Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[vortex]

I loaded up Unreal Engine but I can't run it. I was going over tutorial but switching through editor and blueprints is obnoxious. This is very sad. What kind of PC you need to run Unreal?

 

[V_K]

UE looks like shit anyway, so nothing of value lost.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

I loaded up Unreal Engine but I can't run it. I was going over tutorial but switching through editor and blueprints is obnoxious. This is very sad. What kind of PC you need to run Unreal?

One thing about programming and development you need to know - search for answers in right places. You have a question about what are the minimum hardware requirements for for Unreal Engine? You'll find answer in the engine documentation. Might take some digging (not really) but you'll find it eventually. Asking on a random forum full of trolls is not the way to make any progress developing your game.

 

[vortex]

One thing about programming and development you need to know - search for answers in right places. You have a question about what are the minimum hardware requirements for for Unreal Engine? You'll find answer in the engine documentation. Might take some digging (not really) but you'll find it eventually. Asking on a random forum full of trolls is not the way to make any progress developing your game.

Thx, I'm just below system requirements. That's my luck.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Unless you want to make a game really shiny or sell it on the Epic Store you shouldn't use UE. Both of those tasks are fairly useless for one guy coding in his bedroom to do. Unless there's something specific that only UE can do that the others can't that I'm not aware of.

 

[Heapcleaner]

When your PC can not smoothly run the editor, the best thing to do is to either pick another less performance hungry engine or to upgrade the pc... there's a lot of good engines out there, each of these engine has their own pros and cons, I personally love Godot but I admit that it's not a good choice for some types of games

 

[The Avatar]

Unless you want to make a game really shiny or sell it on the Epic Store you shouldn't use UE. Both of those tasks are fairly useless for one guy coding in his bedroom to do. Unless there's something specific that only UE can do that the others can't that I'm not aware of.

There's a lot that UE can do that Unity or Godot doesn't have out of the box. Behavior trees, distance field stuff, the new water system, multiplayer, virtual texturing, various open-world tools, free assets every month, and source code access. If you ever upgrade your PC and get it running, I would recommend trying Unreal out and making your own decision of what engine to use based on your needs and preferences.

 

[Tavernking]

I want to talk about Knights of the Chalice 2. It got negative feedback about the character positions just being portraits - but I intend on doing the same thing to save money. Is it really worth investing in proper sprites? This is the question I've been asking myself for a few weeks now.

 

[AdolfSatan]

I think almost everyone felt about the same before kotc2 released, but when it came out it turned out the token portraits weren't a bad thing necessarily (the default ones were awful tho, good thing it allows for custom ones). Look at Trials of Fire for example, they nail a much more commercially viable look doing the same thing.

I think it's not so much about the approach you take (first person, isometric, tokens, etc.) but the quality of the artists you hire.

 

[Ysaye]

I want to talk about Knights of the Chalice 2. It got negative feedback about the character positions just being portraits - but I intend on doing the same thing to save money. Is it really worth investing in proper sprites? This is the question I've been asking myself for a few weeks now.

I would take good gameplay and controls but "simple but neat" graphics over good looking graphics and boring gameplay with poor controls.

 

[Heapcleaner]

I enjoyed playing Low magic age that uses static images for the characters, I actually love it because everything is fast paced, no unnecessary animations which novelty only lasts for a couple of battles and becomes annoying afterwards.

Clean and simple presentation is not for everyone tho, and I think you just need to find and cater to your own niche audience who appreciate the game for its charm. The point is, you can't satisfy everybody, especially with your limited development resources

 

[V_K]

I seriously doubt non-animated top-down sprites like in Exile cost more to make, yet IMO they look a lot better.

Or alternatively you could go for Battle Brothers-style tokens, those also make more visual sense to me in a video game than KoTC2 ones:

 

[Tavernking]

I enjoyed playing Low magic age that uses static images for the characters, I actually love it because everything is fast paced, no unnecessary animations which novelty only lasts for a couple of battles and becomes annoying afterwards.

Clean and simple presentation is not for everyone tho, and I think you just need to find and cater to your own niche audience who appreciate the game for its charm. The point is, you can't satisfy everybody, especially with your limited development resources

Damn you might be onto something there. Low Magic Age uses the same kind of combat I'm interested in (but I don't want to use OGL). Low Magic Age also uses paid assets for the sprites, I might use the same assets.

 

[CryptRat]

I enjoyed playing Low magic age that uses static images for the characters, I actually love it because everything is fast paced, no unnecessary animations which novelty only lasts for a couple of battles and becomes annoying afterwards.

Clean and simple presentation is not for everyone tho, and I think you just need to find and cater to your own niche audience who appreciate the game for its charm. The point is, you can't satisfy everybody, especially with your limited development resources

Damn you might be onto something there. Low Magic Age uses the same kind of combat I'm interested in (but I don't want to use OGL). Low Magic Age also uses paid assets for the sprites, I might use the same assets.

I am the opposite of an expert but my reference when it comes to top-down tilesets (OK technically not top-down but you know what I mean ) would be this : https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/436sop/roguelike_tilesets/.
It's a different story if you step aside from top-down or from classic fantasy, but as long as you're going for classic fantasy and top-down there are plenty of available stuff you can use, many tilesets used in some quite classic tileset version of multiple roguelikes (DCSS, Angband... ) you can use for free.

...

Not sure why I don't have the set with all combinations of colors and classes ... but you get the point.

 

[Tavernking]

helpful stuff

Thanks but those are far too pixelated for my game (picture below). Pixel sprites just wouldn't match.

 

[The Avatar]

Made some environment art-

 

[Byerme]

Working on this little game lately. The idea was to make a bunch of low-poly tiles, enough to make something like the first 2 Ultimas. So nothing really deep, just wandering through a not very well thought out world, mindlessly bashing monsters. And it's based on microlite20 ruleset.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

What is the minimum screen resolution nowadays?
It was 640x480x32 in Wizardry8. 20 years ago

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

What is the minimum screen resolution nowadays?
It was 640x480x32 in Wizardry8. 20 years ago

1024x600 should handle even the smallest 10 year old laptops. Maybe that's too cautious though, especially if you have heavier system requirements in some other departments.

 

[Bad Sector]

What is the minimum screen resolution nowadays?
It was 640x480x32 in Wizardry8. 20 years ago

Steam Hardware Survey has a section about resolution and the smallest that it counts and doesn't shove under "other" is 1024x768 at 0.32% of their surveyed numbers. However the smallest *vertical* resolution is 1280x720. So supporting at least 1024x720 should be fine.

However note that modern GPUs can use integer scaling to render low resolutions at higher with crisp results, so for example rendering a 640x480 game on a 2560x1440 monitor results in a crisp image instead of the blurry image it used to be only 2-3 years ago. Some games - especially 2D games, but also 3D with fixed pixel UIs- can in fact be better played at a lower resolution with such scaling. For example for some games, i prefer to play them at 1280x720 (ie. 200% scaling for a 2560x1440) because of their text and UI (of course that is an issue mainly with games that do not have UI scaling or their fonts are too small). Also my GPD Win uses 1280x720 as its default - as do all the newer variants except the GPD Win Max which uses 1280x800 (but the upcoming GPD Win 3 will also use 1280x720).

But as you can see from that Steam Survey above, 2560x1440 is actually a small percentage - there are almost 10 times more users at 1920x1080 (at ~65% it is *by far* the most common resolution, the next one is 1366x768 and that is just around 9%). This means that someone with a 22" or 24" monitor or so might actually try to run a game at 960x540 so that they get larger text and (for heavier games) better performance while keeping the output crisp.

Also notice that there is still a sizeable percentage of users with square-ish monitors/resolutions.

So, with all that in mind, i'd say the minimum is still around 640x480 :-P.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

What is the minimum screen resolution nowadays?
It was 640x480x32 in Wizardry8. 20 years ago

1024x720 should be enough. I do like if there's an option to switch to a much lower resolution (down to 640x480 or 640x400) in case I'm stuck with a GPU that can run the game, but is unable to reach 20+ FPS through other means.

 

[Bad Sector]

Here comes yet another Post Apocalyptic Petra update:

https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apo...on-099j-linux-version-and-sdl-windows-version

This just adds a working SDL backend mainly for making a Linux version but also adds two SDL-based Windows versions. The SDLPETRA.EXE executable should provide the smoothest output for the software rendering version in modern Windows PCs that do not support 8bit DirectDraw video modes anymore (at least not without a wrapper like dgVoodoo2).

Outside of that it is a very minor update, so no fancy screenshots. And most likely unless there isn't any bug (it is something i quickly threw together today in a few hours of coding) i'll probably call it done.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Guess what. It's still alive.

 

[Bad Sector]

Ok, i said that i most likely won't work further on Post Apocalyptic Petra. But here is the thing: i was wrong :-P.

So i made a port to an old-ish open source Linux handheld called GCW Zero. This is a MIPS-based device running a Linux distribution dedicated to handheld devices called OpenDingux (it is based on Dingux which was originally written as a port of Linux to a much older MIPS-based device called Dingoo).

Here it is running:

In the (unlikely, i assume) case that anyone has this around, you can download the GCW Zero version from the itch.io page (look for Petra099jGCW0.zip). Sadly GCW Zero isn't being manufactured anymore (and even when it was it was very hard to find - aside of not releasing the hardware, the creator seemed to basically make every wrong choice when it came to communication). But it may also run on more recent OpenDingux-based devices that use the JZ4770 (or a compatible) MIPS SoC, like most devices that Anbernic is making (though not all are MIPS-based and a couple i think use 640x480 instead of 320x240 as a screen resolution but their SoC does not have HW scaling that creates some issues with existing software - though from what i've heard the RG350P - notice the "P" - is a good GCW Zero replacement and one i might eventually buy myself at some point).

Even though i used SDL, porting wasn't that easy since the official SDK doesn't have support for Free Pascal and was only released in i386 form. Initially i tried to use a MIPS-based Debian with its own FPC binaries but it didn't generate binaries that could run in GCW Zero outside of very simple "hello, world" stuff. It took me a whole night, but eventually i ended up installing the official SDK (which btw was only released for 32bit x86 Linux) in a VM running Slackware, downloading a i386 version of Free Pascal and then its source code and building a custom i386-to-mips cross-compiler. This didn't work out of the box (of course) and still there are a few missing bits (i had to modify Free Pascal's SDL bindings to remove references to the X11 and C libraries since GCW Zero uses uClibc instead of glibc as its C library and FPC assumed glibc - this is probably fixable but it was easy to just mangle the SDL bindings to remove the references anyway). But after a few attempts i managed to get it running and fortunately it is actually running smoothly (i expected the software rendering version to be slow - the device has OpenGL ES 2.0 support though but TBH i prefer how the software rendering version looks better).

So anyway, now to see if there are any other devices around my place to see if i can port it there too :-P.

EDIT: so i actually managed to build the game under QEMU's MIPS emulator running Debian. It didn't work previously due to other issues that i fixed after i moved to using VirtualBox, but i tried a fresh install again using just Debian and its own packages instead of building my own crosscompiler and it worked. Of course that is because Free Pascal doesn't use the system's C library and instead makes syscalls directly, so the fact that Debian uses glibc and GCW Zero uses uClibc doesn't enter in the picture (but then again, i can't use the C library via Free Pascal with the official SDK anyway because FPC assumes some glibc-isms). It might be possible to use patchelf to work around this but using the C library isn't necessary anyway. In any case, after installing Debian and then FPC and squashfs-tools (which is needed to build the package file the handheld uses) i just ran the 'makegcw.sh' script that i used in the VirtualBox build without any change and it built the game properly (albeit a bit slower) and the game installed and played just fine in the device.

Of course now that i have a custom cross-compiler already built using VirtualBox is more convenient since i also have a full desktop environment but it is neat to know it can also be done since that was my original approach before deciding to use the official SDK, VirtualBox and make a custom cross-compiler. The reason it didn't work originally was because of not configuring the proper dynamic loader (which i didn't knew was needed when i was still trying to use QEMU).

 

[deadmeme]

I want to talk about Knights of the Chalice 2. It got negative feedback about the character positions just being portraits - but I intend on doing the same thing to save money. Is it really worth investing in proper sprites? This is the question I've been asking myself for a few weeks now.

I think that Knights of the Chalice have unique image and that is always a plus. I always prefer stylized graphics because it ages better compared to realistic graphics.