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

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141–150 of 254 posts

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

#141
post #136
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)

[flagged]

No, sorry. Claiming a whole big city is part of a conspiracy to cover up, no planes actually crashed into the towers is more weird.

But if you would call for a proper neutral investigation of the whole story, then I would support that.

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

#142
post #112

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…

A guy who worked on Bioshock (lead design?) said in an interview: "At work if we want to experiment with a new idea I have to assembly a team, and spend at least a month before we have something we can work with. Meanwhile, at home, I can make a whole Doom campaign in one evening." (quoting from memory, sorry)

It's like with cyberpunk if they didn't use red engine which is horrible bloatware they could've finished the game in half the time with half the people and it would run on a 10 year old laptop in 60 fps. /s

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well... I recommend you to try an old Amiga 1200 . You will find a big surprise how this 20 Mhz machine it's highly responsive, and boots faster that any current machine with Windows 10/11. However, it would not look fancy to our current eyes.

Loading times from floppies wasn't even remotely quick.

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

#144
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…

It sounds like the sort of thing Sam Vimes would say before being begrudgingly forced to admit, after being forced by Sybil to undergo some painful personal growth, that maybe, sometimes, a thing might need to be more than just a thing. And that Vetinari’s entity component system might seem complicated but it works, damnit and it makes the city function.

And once Nobby says he likes Tramway, everyone realizes Vetinari was right all along XD

(I'm just glad someone got the reference)

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

#145
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".

If bufferbloat is increased latency caused by excessive use of increasingly available RAM, then turbobloat is increased latency caused by excessive use of increasingly available CPU. Certain vintage hardware had a "turbo" button to unleash the full speed of the newer CPUs. The designers blind to the horrors of induced demand.

[deleted]

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

#146
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I'm used to the old old school way of doing things, meaning you write shit in a text editor and then run it. There's no parenting system, no hierarchies, no inheritances, no massive trees of various classes/subclasses that you have to manage. Godot goes beyond friction and actively pisses me off because what should just be ten seconds of writing in a new text document turns into up to sometimes two or three minutes of interacting with the GUI because you have to create a new project, save it, make a scene node, create an object node, create a sub-object node, create an action node, create a container node, then you can start editing code, but only once you link whatever it is to that specific object instead of it being a general script you can re-use, because re-using it means making copies of the parent object and-- It's too complicated.

A lot of 2D game engines are near frictionless because they're just "write and save" style simple, and Blender Game Engine was actually great about translating this to a UI, and more importantly a UI dealing with 3D since every object in the viewport could just have it's own little code block attached to it just by clicking it. It was no different in function than saving the .py file in a new folder, really. This method Unity "pioneered" of everything having to be part of a giant tree in the asset manager is such a slog and makes keeping track of anything during iteration a nightmare. I still prototype in BGE sometimes because every other 3D engine sprawls too quickly and has so many unnecessary steps.

If somebody could just write a text-only "write and save" style editor like LOVE2D but for 3D (and support it for longer than two months) that would be amazing.

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

#147
post #112

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…

A guy who worked on Bioshock (lead design?) said in an interview: "At work if we want to experiment with a new idea I have to assembly a team, and spend at least a month before we have something we can work with. Meanwhile, at home, I can make a whole Doom campaign in one evening." (quoting from memory, sorry)

There are new games that still use (modern forks of) the Doom engine!

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42392172-GZDoom-Games...

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

#148

> 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…

There's an insistence that materials can overcome lacking texturing and normal mapping. It's not true, but it's a result of a lot of marketing fluff from things like Unreal Engine being misunderstood or misrepresented. Did you know that in Super Mario Sunshine, for "sharp" shadows the Gamecube was unable to render, that they actually used flattened meshes instead? In Delfino Plaza the shadows under the canopies near the Shine Gate are actually meshes instead of textures. Meanwhile the tile plaza that the mesh shadows lie on looks so nice because it's not one giant texture, it's actually several dozen 128x128px textures all properly UV mapped. In a modern game you'd get two brick textures and a noise pattern to blend them, and they'd all be 2048x2048px with the shadows being raytraced so they have sharper edges.

Ironically as we've gotten hardware with more VRAM and higher bus speeds we've decided to go with bigger textures instead of more of them. The same with normal mapping, instead of using normal mapping alongside more subdivided models we've just decided that normal maps are obsolete and physically modelling all the details is technologically forward way. Less pointy spheres is one thing, but physically modelling all the cracks and scrapes on the sphere is just stupid and computationally wasteful.

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

#149
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Author stated in the thread that the limit doesn't exist. It's just a joke

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42627930

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

#150
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Baba is You and Stardew would require scaling because their pixel art expects a certain gridsize to encompass the screen. Factorio might as well, I'm not sure. Dwarf Fortress is played in a terminal so whether it can be stated to even have graphics is debatable.
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