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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

#171

Post by OCASMv2 »

Tanoc wrote: post #148
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…

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…

Easier to market "more resolution" and "more polygons" than masterful use of uv mapping.

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

#172

Post by spencerflem »

amjoshuamichael wrote: post #168
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 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 t…

No, they started with a code only framework (my beloved LibGDX) and then moved to Unity/Godot for the sequel for pragmatic reasons. See my other comment.

Being ubiquitous was part of the decision, yes, because it means there are many high quality plugins instantly integratable which is a huge time-saver.

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

#173

Post by bigstrat2003 »

whalesalad wrote: post #100
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it would be way better if it wasn't arbitrarily limited to a tiny column. I have a large screen, use it please. Don't make me dig into the developer console to undo your fixed width in order to have a pleasant reading experience.

dude it's period correct just hit ctrl/cmd and plus and zoom in like the rest of us.

But it's not even period correct! A website of that era would've filled the entire screen no matter what the size, because hobbyists weren't doing weird layout shenanigans.

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

#174

Post by bigstrat2003 »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #156
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it would be way better if it wasn't arbitrarily limited to a tiny column. I have a large screen, use it please. Don't make me dig into the developer console to undo your fixed width in order to have a pleasant reading experience.

Seems pretty entitled if you ask me.

I don't think it's entitled to point out that someone's choices make for a bad user experience. I'm not putting OP on blast and calling him the worst person in the world, I'm simply saying "this is really unpleasant, hopefully you change it to be better".

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

#175

Post by realusername »

speeder wrote: post #57
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…

Yes. And the thing is, some modern games ARE overcast with no dynamic lights, and then go on to use Lumen of all things. This was the case with Silent Hill remake, and that thing runs very slowly, looks WORSE on PS5 Pro, the grass looks worse than in older games and so on. Seriously, the plot of Silent Hill was invented to justify optimization hacks, you have a permanent foggy space called "fog space" to make easier…

It's worse than that, in the Silent hill remake, everything is being rendered behind the fog too, yes you read that right, they render a whole town with complex gemetry to hide it with fog after so you see none of it.

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

#176

Post by dr_kiszonka »

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…

> and programmers coming out of diploma mills, and all they know is Unity/Unreal, so companies hire Unity/Unreal, so universities teach it, etc.

There is a similar phenomenon with ArcGIS.

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

#177

Post by amjoshuamichael »

spencerflem wrote: post #172
amjoshuamichael wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

No, they started with a code only framework (my beloved LibGDX) and then moved to Unity/Godot for the sequel for pragmatic reasons. See my other comment. Being ubiquitous was part of the decision, yes, because it means there are many high quality plugins instantly integratable which is a huge time-saver.

Fair, though when I say "quality decline" I'm mostly talking about extraneous useless features and overly complicated node-based architectures that require GUIs. There are simpler ways to do all of this stuff. This engine, Tramway, is proof of that. Godot sits somewhere in the middle, I've used it a little but I don't know enough about it to say whether it's overly complex or not.

You are correct: I definitely agree that not all gamedevs should be making stuff from scratch, but I also think that Unity is a little too much. There's a good middle ground somewhere slightly above raylib.

My argument is that the promotion of engines that live near this middle ground is blocked by education: people who want to be able to sell long courses to the people who look up "how to make a video game."

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

#178

Post by draven »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #138
p1necone wrote: post #95

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.

> 20 Mhz machine

14 MHz !

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by mr_briggs »

gavmor wrote: post #165
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…

I'm not very familiar with Unity and it's limitations / difficulty of this task. What challenges did you encounter and how did you solve this problem?
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