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

Post by stevage » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

tines wrote: post #39

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…

In isolation, isn't the quote prima facie so bad and so wrong though? We think of collections of things as single things constantly . A human is a collection of body parts, body parts are collections of chemicals, chemicals are collections of molecules, molecules are collections of atoms... and yet at each level we think of those collections as being single things. Not being able to do that is just... absurd. The pro…

Post by amjoshuamichael » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #123

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 - pi…

Post by cess11 » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #71

Suppafly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But also a convenient excuse to sell more ramm and disk space 'for the textures'. Except different companies sell different things. This is like the conspiracy that women's pants don't have pockets to sell more purses.

"This is like the conspiracy that women's pants don't have pockets to sell more purses." Oh my god, this explains everything! (btw. I recently learned, that the 9/11 inside job conspiracy evolved. Nowdays the standard theory is, that there were not even planes in the first place, just bombs and smoke)

Post by Zardoz84 » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

p1necone wrote: post #95

rootnod3 wrote: post #16

I wholeheartedly agree with the turbo bloat problem. Machines are so much more powerful nowadays, but most programs feel actually slower than before. Very cool project. And the website design is A+

> but most programs feel actually slower than before I feel like this is only true for people who happened to luck out with slightly overpowered hardware in very specific time periods. As someone who used pretty average hardware in the windows 98/2000/xp era as a teenager even a low end modern laptop with an ssd running Windows 10/11/KDE/Gnome/Whatever is massively more responsive even running supposedly bloated weba…

Post by gmueckl » Tue, Jan 07, 2025, 10:56 PM UTC

kcb wrote: post #85

gmueckl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is because of how extremely cleverly they picked the art style for the game. You have a lot of diffuse surfaces for which prebaking the lighting just works. Overcast skies allow for diffuse ambient lighting rather than very directional lights, which force angle-dependent shading and sharp high contrast shadow outlines. And the overwhelming majority of glossy surfaces are not too shiny which also helps ou…

There's been a rumor going around that developers move away from prebaked lighting primarily because it complicates their workflow.