Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Nathaniel3W]

One of my favorite bugs (that I only recently found out why it happened) was in the original Civilization, when late in the game Ghandi would suddenly launch a surprise nuclear strike on you. I always thought it was just because I was ahead and the AI decided to gang up on me. But no, it's because the "warmongering" variable was supposed to be something like between 0 and 10. And Ghandi was naturally a 1 or a 2 or something, but then he would adopt some government policy that dropped him to -1, which was an overflow that got turned into 255. So on a warlike scale from 0 to 10, Ghandi was 255.

In other news, I decided I wanted the whole army to appear on the world map when you're moving around:

I thought that would be a fun way for you to estimate your relative strength against enemy armies on the map. There's room on those tiles for maybe a little over 100 characters, but it'll get crowded. Right now the game has a hard-coded 20-squad limit of 10 characters each, for an effective deployable 200 characters. I haven't put a hard limit on the number of characters in the army, but maybe I need to put that in already. Maybe I should also have a limit on the number of characters wandering around the world map with you so your army doesn't overflow the hex boundaries. Also, I still need to build lighting to put some shadows under those trees. Right now working on enemy armies that are still there when you save/load the game and that start a fight when you move onto their hex.

 

[mutonizer]

The way they seem to just stare at the player/camera is creeping me out

 

[Nathaniel3W]

The way they seem to just stare at the player/camera is creeping me out

Don't worry. I've told all the little flat people not to follow you home.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Well it's a start bros.
At least I can into Excel. If not design documents.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Looks good ERYFKRAD Good luck.

I never knew about design documents. I just jumped right into making video games without anyone really telling me where to start. (In the code for Himeko Sutori, I still have lots of leftovers from various tutorials.) I think my game would be less messy if I had written out a design document and stuck to it.

So when are you going to get started giving life to that design?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So when are you going to get started giving life to that design?

Someday.

 

[Alchemist]

Be careful not to stay in design-document limbo for years, like I did. Congrats on the progress though ERYFKRAD !

I think a combination of design docs and early prototyping is the best way to go about getting something started.

 

[Snorkack]

Hey Eryfkrad, I wish you the best for your project! I would have a look at your stuff, however, a zip file containing an excel sheet by some anonymous dude from india just rings one alarm bell too many.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Hey Eryfkrad, I wish you the best for your project! I would have a look at your stuff, however, a zip file containing an excel sheet by some anonymous dude from india just rings one alarm bell too many.

Couldn't upload the excel file as is. If you do decide to have a look, tell me how far I've come compared to Dorian Black, will you?

 

[Bester]

Couldn't upload the excel file as is.

You never heard about google docs?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Couldn't upload the excel file as is.

You never heard about google docs?

D'oh.

 

[Snorkack]

Hey Eryfkrad, I wish you the best for your project! I would have a look at your stuff, however, a zip file containing an excel sheet by some anonymous dude from india just rings one alarm bell too many.

Couldn't upload the excel file as is. If you do decide to have a look, tell me how far I've come compared to Dorian Black, will you?

Congratulations, you pushed the right buttons, I had a peek. Premise sounds interesting, although I still have no idea how the actual gameplay is supposed to work. You mentioned 'brawler'. Is it supposed to be something like Chronicles of Mystara? If yes, do you have experience with programming action games?
Concerning the Dorian Gray question: Like him, you provide specific numbers and stats without explaining how they are supposed to work with each other (I'm really curious what 'Mindrape resistance' protects me from exactly... also, how would a girl with body type 'hilda' look like?). On the other hand: Already four people replied to you, yet you failed to tell them that they are part of the problem because they won't program it for you. Also, despite my snarky comment I don't see you putting me on your ignore list, so still quite a way ahead for you.

Anyways, as I said: good luck, would be happy to see more coming out of this. Also, I think many people here would be happy if you posted something along "screw it, I'll go turn-based" one day.

 

[gaussgunner]

So when are you going to get started giving life to that design?

Someday.

Try prototyping. Just start somewhere. Code small pieces of the game separately, get a feel for it, do everything over when you know what you're doing.

 

[Wayward Son]

So when are you going to get started giving life to that design?

Someday.

Try prototyping. Just start somewhere. Code small pieces of the game separately, get a feel for it, do everything over when you know what you're doing.

That's what I did in my project. Started with the base combat and kept adding on.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Hey Eryfkrad, I wish you the best for your project! I would have a look at your stuff, however, a zip file containing an excel sheet by some anonymous dude from india just rings one alarm bell too many.

Couldn't upload the excel file as is. If you do decide to have a look, tell me how far I've come compared to Dorian Black, will you?

Congratulations, you pushed the right buttons, I had a peek. Premise sounds interesting, although I still have no idea how the actual gameplay is supposed to work. You mentioned 'brawler'. Is it supposed to be something like Chronicles of Mystara? If yes, do you have experience with programming action games?
Concerning the Dorian Gray question: Like him, you provide specific numbers and stats without explaining how they are supposed to work with each other (I'm really curious what 'Mindrape resistance' protects me from exactly... also, how would a girl with body type 'hilda' look like?). On the other hand: Already four people replied to you, yet you failed to tell them that they are part of the problem because they won't program it for you. Also, despite my snarky comment I don't see you putting me on your ignore list, so still quite a way ahead for you.

Anyways, as I said: good luck, would be happy to see more coming out of this. Also, I think many people here would be happy if you posted something along "screw it, I'll go turn-based" one day.

Thanks for the look and stuff. To be honest, as far as prototype is concerned, I figure it'd be easier to mod some game to test this out, currently checking out the FLARE engine to see if it's easy enough to screw around.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Spoiler

(mockup, not a real game)

I tried my hand at spritework. it's harder than I thought it would be.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Not bad for your first try Mr. Pink . So that's where your study in color and 8-bitish graphics was going.

I think you may be working in higher resolution than is entirely appropriate for sprite work. Are you using a drawing tablet? (Even my little Wacom Bamboo makes a HUGE difference in how fast and well I can draw, compared to using a mouse.) If you're looking for feedback, maybe we should take one element at a time. If you're going to consider getting seriously into drawing sprites, you may want to spend some time with 2D-specific (perhaps RPGM-specific, even if you're not working in RPGM) communities that specialize in sprites. And show us how your skills develop.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Alright, so I can put enemy armies on the map now. They're semi-randomly generated. I give it a list of parameters, like slimes spawn on the beach and wolves spawn in the woods. And then the game puts enemy armies there. It works perfectly if I only want to put one enemy in each army:

But if I want to spawn big enemy armies...

Performance takes a major hit. I'm going to have to figure something else out. I think what I'll do is only spawn random encounters near the player. The game is creating possibly tens of thousands of enemies all around the map right now. If I limit that to say, 1,000 enemies just in the vicinity, I think that will be manageable.

(Also, I just noticed that the slimes aren't actually on the landscape. After placing an enemy army on location, I need to change their physics so they fall onto the ground.)

 

[Bester]

The game is creating possibly tens of thousands of enemies all around the map right now.

You can store them in memory in an octree, but not spawn them on the map. Spawn/despawn them only when your player approaches those hexagons by a certain distance or moves away from them. Distance checks with an octree should be very optimized.

 

[barker_s]

Performance takes a major hit.

Does Unreal have any built-in profiler? I wonder what's the source of this performance hit, since your characters are simple sprites and from rendering standpoint shouldn't be too taxing for the engine.

(Also, I just noticed that the slimes aren't actually on the landscape. After placing an enemy army on location, I need to change their physics so they fall onto the ground.)

I'm not an UE expert, but wouldn't physically simulating all these litle fellows be an overkill? You might possibly save some fps by adjusting their position (so they stick to the ground) through your own code.

 

[Bester]

I wonder what's the source of this performance hit

Could be all kinds of stuff. They could be actors with their own Tick method. They could be something other than static, i.e. not cached in vram. Maybe some other wild possibilities.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Thanks for the suggestions Bester and barker_s

I think I need to go read up on what an octree is. Unreal does have a built-in profiler, but I've never used it before. Each character is a rectangle, so adding 2 triangles for each of 10,000 characters shouldn't make a difference. It's gotta be something else. I'll see if I can figure out the profiler. And yeah, physics might be overkill. If it turns out that physics are what's slowing me down, I'll definitely have to fix that. But if it's something else, I'll probably put a simple gravity function in the backlog.

Edit: And yeah, those characters are pretty complicated little guys. They're actors with a tick function, which I have to leave on in order to control their marching animation. They also are each made up of something like 9 sprite layers. And they all have stats and can attack and take damage, and they each have their own controller because even though they move as a unit, they have their own individual destinations.

Edit 2: Bester, do you speak UnrealScript? Each character has its own material instance. For each character I add its own individual skin sprite, armor sprite, weapon sprite, hair sprite, etc. Each one individually is pretty small, but they do add up, especially I guess if they're not getting cached or if none of the textures are being shared.

 

[Bester]

They're actors with a tick function, which I have to leave on in order to control their marching animation.
[...] and they each have their own controller because even though they move as a unit, they have their own individual destinations.

Usually in RTSes and the likes where they have a ton of units, they make a single controller (not an unreal Controller, but just an actor that controls stuff) with one method that goes through all of the units it controls and does all the job for them, such as moving them, playing their animations, etc. Having each unit with a tick method is too costly. Having each unit with physics might also impact performance. Anyway, just check out what the profiler says.

Edit 2: Bester, do you speak UnrealScript? Each character has its own material instance. For each character I add its own individual skin sprite, armor sprite, weapon sprite, hair sprite, etc. Each one individually is pretty small, but they do add up, especially I guess if they're not getting cached or if none of the textures are being shared.

I speak Blueprints, but I just don't know the performance implications of the system you're describing, i.e. I don't know what's being cached or not, sorry. Profiler should help.

 

[Mustawd]

Spoiler

(mockup, not a real game)

I tried my hand at spritework. it's harder than I thought it would be.

Traditional sprite art is indeed difficult.

 

[Wayward Son]

Version 0.3 is up. Got to five fights, with one really difficult (or at least, so I think) fight in the middle. Also, introduced some new math to make mage fights more difficult. Feedback is appreciated.

Edit:
Jesus I'm stupid, here's the link:
https://github.com/sckaledoom/My-Games/blob/master/Gladiators of Teldrin v0.3.7z