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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

#161

Post by nxobject »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #157
Narishma wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you play the original Half-Life 2 from 2004 or one of the "remasters" (though they weren't called that) that comes every few years that updates the graphics and/or engine slightly?

I don't think there's any official way to play the original 2004 version (or even the Source 2006/Episode One version either). The Xbox version is probably closest but they used palettised textures for the Xbox version - something that no PC version of Source ever supported - probably to get it to run okay.

That's such a pity, I always wanted to play HL2 on DirectX 6 mode.

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

#162

Post by spencerflem »

__jonas wrote: post #159
spencerflem wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m curious, what was/is the reason? I would like to learn more about the tradeoffs people are experiencing.

This is mostly on switching from Unity to Godot: https://caseyyano.com/on-evaluating-godot-b35ea86e8cf4

But also features this brief comment on game libraries:

"More than a Game Library: Having worked in SDL and LWJGL I’d like a bit more handholding. A few in-house APIs for loading/unloading resources, font stuff, and display handling please. I don’t want to write those; I want to make games!"

and some words on LibGDX in specific

"The reason we chose LibGDX for Slay the Spire was because it could do PC, Mac, and Linux. Yes, it runs in a JavaVM and it has all sorts of problems but it’s write once, run anywhere amirite? No. It don’t run on consoles and Mac and Windows updates constantly break it. "

All that said, I still love LibGDX, raylib, löve, and if I was going to make a game I'd use one of those because I think they're more fun. But I'm also not doing this professionally, on a deadline, and with a requirement to work on consoles

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

#163

Post by jamesfinlayson »

nxobject wrote: post #161
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any official way to play the original 2004 version (or even the Source 2006/Episode One version either). The Xbox version is probably closest but they used palettised textures for the Xbox version - something that no PC version of Source ever supported - probably to get it to run okay.

That's such a pity, I always wanted to play HL2 on DirectX 6 mode.

Maybe you can? If -dxlevel 60 doesn't work any more I think there's a file called dxsupport.cfg (or something like that) that adjusts various graphical settings based on the DirectX level detected. I don't really know how it works but my understanding is that the engine figures out what version of DirectX you have installed and sets the DirectX level based on that, but all the controls is various graphical settings.

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

#164

Post by Tostino »

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.

You probably missed it in another subthread, but that limit was a joke on their website, not an actual limit.

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

#165

Post by gavmor »

mr_briggs wrote: post #152

As someone currently working with a little team trying to make low-poly games using Godot - this is awesome! > Also when creating things with nodes, you have to go back and forth between node GUI and code. > All of the mainstream engines have a monolithic game editor. It doesn't matter how many features you use from it, you still have to wait 10 minutes for all of them to load in. These notes really resonated; the de…

I am pretty proud of figuring out how to TDD a C# module without booting Unity for a hackathon last month.

Managed to contribute my bit from an underpowered netbook.

I had never written a line of C# before, but I'll be damned if I'm going to concede TDD from the CLI. I knew it could be done, and I made it work. Everybody thought I was crazy, though, and none of the sponsors' DevRel were any help.

And, of course, the biggest point of friction for us, that weekend, was our beefiest machine still had to boot and reboot the damned Unity IDE for a thousand years! Incredible the fetters some folks tolerate.

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

#167

Post by plussed_reader »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #99
plussed_reader wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also a convenient excuse to sell more ramm and disk space 'for the textures'.

Textures are bad, but screen resolution is good.

Ya gonna just leave empty pixels on display?

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

#168

Post by amjoshuamichael »

spencerflem wrote: post #110
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.

I don't think that the developers of Slay The Spire were taught by complexity loving professors, no. But education does more than influence the people at universities. Education informs norms, traditions, and styles that permeate through industries. An example from outside tech: the music notation app Finale found a strangle hold on the education market, and now it's one of the standards for notation, despite being the worst option (source: have you tried Finale?).

I've never played the game, but my understanding is that Slay the Spire largely impresses on a design and artistic front, not a technical one. Its engine requirements were not based on feature set or code quality, but on what developers knew. So they probably picked Unity because it was ubiquitous. Education starts the problem, and then devs who need something common they care hire for continue the problem. I don't blame devs for this, it's the right choice to make and obviously Slay the Spire is great, but I am saying that this is a force that drives down the quality of game engines.

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

#169

Post by wtetzner »

lyu07282 wrote: post #142
zeroq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it's more acknowledging the gain in development efficiency you can get by working on something with lower fidelity.

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

#170

Post by wsc981 »

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)

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