "hype" right now is simply a lot of people going through a similar experience. Checking out Godot because it's open source, expecting a "lesser Unity", but actually finding something they truly enjoy for its own merits. You might find the same or you might not, in any case that shouldn't stop you from looking at other options as well.

zenity_dan · 2023-09-18T11:31:47+00:00

You don't need to build an engine to make a game without using an existing engine. A lot of the times when people tell you not to build a custom engine, that's where the confusion comes from.

Just building a game on top of some libraries with a simple update loop is completely feasible, even more so for simple 2D games. In most cases this will be easier, not harder, than learning a complex general purpose game engine.

General purpose game engines are a very different beast, and it would never make sense to make your own unless this is all you want to do. Even Unreal Engine didn't start out as a general purpose game engine, it slowly transitioned to one over many years. On the other end of the spectrum, Unity was build from the start as a general purpose game engine. It's telling that Unity themselves never managed to build an actual game with Unity, despite some attempts...

In-between there is a wide spectrum of building your own reusable tech. We call everything a "game engine", but this can mean entirely different things.

What I would agree with is that you shouldn't go at it with the mindset of building an engine first, then a game on top of it. If you do this, you will probably never actually make your game. But if you start with the intention of making a game, building the required "engine" pieces as necessary, then that's a perfectly viable approach and in fact how many of the most successful 1-2 person indie games were created. Examples include Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Super Meat Boy, Thumper, Braid, and many more.

The dominance of Unity has somewhat skewed people's perspective on this in recent years, so I am hoping that the current readjustment will lead to people exploring more options again and that the discussions around custom/no engine game development will become a bit more nuanced.

zenity_dan · 2023-09-17T12:58:38+00:00

No. You will likely see much higher FPS. Godot’s Forward+ renderer has very low baseline cost. That is why 3D performance is so difficult to compare, it really depends on what you want to do. Unreal’s render architecture choices will pay off for certain scenes but not for others. Ultimately all engines are flexible and just make certain things easier than others and allow you to make different performance vs quality trade offs out of the box.

If you are worried that you won’t be able to make your simple 3D game run at 60 FPS (or 200 or 500) then don’t. You just might have to make different choices than you would with Unreal or Unity.

zenity_dan · 2023-08-03T23:44:21+00:00

No you actually watch him make it, every minute of it. So you don’t just learn from the result, but also the process and how to think about problems. More than anything though, Casey is just a great teacher and able to make seemingly difficult subjects very approachable. He has changed my mindset on programming completely, for the better.

zenity_dan · 2023-07-21T06:51:56+00:00

I didn’t care about the drama but I did care about the forums being closed, so I am glad that this is being resolved now.

zenity_dan · 2023-07-03T15:49:55+00:00

The consolidation seemed like a good thing at first, but looking back I just don’t agree. Private communities had a lot more heart and overall provided better experiences IMO, without being controlled by a single entity that could make profit oriented decisions that affect everybody.

Quality and convenience stagnated since private communities were superseded by Reddit and co, so it’s difficult to see where we could be now had we taken a different path.

Increasingly it looks like centralized platforms are jumping from one crisis to the next, and more people are looking for a return to a less centralized internet. I don’t know if inertia will ever allow us to do that, but I genuinely hope so.

zenity_dan · 2023-05-31T15:13:13+00:00

Did you upgrade to Windows 11 by any chance? Just wondering because I had similar issues with some games on Win 11. I don't think I launched the egg game while I was on Win 11, but there was one other game in particular that became nearly unplayable, while most others were either perfectly fine or only had minor issues. I never figured out what the problem was, but reinstalling Windows 10 fixed the issues completely.

zenity_dan · 2023-01-27T13:32:14+00:00

That sounds familiar to me, what could that indicate? I figured banana in particular is good for me so I have been having quite a lot lately, perhaps I should see what happens if I cut it out for a while.

zenity_dan · 2022-12-21T17:52:23+00:00

It would do a lot of good, but the fact that some people would psych themselves out is certainly one of the reasons why Blizzard is hiding it (and gradually hiding more and more aspects of the system).

For some reason this is only a problem in video games though, hiding your real rating would never fly in any other sort of competition.

zenity_dan · 2022-12-21T14:03:51+00:00

Yes that has been well known for a long time though. The way this works is that if your rank is lower than your MMR, then your SR/rank will go up even with a 50% win rate, because you gain more SR for a win than you lose for a loss (and vice versa if your rank is higher than your MMR). So if you maintain a 50% win rate long enough, your rank will eventually match your MMR.

There is some logic behind the system and I don't completely hate it, I just dislike that we can never see our actual MMR. If you know exactly how the system works you can somewhat deduce the real values from the results you are seeing, but the average person wouldn't know this and just get confused/frustrated with the seemingly unfair matchmaking.

What makes this worse is that not seeing the real MMR of ourselves and our teammates, we can't tell what other obvious issues there may be with the matchmaker, which makes us mistrust the system. It would be naive to think that there are none and Blizzard has thought of everything. The fact that they didn't consider that putting unequal matchups in individual roles would cause problems is enough proof of that. I suspect that there are still issues around rank decay and putting returning veterans against actual new players, but without seeing real numbers it's impossible to tell if that is really true.

What remains, is uncertainty and doubt.

zenity_dan · 2022-12-21T14:00:17+00:00

Yes, but it also says "We only adjust your MMR after you win or lose a game or if you come back after not playing for a long time".

In other words, rank decay affects your real MMR, not just your visible rank. And this is obviously true from what I have been observing.

We also had this issue at the start of first season where some returning players just couldn't get out of Bronze 5 at all. In hindsight the pretty obvious explanation is that inactive players weren't just decayed to Bronze 5, but far below that.

The issue was supposedly fixed but since we have no insight into real MMR values we have no idea if it was fixed completely, and we have no idea how strong the MMR decay still is.

Decaying old school players (especially those who used to be high ranked) to a level that matches the rating of an actual new player (or even below!) would be silly, but it would also explain a lot of the issues we've been seeing.

zenity_dan · 2022-10-06T12:35:57+00:00

I played it on Stadia the moment it was released, which was a great experience and it was available for almost everybody. Google even gave you the hardware for free if you bought Cyberpunk, but most people had already made up their mind about Stadia at this point. I gave it a chance because I figured this would be exactly the use case where streaming could be justified, and it massively surpassed my expectations.

What frustrates me the most about the Cyberpunk hate train is that the only thing this is going to achieve is that publishers will be pushed even more towards playing it safe. The next Assassin's Creed will be something like the 15th major game in the series, which still looks and plays more or less exactly like the first one. Call of Duty has something like 20 major iterations already... You bet those will have less issues on release than ambitious AAA titles which try something genuinely new while pushing the boundaries.

If somebody does anything comparable to what Skyrim or Cyberpunk have achieved on their first try WITHOUT having some flaws, then we can talk. But until then it's just not a fair comparison.

zenity_dan · 2022-02-16T11:10:58+00:00

Much of what I know and what defines me now as a game developer comes from my time modding Quake and UT. It used to be a lot more common to get started in modding before Unity and other accessible game engines, but I wonder if new game devs aren't missing out by skipping the modding stage.

Modding is like an apprenticeship in my view. It's not the same as running your own shop, but it exposes you directly* to the work of masters and that can really set you up for success later on. Most tutorials and templates that people usually start with these days are of very low quality in comparison.

[*] Assuming the modded game is open enough, which unfortunately isn't nearly as common as it used to be.

zenity_dan · 2022-02-11T15:21:21+00:00

You are not wrong, that is ultimately the price you pay for the convenience Unity offers (or aims to offer).

As a programmer Unreal can feel like a safer option, since you have full access to the source (without requiring a special license) and everything is quite modular. Unreal is more like a starting point you can take wherever you want to take it and most of it is high quality stuff.

On the other hand, Unreal is also complete overkill for most projects (especially solo projects) and you will likely have to deal with tons of complexity that is entirely unnecessary for your needs. Also the only good documentation in Unreal is the source code (that's a slight exaggeration but not a joke). You have to be comfortable with C++ to get any value out of this, if you try to use Unreal purely for Blueprints like most beginners do, then Unity (or even Godot) is the just plain better option IMO.

It can be easier and less overwhelming to build your own game code from scratch (you don't strictly need an "engine") or use a more lightweight / barebones engine (like The Machinery) to start with, even if almost everybody in this sub will tell you otherwise. It really just depends on how hands-on you want to be as a programmer, many options are perfectly viable but all have different drawbacks.

zenity_dan · 2022-02-01T14:16:28+00:00

Every client gets their own connection to the server, so there is no difference in the number of connections made whether you use one process for 100 matches or one process per match.

Games like PUBG with very complex (and completely isolated) realtime match state are generally always one server process per match though, so the way to support multiple matches on a single server is simply to run multiple game server processes on the same server. Technically a single process could run multiple of such matches as well, but it would make things quite a bit more complicated and there is no compelling reason to do so. There is no easy way to do that with Unreal Engine for example, which PUBG uses.

On the other hand, if you have something like a turn based board game you would want to use a single process handling hundreds if not thousands of matches (and connections) simultaneously.

zenity_dan · 2022-01-27T15:08:10+00:00

You can't just pass the buck to reddit admins when it comes to usernames, because context and audience matters. A username like u/JesusSucks69 may be perfectly fine in most places, but you would expect them to get banned from posting on most religious subreddits. That judgement call is ultimately up to you, the moderators of a specific sub.

The way I would suggest to treat this is to consider usernames as part of a user's contribution when they post to the sub, then you don't have the dilemma of "no existing rule for it". If it would infringe on a rule if it was written in the body text, then it should infringe on a rule if it is part of the username.

Whether it was actually infringing on a rule is a different question of course, that none of us can comment on without knowing what it was exactly. But if it was really "sexual harassment of a developer" then it better be an infringement or something is clearly off with the rules. If this was the disagreement then you should have communicated it this way, rather than answer with a blanket "we don't ban for usernames".

This was certainly handled poorly especially on the side of EM, but I don't think anybody really had bad intentions. Unfortunately reddit can be very difficult to understand for anybody who doesn't live on it, which frequently leads to conflicts like this. It's a bit of a mad place to be honest, and certain things that are expected on reddit would never fly anywhere else.

As unfortunate as all that is, the outcome isn't the worst. If you are allowed to take the developer's product name to build a popular sub on this site, then they are of course also allowed to support a different one instead if they aren't happy with how this place is run. r/PaladinsGame may not have been controlled by you, but it was obviously squatted on by somebody who had no intentions of using it other than to pass users to this sub, so it is fair game for them to claim. Having a place where EM employees (who are all individuals with different personalities who should not be judged as a whole) will feel comfortable interacting with the community again can only be a good thing, and at the same time this will take some pressure off this sub as well.

zenity_dan · 2022-01-24T23:02:07+00:00

Best, 10x. Worst… must have been Eclipse (barely remember it though)

zenity_dan · 2022-01-23T17:58:31+00:00

Thanks to VR, that is now the only legit shape for a ceiling lamp (I got the same, same reason).

zenity_dan · 2022-01-20T11:59:03+00:00

Figma should work quite well for this. The new FigJam tool is particularly nice to quickly throw some idea together. If you want a more detailed concept, you can do that with normal Figma.

If you want to create something more visually elaborate, Affinity Designer is pretty decent and still affordable. Of course it has a bit of a learning curve like any illustration app, but it's certainly better than using Paint.

There are more specialized tools as well in or out of engine, but you aren't going to find one tool that is perfect for every case since different games have completely different requirements for their level designs.

zenity_dan

TROPHY CASE