Gorbles

A short post here, but I put most of what I wanted to say in a blog post - https://gorbles.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/honeycomb.html. Next on the list is improving the render cycle as well as implementing a global messaging system that'll allow me to delegate game events to the relevant subsystems in a much nicer way. Trying to minimise dependence on listeners as they can pile up quite quickly, and quite messily.

Haven't done a huge amount this weekend, was too busy with Life™ and such. Spent a lot of the last week doing internal refactoring and making a lot of the UI generation less horrific. LayeredImageFactory now handles a lot of the font / word generation, short term bug is that I broke the default colour for the words on my UI, but to compensate I've got keyword highlighting in there and intelligent cropping of whole words inside paintable areas (it'll start new lines, etc): Next up is improving the main ingame painting loop as well as caching a lot of the generated BufferedImages. It's a bit expensive to be redrawing everything (including new object instantiation) every frame so I'm going to implement a few things to handle that. All of this is kinda a distraction from having a serious look at the renderer as I'm seriously not looking forward to even the most basic of physics in that regard. Thread.sleep(1000 / 60) is my preferred limit, haha

Updated with new logo, beta release and improved notes / progress. Going to spend a bit of time cleaning up the code; this project doesn't really need it but the tech I'm building will serve as a base in future. Going to aggregate some of the font rendering code and shove it into a factory that returns nice single BufferedImages (removes the need for a lot of tedious looping) and maybe look at the render loop to see if I can do some frame-predictive stuff.

I honestly didn't realise there wasn't threading support in Unity. I'd be even more surprised if Unreal didn't offer it. Unreal is also in C++ so heck it might be better just to try that out and see where you get in a month or so.

I saw this briefly on Twitter before it was buried in all the other retweets those bots do. Neat stuff!

It's a perfect depiction of the regular Batman universe that most people can identify with, using a consistent set of voice actors and tying the general aesthetic look and feel with DC's mostly-recent offerings, from the Bale era to the upcoming Bats vs. Supes affair. Yes, there is a multiverse, yes, lots of crazy stuff happens, yes, DC (and often, Marvel) have no idea how to manage their a billion and one variant products, but that's mostly an aside. There are important points to be made about the game as a series, absolutely, and I'll try and avoid going to deep into the game in this thread, because we have far more important things to be looking at. But my point is that doesn't mean that this jibe isn't still a jibe aimed at the same place. Culture is a very interesting point going forwards, though. There is always a culture of harassment. There has, generally, always been one. GamerGate is simply the latest vaguely-mainstream manifestation with significant overlap with feminist theory and how it's more recently been rising in video games. I think we need to start looking at the how we fix this, and I don't think nixxing everything that could potential contribute to an idiot's worldview is going to help - that in itself will end up significantly repressing creative efforts ironically in the way GG is currently crying about (which, obviously, isn't happening at the moment. I'm speaking in theoreticals, to be clear). Better nuance within the troublesome parts of the medium we're exploring - more awareness of the connotations of violence, thinking exercises, the works (Batman actually does a bit more than the average smash-them-up here - which is why I say the Bat-universe is what isn't helping contribute to the general tone of the game(s)). More thought around the notion of a freeform fighting system that magically incapacitates enemies instead of what reality would dictate by the force of physics involved - killing them. That's a fine criticism of the Arkham series and especially of Knight, from what I've read of the Batmobile. But this takes time. We've just got to keep on getting better, as individuals, as an industry, as a sector, all of it. Criticise the bad bits, but don't use that as reason to not have a bit of a laugh at the lighter-hearted bits. (I mean really, was that single tidbit on an ingame computer worth an entire news article? Or multiples thereof?)

The blogpiece that has been linked here already is good, but ultimately you have to bear in mind that these games are made, there is a market for them. The developers getting in a jibe against GamerGate is good in that it shows more of the industry climate against GG (not that that's particularly necessary, but eh). Does it excuse the other issues inherent in such games? Or really, Batman in general because all the game does is model the Bat-universe exquisitely? Not at all. But those issues don't mean this is any less of a decent snipe against GG. Trying to draw a link between the two smacks of pedantry, given how indescribably minor this footnote against GG is in the first place.

The only thing dumber than this being such a bad release (why do WB think they can get away with it) is the general tendency to never edit a Steam review. People are still gonna be parroting issues with this game at release in six months time, sadly.

As someone with the musical talent of a hippo (I was going to say gnat but they do funny things with air pressure), just want to thank you for this thread. Bookmarked!

Bit of a bump, but if anyone is interested they've been showing off their expansion news for some time now. The game has had a couple of patches which address a couple of large mechanical complaints from release (mainly, Wonders and Health). Doubt it'll suddenly make anyone do a 180, but good progress all the same. I absolutely love the game - far more than I got into CiV and I only got CiV with G&K attached. But that's just me - it's been fascinating reading peoples' sci-fi opinions and their favourite authors. Also, more love for Peter F. Hamilton, geez!

I got linked here, posting to remind myself to change my Gravatar. Really nice reads in parts of the forum, and really pleasant atmosphere. Something I've missed in my more historic gaming haunts, of late! I'm a software guy, and I dabble in games dev. on the side. Looking forward to lots of inane debate