erlog

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About erlog

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  1. Unity Questions Thread

    So GameObjects in Unity can be expensive(as your demo shows), and this is because GameObjects are kind of meant to be for complicated things that are going to be scripted somehow, interacted with by the player, or interact with the environment. For your demo here you should build a particle emitter that spits out meshes. Particle systems are used with sprites a lot, but there's nothing stopping you from spitting out your cubes too. http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ParticleSystems.html You could also combine the meshes of all your cubes together into a single game object as in the following question on the Unity site: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/10165/combine-objects-instantiated-at-runtime.html Basically, in order to optimize, you need to find a way to cut down on the memory footprint of each individual cube being constructed. GameObjects are handy, but there's a lot of overhead because there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes to make them so handy. This is also why there's an overall global limit to how many you can have in a scene. Right now there's a lot of cool possibilities because all those cubes are individual game objects, but your demo isn't really using any of those features. So optimization is about making the decision about what you want those things to do and making things more efficient by doing away with the possibilities you don't need.
  2. So I've been a lurker here for a while, but I only recently started posting here more. I recently picked up Nuclear Throne on Steam, and was surprised to see there hasn't been much discussion of it here. Nuclear Throne is a top-down shooter based in pulp sci-fi with randomly generated level layouts, random gun drops, permadeath, and a perk system. It's similar in a lot of ways to Spelunky in that the general progression is similar every game, but the random nature of different things in the game can change your play style pretty significantly. There's also a lot of characters to play, and each of them have their own special ability and traits. The title is a reference to the robot character who can eat guns to scavenge ammo and HP instead of leaving them on the ground to go to waste. That action is bound to the right mouse button just like all the other active specials, and sometimes that can lead to accidentally eating your gun before you get the hang of it. It sounds really annoying, but I find the whole idea of it pretty hilarious. So I usually just laugh really hard whenever that happens. One key difference from Spelunky is that the game is being designed to loop and increase in difficulty as you move forward through the levels in a kind of Dark Souls-esque way. That difficulty bump is not permanent, though. Most everything except for a really minor thing resets when you die. I thought Thumbs readers might want to discuss this game for 2 reasons. The first is that this is a place with people that appreciate Spelunky, and the second is that the development of the game is being streamed live by Vlambeer on Twitch. Dejobaan Games has also done this really heavily, and I find it fascinating as someone who also develops games in their spare time. They've also committed to and have faithfully carried out a once a week update schedule with patch notes viewable in-game. There's been a lot of discussion on Idle Thumbs about what Steam Early Access makes sense for, and this feels like a game that really nails how good that experience can be. The player feedback feels like it is making the game better week after week. The developers are resolute in certain decisions they've made, but tuning is something they seem to be open to a lot of player feedback about. On the most recent episode Chris mentioned that Spelunky feels like lightning in a bottle, and I have to think that's because of the collaborative nature of its development. There were lots of people playing that game, and giving their 2 cents about their experiences with it. I don't feel like Nuclear Throne is there yet, but I feel like it could get there given enough time. You can get a good idea of what the game is by watching the Northern Lion video below: It's a pretty simple game, but the character abilities give each character a really unique feel. So even if I get frustrated with a death I can start over, and play the game in a different way so that it feels less hopeless. I thought this was going to be one of those games where I pick a character then stick with it forever. I've found myself bouncing around between lots of different characters, though, and that's been great. The one knock against it I have at the moment is that the game seems kind of tuned at Developer Difficulty which is otherwise known as Carmageddon 2 syndrome. In my opinion the current version of the game feels like maybe what the game should feel like after you've looped once. That's a difficult thing to balance, though, because that can make the game feel too boring for too long for a lot of people. I've been playing a lot with Robot, Crystal, and Chicken. Have any other people here played this game? What kind of thoughts do you have about the live dev process, Steam Early Access, and game design?
  3. Unity Questions Thread

    Thanks for the advice guys. I've made a few things in Unity prior to my current project, and I think the way I'm doing it now is the best fit for me. Thanks for the sanity check. I find the inspector really tedious to work with, and so I mostly just use it to debug and prototype. I really don't like building content in it because managing a ton of prefabs seems like a real pain. I'm much more comfortable working with code directly. I think I ran into not being able to put GameObjects in namespaces, but that didn't really bother me too much because of how I have structured my project. I'm doing a kind of MVC pattern where my Controller and View are being handled by Unity while my Model is built with classes that do not inherit from any Unity classes in order to make implementing my game systems more straight-forward. The smaller projects I developed before got out of hand pretty quickly when I tried to use Unity stuff for everything. Development on my current project has gone a lot more smoothly because I can leverage Unity's nested object system for stuff like graphics/camera/animation/sound while not having to wrestle with it to implement the core of my game. So instead of having to make a bunch of different prefabs I'm making generic prefabs for each class of objects that are instantiated as the View and configure/update themselves in reference to the model that's running independently behind the scenes.
  4. Unity Questions Thread

    This is more of a C# question than a Unity question, and I feel so embarrassed for asking it. I've done a bunch of programming before in various languages, but never much C#. It feels like every solution I come up with in C# for things feels like it could somehow be the wrong solution and end up creating various horrors. Are there any good resources for best practice design patterns for working with Unity? For example, if I have something like character abilities that I want to implement, right now I'm writing an ability base class then creating a class that extends from that base class for each ability in a separate namespace. Is this the right pattern? I know it will work, but I just want to make sure there's not some special feature of the language I'm missing that would be a more natural fit. I know I should just slog through a primer on C#, but actually making a game is more fun.
  5. The ship: fruitcake steam cruise.

    I had a lot of fun playing the original The Ship mod, and would love to get in on some games with Thumbs people. So I'd be down with fruitcake provided somebody wanted to send me some. Here's a link to my Steam profile: http://steamcommunity.com/id/erlog
  6. The All New XBox Gamertag Exchange Thread!

    My Gamertag is Erlog0001. I don't have any friends on XBLA yet. It feels so lonely.
  7. Starcraft 2

    Did my digital download and registered last night. Runs alright on low settings on my early 2008 Macbook Pro. I'm loving the way the campaign is structured. I haven't played online yet because I haven't played Starcraft in about 8 years. Though, I have played WC3 in that time.