wazanator

In regards to the X-Axis remapping and remapping controls in general, it's actually quite easy in most cases to remap it in the code on a modern engine. If a game doesn't have it is a sign of oversight on the developers end or lazy programming... If you want a visual demonstration of how controller input is read plug in a controller you normally game with on your PC and go to http://html5gamepad.com/ notice the values change as you play around with the controller. Those are the values that your computer sends to the game. Buttons are either an on (1) or an off (0) and joysticks are from -1 to 1 (-1 = left, 0 = center, 1 = right). The problem developers will run into is if early on they do not plan for remapping and start hard coding things like this (please have pity on my ugly looking pseudo code): OnB1() { //The player has pressed button 1 so make them jump jump(); } Now B1 is hard coded to jump. Instead they should do something like: getKeybinds() { //code goes here that loops through and asks user for bindings or //checks menu fill in after they press accept //e.g. print("Please press the key you want for jump\n"); jumpKey = getUserKeyPress(); } OnJumpKey() { //The player has pressed the key bound to jump so make them jump jump(); } In this way your binds can be dynamic. In the case of X-Axis inversion you could do: //X axis works on a range of -1 to 1 with -1 being left, 0 being center, 1 being right //xAxisIsInverted is a boolean variable(true or false) that is toggled by the user //in the menu switching between on and off GetXAxisValue() { int value = xAxisPos(); if(xAxisIsInverted) { //invert the value value = value * -1; } return value; } Hope this helped to clear some of it up

Yes they do but it's not as much as people think. I'll use Prospket as an example. The game costs normally $9.99. Valve first takes a cut for the game selling on Steam which is meant to be under NDA because the amount may vary depending on different factors but people leak their percent quite often these days so you can estimate it to be about 30%, after that they take another cut for you using their I.P. which puts their total percent over 50% (Garry Newman talked about it in regards to Garrys Mods sales figures), and then the studio gets their cut. It used to be the case, I'm not sure if it still is, but Valve would offer to pay the Havok engine license cost on the condition that they get all of your cut from sales until it is paid off in this manner. Your studio would still be responsible for paying RAD tools. So to do some ballpark estimation: Prospket is $8.99 right now. You start in the hole at $25,000 along with the RAD Game Tools cost. Valves taking at least 30% of your sales for just using Steam and probably an extra twenty to thirty for using their I.P. Right now according to Steamspy they've sold 3,226 +- 1,235 so we'll wish high and say 4,500 units. That starts out at $40,455 but Valve takes 50% of that leaving you with $20,227. That's not even enough to pay off Havoks licensing. That's not bad numbers to start at though seeing as this isn't his main source of income and it will sell more units over time especially during future Steam sales, however if you were a small studio team and you were relying on this being the game to kickstart the studio you're going to be sweating bullets like Outerlight probably was and look what happened to them

So as a forward this post is going to come across as kind of a downer about Valve in regards to the Source Engine modding scene but I do want to emphasize that Valve has done a lot of great things for modding as a whole throughout the years it's just the Source side of things has kind of gone downhill. I'm not sure where to really start but I guess I should mention I've been apart of the Source Engine modding scene since 2008 starting with the original Portal before moving into the total conversion modding scene. To start off it is worth pointing out the actual licensing deals that take place in order to get your mod/game on Steam if it is using the Source Engine. You can read Valves FAQ on it here, but to quickly sum it up, you can use any Valve IP you want and you can release on Steam and there is no fee so long as your mod is free but you must still go through the green light process (unless Valve waives it for you). If you want to sell your mod on Steam (such as Black Mesa, Aperture Tag, and Prospekt (the Opposing Forces sequel)) Pay Havok's licensing fee of $25,000 up front Get in contact with RAD tools and negotiate the price of using MILES and/or BINK You can only sell on Steam and distribute through Steam unless you upgrade to a full engine license You will have to work out a deal with Valve in regards to their cut Releasing a paid mod on Steam is almost always a huge financial investment on the developers end unless something gets worked out with Valve. Also worth mentioning is the middle ware licensing increases depending on what platforms you want to release on. Source SDK 2013 compiles for Windows/OSX/Linux but that doesn't mean that Havoks $25,000 up front cost covers all three. Robert Briscoe, the guy behind Dear Esther, has a good blog post up explaining how he was blind sided by these costs and other problems. To further complicate things Valves approach to the Source Engine modding scene since about 2010 has been that of a full time working parent who doesn't have time for their kids but they still really love their kids and they want them to know that. What I mean by this is out of the blue updates will happen and new interesting things will get added for modder use but Valve doesn't have the time to document them properly or stick around to help fix some of the other issues that have been plaguing the community. A good example of this is Vscripts which is one of the best additions to the engine as it adds the ability to write and execute squirrel based script files at run time giving mappers a ton more control and allowing you to easily create new game modes for games like Counter-Strike Global Offensive, however the documentation for it is bare bones and there is no tutorial or proper explanation of how you should use it. If you wanted to make a Source Engine mod right now most of their documentation and a lot of older tutorials will tell you to download the Source SDK tool kit from Steam. Unfortunately that tool set is not only outdated but is completely broken since 2013 with no explanation, warning or how to work around it given. What made that issue even more pressing was up until that day that was how you launched Hammer, the level editor, for HL2, TF2, CSS and all Source mods. Luckily the community figured out in about a month that going forward from now on you had to dig into the games files and launch hammer from the bin folder. This was made more of an issue by the fact that at that time Source was going on nine years old which meant the most popular of getting started guides and videos who's creators have long since left the scene were now out of date and providing false info so anyone new coming into the community was left thinking they were messing up despite following tutorials that had thousands of views and comments saying it worked. To this day we still regularly get on various forums people asking what it is they are doing wrong. On the other end of the scale though at the same time Valve released Source branch 2013 which has become the standard branch and merged the TF2, CSS, DoDS, and HL2 branches into one as well as provide HL2 and it's episodes content free for anyone to use in a Source mod as well changing it so you no longer were required to own a Source Engine game or even have one installed so long as you downloaded the SDK Base 2013. They also went ahead and discontinued all support for 2006, 2007, 2009, and the Alien Swarm branches. But as of late (2014-Present) there has emerged a new issue of Valve branching that engine into two beta branches, beta_test and upcoming. If you are using the newest version of the 2013 game code from their GitHub you and your users must be opted into beta_test on Steam, if you don't the game CTD's on launch with an error. Steam will not opt you into the proper one automatically. This is of course not a problem if your mod has made it through greenlight as it no longer depends on the user installing the SDK base those files are packed into your mod on Steam for you. But if you are having to distribute through a site like ModDB it means you have to make sure your users understand this catch and how to properly switch, however as we all know users are not always the brightest and will often blame the mod team for when it does crash on launch because they didn't follow directions. Then there comes the problem of the tools and proper front ends for these tools. Unless you are wanting to just use base content in a map you have to use a series of command line executables and batch files. Luckily members of the community have made GUI front ends for these but since the big 2013 update a number have become broken and like the people who wrote the tutorials a lot of them have moved on. Biggest problem is the model compiling GUI, if you want to see a nightmare of an asset pipeline go look up how to properly get a model from Blender into the game and then remind yourself afterwards you have to repeat that entire process again if you want to change anything about the model. There's other problems but I think you get point. In general it feels like Valve has sort of stopped caring about the Source Engine community except when it suits them either for good press or profit and I get it they're a company and they are looking out for themselves but at the same time they are burning bridges with Source Engine veterans. A lot of us it has reached the point where we feel like we're being taken advantage of since Valve has made it clear that if the community wants documentation, tutorials, proper tools, etc they can do it themselves. Anyway that's just my two cents on the Source Engine modding scene topic from this weeks episode, hope I wasn't too much of a negative Nancy.