Unity really seems to be picking up momentum. I am always hesitant on them since the engine is so locked off. It really says allot that Microsoft is supporting it.
Ran across this from the Unity subreddit http://slides.com/cratesmith/how-to-use-unity#/ (press the down arrow to see code/examples/detail on some slides) and I like some of the suggestions it has. It's mostly pretty high level but I think it looks like a decent way to structure things. I've been working with Unity for a little while now but the projects have been short and haven't given the small team a chance to really work on following any kind of best practises. Curious if anyone has thought on the slides suggestions. The reddit discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/2c13ty/a_best_practices_presentation_about_the_worst/
So far because my projects have been pretty small and quick I keep running into both ends of the generic vs specific components and coding. I don't want to spend a lot of time building things that are like more frameworks on top of an already existing framework. But then I also run into situations where that would have been useful. I guess it's always a balancing act.
KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
I fixed my issue by the way, thanks for the replies. I forgot that I posted here actually haha. I'll post again if I have anymore troubles or when I finally feel comfortable sharing progress.
Dusdais ashamed of this postSLC, UTRegistered Userregular
@Delzhand are you working on your game through an LLC or something? The BizSpark program is amazing. I haven't had to pay for a copy of Visual Studio or really any Microsoft software in years.
a little over half of conventional diablo-RPG mechanic is done in my source code... I am really dreading UI coding though. I have made a small collection of GUI controls from scratch in SDL2, but actually sizing and placing the GUI is so damn exhausting.
I look in vein for evidence of anyone every successfully merging something like a Qt GUI overlay on top of SDL2... I really want something with a visual editor and not just a more sophisticated code-only approach
a little over half of conventional diablo-RPG mechanic is done in my source code... I am really dreading UI coding though. I have made a small collection of GUI controls from scratch in SDL2, but actually sizing and placing the GUI is so damn exhausting.
I look in vein for evidence of anyone every successfully merging something like a Qt GUI overlay on top of SDL2... I really want something with a visual editor and not just a more sophisticated code-only approach
Yes GUI coding is a pain. When I was still working with XNA I had started to build myself a UI framework that would render UI object similarly to XAML (Silverlight/WPF). This way I didn't have to deal with placement as containers (grid, panels...) would take care of the positioning and scaling for me.
I seriously suggest you build yourself a grid based framework that can contain sub grids that are defined as rows and columns. This way you can quickly partition zones on you screen for the UI elements and place them inside grid sections. Have all the positioning calculations be automatic.
Once you have that light framework you can either build your UI with xml or make a simple editor that uses your ingame renderer.
I got to the point where I wanted to implement a UI in my game/framework. I stopped to think about what I needed and said "Fuck that," downloaded Awesomium, and just blitted the Awesomium buffer over the final, rendered frame. Chromium Embedded Framework might be a better choice than Awesomium though, I just didn't know where the D bindings for it were when I did it, so chose Awesomium instead.
I have been working with mongame lately. I am working on getting tmx maps to render.
I found some free code from here. Her test example renders the level in a windows form. I found out that it did render multiple tilesets on a map. Had to add that in.
Now, I need to get it to render in monogame. Monogame has a sample that is an old converted XNA example. I am going to try to amalgamate the tmx renderer into that. The old example uses a txt file to map the levels, so I will replace that with the tmx loader.
I was recently called upon to start learning iOS development as a "just in case" sort of deal at work, and ended up teaching myself objective-c and cocos2d/spritekit to build games, and as a direct result ended up building a ton of projects (some following tutorials, some not), and overall, this is probably the most motivated I've been getting back into gamedev that I've been since my pygame days. I'm actually thinking about doing my first release on the app store soon (need some more polish before I jump to anything) and then I'm probably going to grab some of my earlier projects and start porting them to iOS. I also joined the makegameswith.us online academy (which has not been as impressive as I had originally hoped).
Amusingly, I've been a Ruby developer for nearly 7 years, and my github account is already nearly 50% iOS/ObjectiveC projects, and most of the Ruby things are one-offs that I'm probably just going to throw away after some period of inactivity.
Still, though, it feels good to finally be getting something into a completed state, and the whole "one completed project is worth one hundred incomplete projects" thing has really started resonating with me in a big way.
ain't got one
+1
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Oh. VSTools doesn't work with Visual Studio Express. It requires Pro.
Huh. Let's just see how much Pro is...
$1,199.00
If you're paying full price (or at all) for Visual Studio, you're fundamentally doing it wrong. And I mean this in a completely legal way. There are myriad avenues to get Visual Studio Pro at a deep discount or downright free.
I got to the point where I wanted to implement a UI in my game/framework. I stopped to think about what I needed and said "Fuck that," downloaded Awesomium, and just blitted the Awesomium buffer over the final, rendered frame. Chromium Embedded Framework might be a better choice than Awesomium though, I just didn't know where the D bindings for it were when I did it, so chose Awesomium instead.
Now my UI is done with HTML.
Awesomium is how I'm doing the UI in my current Unity side project. I know HTML/JavaScript from doing them constantly at work, so it was a no brainer for me.
Oh. VSTools doesn't work with Visual Studio Express. It requires Pro.
Huh. Let's just see how much Pro is...
$1,199.00
If you're paying full price (or at all) for Visual Studio, you're fundamentally doing it wrong. And I mean this in a completely legal way. There are myriad avenues to get Visual Studio Pro at a deep discount or downright free.
Do share. Can you get it that way if you are not a student?
How does Awesomium bind to the data? How is that at all performant? I need a click and drag GUI too that feeds back to the game, wondering if that is even close to the realm of reality. Suspect I would take as much time solving that as I would just making it in The Old Ways
Anyone doing ludum dare this month? I've never participated in a Ludum Dare, only ever pygame competitions (and even then, those were probably nearly 10 years ago), and since I've been on a pretty big motivation uptick I think I'm going to jump in and do it.
Anyone doing ludum dare this month? I've never participated in a Ludum Dare, only ever pygame competitions (and even then, those were probably nearly 10 years ago), and since I've been on a pretty big motivation uptick I think I'm going to jump in and do it.
I totally recommend doing it. I did the last one with @Kashaar and @Kusmeroglu, and it was a blast. I don't know about Kashaar, but Kusmeroglu and I are skipping this one since PAX is the following weekend (that and I have about 40 hours of filming the Monday-Wednesday following the dare and before PAX).
Oh. VSTools doesn't work with Visual Studio Express. It requires Pro.
Huh. Let's just see how much Pro is...
$1,199.00
If you're paying full price (or at all) for Visual Studio, you're fundamentally doing it wrong. And I mean this in a completely legal way. There are myriad avenues to get Visual Studio Pro at a deep discount or downright free.
Do share. Can you get it that way if you are not a student?
Someone already pointed it out, but get a simple LLC to develop your game under and get in on the BizSpark program which is super easy to do and gives access to professional level tools at cut rates.
An LLC costs about... 200 bucks depending on your state.
VS2014 costs.. almost a thousand? over a thousand? pretty much no downside to it. plus, an LLC is just a good thing to have if you ever plan on releasing anything ever
+1
Dusdais ashamed of this postSLC, UTRegistered Userregular
Oh. VSTools doesn't work with Visual Studio Express. It requires Pro.
Huh. Let's just see how much Pro is...
$1,199.00
If you're paying full price (or at all) for Visual Studio, you're fundamentally doing it wrong. And I mean this in a completely legal way. There are myriad avenues to get Visual Studio Pro at a deep discount or downright free.
Do share. Can you get it that way if you are not a student?
Someone already pointed it out, but get a simple LLC to develop your game under and get in on the BizSpark program which is super easy to do and gives access to professional level tools at cut rates.
Correction: it's basically free. My company, Rentler, has been on the BizSpark program for two years and never paid a dime for any Microsoft software. Visual Studio Ultimate, SQL Server whatever, Management Studio, Office, Windows 7/8 licenses, everything. It's fucking awesome, and we qualify for the program until we make more than $texas annually or late 2017 (the program lasts up to five years).
e: I think there's a signup fee of like $40 or something, but it's pennies compared to what you get.
I am going to be participating in this Ludum Dare for sure. I really enjoyed the last one and I learned a lot in a short period of time. This time around, whatever the theme is I know my game is going to be about bacon somehow. That's a promise.
@DiamondGFX - You should totally take part. It's fun.
After doing a bunch of work to get comfortable in unity2d, I am probably going to enter on the team side of it.
Some of the stuff that comes out of the Jams, with teams, is amazing. The art alone in some of the last LD submissions were amazing.
If you did not participate last time, here is the list of all the most voted games and such by category. There is a vote at the end but in general that's just a secondary part. The community and the crazy stuff put out is what makes it really fun.
Oh. VSTools doesn't work with Visual Studio Express. It requires Pro.
Huh. Let's just see how much Pro is...
$1,199.00
If you're paying full price (or at all) for Visual Studio, you're fundamentally doing it wrong. And I mean this in a completely legal way. There are myriad avenues to get Visual Studio Pro at a deep discount or downright free.
Do share. Can you get it that way if you are not a student?
Someone already pointed it out, but get a simple LLC to develop your game under and get in on the BizSpark program which is super easy to do and gives access to professional level tools at cut rates.
Correction: it's basically free. My company, Rentler, has been on the BizSpark program for two years and never paid a dime for any Microsoft software. Visual Studio Ultimate, SQL Server whatever, Management Studio, Office, Windows 7/8 licenses, everything. It's fucking awesome, and we qualify for the program until we make more than $texas annually or late 2017 (the program lasts up to five years).
e: I think there's a signup fee of like $40 or something, but it's pennies compared to what you get.
Can an LLC just be one person? Do they have to produce something?
Really it seems like a bad idea to make an LLC until you really have a game together.
Really it seems like a bad idea to make an LLC until you really have a game together.
Incorrect.
An LLC is a legal entity that provides a person with all kinds of good leverage and tactics for business and finance. Having one puts no obligation on the owner in most states. Check your local laws. In Florida its completely burden-free.
I'd not heard of Awesomium until people here started mentioning it, so I went and read about it on their site. Got very excited about the idea of ultra quick and easy game menus for prototyping and such, and downloaded it.
Couldn't figure out why the demo wasn't working until I made a build and it suddenly worked. Looked online and apparently it doesn't work in the editor ? Please tell me I'm missing something as I am so disappointed right now.
i can't figure out at all how Awesomium provides useful GUIs
i can see how it provides read-only HUDs
but the docs are terrible and I'm not that desperate to figure it out
Awesomium is basically just a fancy wrapper around WebKit (or Gecko? I can't remember, it's one of them). It presents a very browser like DOM model to your JavaScript, and here's the important bit: You can manipulate that DOM data (read/write) and respond to events coming from the JavaScript side in your native code.
In most cases, you would want to write most of your pure UI code in JavaScript/HTML, and then have it call down in to your native engine when it needed to actually make changes to the game world. So if you had an inventory UI, you may need some hooks like the following (completely pulled from my ass as an example):
GetItemInfoFromID - Called by your JavaScript to get the info of an item the user has rolled over
MoveItem - Move an item from one inventory slot to another, done in response to drag/drag
RemoveItem - Removes/destroys an item from the inventory
The actual act of dragging, dropping and clicking is handled by your HTML/JavaScript UI, which at some point in it's processing, calls down in to your engine to effect game state.
In some ways it's actually an incredibly clean way to do things. It forces your UI code to be separate from your game code, and forces you to figure out and expose those hook points for the UI to actually manipulate your engine.
UE4 guys today showed a preview of their new UI system Unreal Motion Graphics. It feels almost like WPF.
I saw that stream, looks good. But what's WPF?
Windows Presentation Foundation. Microsoft's current UI framework for desktop apps. Silverlight was the web version of it and Windows 8 is built upon the same technology for Metro apps. All of these can be done with a designer but I find it's best to just build your UI directly with xaml (html like scripting language).
When I say that it feels like WPF I mean that everything is essentially a container that can house other controls inside. For example a button is not just a box with a background and text, it actually has a content property allowing it to contain a grid with other buttons or list of values and so on. It is extremely flexible. The best usage is for a list of values, you can give your list a complex template that will render each value with that template. In this way you could have a list of people and each entry would be a full control with picture, editable fields and delete or edit buttons. The other main feature of WPF is databinding where the UI is in sync with your datamodel and vice versa where a change to the UI will update your datamodel.
In some ways it's actually an incredibly clean way to do things. It forces your UI code to be separate from your game code, and forces you to figure out and expose those hook points for the UI to actually manipulate your engine.
And it means that other people with existing skillsets/tools for HTML and JavaScript can be applied rather than learning/creating your own toolset/markup-language/whatever-you're-using-to-build-your-UI.
Awesomium is not perfect for doing the UI. Being a full blown HTML renderer does make it much bulkier than something more targeted like ScaleForm. It just has the advantage of being reasonably simple to get going (Took me less than a day, including dealing with what appear to just plain be bugs in Awesomium). I haven't looked at it too much, but I imagine Chromium Embedded Framework is probably a better choice. I just picked Awesomium because it has a relatively reasonable license and I'm the idiot that's using D and didn't find a CEF binding when I looked. :P
I'm going to try it. I realized I was clicked on the much less robust .NET wiki, instead of the C++ wiki.
I wish I had enough money for ScaleForm though
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Eh, I dunno, ScaleForm is basically a re-implementation of Flash/ActionScript. Not really sure what ScaleForm buys you now that HTML5 and EcmaScript 5 are in the wild (and things like Awsomium exists). Basically anyone who can make SWF files can make HTML5 UI's.
I won't be surprised at all when ScaleForm announces their own HTML5 product (if they haven't already) as Flash begins to wind down as a technology.
Well, mostly that ScaleForm is targeted at games, so I imagine it sacrifices some features and abilities in exchange for a lower memory footprint and greater performance. I've never actually used ScaleForm though.
0
MachwingIt looks like a harmless old computer, doesn't it?Left in this cave to rot ... or to flower!Registered Userregular
For those of y'all who are using Maya for modelling/animation, I've jumped into tools development by writing a script to streamline the process of exporting rigs for game engines. Anybody who has had to work with a complicated rig knows that cleaning it up for export (deleting controls, constraints that the game engine doesn't like, etc.) can be an enormous pain in the ass. I've tried to make it a two-click process; one to specify a bone in the skeleton you want to keep, and one to run the script.
This was my first foray into Python, and my first try at extending Maya's functionality (and my first real attempt as a user interface!). I plan on adding support for blendshapes and a way to batch-process multiple files easily. Feedback is appreciated!
Posts
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/07/29/visual-studio-tools-for-unity-1-9.aspx
Great news for unity devs using visual studio
So far because my projects have been pretty small and quick I keep running into both ends of the generic vs specific components and coding. I don't want to spend a lot of time building things that are like more frameworks on top of an already existing framework. But then I also run into situations where that would have been useful. I guess it's always a balancing act.
Huh. Let's just see how much Pro is...
$1,199.00
and I'm done, VOD is available in link if anyone wants to watch
I look in vein for evidence of anyone every successfully merging something like a Qt GUI overlay on top of SDL2... I really want something with a visual editor and not just a more sophisticated code-only approach
Yes GUI coding is a pain. When I was still working with XNA I had started to build myself a UI framework that would render UI object similarly to XAML (Silverlight/WPF). This way I didn't have to deal with placement as containers (grid, panels...) would take care of the positioning and scaling for me.
I seriously suggest you build yourself a grid based framework that can contain sub grids that are defined as rows and columns. This way you can quickly partition zones on you screen for the UI elements and place them inside grid sections. Have all the positioning calculations be automatic.
Once you have that light framework you can either build your UI with xml or make a simple editor that uses your ingame renderer.
Steam: Handkor
Now my UI is done with HTML.
I found some free code from here. Her test example renders the level in a windows form. I found out that it did render multiple tilesets on a map. Had to add that in.
http://tiledmax.xpod.be/
Now, I need to get it to render in monogame. Monogame has a sample that is an old converted XNA example. I am going to try to amalgamate the tmx renderer into that. The old example uses a txt file to map the levels, so I will replace that with the tmx loader.
http://www.monogame.net/2014/04/17/new-breed-of-samples-for-monogame/
This seems like a great place to start though if you want to go tile based.
Amusingly, I've been a Ruby developer for nearly 7 years, and my github account is already nearly 50% iOS/ObjectiveC projects, and most of the Ruby things are one-offs that I'm probably just going to throw away after some period of inactivity.
Still, though, it feels good to finally be getting something into a completed state, and the whole "one completed project is worth one hundred incomplete projects" thing has really started resonating with me in a big way.
If you're paying full price (or at all) for Visual Studio, you're fundamentally doing it wrong. And I mean this in a completely legal way. There are myriad avenues to get Visual Studio Pro at a deep discount or downright free.
Awesomium is how I'm doing the UI in my current Unity side project. I know HTML/JavaScript from doing them constantly at work, so it was a no brainer for me.
Do share. Can you get it that way if you are not a student?
I totally recommend doing it. I did the last one with @Kashaar and @Kusmeroglu, and it was a blast. I don't know about Kashaar, but Kusmeroglu and I are skipping this one since PAX is the following weekend (that and I have about 40 hours of filming the Monday-Wednesday following the dare and before PAX).
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Someone already pointed it out, but get a simple LLC to develop your game under and get in on the BizSpark program which is super easy to do and gives access to professional level tools at cut rates.
VS2014 costs.. almost a thousand? over a thousand? pretty much no downside to it. plus, an LLC is just a good thing to have if you ever plan on releasing anything ever
e: I think there's a signup fee of like $40 or something, but it's pennies compared to what you get.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
I am going to be participating in this Ludum Dare for sure. I really enjoyed the last one and I learned a lot in a short period of time. This time around, whatever the theme is I know my game is going to be about bacon somehow. That's a promise.
@DiamondGFX - You should totally take part. It's fun.
Some of the stuff that comes out of the Jams, with teams, is amazing. The art alone in some of the last LD submissions were amazing.
If you did not participate last time, here is the list of all the most voted games and such by category. There is a vote at the end but in general that's just a secondary part. The community and the crazy stuff put out is what makes it really fun.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/
Can an LLC just be one person? Do they have to produce something?
Really it seems like a bad idea to make an LLC until you really have a game together.
Yes.
Absolutely not.
Incorrect.
An LLC is a legal entity that provides a person with all kinds of good leverage and tactics for business and finance. Having one puts no obligation on the owner in most states. Check your local laws. In Florida its completely burden-free.
Couldn't figure out why the demo wasn't working until I made a build and it suddenly worked. Looked online and apparently it doesn't work in the editor ? Please tell me I'm missing something as I am so disappointed right now.
i can see how it provides read-only HUDs
but the docs are terrible and I'm not that desperate to figure it out
Awesomium is basically just a fancy wrapper around WebKit (or Gecko? I can't remember, it's one of them). It presents a very browser like DOM model to your JavaScript, and here's the important bit: You can manipulate that DOM data (read/write) and respond to events coming from the JavaScript side in your native code.
In most cases, you would want to write most of your pure UI code in JavaScript/HTML, and then have it call down in to your native engine when it needed to actually make changes to the game world. So if you had an inventory UI, you may need some hooks like the following (completely pulled from my ass as an example):
GetItemInfoFromID - Called by your JavaScript to get the info of an item the user has rolled over
MoveItem - Move an item from one inventory slot to another, done in response to drag/drag
RemoveItem - Removes/destroys an item from the inventory
The actual act of dragging, dropping and clicking is handled by your HTML/JavaScript UI, which at some point in it's processing, calls down in to your engine to effect game state.
In some ways it's actually an incredibly clean way to do things. It forces your UI code to be separate from your game code, and forces you to figure out and expose those hook points for the UI to actually manipulate your engine.
Steam: Handkor
I saw that stream, looks good. But what's WPF?
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Windows Presentation Foundation. Microsoft's current UI framework for desktop apps. Silverlight was the web version of it and Windows 8 is built upon the same technology for Metro apps. All of these can be done with a designer but I find it's best to just build your UI directly with xaml (html like scripting language).
When I say that it feels like WPF I mean that everything is essentially a container that can house other controls inside. For example a button is not just a box with a background and text, it actually has a content property allowing it to contain a grid with other buttons or list of values and so on. It is extremely flexible. The best usage is for a list of values, you can give your list a complex template that will render each value with that template. In this way you could have a list of people and each entry would be a full control with picture, editable fields and delete or edit buttons. The other main feature of WPF is databinding where the UI is in sync with your datamodel and vice versa where a change to the UI will update your datamodel.
Steam: Handkor
Awesomium is not perfect for doing the UI. Being a full blown HTML renderer does make it much bulkier than something more targeted like ScaleForm. It just has the advantage of being reasonably simple to get going (Took me less than a day, including dealing with what appear to just plain be bugs in Awesomium). I haven't looked at it too much, but I imagine Chromium Embedded Framework is probably a better choice. I just picked Awesomium because it has a relatively reasonable license and I'm the idiot that's using D and didn't find a CEF binding when I looked. :P
I wish I had enough money for ScaleForm though
I won't be surprised at all when ScaleForm announces their own HTML5 product (if they haven't already) as Flash begins to wind down as a technology.
This was my first foray into Python, and my first try at extending Maya's functionality (and my first real attempt as a user interface!). I plan on adding support for blendshapes and a way to batch-process multiple files easily. Feedback is appreciated!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26862668/RigToGamev1.zip