Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[shihonage]

It does..Reminds me of games I played in early 90s..Does it have RPG elements or it all action?

Thank you.

The game in its modern state is Doom with Robotron controls, but heavily story-based, with Half-Life-style scripted sequences.

You can use Scrap Gun to make bridges across water and find little secrets in weak walls, but the other elements (resource management and 4-item inventory) have been disabled due to feeling tacked-on.

 

[GoblinGrotto]

I hate cameras. Tried to get something that feels alright when moving between unit turns last night. But I'm not sure, feels a bit janky.


Edit:
Here's the latest iteration on it. Better or worse? Made the movement less floaty and had it linger longer on the unit that just made it's turn.



Also some random statue freaks

 

[shihonage]

I hate cameras. Tried to get something that feels alright when moving between unit turns last night. But I'm not sure, feels a bit janky.


Edit:
Here's the latest iteration on it. Better or worse? Made the movement less floaty and had it linger longer on the unit that just made it's turn.



Also some random statue freaks

The iteration looks better, less jerky.

However, the camera movement may be feeling weird because there's no need to take control of camera away from the player. The player can pan the view himself, can he not. And if you want him to pay attention to something that happened beyond a screen boundary, you could put an arrow indicator or a red flash effect on that boundary or something.

 

[what am i doing]

I hate cameras. Tried to get something that feels alright when moving between unit turns last night. But I'm not sure, feels a bit janky.


Edit:
Here's the latest iteration on it. Better or worse? Made the movement less floaty and had it linger longer on the unit that just made it's turn.



Also some random statue freaks

The iteration looks better, less jerky.

However, the camera movement may be feeling weird because there's no need to take control of camera away from the player. The player can pan the view himself, can he not. And if you want him to pay attention to something that happened beyond a screen boundary, you could put an arrow indicator or a red flash effect on that boundary or something.

I mostly agree with this. I don't play a lot of such games (turn-based isometric) so I don't know how they typically handle it but as I recall in Mechanicus, which I actually really did enjoy, the camera only moves in response to units when they're actually off-screen or near the edge of the screen. If it's a unit's turn and that unit walks towards the edge of the screen the camera will pan to keep them away from the edge of the screen, and if it's a unit's turn and the unit is doing an action and the unit was off-screen the camera will pan over there, and I think the same if the player selects a unit that was off-screen - but if the active unit is already on-screen and not near the edges and is moving around in the "safe zone" of the screen, the camera just stays put.

I don't think it's a bad thing to have the game pan automatically (as I've described Mechanicus does it and it works fine) but I do think it's a bad thing to have the game pan unnecessarily.

 

[GoblinGrotto]

However, the camera movement may be feeling weird because there's no need to take control of camera away from the player. The player can pan the view himself, can he not. And if you want him to pay attention to something that happened beyond a screen boundary, you could put an arrow indicator or a red flash effect on that boundary or something.

I agree that it's unnecessary to remove camera control on the players turn, I'll try without it. But I think it would be really strange not to show what's happening on the enemies turn as it would be really easy to miss vital information. At the moment the AI is really stupid and a work in progress so they just wander randomly if there is no player in range, but later they will chase.

but if the active unit is already on-screen and not near the edges and is moving around in the "safe zone" of the screen, the camera just stays put.

I really like the idea of the camera safe zones. I'll give it a try

 

[shihonage]

I agree that it's unnecessary to remove camera control on the players turn, I'll try without it. But I think it would be really strange not to show what's happening on the enemies turn as it would be really easy to miss vital information. At the moment the AI is really stupid and a work in progress so they just wander randomly if there is no player in range, but later they will chase.

What if you pop up a secondary render window, in the corner, which jumps between enemies as they make their turns, and it keeps each enemy in its center, following them as they move. Then it disappears.

While it happens, the player will still be able to scroll around the main window, use the UI (if any) to look up their inventory or whatnot, or even queue moves in advance.

 

[GoblinGrotto]

Final camera iteration for a bit, need to continue with the AI. But for the camera changes, the player have full camera control when moving their units. And it only does big camera changes if the next unit is outside the cameras "focus area".
Still it need some sort of visual indicator when it's the players turn again. Cause right now you just have to know the last enemy finished its turn.

 

[Dualnames]

I really like your fog of war btw, GoblinGrotto

 

[what am i doing]

Final camera iteration for a bit, need to continue with the AI. But for the camera changes, the player have full camera control when moving their units. And it only does big camera changes if the next unit is outside the cameras "focus area".
Still it need some sort of visual indicator when it's the players turn again. Cause right now you just have to know the last enemy finished its turn.

Perhaps having the camera return to / centre on one of the player's units, maybe also select that one. I think that would make it obvious since the player would then see that they can issue orders. The question is which unit; it appears you've made the player free to issue orders to their units in any order so there isn't necessarily a "first", but you could keep track of the order in which the player issued orders to each unit in the previous turn, and pick the oldest still living one on that list as the one to put the focus on when the player's next turn starts.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Can I use Unity Personal for commercial development?​

-
If your revenue from projects in conjunction with your use of Unity is less than $200K USD (or if your business’s aggregate revenue and funding is less than $200K) in the last 12 months, you are eligible to use Unity Personal.

So can I use Unity Personal for making a game and upload that game to itch.io without paying any licence fee? I won't even make $1, let alone $200K.

 

[Habichtswalder]

Can I use Unity Personal for commercial development?​

-
If your revenue from projects in conjunction with your use of Unity is less than $200K USD (or if your business’s aggregate revenue and funding is less than $200K) in the last 12 months, you are eligible to use Unity Personal.

So can I use Unity Personal for making a game and upload that game to itch.io without paying any licence fee? I won't even make $1, let alone $200K.

Yes, you can.

 

[Yuber]

You could put in a option for player to choose which camera type they prefer.

 

[GoblinGrotto]

I really like your fog of war btw, GoblinGrotto

Thanks!

Perhaps having the camera return to / centre on one of the player's units, maybe also select that one. I think that would make it obvious since the player would then see that they can issue orders. The question is which unit; it appears you've made the player free to issue orders to their units in any order so there isn't necessarily a "first", but you could keep track of the order in which the player issued orders to each unit in the previous turn, and pick the oldest still living one on that list as the one to put the focus on when the player's next turn starts.

Yeah, I haven't really put any work into that part yet. But it will be more clearly


Took a break from coding and made some new environment art

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Been working on a sequel to my Mordor: Depths of Dejenol-inspired dungeon crawler. After gathering enough feedback I started from scratch, adding an inventory/equipment system, passive skills, a more freeform campaign structure, and an overall game feel.

The end result feels like playing DnD while drunk with buddies and rolling a die to see how many enemies are beheaded with a single swing of a sword.

 

[Zothique]

I want to work on a small vidya project, but I'm stupid. And this shit is saturated now anyways thanks to crap like Godot and Unity.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I want to work on a small vidya project, but I'm stupid. And this shit is saturated now anyways thanks to crap like Godot and Unity.

Just focus on the educational aspects of it then. Video games don't make money anyways so do it because you want to learn something.
For example, I'm making my own game engine, this'll be the 2nd one I've made and this time built around polygon meshes. The reason is because I wanted to learn this part of the process in the hopes I can make games without the bullshit update/licensing struggles. I've learned a lot in a small amount of time.

You're not going to be successful the first time you do anything, you'll probably be successful on the 10th time. Persistence and Resilience. Make something small if you want, use it as a steppingstone to something bigger, the story doesn't end just because you shipped and made $10. You keep going.

 

[tritosine2k]

(...)

(...) a steppingstone to something bigger, the story doesn't end just because you shipped and made $10. You keep going.

Image-based-rendering used to be all over the place in early 2010s and is waaaaaaay underrated now. I have a theory it's STILL advantagous in certain way (decoupled scene complexity), polygon is even interesting as placeholder to drive certain IBR scheme(s).

They still have it wrapped and buried under the hood. For example below the shiny sugar coat UE Lumen uses "cards" -guess what IBL. The funny thing, you may not even want polygons rendered afterall but still get advantage of IB lighting.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

I have managed to make my first crpg in Unity. It is a Hexplore clone.

 

[what am i doing]

Did a bunch of generation stuff (mostly experimentation, not a whole lot actually achieved yet, but I needed a bunch of trial and error and a whole lot of thinking to settle on a model I was ok with) and also got population density pre-calculation sorted out, a requirement for better ballparking how many pops should be generated in a given tile. A baseline for agricultural society is selected (currently it's 10/km2, but the value could be tweaked) and then it's reduced based on the tile's climate temperature & rainfall, the terrain's suitability for agriculture, and the soil quality. A small bonus is then applied for coastal tiles, and a smaller bonus for tiles neighbouring coastal tiles (that are not coastal themselves). This is then multiplied by the tile's area (I also added distortion correction since the map is equirectangular) to get the expected baseline population. A few corrections will be needed: population density should scale up if the present culture has more developed agriculture, and at some point I need to add rivers (which can increase the "rainfall" score), but at the moment I'm feeling too lazy to get into that kind of finnicky geometry bullshit, so rivers will have to wait.

In any case density is now automatic rather than manual. I may add some kind of "override" brush eventually so that areas that have been recently affected by war, migration, etc., can be modelled, but for now it's just generated based off of environmental factors.
I also need to adjust population predictions for the other ecological adaptive models (there are three that humans largely fall into: Foraging, Pastoralism, Agriculture) since they should suffer a bit less from the penalties agriculture can face when dealing with things like terrain restrictions (jungle requires clearing to build a farm; foraging does not) but should also not scale to high levels (since foraging and pastoralism don't support the kind of populations that agriculture does, in most cases).

(The scale here is adjusted compared to any previous density screenshots I might have uploaded; currently green is 1 person per km/2, yellow is 10, pale blue is 0.1. I needed more sensitivity for the low end to make sparsely populated regions easier to discern.)

Edit: I also made the water shader use a background texture for colour. I'll do a more fleshed out one with ocean elevation and hue variation eventually, when I have time to sit down and relax and get in the right mood for it, but for now at least having a bit of coastal lightness makes the land tiles feel less like they're "hovering" in front of the ocean and a bit more like it's one entity. On that note, I replaced my old Wacom tablet with a new one recently, since I replaced my Thinkpad P51 with a Macbook M4, and as it turns out, the old tablet didn't have drivers for newer Apple Silicon macs. I find the new one has a more paper-like texture and handles small movements and light pressure better, so I'm happy with it anyways.

 

[Tavernking]

First time doing a presentation or Let's Play. Actually turned out better than I thought. I've broken the public speaking anxiety barrier

 

[what am i doing]

Finished tuning densities for other eco-adaptive models and then reviewed settings for agricultural as well. Here they are pictured in order, if the entire world was populated only using the models of Foraging, Nomadic Pastoralism, Cyclic Pastoralism, Settled Pastoralism, and Agriculture, respectively. The total world populations in such cases would be:
Foragers: 24,781,828
Nomadic Pastoralists: 97,351,871
Cyclic Pastoralists: 131,637,283
Settled Pastoralists: 107,898,619
Farmers: 72,337,495
Obviously these values look wrong (for the later types - forager & nomadic estimates are reasonably ok) - and this is because currently all the soils in the world are Regosols, which are perfectly "in the middle" so the EAMs that rely more on soil quality (particularly Settled Pastoralists and Farmers) are moderated a lot. Agriculture has a higher maximum, but it's also more sensitive to terrain restrictions than the other models. Testing with, say, turning the entire world into Chernozemic soils yields a Farmers-only population of nearly half a billion and also drastically boosts Settled Pastoralist outcomes. I will paint soils into the world eventually (probably in the near future actually so that further generation testing makes sense), and between that, eventual inclusion of rivers, and adding agricultural development levels, eventually the main centres of civilization will have drastically higher populations.

I also note that this world is generally going to have a higher carrying capacity than Earth, because it doesn't have the large swathes of largely unusable subarctic land that Earth does in the Canadian Shield and Russian Far East, and has substantial subtropical (Cfa/Cfb/Cwa) regions that are basically optimal for human habitation, especially forming a continuous arc along the north. It also doesn't have some of the global travel issues that Earth does (it's hard to get from between North America, Europe, and China until technology permits it) so high-power crops like rice and potatoes would be spread a lot more early, which will again eventually lead to higher populations.

In any case, moving on to figuring out how to integrate the current population estimates with the existing generation code. It'll be a bit finnicky because culture data is done per-channel (sub-tile, basically) but all population estimate code is based on averaged data for that tile, so I'll have to sort out which stuff can be calculated in advance and which stuff needs to check the culture's EAM.

 

[Sibylla]

https://github.com/racenis/tram-sdk
prosperware 3d game engine

 

[what am i doing]

Adjusted expected populations function to no longer take a specific EAM parameter and instead build & return a map of the expected totals for all tiles for each EAM type. Adjusted the existing basic generation code (only generates subsistence operations and basic staff for them) to take this map and use it for totals, thus leading to a very early form of world population generation. Adjusted the map to look at actual Population struct sizes in the tiles instead of the abstracted "expected population."

Currently this generates a total population of 79,554,600, which is fairly close to the previous Agriculture total, as most cultures in the world here are agricultural. This will increase when I get soils painted, and also when I begin to implement urbanization - but I need to pause a bit and reorient / think about how I want to handle urbanization. I lean towards just basing it off a culture's Agricultural Development setting and the tile's population, the idea being that a more developed agricultural society will produce more of a surplus, which will directly lead to more specialization / urban settlements. I also need to decide how to determine allocation of manpower towards mining and forestry, which are specialized tasks but not urban.
Map of actual population densities (current).

Map of Ecological Adaptive Models. Green - Agriculture. Brown - Foraging. Burgundy - Nomadic Pastoralism. Red - Cyclic Pastoralism. Orange - Settled Pastoralism. White - uninhabited. Eventually this will change somewhat, because currently all existing cultures are just the default for their nation, and I do want to subdivide the nations into different cultures later, which could have different EAMs within the same nation.

 

[GoblinGrotto]

Adjusted expected populations function to no longer take a specific EAM parameter and instead build & return a map of the expected totals for all tiles for each EAM type. Adjusted the existing basic generation code (only generates subsistence operations and basic staff for them) to take this map and use it for totals, thus leading to a very early form of world population generation. Adjusted the map to look at actual Population struct sizes in the tiles instead of the abstracted "expected population."

Currently this generates a total population of 79,554,600, which is fairly close to the previous Agriculture total, as most cultures in the world here are agricultural. This will increase when I get soils painted, and also when I begin to implement urbanization - but I need to pause a bit and reorient / think about how I want to handle urbanization. I lean towards just basing it off a culture's Agricultural Development setting and the tile's population, the idea being that a more developed agricultural society will produce more of a surplus, which will directly lead to more specialization / urban settlements. I also need to decide how to determine allocation of manpower towards mining and forestry, which are specialized tasks but not urban.
Map of actual population densities (current).
View attachment 59899
Map of Ecological Adaptive Models. Green - Agriculture. Brown - Foraging. Burgundy - Nomadic Pastoralism. Red - Cyclic Pastoralism. Orange - Settled Pastoralism. White - uninhabited. Eventually this will change somewhat, because currently all existing cultures are just the default for their nation, and I do want to subdivide the nations into different cultures later, which could have different EAMs within the same nation.
View attachment 59900

Looks cool. Is it for a project or are you just messing around?



Worked a bit more on this. Very temp ui for the player, you can move, attack, and wait so far. Still debating if I want to make a more full screen old school style ui for it or try and figure out something more sleeker. Most stuff with the attacking is set up as well, just need to fix so they actually take damage and fix some death fx (probably just going to have everything explode gib and gore to save on animation work).