Dinosaursssssss

a couple from my first hours with Fallout 4 Hot tip, to hide the UI on PC, hit ~ then type 'tm' and hit enter. Same thing to show it again.

I was sorta hoping the Boston geography would be more accurate; probably shouldn't have expected it, but it's really jarring for me seeing Harvard Square and MIT represent all of Cambridge, with the city ending a block away from the Harvard train station. There are a few recognizable landmarks scattered around, but certain areas like Concord feel so distant from their real life counterpart that it pulls me out a bit. I went to high school in Concord and have lived around Cambridge for the past 6ish years so I'm probably just a little too familiar with it. That said, obviously they were gonna change the geography to make this game playable, and I think they did a great job of capturing the feel of the area. Even if the layout is unrecognizable, the environments and lightning of the woods around Concord feel just right and the architecture feels true to reality (though of course mixed in with Fallouts 50s retro future thing). Anyway, played maybe 8 hours yesterday and I'm enjoying it so far. The main story writing isn't grabbing me, but the Settlers for fo3/new vegas was easily my favorite mod for those games, so the town building aspect is really doing it for me (even though the tutorialization for it is awful).

in the 20 minutes it took to assemble the Pip Boy and put my phone in it, I broke it twice; once pressing a button on top that immediately fell inside, the fitting my phone in I ripped the crappy phone inserts to hold the phone in place. As expected it's incredibly flimsy and feels cheap. Also I ran the installer off the CD, which seems to have installed 1/4 of the game, and the rest is downloading over Steam.

I made a little idle game in 24 hours for Extra Life, the code is up on github: https://github.com/ChrisMaire/ghost-econ Pretty happy with this one, a nice benefit of trying to emulate stuff like A Dark Room/Candy Box is that the bar for UI is set real low, and its kind of expected that some mechanics won't really be explained, which is kind of ideal for a jam game.

I ended up watching all of Austin Walkers Extra Life stream while I was also extra lifin' and I really enjoyed it. He manages to be insightful despite playing and talking for 12 straight hours, and plays a fun mix of stuff. I particularly dug the bizarre Star Wars Mount & Blade mod he busts out in about hour 5. Also, someone just make a damn wrestling thread already; I have a bunch of New Day gifs that need a home.

The trailers focus on artificial intelligence ethics feels like a really weird fit for Fallout to me.

Basically optional themes/restrictions to give people a jumping off point. These are the Global Game Jam ones, to give you an idea of what they're like: http://globalgamejam.org/news/introducing-ggj-2015-diversifiers

You could also post them in this thread https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/9232-where-to-find-game-assets-audiotexturesmodelsetc/page-3

Threading in Unity is weird; if you use built in C# threading methods, you won't have access to the unity API, so if you want to do vector or quaternion math you need to basically rewrite those classes. It's a hassle, but definitely possible. If I remember right there is some rendering and other stuff in the background that is threaded too. There was a talk I linked on the first page called 'A Little Math for your Big Ideas' that touches on how to handle threading in Unity; I believe in his buoyancy system, all the vector positions of the water surface mesh are calculated in a separate thread. Also it's true that foreach/linq performance isn't the best, and people will rightly tell you not to use them for performance reasons, but as long as you aren't on using them in Update() or running them against enormous data sets it's really not noticeable. If you're doing hobbyist development for PC or another platform with a decent amount of ram, it's not something I would worry about at all.

Edit: I think we're full up, sorry! For the Winter Wizard Jam, I'm on a mission to turn the world of winter jam games upside down. To that end, I'll be recruiting a crack team of the most brilliant, driven, skilled developers I can find to build the next big thing in winter game jam games. Do you have what it takes to change the face of winter gaming as we know it? We have a number of exciting positions available: Quality Assurance Associate Community Manager Creative Director / Lead Designer Art Director Graphic / UI Designer Senior Producer Technical Lead Gameplay Engineer Graphics Engineer Don't see a position that fits your unbelievable skillset? Submit an application with what you'd like to do, and we'll see if there's a place for you on the team. Join us, and lets make something great, together. Dinosaursssssss Chief Executive Officer / Executive Producer BigDog Productions My hope is that this format will give folks with specific skills that don't fit into a smaller jam-sized dev team a place to be involved and learn a bit about development. It'll be kinda like game development roleplay. No experience required, we'll form up, take design pitches from team members, then see if 6+ heads are better than one. I will be primarily working as a producer (and if needed, Unity3D consultant) on this project. To apply, PM me with your desired role, timezone / availability, and optionally a portfolio so we can gauge the teams strengths. If you join, you'll be expected to communicate with the rest of the team via the Slack, and we'll be using industry standard tools for version control and task tracking (Perforce or Git, and Hansoft or Jira, depending on how many people join up, due to licensing). Disclaimer: This might end up being a real mess, but I think it'll be a good time.

two people accused me of being in the KKK

I don't disagree, but I'm gonna throw out there that technically Boston is a majority minority city. I think after the last census I read that the city was 47% white.

huh, I didn't think anyone gave a shit about Steam curation.

I ended up basically using the Threes model, which is you get a certain number of plays per day and can watch an ad to get more or buy the game for a buck to play forever. Threes gives you an absurd number of daily plays though, something like 10, which seemed like a lot to me (though, granted, I've played a lot of Threes). I think the developer has said on twitter that it did really well (better than the premium version, at least). My experience with showing the game at events and talking to the general public is that no one buys games on their phone. And especially not anyone under 18.

Basically what I wanted to do is apply the distortion part of that CRT effect to my UI to make it looks as though the hud is being displayed on a curved space helmet. The problem is you can't selectively apply an image effect like that; it always has to apply to the entire screen. I think? I'm certainly no expert, but I googled around and it seems to just be a limitation of how image effects work. The workarounds I can think of are, 1, what I attempted, which is to put all the UI into a render texture and overlay that quad on the camera view, or 2, to build the entire UI in 3D and write a shader with a similar effect that I use on every ui element. I kinda wanted to build the UI in 3D anyway so I'm gonna be investigating that approach I guess.

I spent a while last night messing with image effects and shaders, trying to get my UI to have a nice inward curve. I found a super useful tutorial that got me most of the way there, but I'm not sure what I wanna do can be done using the Unity UI system. It seems like camera effects can't be applied to specific cameras or layers, as (I guess) the source image parameter for OnRenderImage() is the final image with all the cameras combined. I tried a weird solution where I put all my UI on a rendertexture that's laid over the over the screen on a quad, but I couldn't get it looking good, so I'm not sure what I'm gonna do.

I made a free version of MILE-AGE, since I figured I wasn't gonna sell any more copies of the paid version. It was interesting to go back to, I think it's a better game than I remember. I played a bit last night and had fun. The main things I'd change are that the progression system feels very random and the UI is a little clunky; I think it's the result of the UI work not being fun for me, so I ended up ignoring it until I had to and cutting anything that wasn't necessary. I suspect if I'd put the project down for a week or two and gone back to it, I would have seen that and been inclined to fix it. I'm still working on a proper post-mortem; Fun Ghost's Haunted Fun Factory LLC turned 1 the other day so I started a write up, but it was very boring so I've been punching it up a bit.

I threw together a quick ad supported version of my last game, MILE-AGE. Still in cert for iOS but the Android version is up now. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funghost.mileagefree

You smell nice.

The original banner was by Coods! Also my quoted post is grammatically incorrect, and should mention that GameMaker also has visual scripting Last wiz jam I tried to work on my 3d art skills, I think this time around I'd like to pick up LÖVE or Corona and learn LUA finally, or finally actually dig into C++.

Alright, all the Unite talks are up so I'm gonna finish recommending stuff. A must watch if you're doing mobile engineering or graphics optimization. , from the awesome Elliot Mitchell, who runs the Boston Unity Group. I didn't actually watch this one (yet!) but a bunch of people recommended it. . Alex organized the Valve sponsored VR jam here, and has been working with the Valve VR hardware for quite a while, so he knows his stuff.

This talk is a brutal but fair take on the possibility of success as an indie from Rami

Yeah, it wasn't really in my original design but having proper collisions on the planet geometry seemed like it could open up some possibilities. Though really I think the reason I went this route was I continue to be unreasonably scared by shaders. The main problem I ran into is that all the triangles in the mesh are stored in an array, where every 3 indices are the corners of a triangle (ie, mesh.triangles[0], mesh.triangles[1], mesh.triangles[2] is one triangle) and if the edges are hard, each vertex appears multiple times in the array, so actually figuring out what triangles are connected and properly shifting the ones close to each other was more work than I anticipated. Maybe that's a standard thing, I donno, my knowledge of how meshes work is pretty limited so this has been slow going. I think to do this right I need to do some pre-processing and maintain a list of which triangles are adjacent and which vertices in the triangle list are actually the same. I spent a night fiddling and would like to get back to it, but there's a mountain of other work I'm trying to get done first. Anyway, yours look awesome! I should really just accept that I'm too lazy to learn shader programming and buy shader forge. edit: If anyone's curious, here's the code. Note that my GetAdjacentVertices method sucks and does not work, so I'm not including it, and also I didn't actually test if the collider updated. Also I'm not actually sure I need to recalculate the normals or optimize, but the snippets I saw online did, so I am too for now. //Takes in an icosphere mesh and makes continents on it void MakePlanet(MeshRenderer meshRenderer) { MeshCollider meshCollider = meshRenderer.gameObject.GetComponent<MeshCollider>(); MeshFilter meshFilter = meshRenderer.gameObject.GetComponent<MeshFilter>(); Mesh mesh = meshFilter.mesh; Vector3[] verts = meshFilter.mesh.vertices; int[] triangles = meshFilter.mesh.triangles; Vector3[] ContinentCenters = new Vector3[NumContinents]; for(int i = 0; i < NumContinents; i++) { List<int> adjacents = GetAdjacentVertices(meshFilter.mesh, Random.Range(0, verts.Length)); foreach (int adjVertex in adjacents) { Vector3 point = verts[adjVertex]; Vector3 outwardDir = (point - Vector3.zero).normalized * ContinentHeight; verts[adjVertex] = point + outwardDir; } } mesh.vertices = verts; mesh.RecalculateBounds(); mesh.RecalculateNormals(); mesh.Optimize(); meshCollider.sharedMesh = null; meshCollider.sharedMesh = mesh; }

Yeah that talk is amazing, probably my favorite from the conference. Definitely a must watch for anyone doing professional mobile development or...space stuff. A lot of what they talk about is kinda beyond me though; I think I need to learn a lot more about writing shaders before I'll really be able to make use of it. Your procedural planet thing looks good! I started working on something very similar but didn't get quite as far; it took me a little while to grasp how Unity stores triangles/verts. Here's my hilariously bad first attempt: This is from a few days ago, but if I remember right these were getting the same deformation script run on them, but the left one has hard edges.