All my problems this week come because I literally forgot what the name of my control object was (obj_playercontrol).
I am really passionate about my project and really want to do this and make my creativity manifest in some fashion, but whoever said it earlier was right, on again, off again coding is not sustainable.
All my problems this week come because I literally forgot what the name of my control object was (obj_playercontrol).
I am really passionate about my project and really want to do this and make my creativity manifest in some fashion, but whoever said it earlier was right, on again, off again coding is not sustainable.
What is your background in? And what is your experience with coding?
Nothing, and coding is mainly coursework using Arcpy and geocoding in classroom settings. Plus a bunch of code and mod experiments in Fallout that helped a lot in the classroom. Really easy to scrape and geocode after you spend hours forcing papyrus to script this encounter properly.
If you come back and can't remember stuff, there's a few things to help(If you're going to take gaps)
1: Comment! comment comment comment comment comment comment. Even if you think it's super obvious.
I would rather see:
//Loops through every note in the melody, and adds the pitch to the list of pitches
foreach(Note _note in Melody){ Pitches.Add(_note.Pitch);}
than even have to go "Ok what is this loop doing now". Even if it seems obvious, the comment is easy to just read and parse.
2: Make sure your names are super descriptive. something like "obj_playercontrol" is pretty good(though the casing could be better. "PlayerControlObject" or "Object-PlayerControl"?) Also if you know what generally it might be called, you can go "Hey did I call something player controller?" and ctrl-f "PlayerControl" or something.
3: Combining these, at the beginning of a file, class, namespace, function, whatever to comment out what it does and what it implements.
So I for instance have
//findSeed takes a list of ints as the current seed(the previous 1-5 deltas), and the Markov chain to check the seeds against
//it then goes through the markov chain to find a seed, and if they don't match up, truncates the current seed.
//if no seed is found, returns the 0-seed item of the markov chain.
//findSeed returns the markov cell whose seed matches.
MarkovCell findSeed(List<int> seed, List<MarkovCell> markovChain)
{
etc. etc. etc.
}
That way if you go back you can pretty easily get yourself back up to speed about what exactly things are doing.
4: Leave notes for yourself(especially if it's a single-person project.
I'll often have stuff in code like
//TO DO: Swap the specific references to a reference passed in the arguments, and he variables to derive from the argument. Also, add in weighting based on the current contour.
And I can look at where I was and go "Oh right, I needed to do this"
Really, this is just a long way of saying that comments everywhere are your best friend for returning to code. And essential as projects become larger.
Yeah, this was me mainly getting lazy and not double checking code. Each object in gamemaker has an information button in its properties, so if I had proper coding, then I could have marked it with this
///Setting Variables
//obj_playercontrol is the control object for each level.
//Invisible, it moves along at a constant speed
// and the room's view is tied to it
//Player constants
health = 100;
lives = 3;
score = 0;
defaultplayerdamage = 1;
playerdamage = defaultplayerdamage;
// obj_playercontrol values
movespeed = 1;
Damn man, that is looking fucking great. I played a demo for Thief 2 back when it was new, and while I didn't actually get the game, I've always held it in the back of my head as a kind of platonic ideal of a genre. But now it's old enough that I don't think it'd live up to what I thought, so I guess what I'm saying is finish your game so I can play a proper modern Thief :P
Damn man, that is looking fucking great. I played a demo for Thief 2 back when it was new, and while I didn't actually get the game, I've always held it in the back of my head as a kind of platonic ideal of a genre. But now it's old enough that I don't think it'd live up to what I thought, so I guess what I'm saying is finish your game so I can play a proper modern Thief :P
Thief is awesome so you should go back and play it. But I am also really excited for LaCabra's Thief.
Any code you can share for the dynamic music? I am curious how that would work.
Progress today, finally got the floaty shooty type enemy going, then I realized as I was typing this out that it wasn't following the viewport and I had to redo it.
Now I'm a little further back than where i was before, with my enemy flying off the screen after I had it fine. But I did make up the difference, and getting it right in the beginning will save me time later, I think.
Damn man, that is looking fucking great. I played a demo for Thief 2 back when it was new, and while I didn't actually get the game, I've always held it in the back of my head as a kind of platonic ideal of a genre. But now it's old enough that I don't think it'd live up to what I thought, so I guess what I'm saying is finish your game so I can play a proper modern Thief :P
Thief is awesome so you should go back and play it. But I am also really excited for LaCabra's Thief.
Any code you can share for the dynamic music? I am curious how that would work.
I'm not sure how LaCabra's version is working, but dynamic music is super easy, with middleware(I'm not 100% sure about unreal's onboard music stuff)
In something like FMOD or Wwise, you can set different effects, clips and combinations of clips to have different parameters that can be passed from the game. So an easy example is, say, as the player gets closer to a guard, put a lo-pass filter on the audio, with the Q narrowing as they get closer, to indicate concentration, or heightened tension, or whatever. Maybe if the guard is "searching" you fade up some drums, but if they're not, you fade out the drums.
Then in the game you can just send a parameter like "Distance from Guard" to the audio engine, and it'll fade down the Q to narrow the spectrum. Or you indicate a bool of "Searching" which the audio middleware then blends into/out of the "searching" mix when it's true/false.
My thing is more or less just crossfading between 5 different music tracks based on whether there are any hostile NPCs within a radius of the player, and what the highest alert state among those hostile NPCs is. The intensity levels/different tracks are
"ambient" (there is nobody around who would be hostile if they saw you)
"unaware" (there is but they have no idea anything is amiss)
"suspicious" (someone heard a noise but doesn't know for sure it was anything important)
"searching" (they know you're around and are actively looking for you)
"combat" (they saw you and are drawing swords and trying to chase/kill you)
each "song" (set of 5 audio tracks) is set up in a single sound cue and crossfades by a float parameter (0-4 for the 5 states) as below. in the video, you can see the ProcMusicComponent's eventgraph lerping that float towards the current alert state.
it's not a whole lot o' graph:
i'm just headin' to bed but can go into more detail tomorrow if ya'll want
My thing is more or less just crossfading between 5 different music tracks based on whether there are any hostile NPCs within a radius of the player, and what the highest alert state among those hostile NPCs is. The intensity levels/different tracks are
"ambient" (there is nobody around who would be hostile if they saw you)
"unaware" (there is but they have no idea anything is amiss)
"suspicious" (someone heard a noise but doesn't know for sure it was anything important)
"searching" (they know you're around and are actively looking for you)
"combat" (they saw you and are drawing swords and trying to chase/kill you)
each "song" (set of 5 audio tracks) is set up in a single sound cue and crossfades by a float parameter (0-4 for the 5 states) as below. in the video, you can see the ProcMusicComponent's eventgraph lerping that float towards the current alert state.
it's not a whole lot o' graph:
i'm just headin' to bed but can go into more detail tomorrow if ya'll want
In my experience if you use UE4's sound system, those sounds will be pretty out of sync... if you want tracks to sync up when fading, then atm you have to use a third party solution like fmod. Simple enough though!
Taco Bell is doing a little something for Indie Game devs. I submitted my game because.. why not? 500 in free Taco Bell would make for a great game jam or even support/feed some kind of indie-charity event.
My thing is more or less just crossfading between 5 different music tracks based on whether there are any hostile NPCs within a radius of the player, and what the highest alert state among those hostile NPCs is. The intensity levels/different tracks are
"ambient" (there is nobody around who would be hostile if they saw you)
"unaware" (there is but they have no idea anything is amiss)
"suspicious" (someone heard a noise but doesn't know for sure it was anything important)
"searching" (they know you're around and are actively looking for you)
"combat" (they saw you and are drawing swords and trying to chase/kill you)
each "song" (set of 5 audio tracks) is set up in a single sound cue and crossfades by a float parameter (0-4 for the 5 states) as below. in the video, you can see the ProcMusicComponent's eventgraph lerping that float towards the current alert state.
it's not a whole lot o' graph:
i'm just headin' to bed but can go into more detail tomorrow if ya'll want
In my experience if you use UE4's sound system, those sounds will be pretty out of sync... if you want tracks to sync up when fading, then atm you have to use a third party solution like fmod. Simple enough though!
really? i havent experimented much but that seems like an obvious lacuna if true... being able to play sounds in time seems like such an obvious feature
My thing is more or less just crossfading between 5 different music tracks based on whether there are any hostile NPCs within a radius of the player, and what the highest alert state among those hostile NPCs is. The intensity levels/different tracks are
"ambient" (there is nobody around who would be hostile if they saw you)
"unaware" (there is but they have no idea anything is amiss)
"suspicious" (someone heard a noise but doesn't know for sure it was anything important)
"searching" (they know you're around and are actively looking for you)
"combat" (they saw you and are drawing swords and trying to chase/kill you)
each "song" (set of 5 audio tracks) is set up in a single sound cue and crossfades by a float parameter (0-4 for the 5 states) as below. in the video, you can see the ProcMusicComponent's eventgraph lerping that float towards the current alert state.
*snip*
it's not a whole lot o' graph:
*snip*
i'm just headin' to bed but can go into more detail tomorrow if ya'll want
In my experience if you use UE4's sound system, those sounds will be pretty out of sync... if you want tracks to sync up when fading, then atm you have to use a third party solution like fmod. Simple enough though!
really? i havent experimented much but that seems like an obvious lacuna if true... being able to play sounds in time seems like such an obvious feature
From what I've been given to understand, it's due to the way sounds are played. Apparently all UE4 does is pass the audio file into the hardware sound buffer or something, meaning that if a sound is not audible, it's not being played... which means that if you fade it out and fade it in again, it starts again from the beginning.
It kinda sucks if you want to do anything more advanced with sounds, especially music.
From what I've been given to understand, it's due to the way sounds are played. Apparently all UE4 does is pass the audio file into the hardware sound buffer or something, meaning that if a sound is not audible, it's not being played... which means that if you fade it out and fade it in again, it starts again from the beginning.
It kinda sucks if you want to do anything more advanced with sounds, especially music.
Can you play it at 1% ?
Cornucopiist on
+2
KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
My thing is more or less just crossfading between 5 different music tracks based on whether there are any hostile NPCs within a radius of the player, and what the highest alert state among those hostile NPCs is. The intensity levels/different tracks are
"ambient" (there is nobody around who would be hostile if they saw you)
"unaware" (there is but they have no idea anything is amiss)
"suspicious" (someone heard a noise but doesn't know for sure it was anything important)
"searching" (they know you're around and are actively looking for you)
"combat" (they saw you and are drawing swords and trying to chase/kill you)
each "song" (set of 5 audio tracks) is set up in a single sound cue and crossfades by a float parameter (0-4 for the 5 states) as below. in the video, you can see the ProcMusicComponent's eventgraph lerping that float towards the current alert state.
*snip*
it's not a whole lot o' graph:
*snip*
i'm just headin' to bed but can go into more detail tomorrow if ya'll want
In my experience if you use UE4's sound system, those sounds will be pretty out of sync... if you want tracks to sync up when fading, then atm you have to use a third party solution like fmod. Simple enough though!
really? i havent experimented much but that seems like an obvious lacuna if true... being able to play sounds in time seems like such an obvious feature
From what I've been given to understand, it's due to the way sounds are played. Apparently all UE4 does is pass the audio file into the hardware sound buffer or something, meaning that if a sound is not audible, it's not being played... which means that if you fade it out and fade it in again, it starts again from the beginning.
It kinda sucks if you want to do anything more advanced with sounds, especially music.
ah. i guess the fix is to set the volume to something undetectable then like corn suggests and just run everything at all times!
http://www.fmod.org/sales/
Free for non-commercial, and you get 1 free commercial licence per year if your budget is <$100k.
swag, i shall check it out!
surrealitycheck on
0
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
I have been tooling around in RPG Maker VX Ace for a while, I've had this dumb idea to make an RPG since I was a kid and here is a tool that lets me finally do that. But man, it feels like every time I have a cool idea, it turns out to be prohibitively difficult to implement in RPG Maker.
Like I wanted to have reactive battle music, so that when party members die instruments get stripped out of the music accordingly. And in boss fights, the opposite would happen where doing more damage and taking out phases makes the music amp up.
Took this idea to the RPG Maker nerds who told me naw, that ain't gonna be happening dawg.
And now I dunno what to do, cause I feel like I'm not smrt enough to learn how to mek the game from scratch without having a nice program that lets me drag and drop stuff into it. Are there more flexible 'babys first game maker' programs out there that might be a better fit for me?
I have been tooling around in RPG Maker VX Ace for a while, I've had this dumb idea to make an RPG since I was a kid and here is a tool that lets me finally do that. But man, it feels like every time I have a cool idea, it turns out to be prohibitively difficult to implement in RPG Maker.
Like I wanted to have reactive battle music, so that when party members die instruments get stripped out of the music accordingly. And in boss fights, the opposite would happen where doing more damage and taking out phases makes the music amp up.
Took this idea to the RPG Maker nerds who told me naw, that ain't gonna be happening dawg.
And now I dunno what to do, cause I feel like I'm not smrt enough to learn how to mek the game from scratch without having a nice program that lets me drag and drop stuff into it. Are there more flexible 'babys first game maker' programs out there that might be a better fit for me?
So... A: Yes there are tons of pretty easy game engines. Construct 2 is pretty great, and GameMaker has people who really like it. However, stuff like your audio needs might not be super easy with them(I've heard that GameMaker is actually the worst thing that has ever existed for sound). Having access to middleware(FMOD and Wwise specifically, which both have free versions for personal use) B: using the "big boys" like Unity and Unreal is way easier than I think you think it is(Lumberyard maybe, but I haven't really checked it out, and since it's just Cryengine, I've heard real bad things about its documentation). Unreal you never have to write a single line of code if you don't want to, for instance. Unity has amazing documentation, which starts from literally "Put a ball in a scene. Now you have a ball!". They both have a drag-and-drop interface in terms of adding things to scenes, so you're not just staring at banks of code all day, or anything like that.
Also, you can sort of approach the engines as much as you want to. For instance, you can totally get into uses of Coroutines v. Update(), or if you're no big into programming, you can just shove your code all into Update() because honestly, who cares at that point?
The meatier engines definitely are going to be more work than something like RPG Maker, but picking up the basics is actually really easy, and if you're concerned about being able to implement more advanced ideas later on, you can always do that.
And now I dunno what to do, cause I feel like I'm not smrt enough to learn how to mek the game from scratch without having a nice program that lets me drag and drop stuff into it. Are there more flexible 'babys first game maker' programs out there that might be a better fit for me?
So... A: Yes there are tons of pretty easy game engines. Construct 2 is pretty great, and GameMaker has people who really like it. However, stuff like your audio needs might not be super easy with them(I've heard that GameMaker is actually the worst thing that has ever existed for sound). Having access to middleware(FMOD and Wwise specifically, which both have free versions for personal use) B: using the "big boys" like Unity and Unreal is way easier than I think you think it is(Lumberyard maybe, but I haven't really checked it out, and since it's just Cryengine, I've heard real bad things about its documentation). Unreal you never have to write a single line of code if you don't want to, for instance. Unity has amazing documentation, which starts from literally "Put a ball in a scene. Now you have a ball!". They both have a drag-and-drop interface in terms of adding things to scenes, so you're not just staring at banks of code all day, or anything like that.
Also, you can sort of approach the engines as much as you want to. For instance, you can totally get into uses of Coroutines v. Update(), or if you're no big into programming, you can just shove your code all into Update() because honestly, who cares at that point?
The meatier engines definitely are going to be more work than something like RPG Maker, but picking up the basics is actually really easy, and if you're concerned about being able to implement more advanced ideas later on, you can always do that.
All of the above. When I was working with the Coldstone engine, pretty much 80% of the effort was hacky workarounds to the built-in limits. For Unity, there's quite a few limits, but they all have 'off the shelf' and solid workarounds which you can search for on their own site. It does require some coding, though.
Looking back (a long time) at devving on Coldstone, the built-in limits, and the reluctance of the developers to adress them, were what killed most projects. Either you accept the engine you're on and focus on content (which, for an RPG, do not underestimate how much time you'll spend in designing maps and writing strings) or jump to another platform ASAP.
A smarter platform should also let you generate procedural content- there should be plugins/mods that even do the coding on those- which'll allow you to focus on the wordbuilding at a higher level.
Posts
Sauce?
Pretty sure there's been a third party c# integration, but anything official?
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
not exactly official but
I am really passionate about my project and really want to do this and make my creativity manifest in some fashion, but whoever said it earlier was right, on again, off again coding is not sustainable.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
What is your background in? And what is your experience with coding?
I'm smart, but I've no experience.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
1: Comment! comment comment comment comment comment comment. Even if you think it's super obvious.
I would rather see:
//Loops through every note in the melody, and adds the pitch to the list of pitches foreach(Note _note in Melody){ Pitches.Add(_note.Pitch);}than even have to go "Ok what is this loop doing now". Even if it seems obvious, the comment is easy to just read and parse.2: Make sure your names are super descriptive. something like "obj_playercontrol" is pretty good(though the casing could be better. "PlayerControlObject" or "Object-PlayerControl"?) Also if you know what generally it might be called, you can go "Hey did I call something player controller?" and ctrl-f "PlayerControl" or something.
3: Combining these, at the beginning of a file, class, namespace, function, whatever to comment out what it does and what it implements.
So I for instance have
//findSeed takes a list of ints as the current seed(the previous 1-5 deltas), and the Markov chain to check the seeds against //it then goes through the markov chain to find a seed, and if they don't match up, truncates the current seed. //if no seed is found, returns the 0-seed item of the markov chain. //findSeed returns the markov cell whose seed matches. MarkovCell findSeed(List<int> seed, List<MarkovCell> markovChain) { etc. etc. etc. }That way if you go back you can pretty easily get yourself back up to speed about what exactly things are doing.
4: Leave notes for yourself(especially if it's a single-person project.
I'll often have stuff in code like And I can look at where I was and go "Oh right, I needed to do this"
Really, this is just a long way of saying that comments everywhere are your best friend for returning to code. And essential as projects become larger.
and had it come out like that...
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Thief is awesome so you should go back and play it. But I am also really excited for LaCabra's Thief.
Any code you can share for the dynamic music? I am curious how that would work.
Now I'm a little further back than where i was before, with my enemy flying off the screen after I had it fine. But I did make up the difference, and getting it right in the beginning will save me time later, I think.
Edit: Holy shit, it works.
Now to figure out a shotgun effect.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I'm not sure how LaCabra's version is working, but dynamic music is super easy, with middleware(I'm not 100% sure about unreal's onboard music stuff)
In something like FMOD or Wwise, you can set different effects, clips and combinations of clips to have different parameters that can be passed from the game. So an easy example is, say, as the player gets closer to a guard, put a lo-pass filter on the audio, with the Q narrowing as they get closer, to indicate concentration, or heightened tension, or whatever. Maybe if the guard is "searching" you fade up some drums, but if they're not, you fade out the drums.
Then in the game you can just send a parameter like "Distance from Guard" to the audio engine, and it'll fade down the Q to narrow the spectrum. Or you indicate a bool of "Searching" which the audio middleware then blends into/out of the "searching" mix when it's true/false.
My thing is more or less just crossfading between 5 different music tracks based on whether there are any hostile NPCs within a radius of the player, and what the highest alert state among those hostile NPCs is. The intensity levels/different tracks are
"ambient" (there is nobody around who would be hostile if they saw you)
"unaware" (there is but they have no idea anything is amiss)
"suspicious" (someone heard a noise but doesn't know for sure it was anything important)
"searching" (they know you're around and are actively looking for you)
"combat" (they saw you and are drawing swords and trying to chase/kill you)
each "song" (set of 5 audio tracks) is set up in a single sound cue and crossfades by a float parameter (0-4 for the 5 states) as below. in the video, you can see the ProcMusicComponent's eventgraph lerping that float towards the current alert state.
it's not a whole lot o' graph:
i'm just headin' to bed but can go into more detail tomorrow if ya'll want
In my experience if you use UE4's sound system, those sounds will be pretty out of sync... if you want tracks to sync up when fading, then atm you have to use a third party solution like fmod. Simple enough though!
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Taco Bell is doing a little something for Indie Game devs. I submitted my game because.. why not? 500 in free Taco Bell would make for a great game jam or even support/feed some kind of indie-charity event.
http://www.FeedTheBeta.com
What are you going to do with your tacos HallowedFaith?
really? i havent experimented much but that seems like an obvious lacuna if true... being able to play sounds in time seems like such an obvious feature
From what I've been given to understand, it's due to the way sounds are played. Apparently all UE4 does is pass the audio file into the hardware sound buffer or something, meaning that if a sound is not audible, it's not being played... which means that if you fade it out and fade it in again, it starts again from the beginning.
It kinda sucks if you want to do anything more advanced with sounds, especially music.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Probably host a game jam here in my town and have Taco Bell cater it. I'm not gonna eat all that lol.
Can you play it at 1% ?
Go to your nearest city and walk around feeding the homeless. That's what I would do.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
ah. i guess the fix is to set the volume to something undetectable then like corn suggests and just run everything at all times!
does fmod cost... money... though
*blanches in disgust and fear*
Free for non-commercial, and you get 1 free commercial licence per year if your budget is <$100k.
I can see the headline now, "Local Indie Game Dev crushed by Taco crazy mob"
swag, i shall check it out!
Like I wanted to have reactive battle music, so that when party members die instruments get stripped out of the music accordingly. And in boss fights, the opposite would happen where doing more damage and taking out phases makes the music amp up.
Took this idea to the RPG Maker nerds who told me naw, that ain't gonna be happening dawg.
And now I dunno what to do, cause I feel like I'm not smrt enough to learn how to mek the game from scratch without having a nice program that lets me drag and drop stuff into it. Are there more flexible 'babys first game maker' programs out there that might be a better fit for me?
The ugly pcgamer article I think I posted on the first page listed the pro's and cons of various game creation software with testimonials.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
So... A: Yes there are tons of pretty easy game engines. Construct 2 is pretty great, and GameMaker has people who really like it. However, stuff like your audio needs might not be super easy with them(I've heard that GameMaker is actually the worst thing that has ever existed for sound). Having access to middleware(FMOD and Wwise specifically, which both have free versions for personal use) B: using the "big boys" like Unity and Unreal is way easier than I think you think it is(Lumberyard maybe, but I haven't really checked it out, and since it's just Cryengine, I've heard real bad things about its documentation). Unreal you never have to write a single line of code if you don't want to, for instance. Unity has amazing documentation, which starts from literally "Put a ball in a scene. Now you have a ball!". They both have a drag-and-drop interface in terms of adding things to scenes, so you're not just staring at banks of code all day, or anything like that.
Also, you can sort of approach the engines as much as you want to. For instance, you can totally get into uses of Coroutines v. Update(), or if you're no big into programming, you can just shove your code all into Update() because honestly, who cares at that point?
The meatier engines definitely are going to be more work than something like RPG Maker, but picking up the basics is actually really easy, and if you're concerned about being able to implement more advanced ideas later on, you can always do that.
Here's that article I meant.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I sticking with Gamemaker for 2D and Unity for 3D.
I feel like anyone with that complaint has no idea how good a deal they're getting
All of the above. When I was working with the Coldstone engine, pretty much 80% of the effort was hacky workarounds to the built-in limits. For Unity, there's quite a few limits, but they all have 'off the shelf' and solid workarounds which you can search for on their own site. It does require some coding, though.
Looking back (a long time) at devving on Coldstone, the built-in limits, and the reluctance of the developers to adress them, were what killed most projects. Either you accept the engine you're on and focus on content (which, for an RPG, do not underestimate how much time you'll spend in designing maps and writing strings) or jump to another platform ASAP.
A smarter platform should also let you generate procedural content- there should be plugins/mods that even do the coding on those- which'll allow you to focus on the wordbuilding at a higher level.
It's the game creators version of "Oh great, I just got a raise so now I have to pay even more in taxes!"