Game Development Omni-thread [Unity, XNA, UDK, etc]

Cokomon

So I was wondering what you, the PA community's, opinion is on Flat Red Ball? Yay or Nay? I'm thinking about making a 2D platformer and I think this might be a good starting point (after trying and failing a couple times to get started on an XNA game).

vad710

What are you having trouble with using XNA directly? Whatever it may be, there is a possibility that FRB does not address the troubles you have struggled with in the past.

Cokomon

Actually my struggles have just been putting in the time and effort to learn XNA. I decided to skip FRB and put my focus back into the learning the core coding. I have an XNA book from all the way back in 1.0, so I recently ordered a new one to bring me up to speed in 4.0.

I feel kind of dumb having asked about it, I was just curious if anyone had any experience with it.

Starglider

Completed the first couple of story missions; mostly player training, relatively slow paced, a little character development in the cutscenes. The third one will kick things up a notch.





EDIT : finally completed the third story mission; skip to the last two minutes for neat exploding airships

slash000

Wellp, it looks like we'll be putting the Xbox build of Rainslick3 up on the XNA Playtesting forums shortly!

Starglider

I submitted Windhaven to DBP2012 and I saw Apple Jack 2 in the gallery as well, anyone else from here enter?

AlejandroDaJ

Nope, I wasn't interested.

Btw, semi-secret test cut of my new trailer. I used it for my Steam pitch which went in over the weekend:



I'll release the trailer and screenies and whatnot once I've got all my ducks in a row.

slash000

I love the trailer, great work. Also I'm loving the the graphical overhaul you went through. Fingers crossed for you, for Steam!

insert obligatory wherez mah iphone versn comment

Starglider

AlejandroDaJ wrote: »

Btw, semi-secret test cut of my new trailer. I used it for my Steam pitch which went in over the weekend

Looks very slick and polished, love the new art! Hope you make it.

darleysam

Hey guys, guess what game's finally up today? CHERRY POKE PRISON! A SEXY ADVENTURE WHERE YOU SOMETHING SOMETHING TITS (nsfw, 3/3 mature)

Oh and Apple Jack 2 http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/Product/Apple-Jack-2/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550b4d

AlejandroDaJ

Congrats to Trumpets for releasing Apple Jack 2! Still, you should join me on PC, we have punch and pie here.

Trumpets

Working on it!

(new art looks good BTW).

slash000

Congrats Trumpets! I've been convincing friends left and right to get AJ2



In other news, well we put Rainslick3 into Peer Review yesterday.

The excitement of putting a game into peer in anticipation of a release date never gets old

Balrog

How is everyone else doing the collision handling in their games? I'm still using a hacked version of the one in the platformer starter kit but it's pretty flaky.

mntorankusu

I wrote my own. It's terrible.

Delzhand

Balrog wrote: »

How is everyone else doing the collision handling in their games? I'm still using a hacked version of the one in the platformer starter kit but it's pretty flaky.

I just prototyped a new collision engine last week. I don't know if it's suitable for sharing, it makes some assumptions like gravity (grounding collision is a special case), and you can't make sloped ceilings (floors are fine).

Alistair Hutton

Over the weekend I knocked together a little program to generate Sensible Soccer style little man sprites in XNA. Weee, that as fun.

AlejandroDaJ

Balrog wrote: »

How is everyone else doing the collision handling in their games? I'm still using a hacked version of the one in the platformer starter kit but it's pretty flaky.

Cute Things uses a heavily-modified version of the Platformer sample. The biggest change I added was ordering the collision checks by physical object proximity to the solid object to be collided with. I also added bouncing, simple Yes/No collision detection for circles, and a quadtree check for the particle system.

Balrog

AlejandroDaJ wrote: »

Balrog wrote: »

How is everyone else doing the collision handling in their games? I'm still using a hacked version of the one in the platformer starter kit but it's pretty flaky.

Cute Things uses a heavily-modified version of the Platformer sample. The biggest change I added was ordering the collision checks by physical object proximity to the solid object to be collided with. I also added bouncing, simple Yes/No collision detection for circles, and a quadtree check for the particle system.

I'm guessing you mean you check the closest objects first?

ManDance

The wife and I have been working in unity 3d. We decided to go with making an isometric action rpg. We've been working on it for about two months but have had the trouble finding a 2d artist. We've got the preproduction work done for the most part, but we're still working on the game manager and combat.

Starglider

Balrog wrote: »

How is everyone else doing the collision handling in their games? I'm still using a hacked version of the one in the platformer starter kit but it's pretty flaky.

An assortment of handwritten sphere/sphere, cuboid/sphere, ray/sphere, ray/triangle and triangle/triangle checks (the ones that come with XNA are not very optimised), in an ad-hoc heirarchical scheme.

Krathoon

I am pretty impressed with rbwhitaker's tutorials (http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/introduction-to-xna). I do believe I will follow it. The part on resource management is a section that a lot of game dev books really need.

Kupi

When I was working on the scaffolding for the games I planned to make over time, I created a file type that associated sets of convex polygons with individual frames of animation and used the Separating Axis Theorem to do checks between polygon sets.

Delzhand

Krathoon wrote: »

I am pretty impressed with rbwhitaker's tutorials (http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/introduction-to-xna). I do believe I will follow it. The part on resource management is a section that a lot of game dev books really need.

Yeah, that's where I got most of my tutorials after Riemers went away (although it does look like it's back now)

AlejandroDaJ

Kupi wrote: »

When I was working on the scaffolding for the games I planned to make over time, I created a file type that associated sets of convex polygons with individual frames of animation and used the Separating Axis Theorem to do checks between polygon sets.

SAT is a pain to get working. If anyone's game can get by with just axis-aligned bounding boxes, I recommend that over SAT.

Delzhand

Man, no fuckin' joke. After trying for several hours on an old project I was pretty much like "welp, this diagonal laser can be made up of 5 squares much more easily"

Kupi

A pain to get working in terms of performance or difficulty of coding?

Because right now I'm sitting on a library that handles it just fine. Performance I've yet to test, though the next step in development on that project was getting a bounding box-based quadtree system in place to reduce the number of SAT checks done.

EDIT: To expand on that, since I was building a library to use for multiple games, I wanted to go whole-hog and make sure I could get something close to pixel-perfect collision without actually using pixel-perfect collisions. I know they say "make games, not engines", but all the games I want to make would use collision in the same way, so it would save a massive amount of time to get it done once, and done right.

Alistair Hutton

Alistair Hutton wrote: »

Over the weekend I knocked together a little program to generate Sensible Soccer style little man sprites in XNA. Weee, that as fun.

And yesterday evening I wrote a little sprite packer to put all the little man animation frames onto a single texture for each man rather than having 24 separate textures for each player.

Now I just need to write a player packer that will pack all of these mini sprite sheets into one single sprite sheet and then I'll have 1 texture that contains every player animation in the game. Fun, fun fun.

Awk

Can someone give a rookie a hand? I'm reading through O'Reilly's XNA 4.0 book. I'm adding my first sound to my game. I created a XACT project and saved it into the project's Content\Audio directory on my hard disk along my .wav's. I added the following to the LoadContent method:

audioEngine = new AudioEngine(@Contents\Audio\GameAudio.xgs);
waveBank = new WaveBank(audioEngine, @Content\Audio\Wave Bank.xwb);
soundBank = new SoundBank(audioEngine, @Content\Audio\Sound Bank.xsb);

Compiling, i receive this error:
Error 1 Wave file "C:\Users\Raptawk\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\AnimatedSprites\AnimatedSprites\AnimatedSpritesContent\Audio\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\AnimatedSprites\AnimatedSprites\AnimatedSpritesContent\Audio\start.wav" not found. C:\Users\Raptawk\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\AnimatedSprites\AnimatedSprites\AnimatedSpritesContent\Audio\GameAudio.xap AnimatedSprites

Obviously the destination is not correct but i don't know how to rectify it. Preferably I want to keep the object instantiation code the same (just like the book), so something elsewhere is messing up. A hand?

Delzhand

I don't know what the rest of the O'Reilly's code looks like, but it seems a bit unusual that you'd pass a full file path to a constructor. In most cases you don't need the file extension. Another possibility is that even if you've saved the wav to your Audio folder, you haven't added it to the project.

Tzyr

Awk, look at the audioEngine line. You wrote Contents, not Content.

redraptor

So was Penny Arcade Chronicles 3 done in XNA or did they transistion to another solution?

agoaj

redraptor wrote: »

So was Penny Arcade Chronicles 3 done in XNA or did they transistion to another solution?

XNA, mac and IOS versions will be ports using mono

Thendash

@Awk: I don't think you need the @Content part of the file name because it looks to me like it's doubling the whole path.

Tzyr

I'm pretty sure for audio, you need Content part of the path since it's a relative path from where the executable is located.

For graphics though, in the constructor:

Content.RootDirectory = "Content";

Is often set for you. If you load anything using the Content property, it already looks in the Content folder. Audio however is not initialized as such and needs Content.

That is at least my understanding of the systems.

Death of Rats

So is this for just XNA, or is unity welcome to?

Just spent the vast majority of the day/night trying to get myself accustomed to C# in unity (and in general).

So far I have a J shaped tetris block inside a grid. It moves down by one grid space at a steadily increasing speed. When it hits the bottom, it stops. The grid can also rotate (taking the block with it), and the block will then continue to fall down. I have a second J shaped block which does the same as the other block, and when they hit eachother, the one on top stops appropriately.

It may have taken me 7 or so hours, but I think for someone who's never programmed before that's not too bad.

Right? Right?

:oops:

RainbowDespair

agoaj wrote: »

redraptor wrote: »

So was Penny Arcade Chronicles 3 done in XNA or did they transistion to another solution?

XNA, mac and IOS versions will be ports using mono

Actually, the ports will be using Unity.

Delzhand

I've been fucking around with shaders all weekend trying to get an outline effect that doesn't suck balls. There are a lot of easy ways to do it that end up being terrible for low-poly models and models with split surfaces.

It seems like maybe the best way to go about it would be to apply the sobel post-process to the depth buffer. I haven't tried it yet, I'm kinda burned out after exhausting all the easy options. Has anyone else found a decent way to do it?

Alistair Hutton

Death of Rats wrote: »

So is this for just XNA, or is unity welcome to?

Just spent the vast majority of the day/night trying to get myself accustomed to C# in unity (and in general).

So far I have a J shaped tetris block inside a grid. It moves down by one grid space at a steadily increasing speed. When it hits the bottom, it stops. The grid can also rotate (taking the block with it), and the block will then continue to fall down. I have a second J shaped block which does the same as the other block, and when they hit eachother, the one on top stops appropriately.

It may have taken me 7 or so hours, but I think for someone who's never programmed before that's not too bad.

Right? Right?

:oops:

Seven hours and never programmed before? I don't know how much Unity does for you but that sounds close to heroic.

Death of Rats

Alistair Hutton wrote: »

Death of Rats wrote: »

So is this for just XNA, or is unity welcome to?

Just spent the vast majority of the day/night trying to get myself accustomed to C# in unity (and in general).

So far I have a J shaped tetris block inside a grid. It moves down by one grid space at a steadily increasing speed. When it hits the bottom, it stops. The grid can also rotate (taking the block with it), and the block will then continue to fall down. I have a second J shaped block which does the same as the other block, and when they hit eachother, the one on top stops appropriately.

It may have taken me 7 or so hours, but I think for someone who's never programmed before that's not too bad.

Right? Right?

:oops:

Seven hours and never programmed before? I don't know how much Unity does for you but that sounds close to heroic.

I've been reading up on C# and watching some stuff on 3D Buzz about unity, so I'm familiar with the syntax for everything.

The nice part about unity is that it has a component oriented system already in place. You have game objects that you put in via a GUI, and attach the scripts to that. Unlike XNA, as far as displaying visuals, everything is already there for you, and there's a lot of debug stuff built right into the editor. So basically what you really have to do is program just the logic, not so much anything as far as a visual engine. It's a lot more like making something with Unreal than programming something by scratch, even with the huge advantage something like XNA has built into it.