Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Axioms]

Even the Codex is a shadow of former glory though it is more active than the other options. r/truegaming is no longer self-promotion or wordwall friendly. r/4xgaming is sleepy as fuck. I've got into it a lot with the explorminate people so their semi-active steam forum is out. Maybe I could sneak back to rpg.net? Not sure the community politics is worth the exposure.

Man, rpg.net... I don't even want to set foot in that place. Even harmless truthful comments like "Donald Trump is not Satan incarnate" will earn you a permaban. That's in the rules. You are not allowed to defend Trump at all, in any form, or you will get banned. And someone got a warning for saying he or she wanted to buy a Harry Potter book because that's open support of a transphobe. It's like if you took one of those university safe spaces, and applied it to an entire RPG forum, but it's only a safe space if you are a woke special snowflake millennial. And if you have an opinion that is 1 degree out of line with the officially sanctioned groupthink, you get the banhammer.

Imagine that out there somewhere on the internet there's a forum, where people who sacrifice children to Baal go to discuss RPGs. Yeah, you could go there and post about how sacrificing children to Baal is cool and all, and after you've hit the requisite karma or whatever, you can tell them about the game you're working on. But the mental trauma from praising Baal and the taint of associating your game with that community probably wouldn't be worth the sales. That's how I feel about rpg.net.

Edit: Wait, are you on RPG Watch? Go to RPG Watch. They're not so bad. I sometimes forget about them because the community isn't as colorful as it is here.

Edit 2: Former glory? What former glory? In another month I will have been here for 7 years. Is there some ancient glory of which I am ignorant? Did I witness the rise and fall of the Codex and never notice?

Yeah that is maybe a little dramatic but is mainly accurate about rpg.net. I should look at rpgwatch.

I first started on the Codex in 2011 and it was quite active, some famous devs posted here, and the simulation and strategy forum was much more active. I originally came here to post about my open source game on my fork of the Glest Advanced Engine which was Majesty1+++ basically. Forum activity had already dropped in 2015 when I was posting a lot about my current commercial project.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

I have finished my strategy game. The loading screen was the hardest.
https://youtu.be/250TZfixu1c
Now I should upload it to itch.io.
Without any beta testing it will be a scandal.

 

[Tyranicon]

Edit 2: Former glory? What former glory? In another month I will have been here for 7 years. Is there some ancient glory of which I am ignorant? Did I witness the rise and fall of the Codex and never notice?

Codex used to be pretty big, we had Chris Avellone shitposting here and Josh Sawyer ranted about the dex being totally wrong when it comes to PoE's attributes being boring in a Ted talk about how to make fun rpg mechanics.
Mitsoda was here aswell I think?

I think the more famous devs are probably still lurking around, but I wouldn't expect them to post on their official handles.

 

[Ninjerk]

Edit 2: Former glory? What former glory? In another month I will have been here for 7 years. Is there some ancient glory of which I am ignorant? Did I witness the rise and fall of the Codex and never notice?

Codex used to be pretty big, we had Chris Avellone shitposting here and Josh Sawyer ranted about the dex being totally wrong when it comes to PoE's attributes being boring in a Ted talk about how to make fun rpg mechanics.
Mitsoda was here aswell I think?

Ziets, Cain, Boyarsky, Adler, and others. tag Roguey if you want the full list

 

[Axioms]

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.c...ment?r=i2fsj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Made a high level post about the RPG mechanics. No reason we can't have some STR and some Fire Magic lvl 1 in a strategy games.

Also some pictures of my programmer art shit and dev environment since people asked in shoutbox:
https://imgur.com/ul6DAE3

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Edit 2: Former glory? What former glory? In another month I will have been here for 7 years. Is there some ancient glory of which I am ignorant? Did I witness the rise and fall of the Codex and never notice?

Codex used to be pretty big, we had Chris Avellone shitposting here and Josh Sawyer ranted about the dex being totally wrong when it comes to PoE's attributes being boring in a Ted talk about how to make fun rpg mechanics.
Mitsoda was here aswell I think?

I know of at least two obsidian devs who post under aliases.

 

[infidel]

is the lack of good forums

Well, there's NeoGAF.

And TIGSource looks to be somewhat alive. There are reddits for indie games, too, like /r/IndieGaming, /r/IndieDev and maybe others.

 

[Axioms]

is the lack of good forums

Well, there's NeoGAF.

And TIGSource looks to be somewhat alive. There are reddits for indie games, too, like /r/IndieGaming, /r/IndieDev and maybe others.

OMG I have an account on tigsource! I'll try neogaf. neoseeker blows these days.

Indiedev and indiegaming have strict rules sadly.

 

[infidel]

I'll try neogaf.

Indiedev and indiegaming have strict rules sadly.

Rules, what rules? I thought you were gonna post something like "here's my progress and screenshots/vids", they're full of them.

 

[Axioms]

I'll try neogaf.

Indiedev and indiegaming have strict rules sadly.

Rules, what rules? I thought you were gonna post something like "here's my progress and screenshots/vids", they're full of them.

Not at a good stage for screenshots. I can post them but they look mediocre cause I'm doing ui skinning and fancy map stuff last.

 

[Hag]

I have finished my strategy game. The loading screen was the hardest.
https://youtu.be/250TZfixu1c
Now I should upload it to itch.io.
Without any beta testing it will be a scandal.

I like the overall map with the rectangle islands. Looks fun. Actually, with a good-looking tileset, this could be good. Nobody wants to play a game looking like it was designed in one hour on paint, but the mechanisms behind seem sound and a better-looking interface would improve its production value tenfold.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

I went live. https://magicscreen-games.itch.io/steel-breeze-empire

 

[Bad Sector]

Ported the Post Apocalyptic Petra editor to Linux (replaced some Windows-specific graphics code with LCL that should be crossplatform and added an OpenAL backend for non-Windows editor builds - using OpenAL just to spit out buffers i mix manually feels like using OpenGL to draw a fullscreen textured quad with the output of software rendering, but that is the only cross-platform API that i could find out of the box in Free Pascal and i don't want to add any 3rd party dependencies).

I am also trying to optimize the renderer a bit for low(er) end DOS PCs since it basically tries to render a ton of polygons that aren't visible. I added a wireframe mode in the editor to see exactly what is being drawn, as shown in the video. The PVS i added some versions ago help to remove some hidden polygons though it still renders more than necessary (and works on a per-grid basis, ie. it stores in each grid which other grids are visible, which is a bit too coarse - e.g. the grid below the starting position is always drawn even though it is visible only from a tiny trapdoor). Though making it "finer" wouldn't be easy as the renderer doesn't really know about the PVS - it was bolted on after the fact (it basically toggles the visibility of scene nodes) and to improve visibility in general i'd need to alter how rendering works. But most likely that will affect the data files themselves (which, aside from acceleration structures like the PVS data, are basically the same since the first version from the DOS game jam) and i don't want to alter these.

In the meanwhile i'm experimenting with an alternative approach to generate the PVS that should generate better data (the data are the same but the calculation is done in a completely different manner - the current PVS uses random raycasts from grid cell centers whereas the new one voxelizes the world and treats the open areas as volumes on which to project/trace the volumes from the other grids to find any occlusions - if the tracing is occluded, the grids aren't visible). The results look better as some previously wrongly rendered geometry is now skipped but the PVS generation takes much longer.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

New character creation screen. I'll probably add a more interesting background so that the whole scene isn't just black. Right now this menu creates your starting character, but I can use the same menu to customize any characters who join your party later.

 

[Ninjerk]

Nathaniel3W ...does he have one of those baby teething things in his mouth?

 

[Bigg Boss]

This isn't some diaper fetish sim is it?

 

[Bad Sector]

Ok, screw PVS, it is too slow to precalculate, too error prone and too much of a PITA.

Portals are my new best friend. Well, they always were, i was just too lazy to do them properly in Post Apocalyptic Petra :-P



Until now that is! After implementing them the performance has been improved compared to the PVS version and doesn't have the glitches PVS it had. Also instead of waiting for like half an hour to calculate the PVS, portals are calculated instantly (so i do that automatically, no need to update them manually like with the PVS).

Nathaniel3W are those generated / modular sprites? How does it work? Perhaps you mentioned it before but i forgot :-P

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Nathaniel3W ...does he have one of those baby teething things in his mouth?

I think that's a beard.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Are you using similar method? For receiving a crash report?
"When a game crashes and it comes up with that box asking you to send a crash report, what data does it send to the devs when you click accept?"

 

[Nathaniel3W]

This isn't some diaper fetish sim is it?

Sorry to disappoint the diaper fetishists with the new and improved character creator.

Edit: Just thought I would take a second to explain why the clothes look all gray and low-contrast. It's because of UE3/Scaleform's incomplete Flash implementation and therefore my inability to use true gamma correction.

Your eyes can see gradations of color in finer detail between darker colors. Lighter colors tend to look the same. So image-file-people got together with video-game-rendering people and came up with the gamma color space, where most of the file's color information is packed into darker colors.

UE3 (and probably most video game engines) wants to use textures in gamma color space. If your file isn't in gamma color space, you can mark the texture as sRGB and the game engine will correct the color for you.

The problem is that Flash (written for the web, and not for 3D graphics) wants the original color curve, not the darker curve that the game engine prefers. So if you load a texture from the game engine into Flash (my UI is built in Scaleform, which is an extension for Flash, and was a very popular UI tool from about 2005-2015), the image ends up looking too dark and saturated.

Flash has a built-in library for accessing the bitmap's color information directly, and you can write a custom gamma-correction function to get everything to look right. Unfortunately, Scaleform (or maybe just UE3's implementation of Scaleform?) left out that library. So no in-UI gamma correction for you. You either need two copies of each texture (one for the game engine, one for the UI) or you write a cheap fake gamma-correction function with the tools you have.

Scaleform does give you access to a kind of add and multiply for colors. That doesn't give you as fine control, but it had to suffice. I reduce the contrast and brighten the picture, and for most of the color range, it looks OK. But darker colors end up looking gray. So that's what we see with the bodice, skirt, and boots, which should be a darker brown.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Bro your dudes all look like weebs man.

 

[Bad Sector]

UE3

So, out of curiosity, why are you using UE3 instead of any more recent version (or Unity, if UE4/UE5's requirements are too high)?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

UE3

So, out of curiosity, why are you using UE3 instead of any more recent version (or Unity, if UE4/UE5's requirements are too high)?

I started my project back around 2016 or so, before UE4 was widely available. I might have been able to get into the UE4 beta at the time, but the details around distributing a game with the editor and source included were still murky. I definitely wanted to ship an editor, so I stuck with UDK and eventually bought a license for the full UE3 C++ source. Now I'm working on an expansion for my game, so I'm still using UE3.

I was also thinking about something Jeff Vogel said in one of his presentations at GDC. It was something like his business model is to make mediocre games quickly and at low cost, and part of that means reusing the code and assets from previous games. Using the tools I already know, code I've already written, and assets I've already made or purchased, I could probably crank out a decent game every year. If I were to start learning UE4 today, it would take me a lot longer to get a product to market.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Bro your dudes all look like weebs man.

What can I say? It's a profitable market.

I kid, of course. I'm not exactly swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck over here. But now that I'm thinking about it, if I had gone with a different aesthetic, the 2D Fallout or Wasteland style, for example, I don't think I would have had the success I have, modest though it may be. About 1/3 of my sales have been in Japan, and an increasing percent in China since that localization. Anyone know of any good comparisons I could take a look at? A WRPG and JRPG that had similar mechanics but different styles?

 

[infidel]

About 1/3 of my sales have been in Japan

Noice. The elusive Japanese market.