Maaaan, I really want to help, but I barely had time to look at the Shotgun Sunrise mod programming stuff last week. I definitely won't have time to work on this unless I were to quit my job or something. My school workload is conspiring to stop me from ever doing anything fun. X__X
Could I get an invite to the wave anyway? I want to help eventually but I guarantee it'll be of the small-unpaid-jobs variety. Until next summer that is.
(And then unexpectedly you'll all be "we want to implement this certain kind of algorithm but I can't find any tutorials or howtos," and then someone will say "man I wish we had a guy who was only about 12 credit hours away from his masters in computer science" and then I'll be like "I think that was directed at me! Yes, in fact I DID write a paper about time-series segmentation of event log data. Here's an algorithm!")
mspencer on
MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
It pretty much can't be, and yes I'm a HUGE nerd. :-)
Essentially all it's good for is taking a huge log of random-seeming events and some kind of homogeneity (sameness) metric, and finding order in the chaos. So for example you have a software commit changelog for a huge open source project, tens of thousands of entries. Instead of trying to analyze them over even one-year or one-month boundaries, you tell the algorithm to split the log into N chunks and it picks the boundaries that give maximum homogeneity within each chunk and minimum between chunks. What's cool is that you'll find the algorithm tends to pick cutoff times that correspond with real-world events that the algorithm couldn't have known about.
So the only game applications I can think of would be anything that's hugely data-driven, like analyizing tons of usability testing session logs, or maybe some crazy AI that needs to learn from a metric TON of player behavior data.
mspencer on
MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
Thanks for the serious definition... I guess you could use it for a super serious simulator of some sort. Or something? (The description went a bit over my head there :P)
Zetx on
0
pyromaniac221this just might bean interestin YTRegistered Userregular
edited November 2009
Wow. This kind of makes me wish I knew what any of this shit was. I installed it because I had a few minutes to burn, and when I opened it up my head nearly exploded. So fucking complicated, and way out of my league, but it looks interesting and definitely is something I'd want to learn about
If anyone here can tell me how to make my playerController class possess my Pawn class I might* send them a cookie.
All I could find was this:
PlayerControllers are used by human players to control Pawns, while AIControllers implement the artificial intelligence for the Pawns they control. Controllers take control of a Pawn using their Possess() method, and relinquish control of the pawn by calling UnPossess().
But I have no idea how to actually call the Possess() method or what class it should be called from.
*
won't actually send it but eat it myself
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
No problem. You're probably surprised that was a real actual thing. :-P And not so much a simulator -- literally it's for mining knowledge from data. A simulator would just use all of the data in total, and not try to aggregate it. Data mining is for learning or training. So, show players where they went wrong, or calculate the approximate "dramatic turning points" of a long and chaotic multiplayer game, or take a chaotic behavioral training set for an AI and separate it into more meaningful smaller training sets.
OK, enough out of me, back on topic. Sorry guys. :-)
I had to summarize that paper and give a presentation. The catch? Three of the four authors of that paper were the three professors who team-taught the class. I was presenting them their own paper. No stress, naw, none at all. *sweats bullets*
The first eight pages detail the algorithm, and the rest is them running the algorithm against developer commit logs for Mozilla, Eclipse, and Apache. I'd start with page 9, read why this is kinda cool, and THEN slog through the first eight pages. The couple pages that define the algorithm are VERY slow going, full of math and algorithm stuff, but take your time and it should make sense.
mspencer on
MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
I've wanted to get into amateur videogame creation for a long time. I have no experience except for dicking around with Hammer making a couple of crappy Half Life levels a few years ago.
I understand that it is hard work, long work, and it will take a considerable amount of input and dedication before you can come up with something playable, let alone good, but is it really as intimidating as this thread makes it sound?
I've wanted to get into amateur videogame creation for a long time. I have no experience except for dicking around with Hammer making a couple of crappy Half Life levels a few years ago.
I understand that it is hard work, long work, and it will take a considerable amount of input and dedication before you can come up with something playable, let alone good, but is it really as intimidating as this thread makes it sound?
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to dissuade you, but this is a pretty top of the line product they've just tossed out there.
There are quite a few triple A game made on this platform, so it can do some hefty stuff.
So it takes some work to understand it all on the programming side, but I don't really know as much about mapping. I'd ask Lacabra about that.
I've wanted to get into amateur videogame creation for a long time. I have no experience except for dicking around with Hammer making a couple of crappy Half Life levels a few years ago.
I understand that it is hard work, long work, and it will take a considerable amount of input and dedication before you can come up with something playable, let alone good, but is it really as intimidating as this thread makes it sound?
Depends on what type of work you're going to do. There is quite a bit of documentation on level building and asset creation that will help get you going if you want to edit levels or build models. And since 3ds max and Maya have been around forever and are industry standards there are TONS of tutorials out there on how to use those. The "harder" parts are when you start getting into code, mainly because 1) most people find the code part very boring and 2) The current UDK UnrealScript documentation isn't really setup for newbs, it's kinda of like not knowing English then being given a dictionary then being told to right a good story. (That's a horrible analogy, but I'm drunk and it's 2am)
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
I've wanted to get into amateur videogame creation for a long time. I have no experience except for dicking around with Hammer making a couple of crappy Half Life levels a few years ago.
I understand that it is hard work, long work, and it will take a considerable amount of input and dedication before you can come up with something playable, let alone good, but is it really as intimidating as this thread makes it sound?
Depends on what type of work you're going to do. There is quite a bit of documentation on level building and asset creation that will help get you going if you want to edit levels or build models. And since 3ds max and Maya have been around forever and are industry standards there are TONS of tutorials out there on how to use those. The "harder" parts are when you start getting into code, mainly because 1) most people find the code part very boring and 2) The current UDK UnrealScript documentation isn't really setup for newbs, it's kinda of like not knowing English then being given a dictionary then being told to right a good story. (That's a horrible analogy, but I'm drunk and it's 2am)
yeah, you'd end up getting "right" and "write" mixed up all the time
I loved level design more than anything. I think I spent more time in Build then I did playing DN3D proper, and I enjoyed slogging my way through the Hammer tutorials and watching my maps become better and better as I learned new techniques.
Lately I have really been wanting to get back into mapping, but was unsure as to which engine I wanted to learn (basically, I was unsure between Unreal and Source, although I was sorta leaning toward Source since everyone and their mom is coming up with HL2 mods, so it seemed like it would be easier to get help from more experienced mappers). It didn't really matter anyway, since I won't be able to get started until I build my new machine in December (my current rig has a hard time handling games from either engine).
But, this announcement tells me that there's going to be a huge amount of UE3 community projects springing up in the future, so I think it would be better to start working in UE3 and, once my skills are decent, get hooked up with (or create) one.
So, where would a guy like me find good resources for mapping with UnrealED, in terms of tutorials and interaction with other mappers?
For those on the VJISP team, I'm setting up VisualSVN at work today for a project I'm doing there, and if I like it, I'll set one up at home for the game.
God if only this was released 6 months ago. I had to do my capstone project at university and I could have used this beautiful piece of technology over everything else we had to use noooooooooo.
For the programmers out there - do you guys have any really good guides for games programming for programmers? I've got a few years experience with a number of languages (Java, C, C++, C# most specifically) and did a year of OpenGL programming. Without having had a proper try at it, I don't really know much about game programming. 99% of my coding is event based web or desktop applications made for business purposes, not so much active state based stuff.
So, anybody got any good guides? I mean I'm not a big dumbass when it comes to coding, but in games, performance is so fucking important, and I know that my hacky ways of dreaming up how to do something would most definitely not be the best.
For the programmers out there - do you guys have any really good guides for games programming for programmers? I've got a few years experience with a number of languages (Java, C, C++, C# most specifically) and did a year of OpenGL programming. Without having had a proper try at it, I don't really know much about game programming. 99% of my coding is event based web or desktop applications made for business purposes, not so much active state based stuff.
So, anybody got any good guides? I mean I'm not a big dumbass when it comes to coding, but in games, performance is so fucking important, and I know that my hacky ways of dreaming up how to do something would most definitely not be the best.
To be honest, I learned from seeing what other people did. The release of the Quake 2 source code (as messy and awfully commented as it was) was a huge boon for me. Obviously, that's all horribly outdated now, and there are countless internet references that probably are better.
So here I am thinking this is the same stuff that came with like UT2k3, not the UE3 stuff. Yeah, my PC can barely run UT2k3, let alone anything UE3. I loaded up the demo map in the editor and it was probably pushing about 10fps or less. Reasons I need a new fucking PC!
Man, I don't know what you guys are talking about. UE3 is complete cake compared to practically every other Editor out there.
I just got DA's editor setup over the weekend. After playing with that, and Hammer, and Marathon's editor (10'ish years ago?) UE3 is the easiest to use set of tools out there.
They're just so fucking powerful they'll intimidate you if you don't have a starting point.
Get the tutorials from the UT3 bonus disc - that's a fantastic place to start. (You can also find them on www.3dbuzz.com.) These tutorials cover everything in regards to static meshes, modeling basics, import tools for Maya, workflow, level editing stuff, material editor, Kismet, and much more)
Hourences is probably one of the best places for the level editing stuff. He's a smart guy:
I'll throw some more links in here when I get home
Some of this stuff may be outdated (in regards to lighting and how the tools are laid out), but 90% of that stuff is gold if you've never touched this.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited November 2009
So I got a custom package setup last night and started playing with making custom camera and player controllers. The whole thing really is quite powerful. You would think UnrealScript only would limit your possibilities, but the engine can be changed at a pretty low level with UnrealScript, provided you know what to look for and how to wire it up.
I saw a lot of people commenting that this was very shooter specific, which would be incorrect. It only seems that way at first blush because the editor automatically loads the UTGame package as part of it's start up, so you are going to see all the UTGame Actors and Pawns. You can tell the editor to load a different package entirely, and it will load your package instead, along with the core package. You can then literally create a game from scratch.
Note: This requires quite a bit of UnrealScript to get up and running any serious game concept. If you're an artist, and want to go down this path, I really suggest you learn Kismet, which makes rapid prototyping of game ideas quite a bit easier. You can then have a programmer go in behind you and take your Kismet script and optimize it.
Today's task, for me, is going through the Whizzle Development Diary (available as a PDF from here) and reading up on everything they did. I'll get back to you guys once I'm finished as to whether or not it's actually helpful to a programmer.
EDIT: Yeah, reading up on UnrealScript over at the Unreal Wiki, US is essentially a video game programming language. Anything you need done for games can go through US unless you really need it written in native code.
Kupi on
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited November 2009
The thing is, they give you so much access to the engine, you really could do anything you wanted in UnrealScript. You don't NEED access to the native code. You can quite literally create an entirely new game, in a totally different genre, just using UnrealScript and the editor. It will require quite a bit of work, but it can be done.
Kismet is extremely powerful as well. Using Kismet and the Editor, an aspiring game designer could wire up a really complete game demo idea, then get a serious US programmer to come back through and flesh out the entire game logic in UnrealScript.
The great thing about UnrealScript is that it compiles to native code. It's not interpreted. So when your game is running your US code, it's running very quickly. It's not as fast as hand tuned C++, of course, but it's still quite a bit quicker than an interpreted scripting language would be.
Yeah, by extending the GameInfo class, you can pretty much have your code do whatever you want.
That's why I was blown away that they released it as-is. It's an amazing package to have.
Yah, I still question the ability for indies to produces the masses of high quality art you're going to need to do a full blown UE3 game, but damnit, I don't care. There is so much power here.
The best part is, if you were to create a full indy game with the UDK, you can now claim real UE3 experience on a resume if you were trying to get a job in the industry.
In fact, I would really recommend aspiring designers (and even programmers) make something with this as a portfolio entry, because UE3 is becoming very ubiquitous this generation. If nothing else, it shows your perspective employer that you've successfully used a top tier engine and it's tools to do something, anything. The game development market is so competitive, the littlest things can get you an edge.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited November 2009
So....we really should get some of the talent together off this board and make something. In this thread alone we seem to have the folks capable of making art and doing the advanced scripting.
So....we really should get some of the talent together off this board and make something. In this thread alone we seem to have the folks capable of making art and doing the advanced scripting.
Well, on the one side you have LaCabra and his supr srs Interview-game crew and on the other, the rest of us are just screwing around doing our own thing -- unorganized.
My goal today is to make the camera stationary in a top-down position and create a simple box of a map to show it as such.
Zetx on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
So....we really should get some of the talent together off this board and make something. In this thread alone we seem to have the folks capable of making art and doing the advanced scripting.
Well, on the one side you have LaCabra and his supr srs Interview-game crew and on the other, the rest of us are just screwing around doing our own thing -- unorganized.
My goal today is to make the camera stationary in a top-down position and create a simple box of a map to show it as such.
I'm working on getting an isometric camera working, as I have this dream of doing an episodic tactical RPG on the Unreal engine.
So....we really should get some of the talent together off this board and make something. In this thread alone we seem to have the folks capable of making art and doing the advanced scripting.
Well, on the one side you have LaCabra and his supr srs Interview-game crew and on the other, the rest of us are just screwing around doing our own thing -- unorganized.
My goal today is to make the camera stationary in a top-down position and create a simple box of a map to show it as such.
I'm working on getting an isometric camera working, as I have this dream of doing an episodic tactical RPG on the Unreal engine.
So....we really should get some of the talent together off this board and make something. In this thread alone we seem to have the folks capable of making art and doing the advanced scripting.
Well, on the one side you have LaCabra and his supr srs Interview-game crew and on the other, the rest of us are just screwing around doing our own thing -- unorganized.
My goal today is to make the camera stationary in a top-down position and create a simple box of a map to show it as such.
I'm working on getting an isometric camera working, as I have this dream of doing an episodic tactical RPG on the Unreal engine.
For the longest time, my dream has been a game heavily inspired by Bomberman.
So....we really should get some of the talent together off this board and make something. In this thread alone we seem to have the folks capable of making art and doing the advanced scripting.
Well, on the one side you have LaCabra and his supr srs Interview-game crew and on the other, the rest of us are just screwing around doing our own thing -- unorganized.
My goal today is to make the camera stationary in a top-down position and create a simple box of a map to show it as such.
I'm working on getting an isometric camera working, as I have this dream of doing an episodic tactical RPG on the Unreal engine.
For the longest time, my dream has been a game heavily inspired by Bomberman.
Well if we're going there! My dream is a 3rd person loot crawl with JKII's combat system mixed with a physics system. But you guys have the ability to make your dreams come true! I wish you luck there
Posts
Could I get an invite to the wave anyway? I want to help eventually but I guarantee it'll be of the small-unpaid-jobs variety. Until next summer that is.
(And then unexpectedly you'll all be "we want to implement this certain kind of algorithm but I can't find any tutorials or howtos," and then someone will say "man I wish we had a guy who was only about 12 credit hours away from his masters in computer science" and then I'll be like "I think that was directed at me! Yes, in fact I DID write a paper about time-series segmentation of event log data. Here's an algorithm!")
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
So the only game applications I can think of would be anything that's hugely data-driven, like analyizing tons of usability testing session logs, or maybe some crazy AI that needs to learn from a metric TON of player behavior data.
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
All I could find was this:
But I have no idea how to actually call the Possess() method or what class it should be called from.
*
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
OK, enough out of me, back on topic. Sorry guys. :-)
Edit: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.139.6562&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I had to summarize that paper and give a presentation. The catch? Three of the four authors of that paper were the three professors who team-taught the class. I was presenting them their own paper. No stress, naw, none at all. *sweats bullets*
The first eight pages detail the algorithm, and the rest is them running the algorithm against developer commit logs for Mozilla, Eclipse, and Apache. I'd start with page 9, read why this is kinda cool, and THEN slog through the first eight pages. The couple pages that define the algorithm are VERY slow going, full of math and algorithm stuff, but take your time and it should make sense.
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
Then again, I also like shiny objects.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
I understand that it is hard work, long work, and it will take a considerable amount of input and dedication before you can come up with something playable, let alone good, but is it really as intimidating as this thread makes it sound?
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to dissuade you, but this is a pretty top of the line product they've just tossed out there.
There are quite a few triple A game made on this platform, so it can do some hefty stuff.
So it takes some work to understand it all on the programming side, but I don't really know as much about mapping. I'd ask Lacabra about that.
Depends on what type of work you're going to do. There is quite a bit of documentation on level building and asset creation that will help get you going if you want to edit levels or build models. And since 3ds max and Maya have been around forever and are industry standards there are TONS of tutorials out there on how to use those. The "harder" parts are when you start getting into code, mainly because 1) most people find the code part very boring and 2) The current UDK UnrealScript documentation isn't really setup for newbs, it's kinda of like not knowing English then being given a dictionary then being told to right a good story. (That's a horrible analogy, but I'm drunk and it's 2am)
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
yeah, you'd end up getting "right" and "write" mixed up all the time
:P
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
I loved level design more than anything. I think I spent more time in Build then I did playing DN3D proper, and I enjoyed slogging my way through the Hammer tutorials and watching my maps become better and better as I learned new techniques.
Lately I have really been wanting to get back into mapping, but was unsure as to which engine I wanted to learn (basically, I was unsure between Unreal and Source, although I was sorta leaning toward Source since everyone and their mom is coming up with HL2 mods, so it seemed like it would be easier to get help from more experienced mappers). It didn't really matter anyway, since I won't be able to get started until I build my new machine in December (my current rig has a hard time handling games from either engine).
But, this announcement tells me that there's going to be a huge amount of UE3 community projects springing up in the future, so I think it would be better to start working in UE3 and, once my skills are decent, get hooked up with (or create) one.
So, where would a guy like me find good resources for mapping with UnrealED, in terms of tutorials and interaction with other mappers?
I can scarcely believe they actually did it.
How many managers died to make this happen?
We could start a new thread once we have stuff to show, but we don't yet, besides some prototype offices.
So, anybody got any good guides? I mean I'm not a big dumbass when it comes to coding, but in games, performance is so fucking important, and I know that my hacky ways of dreaming up how to do something would most definitely not be the best.
To be honest, I learned from seeing what other people did. The release of the Quake 2 source code (as messy and awfully commented as it was) was a huge boon for me. Obviously, that's all horribly outdated now, and there are countless internet references that probably are better.
So here I am thinking this is the same stuff that came with like UT2k3, not the UE3 stuff. Yeah, my PC can barely run UT2k3, let alone anything UE3. I loaded up the demo map in the editor and it was probably pushing about 10fps or less. Reasons I need a new fucking PC!
TOTP FTL.
I just got DA's editor setup over the weekend. After playing with that, and Hammer, and Marathon's editor (10'ish years ago?) UE3 is the easiest to use set of tools out there.
They're just so fucking powerful they'll intimidate you if you don't have a starting point.
Get the tutorials from the UT3 bonus disc - that's a fantastic place to start. (You can also find them on www.3dbuzz.com.) These tutorials cover everything in regards to static meshes, modeling basics, import tools for Maya, workflow, level editing stuff, material editor, Kismet, and much more)
Hourences is probably one of the best places for the level editing stuff. He's a smart guy:
www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsindex.htm
I'll throw some more links in here when I get home
Some of this stuff may be outdated (in regards to lighting and how the tools are laid out), but 90% of that stuff is gold if you've never touched this.
Sorry coders, I don't got anything for you.
I saw a lot of people commenting that this was very shooter specific, which would be incorrect. It only seems that way at first blush because the editor automatically loads the UTGame package as part of it's start up, so you are going to see all the UTGame Actors and Pawns. You can tell the editor to load a different package entirely, and it will load your package instead, along with the core package. You can then literally create a game from scratch.
Note: This requires quite a bit of UnrealScript to get up and running any serious game concept. If you're an artist, and want to go down this path, I really suggest you learn Kismet, which makes rapid prototyping of game ideas quite a bit easier. You can then have a programmer go in behind you and take your Kismet script and optimize it.
EDIT: Yeah, reading up on UnrealScript over at the Unreal Wiki, US is essentially a video game programming language. Anything you need done for games can go through US unless you really need it written in native code.
Kismet is extremely powerful as well. Using Kismet and the Editor, an aspiring game designer could wire up a really complete game demo idea, then get a serious US programmer to come back through and flesh out the entire game logic in UnrealScript.
The great thing about UnrealScript is that it compiles to native code. It's not interpreted. So when your game is running your US code, it's running very quickly. It's not as fast as hand tuned C++, of course, but it's still quite a bit quicker than an interpreted scripting language would be.
*cries*
It's so....so beautiful.
That's why I was blown away that they released it as-is. It's an amazing package to have.
Yah, I still question the ability for indies to produces the masses of high quality art you're going to need to do a full blown UE3 game, but damnit, I don't care. There is so much power here.
The best part is, if you were to create a full indy game with the UDK, you can now claim real UE3 experience on a resume if you were trying to get a job in the industry.
In fact, I would really recommend aspiring designers (and even programmers) make something with this as a portfolio entry, because UE3 is becoming very ubiquitous this generation. If nothing else, it shows your perspective employer that you've successfully used a top tier engine and it's tools to do something, anything. The game development market is so competitive, the littlest things can get you an edge.
Well, on the one side you have LaCabra and his supr srs Interview-game crew and on the other, the rest of us are just screwing around doing our own thing -- unorganized.
My goal today is to make the camera stationary in a top-down position and create a simple box of a map to show it as such.
I'm working on getting an isometric camera working, as I have this dream of doing an episodic tactical RPG on the Unreal engine.
I'm listening...
For the longest time, my dream has been a game heavily inspired by Bomberman.
Well if we're going there! My dream is a 3rd person loot crawl with JKII's combat system mixed with a physics system. But you guys have the ability to make your dreams come true! I wish you luck there