Game News Wasteland 2 to use Unity

[koyima]

Just registered here to say that you guys: don't know shit!

Welcome to the Codex. You'll fit right in.

Thanks! Yeah, I got that by reading this single thread.

I sense a marketer within this Koyima.

Marketer...?I use the same nickname all over the net. Check me out.

http://www.darkopolis.com

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

I sense a marketer within this Koyima.

Yeah, bro. Because all of us are thinking about buying a game engine, right? And besides...even if Koyima was found out to be a shill from some interested party, both this:

you guys: don't know shit!

and this:

~zero real info up until now.

are quite humorous in their veracity.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

If they were serious about it they would have made/updated their own tech.

Easier said than done. How long did it take Obsidian to develop their engine? As for updating their own tech, either it's owned by publishers or has too many limitations..

From what little i know of obsidians onyx, it's primarily console focused and a platform for all their games going forward. i can understand the sunk cost in something like that.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Just registered here to say that you guys: don't know shit!

will our fine admins perhaps gift this fellow with an unity logo avatar

 

[koyima]

I only do it because Jaesun likes it so much. And also it's just interesting to me, hey I'm a nerdy programmer and my only interests are programming and RPGs. Sue me.

C4 isn't the one true engine, its editor is pretty crap, but most of the engines around are really crap for making a complex game such as XCom or TOEE.

Recently RPGCodex is a lot about engine whining. In some cases it's justified ( AOD/DS ), in others it's not.

Unity can't scale an image properly, either.

And it can't even directly draw anything on the screen! It has to be part of a provided (very barebones) widget set, or a 3D object. So people making 2D games actually use 3D billboards, which then have a whole bunch of artifacts and have to be transformed in 3D if you want to move them around (hope you remember your maths, and whoops too bad screen space doesn't map directly into the view frustrum, you have to cast a ray and you still get errors). Pretty cool, huh?

But the punchline is that the scripting for it works exactly like javascript. Meaning you have a bunch of scripted onDraw commands and you can't really use anything like OOP for the GUI, the place it's of the most use. So it basically completely kills all software engineering, which is replaced by copypasting, and having the same thing programmed in many places. It's exactly like javascript in a web page. Great for simple stuff, impossible for anything else.

Cryengine is a finely made engine, but when someone says they are making an RPG it means you can probably be sure it's going to be very heavy on the action and light on the RPG, but even it is better than Unity for RPG style game. Torque and Unity are both just plain crap. Unity is a lot easier for artists to use than torque but it's even more shit for programmers than Torque.

Not only DIY shovelware games are made with Unity

Yeah there's also corridor shooters with almost nonexistent GUI, and very few enemies onscreen at once.

Games today aren't just crap because bobby kotick hates christmas. They're also crap because of consoles, and engines. When engines are designed a certain way (part due to consoles and cellphones, part because it's just cheaper) that's how the games are because that's all you really can make without spending way too much effort.

Why are games in corridors? Why are there few enemies onscreen? Why is HUD getting tinier with every game? Why is AI scripted? Why hitscan? Why health regen? Why do guys run so slow in most games now?

It's not just because they seemed like cool ideas, and not all of it is due to consoles.

You say you are a programmer, yet you think gameplay is tied to the engine. Some game engines make it easier to make some types of games, due their origins, there is nothing stopping you from doing otherwise.
You say Unity can' draw anything "directly draw anything on the screen!" .When it has been this way internally since November 2008 2000, almost 12 years ago, when directX 8 was released.Seriously get your facts straight.

You say "the punchline is that the scripting for it works exactly like javascript. Meaning you have a bunch of scripted onDraw commands and you can't really use anything like OOP for the GUI, "
when nearly everything in Unity is a GameObject, making it the definition of OOP and when there so many GUI solutions that you will have trouble deciding which cool features you want.

You say:" Yeah there's also corridor shooters with almost nonexistent GUI, and very few enemies onscreen at once."
With over 1 million, yes 1.000.000. registered developers and a FREE version there are bound to Like when flash went mainstream everyone and his mother is trying out making 3d games now.

Torque had reached the point of closing down


You ask: "Why is HUD getting tinier with every game?"
Because the mainstream audience finds it detracts from the experience, it breaks the immersion, it feels like a layer between the player and the game.Game design, not engine limits.

You ask: "Why is AI scripted"
Because that's how you do AI. I don;t think you even understand what you are talking about. If you mean why do they seam to repeat actions, it's most likely because of time available and playtesting finding too many issues with AI that acts more 'freely".Game design, not engine limits.

You ask: "Why health regen?"
Games that use health regeneration are trying to keep the pace of the game faster. They are trying to avoid hording, wanfering off, they are trying to make you take risks, instead of Quicksave every 2 minutes. It's part of what they want to do with the game. Game design, not engine limits.

You ask: "Why do guys run so slow in most games now?"
Cos the quake way of doing things was replaced by a more "realistic" way of doing things. Make the game feature some sort of tactics, instead of simply twitch reflexes. Game design, not engine limits.

 

[Ethan Duvall]

Just registered here to say that you guys: don't know shit!

Some facts about Unity:

- Unity is the engine that brought game engines to the masses with it's cheap pricing scheme. Before Unity, Unreal only had "buy me for a million bucks".

What a marketing bullshit! What about Ogre3d?

Unity is good for casual shit.
Unreal is far better and more stable.

 

[Davaris]

...

I checked you out on Google and find you are a fairly decent artist. Just out of interest, will we be seeing your work in Wasteland 2?

 

[koyima]

Just registered here to say that you guys: don't know shit!

Some facts about Unity:

- Unity is the engine that brought game engines to the masses with it's cheap pricing scheme. Before Unity, Unreal only had "buy me for a million bucks".

What a marketing bullshit! What about Ogre3d?

Unity is good for casual shit.
Unreal is far better and more stable.

Ogre3D is a 3D engine, it is not a game engine. Basically it's only graphics, you don't know what you are talking about.
Unity is good for casual shit. True.
Unreal wants royalties if you use UDK. If you want Unreal 3, you need a million bucks. It better be good.

 

[Brother None]

I am loving all this armchair quarterbacking.

I didn't see it at the time, but Unity was a forgone conclusion as soon as Fargo said, he wanted easy import of assets. It could be, he plans to make use of freelancers.

They do plan to do that, yes.

The interesting thing is that Unity engine is actually sold as a Sandbox environment - i.e. you don't get source code to the 3D engine and you can extend it only using scripts. (...) Back to Wasteland team I think using Bard's tale engine might be even better choice..

They're not working without source code access and support (that was the problem in the Unigine free offer too).

The Bard's Tale Engine? You mean the Snowblind engine!? Tell me you're joking.

 

[FeelTheRads]

They do plan to do that, yes.

Interesting. Can you give more details on how they'll approach this?

 

[tiagocc0]

Language doesn't matter, engine doesn't matter.. what matters is who is behind it.
You can get the best language with the best engine and give it to one thousand assholes, you will end up with bullshit all over the place.
You can get assembly and no fucking engine and give it to a team of nerdy programmers, a bunchy of hungry artists and a brilliant mind managing it and you will always end up with a gem.

EDIT: Given there's no publishers involved.

 

[Brother None]

Interesting. Can you give more details on how they'll approach this?

Don't know any details. I just know Fargo brought up using freelance work or even some "crowdsourced" submissions very early in the process. I don't know what his exact plans on it are, though. But if they wanna, say, throw some work to this guy, I wouldn't mind. Freelance/outsourced work was always an option, hell, Andree Wallin is doing his stuff as a freelancer, and will be done with the project soon.

 

[20 Eyes]

ITT:

[strong opinions on something I don't know much about]
[armchair game developers]
[mass butthurt flowing freely]
[A few reasonable bros]

Fuck. This means it will never be open sourced.

This was never going to happen anyway. How many multimillion dollar commercial games are open sourced?

 

[VonVentrue]

Why are we even discussing the feasibility of inXile creating a brand new engine from scratch, as if that was ever an option considering the "far from infinite" budget, not to mention the overambitious (understatement) estimation of the development time needed?

 

[tiagocc0]

good lord Drocon, at least put it all together in one post

 

[tiagocc0]

I think that's insulting. They all deserve their own post, don't they?

Double post worries were just from the bad old days when forum software was crap and long threads were a big problem.

Well, this one big post with a huge quote deserved it's own, the rest could easily fit on another. It would make reading it a lot better, it's not just a question of rules of whatever they used to do before.

 

[koyima]

Drocon: A whole page of "answers", yet no info in those "repllies" but swearing, hissing and cursing. Even a noob to this forum can see you can't hold
up in a debate. Bye bye!

 

[Burning Bridges]

Ogre3D is a 3D engine, it is not a game engine. Basically it's only graphics, you don't know what you are talking about.
Unity is good for casual shit. True.
Unreal wants royalties if you use UDK. If you want Unreal 3, you need a million bucks. It better be good.

You guys have reached a point where you're bitching for bitchings sake, and it's hard to say something reasonable, or agree with one of you two.

Drocon has a point, games with Unity feel a bit sluggish and unresponsive, having all this extra stuff running in the background like .NET runtime and a garbage collector. Many engines are much faster but just incomplete and hard to create something else than demo XYZ. Ogre3D is a good example, it is extremely fast and suited to create really impressive graphics, but it's very hard to make a complete game with it.

It all boils down to some engines are more high level like Unity, others more low level. High level engines often have a lot of inbuilt stuff that rails you into making a generic fps shooter, like for example Unity and Neoaxis, I think. but you can bypass that stuff, it's still an API and you can simply write your own game and ignore the other stuff.

koyima, also has a point in defending Unity. There are some great games running with Unity (Kerbal Space Program), and while I feel it has some problems I can live with them because I know the programmers can concentrate on the game, not on the engine.

I don't know much about C4 but I keep hearing that it's great. But what if Fargo inXile just don't feel they need any of the advantages (performance, and code, mostly) that it offers?

Of course I am also a bit surprised they have chosen Unity, because it seems more suitable for mid level projects. I thought they could afford to go for something more hardcore. But there are 100s of engines, and if they chose one that allows them to make the game really quickly what's so wrong with that? As long as a game is not made with something really cumbersome stuff like Java or a Browser API, I think I can imagine that the engine will not bother me if the game is good.

In before 10 more pages of overblown bitching back and forth while Fargo is probably laughing his ass off right now.

 

[tiagocc0]

Especially now that the forums have changed to remove anything the poster you reply to was replying to.

What? It's not removing here for me.

So worry about your own posting, I won't be doing that.

And here you were talking about posting in separated posts because you don't want to be disrespectful to the posters you reply to.
Like you really worry about that.

 

[koyima]

. I thought they could afford to go for something more hardcore.

Like? What is the point of what you call "hard-core"? What would the benefit be?
You have to realize that RPGs have vast amount of content, so it is priority number one to easilty get and implement content.

You think Fargo is reading this right now? Dellusional...

 

[EG]

koyima

Purdy photos. I retract my viscous slander.

TwinkieGorilla I'm sure management has sacked away several hundred thousand over the years and are biding their time to purchase one.

Something like this seems to be what Drocon is on aboot:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/81763-Object-oriented-GUI
(Grabbed the demo of c4, including 31st. I assume the source you've mentioned is only included when you contribute 10$ to its continued development?)


It's, of course, something I can hardly judge having little experience with any of this beyond a cursory knowledge of C, C++, and Java. Though, I'm all for angry yelling.

 

[potatojohn]

This was never going to happen anyway. How many multimillion dollar commercial games are open sourced?

Doom 3? Arx Fatalis? Penumbra? JA2? ...

 

[Average Manatee]

AI War/AVWW both use Unity. Both games perform flawlessly, and the engine seems to scale really well (until you get over 5k active units in a system in AI War at least). Creating content must be really easy since basically 2 people + 1 or 2 artists handled all of their stuff.

I see no problem with this choice. In the end 99% of the game depends on the people behind it, not the engine.

EDIT: Dunno why these games aren't listed in the Unity game list thing. Looking through their entire list I only see 1 or 2 games that I vaguely remember hearing of before. But they definitely use Unity.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I think what Drocon actually means is

1. responsivity, i.e. if you push a button and you feel it always takes 0.5 seconds to respond, or it feels instant. You can usually feel if a game is written in C++ (very responsive), C# (medium), Java etc (very bad). Or with a high / low level API if you want.
2. image quality, a lot of games made with e.g. Unity do not look nearly as crisp as it should be, the reason for the genericness of many current games.

Drocon is a very uncomprimising guy when it comes to technology, I can not blame him for that. But he's also narrow minded, there are many other things to put into consideration, easy and comfort of programming one of them, because this also directly influences the speed of development.

 

[Davaris]

Here's how Fallout 1 might have looked, if they had used Unity3D 2 years ago and indies had made it:







When I saw it back then, I thought it looked pretty great for an indie project. Brian Fargo's crew can do a lot better, but it gives you a very rough idea of what to expect.

 

[Davaris]

(Grabbed the demo of c4, including 31st. I assume the source you've mentioned is only included when you contribute 10$ to its continued development?)

It's, of course, something I can hardly judge having little experience with any of this beyond a cursory knowledge of C, C++, and Java. Though, I'm all for angry yelling.

This is the closest you get to the source, with no money down:

http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/doco/

http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/architecture.php

The world editor is in the demo from what I understand.