How many of us are here, and what kind of things are we working on? (No need to be specific if what you're working on is sensitive, or you just don't feel like it)
I did a degree in games technology in Scotland and though I've worked on a couple little games for educational charities, I've not worked on anything major (or even good), I've started my own company that I work on in my spare time but by day I'm a disenchanted web developer.
I've been working on a platform game engine for a while and hope to at least produce a little game on top of it that would be usable as a portfolio piece to get a job doing something other than web development.
Just wondering if there are many of us in here.
i am kinda in the process of designing a game. i am working on designing it before i really get started on it. i don't want to start and screw stuff up. i'm also trying to pick an engine, i don't want to build my own from scratch, i don't think i am quite ready for that kind of project.
Right now I'm working on a random terrain generator for a massive game idea. Basically generate EVERYTHING. Just because why not?
terrain consistency maybe? it still baffles me how minecraft can generate terrain at random and have things like smooth hills and flat areas and whatnot. maybe i just don't understand random generation very well
3 Dimensional Perlin Noise can be complex to use. Minecraft runs off of a predefined area for the random seeding so it can have biomes in specific coordinates selected. It goes from there really. You can find a bunch on terrain generation using perlin noises.
I'm glad to know I'm not alone on here! Don't worry about starting and screwing things up, you'll definitely make mistakes and go down dead ends, but it's the same in any creative process, just starting is always the most important thing even if you throw away everything you did at the start, you'll have at least learned from doing that, and you'll know more and be better experienced than if you waited to do a bit more research first. I also wouldn't throw out building your own from scratch if you've not done it before, if you start with something really small and try to build it entirely yourself, you'll learn a lot about the process and architecture behind such things. Though indeed if your dreams are of beautifully shaded 3d worlds dripping with details and using a billion polygons then you're very unlikely to be able to build an engine that does that well or at least one that does that and runs on hardware that isn't from the year 2200 on your first attempt. So there are of course merits of both roads and I'm clearly biased to writing your own as that's what I've always done. What have you considered for your engine? And what kind of genre is your game going to be?
That does sound very interesting, I've always loved the idea of having expansive worlds that are completely different for everyone that enters them, but I've never really looked into what goes on in their creation, I made a little strategy game that had randomized blobs of various resources that were then altered by a few functions to adjust for their effects on each other and so on. But I've never ventured to anything more exciting than that, I've always wanted to have a go. Perhaps in my next project. I'll google "Perlin Noise" thanks for sharing.
Interesting! I'm a university student who's just getting the ball rolling on a small, indie-game company of my own. Presently working on a charter for the first project, assembling a small team on campus, etc. Unity and Blender are at the top of our software list. My summer will be busy!
I used to play with making my own very basic engines in AS3. Really, it feels a bit cheap to call them engines considering they were more like very basic physics toolkits or frameworks for text-based games. Though, it did teach me a bit about rendering and writing neat, reusable code. I flinch a little at writing this because AS3 feels kinda trivial.
Anyways, I'm admittedly more into the storytelling, games-as-an-art-form end of things. What a brilliant, enjoyable medium with a potential that is just beginning to be realized.
i have looked at Unity, JMonkey, and now Cry. Cry seems easy as ever to script. Unity is working on a new version again. and JMonkey is pure java which really just makes it easy for Linux deployment. But the JVM has me worried about footprint at run time. as for genre, FPS really. they are what i personally prefer to play. another issue i have is server hosting. i am not a fan of this whole "official" server hosts. more of a fan the way minecraft does it where the community can rent a server if they really want to but most are just community hosted. like i said, i am in the designing phase. gotta get a good solid idea of what i want to do but with finals this week i am a bit preoccupied with not failing classes.
so the seed is really important in determining how the world is generated? so they take the seed and punch it through a "pretty" algorithm and then that determines how a chunk will be loaded?
i too am a university student. but i also have a personal project that i really want to do before i graduate. which is deploy NVIDIA GRID on campus here. just because my college is awesome like that. CSCI department head thinks it would be fun to have.
Ah yes, if you're looking at FPS then making your own engine would be quite a job, and there are plenty available that do a very good job and as you say and it is always good to build what you like to play, keeping up motivation can always be a challenge so it helps a lot if you're excited and passionate about the end result. I've heard a lot of good things about Unity, though I've not used it myself. The Cry engine would seem to be an ideal engine for building an FPS game but again, I've not used it so that's purely speculation. Perhaps someone else with more experience in such things will pop on and give more relevant opinions on that. Local hosting is excellent, and it's a shame that more games don't allow you to do it, though one can understand the desire to reduce piracy, one would also think that hosting servers and the bandwidth they consume also isn't free so I don't know what the trade offs between the two are.
Best of luck with your finals, I do hope they go well for you, certainly a very stressful time.
How well formed is your idea? are you going to have any interesting quirks to it? (though I entirely understand if you want to keep the details to yourself)
Computers are unable to create truly random numbers, generally they have a random number table that is produced by measuring the radio active decay of an element that I forget the name of now. This produces true random numbers, but as the computer by default just pulls them out one after the other if you run a program twice it'll use exactly the same numbers which isn't great if you want a random experience for your players, but you can solve this with a "seed" which is simply a point to start in this table. But if computers can't pick random numbers how can you pick a random seed? At least on the occasions I've used it I've picked the number of ticks, which is the number of milliseconds since 01/01/0001 (I think). This value will of course be different every time the program is run, (if the number is larger than the length of the random number table it just loops back around to the start again) This ensures that every player will have a very small chance of getting the same game as someone else, but if you make the seed available, it also means that everyone who plugs that seed into your game is going to get the same world as it will start pulling random numbers out of the same point in the table. So you can get a vast amount of random behavior, but repeatable randomness if that makes any sense. I'm not 100% on this and if anyone else is better versed in it I'm more than happy to be corrected, but at least with the random elements I've worked with before this has been the case.
That is always an excellent idea, getting together with like minded students and working on something will introduce you to the best of development, the free flow of ideas in a small team of peers with their own specialisations. There is nothing trivial about any learning experience, building things from scratch, even small things like text based games teach you very valuable lessons that scale up to any size of project. Learning to write ever more reusable and clean code is invaluable in any kind of development. If you're more on the ideas and story side you may find yourself in high demand, Though there are many with creative skills in code and art, but coming up with a good idea and a good story is in my experience much rarer. That might be a skill worth stretching and exploring as much as your technical skills. Do you have any ideas or details you can share on your project? (unless you're keeping your killer title under wraps until you're finished)
i have played around with unity some. i am playing around with cry's free sdk right now. i thought about unreal but they don't have a free demo version i can play with. as for the idea, its post apocolyptic nuclear warfare but the guy you will play has been on a century long deep space mission and left before all this shit happened so coming back is a bit of a surprise to him.
haha convince my college to buy hardware, then like three of us all use it. do presentations on it, yeah great collaboration effort.
To us they are completely random. The idea that we are going to be able to predict every aspect of a generation would require quite a bit more computational power considering the fact that random generations aren't based completely off of the gpu timings. It will poll random inputs from devices found in the computer.
A default seed is used yes, but when polling another random number, it will change the seed. Generate off of completely different seeds after each random seed. A seed isn't going to get you near the same outputs as some other person who uses it. Seeds really don't matter terribly much. Unless you have the exact same states in hardware, which is extremely hard to achieve.
tl;dr Base seeds can be the same, but never give you the same thing.
That is interesting, I suppose the guy will be coming back with technology and ideas from a world now lost, the influence that kind of event would have on a post apocalyptic world would be interesting to explore, and you know blow stuff up while exploring. You could definitely do a lot of interesting things with that premise though, it's a great idea.
If you never change (or set at all) a seed and pull from the same object without reinitialising you'll always get the same numbers, and you'll be able to get identical results every time, I found this to my detriment trying to generate random sequences and discovering that I always got the same set of random numbers so though the words my game picked were random it was the same set of words every time it ran, it took me hours to work out that I had to seed it in first place to get a different set, so that I could make each level actually different. I thought I was mixing up a reference or not reinitialising properly and so on. I've run into the same with C++, I'm not sure what you're working with as I suspect if you're using a frame work/engine they might handle it more intelligently and reseed automatically for you or you may simply be reseeding every time you pull a number from the table.
well it also leaves the question what happened to his family. so your trying to find out what happened to them while also uncovering tons of information about what happened in general while gone. so yeah :) will be a fun one