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

racenis.github.io

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

#121

Post by racenis »

smcl wrote: post #68

You reference "Turbobloat" and engines being "bloated" - which is to some extent fair. But it is maybe worth describing what that means to you - what features you consider "bloat" and which you have omitted from the Tramway project. To some the inclusion of an RPG framework may be considered bloat, for example, yet there is one present in Tramway.

That's why added it in as an optional extension. It is a part of the larger engine project, but it is completely optional.

I like the C++ principle of paying only for what you use.

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

#123

Post by bombcar »

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…

The other thing to remember is the games and the engines built together handle each other - Doom couldn't have a floor above another floor (engine limitation because of CPU limitations) so the level designers created tricks to make it feel like it did.

When you're designing both you can take advantage of features you add but also avoid the ones you can't do well - or even change the art style to "fit" the engine - pixelated angular mobs fit Minecraft quite well, but once they start getting more and more detailed you're in an "uncanny valley" where they look worse and more dated than Minecraft - until you finally have enough polygons to render something decent.

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

#124

Post by danbolt »

bowsamic wrote: post #117
notnaut wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been trying to learn godot for years and I’m not doing so hot. This chatter feels very relevant to my struggles but I’m not the best with software design, so what do I know? I was in a tizzy the other day and spammed my thoughts out about it, I hope it’s relevant here. trying to wrap my head around using scenes vs. nodes in something simple like a 2d platformer. Platforms: My thinking: I'm gonna be using a ton o…

Honestly this is the kinda stuff that put me off Godot. A million ways to do things and they all seem bad or feel like they’re going to shoot me in the foot later. Somehow I never had these issues in Unity

I think every developer finds footgun issues with various tools for their aims. Or, I know developers that express similar sentiments towards Unity (or Unreal, proprietary engines, etc.).

When a game team is successful, it can often stem from having picked tooling and workflows that enabled them to be productive enough and avoid enough pitfalls. That’s going to change from project to project and team to team.

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

#125

Post by taberiand »

jameshart wrote: post #94
mlekoszek wrote: post #51

" Some might say "just get a better computer". This is why getting a better computer is bad: 1. Affordance: A lot of people, especially from 3rd world countries are very poor and can't afford to buy hardware to run Turbobloat. 2. e-Waste: Producing computer chips is very bad on the environment. If modern software wasn't Turbobloated you would buy new hardware only when the previous hardware broke and wasn't repairabl…

What is ‘turbobloat’? From context, I interpret it to be ‘graphics tech I don’t like’, but I’m not sure what counts as turbobloat.

The whole post in tongue in cheek, it just means "features the game you're making doesn't need (like modern graphics with advanced shaders and super high resolution requiring the latest graphics cards)".

If you're making a game that needs those features, obviously you'll need to bloat up. If you're not, maybe this SDK will be enough and be fast and small as well.

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

#126

Post by bombcar »

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…

You can get something working quite quickly (especially with things like Unity) - but to get them looking amazing takes extra skill and polish.

Even a "2D" game like Factorio has amazing polish difference between original release, 1.0, and today.

(This can very obviously be seen with modded games, because the modded assets often are "usable" but don't look anywhere near as polished as the main game.)

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

#127

Post by the__alchemist »

racenis wrote: post #119
the__alchemist wrote: post #114

From the perspective of someone who's dabbled in 3D graphics, and has made an engine for 3D visualizations for my science projects: What is blocking this from high resolutions, and dynamic or smooth lighting? The former is free, and you can do the latter in Vulkan/Dx/Metal/OpenGl etc using a minimal pixel and fragment shader pair.

There's literally nothing preventing you from dragging the edge of the engine window and resizing it, or calling the screen resize function from the C++ or Lua API. That bit about 24-bit color and 800x600 resolutions was mostly meant to be a fun nod to promotional text that you could find on the backs of old game boxes. The default renderer for the engine is meant to emulate what you could achieve with a graphics car…

Great info! That answers my question entirely.

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

#129

Post by poglet »

dmonitor wrote: post #115
mathnode wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as a fantasy console, like pico-8 which despite the extreme restrictions is home to some incredible content that of which exceeds many big studio engines. The imposed ceiling now allows a solo dev or a team to now concentrate on delivering gameplay and vivacious content instead of graphical gimmicks which eat resources both for the consumers and creators. Nobody argues that FTL, Minecraft, baba is you, St…

Minecraft is a bad example. It uses low resolution textures, but the screen resolution is as big as your display. I'm not even sure what the maximum is.

I could be wrong however I believe all listed games can be run in full screen at modern resolutions.
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