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Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

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Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#101

Post by Sharlin »

adastra22 wrote: post #59
diggan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the term "turbobloat", never heard it before (and I've made games), the author doesn't define it and a quick search returns the submission article on Kagi, while nothing relevant at all on Google. So, what does it mean? Just "very bloated"? Edit: Reading around on the website and seeing more terms like "Hyperrealistic physics simulation" makes me believe it just means "very bloated".

I don’t think it is a real word. “Turbo” means “very” or more accurately “extremely,” but is typically only used in a positive context, e.g. turbocharged. That makes the turbobloated neologism ironic and funny.

It’s funny that the "turbo-" prefix is simply derived from the word "turbine", as in a turbocharger works by means of a turbine, similarly "turbojet" or "turboprop" or "turbopump", but has turned into an augmentative prefix due to the connotations, and also because of the parallelization of "turbocharger" with the earlier term "supercharger", meaning a charger powered mechanically by the crankshaft.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#103

Post by jameshart »

fidotron wrote: post #17

> Most Unity games look like very bad, even with fancy shaders, normal mapping and other techniques. This seems to be an increasingly common point of view among those of a certain age. It is definitely the case that the art of a certain sort of texture mapping has been lost. The example I go back to is Ikaruga, where the backgrounds are simply way better than they have any right to be, especially a very simple forest…

Most good looking games built with Unity don’t ’look like Unity games’ so people don’t think of them as constituting an example of ‘what Unity games look like’. So the archetype for ‘what a Unity game looks like’ remains at ‘pretty rough’.

The ‘art’ of making stuff look good has not been lost at all. It’s just very unevenly distributed.

When a team has good model makers and good texture artists and good animators and good visual programming, it looks great, whether it’s built in Unreal or Unity or a bespoke engine or whatever.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#104

Post by lukan »

pandemic_region wrote: post #96
lukan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Screen resolutions from 320x200 to 800x600." Still, higher resolutions were not just invented because of Turbobloat.

Is that a hard wired limit? I know nothing about game engines, so I'm a bit in the dark why it would only support up to that resolution. Is this about optimized code in terms of cpu cache aligned instruction pipelines etc?

"Is this about optimized code in terms of cpu cache aligned instruction pipelines etc?"

That is what I would assume, but so far I did not found a reason explaining the limit. Might also just be like it, because the author likes it like it.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#105

Post by amjoshuamichael »

I'm starting to believe there is an external force that drives down the quality of game engines over time. In most tech, the things that catch on are the things that are the easiest to develop curriculum for. The shape of a node-based editor like Unity is uniquely suited to explaining over a number of classes. (Source: I had to learn Unity at my University) On the other hand, an engine like raylib can be grokked in an afternoon, so a university-level raylib class wouldn't work. So you have all these amateur game developers and programmers coming out of diploma mills, and all they know is Unity/Unreal, so companies hire Unity/Unreal, so universities teach it, etc. See also: Java being popular. Then of course, all these companies have wildly different needs for their Unity projects, so Unity, being a for-profit company that serves its customers and not a single disgruntled programmer, has to conform their engine. So you end up with 'turbobloat.' (amazing term, btw)

The Half-Life and Morrowind engines are in a unique situation where they're put together by enthusiastic programmers who are paid to develop stuff they think is cool. You end up with minimal engines and great tech, suited to the needs of professional game developers.

This seems like something that sits in between a raylib and a Unity. I haven't used it, but I worry that it's doesn't do enough to appeal to amateur programmers, but it does too much to appeal to the kind of programmer who wants a smaller engine. I could be very wrong though, I hope to be very wrong. Seems like the performance here is very nice and it's very well put together. There's definitely a wave of developers coming out frustrated from Unity right now. As the nostalgia cycle moves to the 2000's, there's a very real demand to play and create games that are no more graphically complex than Half-Life 2.

Anyway, great project. Great web design. Documentation is written in a nice voice.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#106

Post by whoknowsidont »

danbolt wrote: post #78
tsumnia wrote: post #25

"A thing should be a thing. It should not be a bunch of things pretending to be a single thing. With nodes you have to pretend that a collection of things is a single thing." Just want to say this line was great, very Terry Pratchett. Feels like something Sam Vimes would think during a particularly complex investigation. I love it and hope you keep it moving forward. Haven't gotten a chance to mess around with it, bu…

I think the paragraph after is really interesting: “Also when creating things with nodes, you have to go back and forth between node GUI and code.” You can see Godot’s Node/GDScript setup as a bit of a response to this argument. Or, they try to make the “going back and forth” as seamless and integrated possible with things like the $ operator and autocomplete. That said, I do think at the end of day, the “thing is a…

The problem is "a thing is a thing" only gets you those exact things with those exact thing-behaviors.

Sharing behaviors or making things look or act like a little bit like this other thing becomes an absolute nightmare, if not out right impossible, with "a thing is a thing."

There's a reason graph based systems or ECS is basically the corner stone of every modern engine. Because it works and is necessary.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#107

Post by fidotron »

jameshart wrote: post #103
fidotron wrote: post #17

> Most Unity games look like very bad, even with fancy shaders, normal mapping and other techniques. This seems to be an increasingly common point of view among those of a certain age. It is definitely the case that the art of a certain sort of texture mapping has been lost. The example I go back to is Ikaruga, where the backgrounds are simply way better than they have any right to be, especially a very simple forest…

Most good looking games built with Unity don’t ’look like Unity games’ so people don’t think of them as constituting an example of ‘what Unity games look like’. So the archetype for ‘what a Unity game looks like’ remains at ‘pretty rough’. The ‘art’ of making stuff look good has not been lost at all. It’s just very unevenly distributed. When a team has good model makers and good texture artists and good animators and…

I don’t think that is what people are getting at, since they uniformly want more texture detail.

There are a lot of technically polished Unity titles that get knocked because they look like very well rendered plasticine, for want of a better description.

For example, there was an argument on here not too long ago where various people pushing the “old graphics were better” (simplification) did not understand or care that the older titles had such limited lighting models.

In the games industry I recall a lot of private argument on the subject of if the art teams will ever understand physically based models, and this was one of the major motivations for a lot of rigs to photograph things and make materials automatically. (In AAA since like 2012). The now widespread adoption of the Disney model, because it is understandable, has contributed to a bizarre uniformity in how things look that I do think some find repulsive.

Edit to add: I am not sure this is a new phenomenon. Go back to the first showing of Wind Waker for possibly the most notorious reaction.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#108

Post by mlekoszek »

Sharlin wrote: post #101
adastra22 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it is a real word. “Turbo” means “very” or more accurately “extremely,” but is typically only used in a positive context, e.g. turbocharged. That makes the turbobloated neologism ironic and funny.

It’s funny that the "turbo-" prefix is simply derived from the word "turbine", as in a turbocharger works by means of a turbine, similarly "turbojet" or "turboprop" or "turbopump", but has turned into an augmentative prefix due to the connotations, and also because of the parallelization of "turbocharger" with the earlier term "supercharger", meaning a charger powered mechanically by the crankshaft.

Ontologically, it implies the existence of Turbobloat 3000.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#109

Post by 6510 »

shermantanktop wrote: post #72
mlekoszek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an absolute hardliner for appropriate technology, probably -- but simplicity isn't necessarily all-or-nothing, and (IMO) helping people pull off cool things with simpler tools isn't so bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology

Sure, but we're not talking about how to irrigate a field here, we're talking about being limited to 600x800 resolution when playing a game. Some people were teenagers when that was the best you could get, so I'm guessing they see it as a "good old days" baseline that they can be principled about while indulging their nostalgia.

It is enough to make gameplay the main challenge?

https://i.chzbgr.com/full/9632128256/hDF15F98F/cat

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#110

Post by spencerflem »

amjoshuamichael wrote: post #105

I'm starting to believe there is an external force that drives down the quality of game engines over time. In most tech, the things that catch on are the things that are the easiest to develop curriculum for. The shape of a node-based editor like Unity is uniquely suited to explaining over a number of classes. (Source: I had to learn Unity at my University) On the other hand, an engine like raylib can be grokked in a…

I love library based game dev, like raylib or libgdx, but there is a reason that games like slay the spire moved to unity and then godot for their sequel.

That is to say, I don't think people are using Unity because they were mistaught by complexity loving professors.

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