Game News Wasteland 2 to use Unity

[Davaris]

Seriously, I would rather they did a top down 2D game, with a custom engine and did it really well.

I find the discussion here is just bizarre. What problem would a custom engine solve that would justify the expenses? As a software developer you are paid to solve problems and not to write code. And as a game developer you are tasked with, you know, creating games and not developing engines and tools. You want to use off-the-shelf software whenever possible unless you can make a strong case for doing the development yourself (e.g. prohibitive costs, market expansion, software not not available or modification too costly, etc.). What is this absurd fascination with reinventing the wheel whenever possible? Do you also build your own hammer whenever you need to put a nail into the wall?

Making a top down 2D engine, with the same functionality would take a week. Heck there are ones they could take and use right now.

The time consuming part of coding an RPG, is the RPG part - interacting with creatures and objects, the rules that govern those interactions and the enormous amount of scripting. They have to do all those things in a 3D engine, just as they would have to do them in a 2D engine.

Of course they aren't going to change track, but top down 2D, is what I assumed they were doing from the start. Old school is 2D.

 

[commie]

I don't know who's right or wrong(my money's on inXile) but I know that of all the pseudo devs here, only koyima has managed to give me such an awesome avatar...

 

[SerratedBiz]

Of course they aren't going to change track, but top down 2D, is what I assumed they were doing from the start. Old school is 2D.

I'd rather my oldschoolism came from oldschool quest design, gameplay mechanics, character progression and party system, rather than wasting money on drawing 2D environments for the pretty.

 

[lmbarns]

You act like you can't cull objects in Unity based off: layers, zones, triggers, camera frustum, etc.

Individuals make nice mechanics in C4, can you show me shit that 1-3 people have published with it? Full on AI, spell system, skill system, aim-to-hit melee combat, etc. Curious to know cause the creator is a Unity user over on the forums claiming they're adding C# support and "following" unity's lead. I know a huge millions of dollar team makes good shit with it like they would with anything.

Nobody even fucking mentions XNA in this thread??????

Takes 2 pages of code to do a simple raycast in C4, like wtf seriously how productive is that? What about doing a raycast and doing damage and instantiating a particle effect based off the velocity at the point of impact???? How many pages would that take?

Also you can build static menus in Unity and enable/disable shit as you want it in code drawing/not drawing it as needed. What are you talking about?

Even Unity will tell you not to use unityGUI on mobiles due to performance hit. Just because they didn't build in a bunch of extra shit and left it "extensible" has nothing to do with the quality of the plugins, it means it's not confined to die like engines before it.

I use what gets me the furthest, fastest, if it changes I'll change with it, but I switched to Unity from XNA after wasting time with torque, UDK, and C4. Firstly all my models are FBX format so I start over when I go to C4 and I don't even have a way of acquiring assets for C4, so I either need huge budget, or become a modeler so I can pursue making a game with C4.

Personally for me I'd rather make shitty games for mobile made by 1 person, with 1 mouth to feed, that I can put directly in app stores where minor success is pretty good for an individual.

But good luck distributing your C4 game after all that hard work!! But honestly I could give a fuck haha I just joined cause I thought this was entertaining. But sadly everything I say awaits moderation

 

[Davaris]

Of course they aren't going to change track, but top down 2D, is what I assumed they were doing from the start. Old school is 2D.

I'd rather my oldschoolism came from oldschool quest design, gameplay mechanics, character progression and party system, rather than wasting money on drawing 2D environments for the pretty.

Well I guess you are not a purist.

 

[Davaris]

I don't know who's right or wrong(my money's on inXile) but I know that of all the pseudo devs here, only koyima has managed to give me such an awesome avatar...

The teeth are fantastic.

 

[tiagocc0]

Of course they aren't going to change track, but top down 2D, is what I assumed they were doing from the start. Old school is 2D.

I'd rather my oldschoolism came from oldschool quest design, gameplay mechanics, character progression and party system, rather than wasting money on drawing 2D environments for the pretty.

I wouldn't mind it being 3D, but I would love if it was a fixed camera top-down view which you can't rotate so they design the game where you can actually see everything and not a 3D which you can rotate and you HAVE to rotate to not miss parts of the game and then it all gets very confusing in combat.

 

[Antagonist]

Because you can't follow it. Don't worry little princess, just go back to sleep.

True to a certain extent. I've never done 3d engine programming so my understanding is superficial at best when it comes to the gritty details. But I have been part of a team tasked with requirements elicitation and deciding about tool usage. Given the usual project factors like budget, time, complexity, manpower and general risk assessment, in most cases it was cheaper, easier, less risky and more secure to take off-the-shelf software/libraries and do some modifications if necessary. So I can identify with koyima's reasoning from a pure project management point of view. Less so with some arguments which have been brought up against the choice of Unity, especially when the argumentation is mostly based on speculation ("will never get finished", "will be dumbed down", "will not run fluently" etc.).

The problem of having a game that never gets completed, has terrible performance, and/or gets dumbed down to deal with a really oversimplistic engine. They don't dumb down games because gamers want that, but because engine and platform choice dictates the necessity.

Yeah, I guess the Transformers movie was such a piece of shit because the studio was limited by the choice of 3D modelling software and not because the move had to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator to increase the chance that it will ever recoup the huge investments, let alone make a healthy profit.

 

[Hirato]

Of course they aren't going to change track, but top down 2D, is what I assumed they were doing from the start. Old school is 2D.

I'd rather my oldschoolism came from oldschool quest design, gameplay mechanics, character progression and party system, rather than wasting money on drawing 2D environments for the pretty.

I'm sure they can give the 2D-fags an orthographic perspective or something to play around with.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I wouldn't mind it being 3D, but I would love if it was a fixed camera top-down view which you can't rotate so they design the game where you can actually see everything and not a 3D which you can rotate and you HAVE to rotate to not miss parts of the game and then it all gets very confusing in combat.

They said they'll have limited camera move. I hope they stick to that and that it means something like SC2 with just zooming. When you add rotation you're almost sure to fuck things up.

 

[lmbarns]

Of course they aren't going to change track, but top down 2D, is what I assumed they were doing from the start. Old school is 2D.

I'd rather my oldschoolism came from oldschool quest design, gameplay mechanics, character progression and party system, rather than wasting money on drawing 2D environments for the pretty.

I wouldn't mind it being 3D, but I would love if it was a fixed camera top-down view which you can't rotate so they design the game where you can actually see everything and not a 3D which you can rotate and you HAVE to rotate to not miss parts of the game and then it all gets very confusing in combat.

You mean straight down top down? So you only see the roof of buildings and maybe a front facing wall? I prefer dimetric but adjust the clipping plane so it cuts out anything blocking the character from view.

And yea people are pixel whores and no matter how elaborate your progression system, item system, crafting system, loot system, when you show a prototype it's like "oh, a game like zelda", well uh I guess being tile based but nobody see's past the placeholder graphics. bastards

 

[commie]

I don't know who's right or wrong(my money's on inXile) but I know that of all the pseudo devs here, only koyima has managed to give me such an awesome avatar...

The teeth are fantastic.

That, the strange white man trying to be an Indian look(Wyrmlord in reverse) and the ambiguous weapon/hand that looks like a mailed fist doing the 'jerk off' action...

 

[SuicideBunny]

They don't dumb down games because gamers want that, but because engine and platform choice dictates the necessity.

"they" dumb down games because at some point during the development process some moron (more often than not one wearing a suit and coming from the publisher) drops words like accessible, immersion, cinematic, epic or casual gamers.

 

[tiagocc0]

They don't dumb down games because gamers want that, but because engine and platform choice dictates the necessity.

"they" dumb down games because at some point during the development process some moron (more often than not one wearing a suit and coming from the publisher) drops words like accessible, immersion, cinematic, epic or casual gamers.

Let's ban these words from the codex!

 

[SerratedBiz]

I wouldn't mind it being 3D, but I would love if it was a fixed camera top-down view which you can't rotate so they design the game where you can actually see everything and not a 3D which you can rotate and you HAVE to rotate to not miss parts of the game and then it all gets very confusing in combat.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that they mean to do it top-down, 3D or not. I guess that's what keeps me from doing the RAGE.

 

[Brother None]

Seriously, I would rather they did a top down 2D game, with a custom engine and did it really well.

It's been clear for some time that's not happening.

It's 3D, with the camera at a fixed angle, higher up than Fallout in default. It will offer some zoom in/out functionality. I'm a little unclear on what they want to do with camera movement, but it'll be limited, so I'm not thinking full rotation.

 

[EG]

I want my childhood back with this game.M:

You were much dumber as a child. Why would you want to go back to that?

 

[mindx2]

Seriously, I would rather they did a top down 2D game, with a custom engine and did it really well.

It's been clear for some time that's not happening.

It's 3D, with the camera at a fixed angle, higher up than Fallout in default. It will offer some zoom in/out functionality. I'm a little unclear on what they want to do with camera movement, but it'll be limited, so I'm not thinking full rotation.

I would be fine with that description... but you know... the Codex is gonna Codex... as this long winded thread has clearly shown :p

 

[tiagocc0]

I want my childhood back with this game.M:

You were much dumber as a child. Why would you want to go back to that?

I want the nostalgia back not the lack of knowledge or hairy chest.

 

[St. Toxic]

I'm pretty sure the idea is to go for 3d person view. They were talking about making a squad based tactical shooter, no? Unity seems like a pretty good choice in that regard.

I want the nostalgia back not the lack of knowledge or hairy chest.

You had a hairy chest when you were a child? Why did the hair fall off as you grew older?

 

[Twinkle]

I'm a little unclear on what they want to do with camera movement, but it'll be limited, so I'm not thinking full rotation.

Brian be praised.

 

[St. Toxic]

Of course it'll be full camera movement, 360 all the way. Ever since they switched to real-time and action oriented this feature has been a given.

 

[Marsal]

It occurs to me we get most of our new users through butthurt. No wonder we get so many problems.

Joined: Apr 19, 2012

Indeed.

Nobody even fucking mentions XNA in this thread??????

Because it sucks shit. Just download CreamyBlood's game and see for yourself.

What exactly "sucks shit" in XNA? Where can I download a game written for your engine of choice and see if it "sucks shit", as you so eloquently put it?

 

[tiagocc0]

I want the nostalgia back not the lack of knowledge or hairy chest.

You had a hairy chest when you were a child? Why did the hair fall off as you grew older?

Eh... it should read like this "I want the nostalgia back not the lack of knowledge or lack of hairy chest."
I didn't think I should have duplicated the 'lack' word.

 

[Davaris]

Where can I download a game written for your engine of choice

I don't know about XNA, but you can go here and use Google to find C4 demos you like the look of:

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

A very small part of the 31st can be found in the C4 demo. The simulator type games and bridge construction (I think), are made by small but professional studios. Gremlin Invasion, is a recent indie casual game, made by some up and comers on the C4 forums. English is not their first language, so they are doing very well. Wingball is unfinished and made by a guy on the forum learning and having some fun in his spare time. The rest are out of date.

What you should be looking for, when you shop for an engine is performance and variety in the kinds of games that are made with it. You don't want to make a game that looks like 1000 other games, or a mod of an FPS, because it will be unoriginal and no one will care about it.

As DU said, quantity of games made is a silly argument, that appeals neither to serious developers, nor hardcore players. One excellent game is all it takes to prove an engine and some engines are not capable of that excellent game, because they don't deliver on performance or API. Fallout 1 and 2, are the only games made with that engine. Damn fine RPG engine, but by koyima's reasoning, it is a failure.